Feed aggregator

 

A white establishment centrist using racist tropes (City and State, 6/13/24) and backed by a whopping $14.5 million from the Israel lobby (Axios, 6/26/24) has ousted a Black progressive congressmember from New York. Establishment newspapers are very pleased.

Two-term congressmember Jamaal Bowman was the target of the most expensive House primary in history, with almost $25 million total spent on advertising, a 798% increase over Bowman’s 2020 and 2022 primary races combined (AdImpact, 6/24/24). Westchester, N.Y., county executive George Latimer and his dark money allies outspent Bowman’s campaign by more than 7-to-1 (CNN, 6/26/24).

Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/25/24) celebrated Bowman’s defeat in the June 25 Democratic primary. “Mr. Bowman is part of the Squad, an uberprogressive faction in Congress, and his defeat could prompt similar challenges,” the paper wrote hopefully. It called Bowman’s defeat “an act of political hygiene.”

Ignore for a moment the implicit racism that calls a monied white man ousting a Black man who supported other marginalized people a form of “hygiene.” Focus instead on the board dismissively quoting socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: “The defeat of Bowman…would be a message to every member of Congress that if you oppose corporate interests, the billionaire class will take you down.”

That is the problem here: Thanks to the Citizens United ruling, money rules politics and monied interests can essentially buy elections (FAIR.org, 6/11/24). The Wall Street Journal is a right-wing paper, so of course it would be fine with that. But it wants readers to think Bowman’s loss was about “voters reject[ing] his antagonistic progressive politics,” and the so-called guardians of democracy in the rest of the free press fell in line behind the Journal.

‘Veered too far left’

Dana Milbank’s evidence (Washington Post, 6/25/24) of Jamaal Bowman’s “bigotry” included doubting dubious reports of mass rape on October 7 and criticizing apartheid in Israel—as leading human rights groups do.

The Atlantic (6/25/24) said Bowman “veered too far left.” Lloyd Green at the Daily News (6/27/24) said Bowman’s defeat was “a stinging rejection of left-wing politics and a reaffirmation of suburban centrism.”

Then there’s Dana Milbank of the Washington Post (6/25/24), who all but ignored the outside spending and equated Bowman with former president Donald Trump under the headline, “Jamaal Bowman Was a Democratic Trump. Now He’s Gone.” Milbank wrote that both politicians were “scoundrels” and “extremists,” with “a history of bigotry, bullying, law-breaking, promoting bogus conspiracy theories, engaging in obscene public rants and playing the martyr.”

The impulse to brand anyone on the socialist left as a mirror image of Trump is both superficial and dangerous (FAIR.org, 1/24/20). Milbank’s parallels are either trivial—both men use swear words in public!—or anything but equivalent. For instance, Milbank likened Bowman’s misdemeanor guilty plea, for pulling a fire alarm, to Trump’s 34-count felony conviction, which is truly grasping at straws.  (Will we next hear about Bowman’s parking tickets?) As for bullying, Bowman shouting “freaking cowards!” at Republican politicians is not in the same ballpark as evoking Hitler by calling your enemies “vermin,” or being found guilty of rape in court. Trump isn’t an outlier in US politics because he curses on camera, but because he is actively and openly seeking to undo basic democratic guardrails (MSNBC, 2/29/24).

Egregiously misleading

For New York Times columnist Pamela Paul (6/25/24), if you’re critical of AIPAC dumping more than $14 million into a House primary race, you must hate “the Jews.”

At the New York Times, columnist Pamela Paul (6/25/24) dismissed criticism of the infusion of Israel lobby cash as little more than antisemitism:

We’ve heard plenty about the outsize funding for Latimer, particularly from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. The question said aloud by Bowman supporters has been, “Why so much money from a foreign government for a local congressional candidate?” The unspoken question has been, “Why are the Jews funding this candidate?”

First, this blithely waves away the problem that monied organizations can simply buy an election, whether it’s AIPAC or any other lobby. But Paul (no relation) also invokes the antisemitic trope that the Israel lobby equals “the Jews,” when many Jews are critics of Israel and many non-Jews are a critical part of the Zionist coalition. Bowman had many Jewish supporters, including Bernie Sanders and the left-wing organization Jewish Vote (JFREJ, 1/24/24). Does that mean “the Jews” supported Bowman?

This is a continuation of a bad trend from a previous news piece (New York Times, 6/20/24) about AIPAC spending on the race, where reporter Nicholas Fandos wrote that Bowman had “prais[ed] a writer many Jews consider an antisemite.”

The writer in question—unnamed by Fandos—was Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar and outspoken critic of Israel, whose father survived Auschwitz and whose mother escaped the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. “Apart from his parents, every member of Finkelstein’s family, on both sides, was exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust,” openDemocracy (5/3/16) noted. It is already journalistic malpractice to denounce criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitism, but it’s an extra twist of the knife to shove this insult onto Jewish victims of antisemitic terror.

Paul also said that Bowman “voted against Biden’s infrastructure bill, one of the administration’s key bipartisan successes and fundamental to Biden’s re-election.” It’s a claim that was central to Latimer’s campaign (Slate, 6/24/24), but it’s also egregiously misleading, suggesting Bowman sided with the Republicans and against both Biden and the public interest.

In fact, Bowman and several other members of the Squad voted against the bill in an effort to stop Republicans and conservative Democrats from decoupling it from Biden’s original, more robust, Build Back Better plan that included social spending on things like childcare, paid family leave and healthcare (Spectrum News NY1, 11/9/21; see FAIR.org, 10/6/21). The progressives failed, but their vote “against” Biden’s bill was a symbolic vote for his more ambitious plan.

‘Pendulum swinging back’

The New York Times (6/25/24) called Bowman’s defeat “an excruciating blow for the left.”

In its news coverage, the New York Times (6/25/24) said:

The movement once held up Mr. Bowman’s upset win in a Democratic primary in 2020, just two years after Ms. [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez’s, as proof of the left’s ascent. Now, with the pendulum swinging back toward the party’s center, he is the first member of the House’s “squad” of young, left-wing lawmakers of color to lose a seat—and may not be the last.

To the centrist corporate media, the pendulum is always swinging toward the center (see FAIR.org, 7/16/21; Jacobin, 2/16/24). Indeed, in an analysis article the next day (“What Jamaal Bowman’s Loss Means for the Left,” 6/26/24), the Times subhead argued that “in 2024, the center is regaining power.”

The original published version of the article closed by noting that Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, hardly a friend of the left, “suggested that moderates would be well advised not to view [Bowman’s] loss as a major setback for progressives, who have proven that they can win races.”

Perhaps editors realized Sheinkopf was undermining their preferred takeaway, as this quote was later removed from the story in the online version (though it can still be found at DNYUZ—6/26/24–and it is also archived). The revised piece now concludes by quoting two conservative Democrats, who unsurprisingly said that the “pendulum swing has come back a bit” toward the center and that “the Squad politics are on the way out, not the way in. There’s a swing from extremism to a more common-sense Democratic lane.”

The center-swinging pendulum assessment ignores not just the role of the record-breaking dark money spending for the centrist candidate. It also ignores the broader context of the New York primary races, in which most socialist and progressive incumbents handily protected their seats, and socialists even grew their presence at New York state level (City and State, 6/26/24; Albany Times-Union, 6/26/24). Once again, Bowman’s race seems more of a lesson in the effects of money in politics than it does of any sort of rejection of progressive politics—but don’t expect to see that takeaway in corporate media.

 

 

Heated (6/27/24): “Most mainstream outlets continue to write about these lethal, record-breaking events as if they were merely acts of God.”

This month brought yet another record-breaking spate of flash floods and deadly heatwaves across the US. Yet, as a new study by Heated (6/27/24) reveals, despite ample reporting on these events, a majority of news outlets still did not link these events to their cause: climate change.

Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson, writers for the climate-focused, Substack-based outlet, analyzed 133 digital breaking news articles from national, international and regional outlets reporting on this month’s extreme weather. Just 44% mentioned the climate crisis or global warming. Broken down by weather event: 52% of stories that covered heatwaves, and only 25% of stories that covered extreme rainfall, mentioned climate change.

As Atkin and Samuelson write, by now we know that climate change is the main cause of both extreme heat and extreme flooding. And we know the biggest contributor of climate-disrupting greenhouse gasses: fossil fuels, which account for about 75% of global emissions annually.

Still, the study’s authors found, only 11% of the articles they studied mentioned fossil fuels. Only one piece (BBC, 6/24/24) mentioned deforestation, which scientists say contributes about 20% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. None mentioned animal agriculture, which the FAO estimates contributes about 12% of global emissions.

Stark omissions 

This New York Post story (6/21/24) had no mention of climate change, but it did have Fox Weather meteorologist Stephen McCloud’s reassurance that “it’s not record-breaking heat.”

The omissions were laughably stark: A New York Post piece (6/21/24) ended with a New Yorker and former Marine who said he’d been in “way hotter conditions”—in Kuwait and Iraq. An AP article (6/4/24) quoted the “explanation” offered by a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management: “It does seem like Mother Nature is turning up the heat on us a little sooner than usual.”

Heated recognized some outlets that consistently mentioned climate change in their breaking coverage of heat and floods this month. That list included NPR, Vox, Axios, BBC and Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Then there were the outlets whose breaking coverage never mentioned it: ABC News, USA Today, The Hill, the New York Post and Fox Weather. When questioned, many of these outlets pointed the study’s authors to other climate coverage they had done, but this study’s focus on breaking news stories  was deliberate:

Our analysis focused only on breaking stories because climate change is not a follow-up story; it is the story of the lethal and economically devastating extreme weather playing out across the country. To not mention climate change in a breaking news story about record heat in June 2024 is like not mentioning Covid-19 in a breaking news article about record hospitalizations in March 2020. It’s an abdication of journalistic responsibility to inform.

Explaining isn’t hard

The Washington Post (6/13/24) noted that two recent extreme rains in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, “bear the fingerprint of human-caused climate change, which is increasing the intensity and severity of top-tier rain events.”

A crucial takeaway for journalists and editors in this piece is that explaining the cause of these weather events isn’t hard. It’s often a matter of adding a sentence at most, Atkin and Samuelson write. They provide examples of stories that successfully made this connection, as with BBC (6/24/24):

Scientists say extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense as a result of human-caused climate change, fueled by activities like burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests.

Or the Guardian (6/23/24):

Heatwaves are becoming more severe and prolonged due to the global climate crisis, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.

Notably, the Guardian piece was a reprint of an AP article that did not originally include that sentence; Heated confirmed that it was added by a Guardian editor.

AP, however, was sometimes able to provide appropriate context, as in a June 21 piece:

This month’s sizzling daytime temperatures were 35 times more likely and 2.5 degrees F hotter (1.4 degrees C) because of the warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas—in other words, human-caused climate change.

More denial than acknowledgment 

FAIR (7/18/23): “By disconnecting climate change causes and consequences, media outlets shield the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who aid and abet them.”

During last summer’s apocalyptic orange haze on the East Coast, caused by record Canadian wildfires, I conducted a similar study (FAIR.org, 7/18/23) on US TV news’s coverage. Out of 115 segments, only 38% mentioned climate change’s role. Of those 115, 10 mentioned it in passing, 10 engaged in climate denial and 12 gave a brief explanation without alluding to the reality that climate change is human-caused. Only five segments acknowledged that climate change was human caused, and just seven fully fleshed out the fact that the  main cause of the climate crisis is fossil fuels.

When there are more segments denying climate change than acknowledging fossil fuels’ role in it, you know there’s a problem.

This year, I noticed coverage of worldwide coral bleaching that did make the appropriate connections (FAIR.org, 5/17/24). As Atkin and Samuelson emphasized, the difference between careless and responsible reporting on this issue is often just a few words.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628.mp3

 

Common Dreams (6/10/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Headlined “The Cash Monster Was Insatiable,” a 2022 New York Times piece reported insurance companies gaming Medicare Advantage, presented as a “low-cost” alternative to traditional Medicare. One company pressed doctors to add additional illnesses to the records of patients they hadn’t seen for weeks: Dig up enough new diagnoses, and you could win a bottle of champagne. Some companies cherry-picked healthier seniors for enrollment with cynical tricks like locating their offices up flights of stairs.

Such maneuvers don’t lead to good health outcomes, but they serve the real goal: netting private insurers more money. There is now new research on the problem, and the response. We hear from David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and co-author of this new analysis of Medicare Advantage.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628Himmelstein.mp3

 

(CC photo: Jim Naureckas)

Also on the show: You may get the impression from media that marijuana is legal everywhere now, that it’s moved from blight to business, if you will. It’s not as simple as that, and many people harmed by decades of criminalization have yet to see any benefit from decriminalization. Tauhid Chappell has tracked the issue for years now; he teaches the country’s first graduate-level course on equity movements in the cannabis industry, at Thomas Jefferson University. We’ll get an update from him.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628Chappell.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Julian Assange.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628Banter.mp3

 

 

WikiLeaks director Julian Assange pleaded guilty “to a charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information” (CBS, 6/25/24).

In some ways, the nightmare for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is coming to an end. After taking refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, he was arrested in 2019 by Britain, who have since been trying to extradite him to the United States on charges that by publishing official secrets he violated the Espionage Act (FAIR.org, 12/13/20; BBC, 6/25/24). Once he enters a guilty plea, he will be sentenced to time served and walk away a free man (CBS, 6/25/24).

Assange’s case has attracted the attention of critics of US foreign policy, and those who value free speech and a free press. His family has rightly contended that his treatment in prison was atrocious (France24, 11/1/19; Independent, 2/20/24). A group of doctors said he was a victim of “torture” tactics (Lancet, 6/25/20). In 2017, Yahoo! News (9/26/21) reported that the “CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation” and that CIA and Trump administration insiders “even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him.”

His supporters noted that the charges against him came after he harmed the US imperial project, particularly by leaking a video showing US troops killing Reuters journalists in Iraq (New York Times, 4/5/10). Under his watch, WikiLeaks also leaked a trove of diplomatic cables that the New York Times (11/28/10) described as an “unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders, and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.”

Press freedom and human rights groups like the International Federation of Journalists and Amnesty International had long called for his release. Several major news outlets from the US and Europe—the New York Times, Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País—signed a letter calling for his release (New York Times, 11/28/22). They said his “indictment sets a dangerous precedent and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”

Hostility toward press freedom

Assange will owe the Australian government half a million US dollars for his flight home from imprisonment (Guardian, 6/25/24).

Assange’s loved ones and supporters are certainly glad to see him come home (Guardian, 6/25/24). But let’s be perfectly clear-eyed: The entire ordeal and his plea deal are proof of a hostile climate toward a free press in the United States and the wider world, and its chilling effect on investigative journalism could substantially worsen.

Assange’s deal has echoes of the end of the West Memphis Three case, where three Arkansas men were wrongfully convicted as teenagers of a heinous triple homicide in 1993 (Innocence Project, 8/19/11). The three re-entered guilty pleas in exchange for time served. They won their freedom, but their names were still attached to a terrible crime, and the state of Arkansas was able to close the case, ensuring the real killer or killers would never be held accountable. It was an imperfect resolution, but no one could blame the victims of a gross injustice for taking the freedom grudgingly offered.

Something similar is happening with Assange. It compounds the persecution already inflicted on him to force him to declare that exposing US government misdeeds was itself a high crime.

“On a human level, we’re thrilled that he’s out of prison, including the time in the embassy,” said Chuck Zlatkin, a founding member of NYC Free Assange, a group that has held regular protests calling for his release. “We’re thrilled for him personally.”

But the deal shows how eager the US government is to both save face and remain a threatening force against investigative reporters.

‘Criminalization of routine journalistic conduct’

Freedom of the Press Foundation (6/24/24): “Under the legal theory used in the indictment, any journalist could be convicted of violating the Espionage Act for obtaining national defense information from a source, communicating with a source to encourage them to provide national defense information, or publishing national defense information.”

As Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation (6/24/24), said in a statement:

It’s good news that the DoJ is putting an end to this embarrassing saga. But it’s alarming that the Biden administration felt the need to extract a guilty plea for the purported crime of obtaining and publishing government secrets. That’s what investigative journalists do every day.

The plea deal won’t have the precedential effect of a court ruling, but it will still hang over the heads of national security reporters for years to come. The deal doesn’t add any more prison time or punishment for Assange. It’s purely symbolic. The administration could’ve easily just dropped the case, but chose to instead legitimize the criminalization of routine journalistic conduct and encourage future administrations to follow suit. And they made that choice knowing that Donald Trump would love nothing more than to find a way to throw journalists in jail.

And that is all happening while threats against leakers and journalists remain. Edward Snowden, the source in the Guardian’s investigation (6/11/13) into National Security Agency surveillance, still resides in Russia in order to evade arrest. I recently wrote about the excessive sentencing of the man who leaked tax documents to ProPublica and the New York Times showing how lopsided the tax system is in favor of the rich (FAIR.org, 2/2/24). NSA contractor Reality Winner was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking documents to the Intercept on the issue of Russian interference in the 2016 US election (Vanity Fair, 10/12/23).

Laura Poitras, one of the journalists who brought Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance to light, said that Assange’s conviction could silence reporters doing investigative reporting on the US government (New York Times, 12/21/20). Chelsea Manning, Assange’s source for these investigations, spent only seven years in prison out of the 35 years of her sentence thanks to presidential clemency, but that is still a harrowing experience (NPR, 5/17/17).

‘Not transparency’ but ‘sabotage’

The New York Post (6/25/24) predicted that Assange’s release would be cheered by “anarchists and America-haters.”

Worse, some in the so-called free press have rallied behind the government. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/11/19) cheered the legal crusade against Assange, arguing that the leaks harmed national security. “Assange has never been a hero of transparency or democratic accountability,” the Murdoch-owned broadsheet proclaimed.

The neoconservative journal Commentary (4/12/19) dismissed the free press defenders of Assange, saying of Wikileaks’ investigations into US power: “This was not transparency. It was sabotage.”

And the British Economist (4/17/19) said, in support of Assange’s extradition to the US:

WikiLeaks did some good in its early years, exposing political corruption, financial malfeasance and military wrongdoing. But the decision to publish over 250,000 diplomatic cables in 2010 was malicious. The vast majority of messages revealed no illegality or misdeeds. Mr. Assange’s reckless publication of the unredacted versions of those cables the following year harmed America’s interests by putting its diplomatic sources at risk of reprisals, persecution or worse.

Unsurprisingly, Murdoch outlets gave the plea deal a thumbs down. “Don’t fall for the idea that Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a persecuted ‘publisher,’” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/25/24) warned.

The New York Post editorial board (6/25/24) disparaged Assange’s motives, saying he “wasn’t interested in justice or exposing true abuse; he simply relished obtaining and releasing any secret government or political material, particularly if US-based.” Alleging that the documents he published were sensitive, the paper argued in favor of government secrecy: “Uncle Sam needs to keep some critical secrets, especially when lives are on the line.”

In reality, US intelligence and military officials have never been able to trace any deaths to WikiLeaks‘ revelations (BBC, 12/1/10; Guardian, 7/31/13; NPR, 4/12/19)—and certainly have never identified any damage anywhere nearly as serious as the very real harms it exposed. (NPR did quote a former State Department lawyer who complained that WikiLeaks‘ exposes “can really chill the ability of those American personnel to build those sorts of relationships and have frank conversations with their contacts.”)  Alas, some publications side with state power even if journalistic freedom is at stake (FAIR.org, 4/18/19).

‘Punished for telling the truth’

The vindictive plea bargain the Biden administration forced on Assange might provide Donald Trump in a potential second term with tools he could use to put establishment journalists in prison (CNN, 12/7/23).

Assange’s case is over, but he walks away a battered man as a result of the legal struggle. And that serves as a warning to other journalists who rely on brave people in high levels of power to disclose injustices. Stern is right: Another Trump administration would be horrendous for journalists. But the current situation with the Democratic administration is already chilling.

“All he was being punished for was telling the truth about war crimes committed by this country,” Zlatkin told FAIR.

And without a real change in how the Espionage Act is used against journalists, the ability to tell the truth to the rest of the world is at risk.

“We’re still not in a situation where we as a general population are getting the truth of what’s being done in our name,” Zlatkin said. “So the struggle continues.”

 

On Thursday, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will face each other on CNN for the first scheduled debate of the 2024 presidential election. This year, things will be run differently; CNN will be entirely in charge. If history is any guide, things will not go well for democracy.

‘A fraud on the American voter’

Once upon a time, presidential debates were hosted by the nonpartisan League of Women Voters, which set the terms and chose the moderators. But the national chairs of the two dominant parties formed the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) and wrested control from the League in 1988. The LWV responded by accusing the parties of

perpetrat[ing] a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.

FAIR (8/2/19) on a 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate: “CNN took an approach to the debates more befitting a football game than an exercise in democracy.”

The result was, as FAIR repeatedly documented (e.g., 10/26/12, 8/26/16, 8/2/19, 2/29/20), largely what the League predicted: few tough questions, most with a right-wing corporate framing, rarely reflecting the issues of most concern to voters. But even the CPD has lost its grip on the debates now, starting in 2022, when the RNC announced its distancing from the organization. Earlier this year, Biden signaled his own interest in working out a debate outside the normal CPD process.

Which brings us to the current situation, featuring two scheduled debates—on June 27 on CNN, and on September 10 on ABC—following rules agreed upon by the host network and the two candidates. CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will moderate the first contest.

As we’ve said before (7/19/23), the public needs to fully understand the stakes of the 2024 election, and that can’t mean a blackout on Trump. But it does require incisive questions that speak to people’s real needs and concerns, and some way of offering real-time factchecking to viewers. CNN viewers are unlikely to get the former, and CNN has already promised not to supply the latter.

Unfit to host

FAIR (7/19/23) on CNN‘s 2023 “town hall” for Trump: “The entire affair read as a giant campaign rally sponsored by CNN.”

Of the major nonpartisan news networks (i.e., excluding Fox), CNN is perhaps the least fit to host a presidential debate. In recent elections and primaries, it has repeatedly proved that it’s not an enlightened public the network is after, but ratings (e.g., FAIR.org, 8/2/19, 8/25/22, 7/19/23).

In the most recent example, the network infamously hosted a town hall with Trump during the 2023 Republican primaries. That choice appeared to be entirely self-serving. After working to move the network rightward, then–chair Chris Licht had led CNN to what the Atlantic (6/2/23) described as “its historic nadir,” in terms of ratings as well as newsroom morale. The Trump town hall was the big plan to turn the ship around.

Instead, it quickly proved to be an embarrassment that ultimately cost Licht his job (FAIR.org, 6/8/23). Trump turned the event into what came across as a campaign rally sponsored by CNN, spouting falsehood after falsehood and running roughshod over CNN host Kaitlan Collins in front of cheering fans. (The CNN floor manager instructed the audience that while applause was permitted, booing was not.)

Even in its town halls with Trump’s slightly less truth-challenged primary challengers, the network’s own post-event factchecks showed that CNN hosts—including Tapper and Bash—failed to counter major falsehoods in real time (FAIR.org, 7/19/23).

Reliance on right-wing talking points

CNN‘s Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) claimed that student protests against genocide in Gaza were spreading “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses,” and said they were  “hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe.”

Though Trump (who agreed to the ground rules and choice of host) has been pre-emptively complaining he won’t get a fair shake from such a “biased” outlet—biased to the left, he means—Tapper and Bash hardly have a record of asking left-leaning questions.

CNN didn’t host a presidential debate in 2020, but it did host Democratic primary debates. Beyond its ESPN-like introductions to the candidates and questioning style that seemed designed to foment conflict more than to inform, the network relied heavily on right-wing talking points and assumptions to frame its questions (FAIR.org, 8/2/19).

In just one example, Tapper started off a 2019 Democratic primary debate night by asking Bernie Sanders whether “tak[ing] private health insurance away from more than 150 million Americans, in exchange for government-sponsored healthcare for everyone,” was “political suicide” (FAIR.org, 8/2/19).

In a 2016 Democratic debate, Bash questioned Hillary Clinton on her proposal for paid maternity leave—something every other industrialized nation in the world provides—with a decidedly antagonistic framing (FAIR.org, 7/16/19): “There are so many people who say, ‘Really? Another government program?’ Is that what you’re proposing? And at the expense of taxpayer money?”

After CNN‘s 2023 Trump town hall, Tapper (On With Kara Swisher, 7/10/23) argued that the event was “in the public’s interest.” But there’s no world in which offering a serial liar a town hall stuffed full of people instructed to cheer but not boo serves the public interest. Tapper’s take on the “public interest” doesn’t bode well for his performance this week.

On the central foreign policy issue of the year—Israel’s months-long assault on Gaza—Tapper and Bash both have exhibited a strong pro-Israel bias (FAIR.org, 5/3/24). It’s not a promising setup for a debate between a strongly pro-Israel candidate occasionally critical of the country’s right-wing government (Biden) and a strongly pro-Israel candidate aligned with that right wing (Trump).

And CNN, like its fellow corporate media outlets, is allergic to questions about many issues of critical importance to large numbers of viewers. In its first 2019 Democratic primary debate (FAIR.org, 8/2/19), CNN asked more non-policy questions—primarily about whether some candidates were “moving too far to the left to win the White House”—than questions about the climate crisis. Across two nights of debates, the network’s 31 non-policy questions overwhelmed those on key issues like gun control (11) and women’s rights (7).

Factcheck abdication

CNN declines to do real-time factchecking, but its after-the-fact factchecking is no great shakes either (FAIR.org, 10/5/12).

The debate and its terms have been agreed to by both Biden and Trump. There will be no audience on Thursday. The candidates’ microphones will be muted when it’s not their turn to speak. In a first for a presidential debate, there will be two commercial breaks during the debate. (It remains to be seen which giant corporations will be sponsoring this supposed exercise in democracy.)

What will this format offer viewers—and, more broadly, democracy? The microphone rule should help avoid the 2020 debate debacle, in which Trump’s incessant interruptions rendered the event virtually unwatchable (FAIR.org, 10/2/20). But Trump doesn’t just interrupt incessantly; he lies incessantly as well. Will Tapper and Bash factcheck every lie, even if it means doing so more often to Trump than to Biden?

Shockingly, CNN isn’t even going to pretend to try. Political director David Chalian  (New York Times, 6/24/24) said that a live debate “is not the ideal arena for live factchecking,” so instead the moderators would be “facilitating the debate between these candidates, not being a participant in that debate.” Factchecking will be reserved for post-show analysis. Meanwhile, moderators “will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion” (CNN, 6/15/24).

On the one hand, Trump has made real-time factchecking essentially impossible, because the rate at which he puts forth falsehoods would require constant interruption. Of the 74 Trump debate claims checked by Politifact (2/2/24), only two were judged “true,” and seven “mostly true.” Across time and setting, 58% of Biden’s claims were judged at least “half true,” compared to 24% for Trump.

On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine how the public will be served by a “debate” featuring a notorious fabulist in which the moderators don’t even try to point out blatant lies. Saving factchecking for after the debate won’t help the millions who tune out when the debate ends. And you can hardly expect an opponent to be responsible for countering every lie Trump tells.

CNN has never been particularly good at factchecking (e.g., FAIR.org, 10/4/11, 10/5/12). Now with a candidate and party that aggressively disdain facts and honesty, the network is virtually guaranteed to fail the public even more miserably—and with potentially graver consequences.

ACTION ALERT: Messages to CNN can be sent here. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

Featured Image: CNN images of its debate moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

 

Shalhevet school head David Block (Boiling Point, 6/2/24): “If our community can’t handle something, I do have to consider that.”

The staff of the Boiling Point don’t consider themselves student journalists. They consider themselves journalists.

The official paper of Shalhevet, a prestigious orthodox Jewish day school in Los Angeles, is not a mere extra-curricular activity for the college-bound, but a living record of the larger community. And so the fact that the school is censoring the paper’s coverage of pro-Palestine viewpoints is an illustration of the nation’s current crisis of free speech and the free press as Israel’s slaughter in Gaza rages on.

The Boiling Point (6/2/24) reported that the school administration had censored an article about Muslim perspectives on Gaza because it quoted a teenager who “said Israel was committing genocide and that she did not believe Hamas had committed atrocities.” The paper said:

Head of school Rabbi David Block told faculty advisor Mrs. Joelle Keene to take down the story from all Boiling Point postings later that day.

It was the first time the administration had ordered the paper to remove an active story. The story is also not published in today’s print edition.

“Shalhevet’s principal ordered that the entire paper be taken out of circulation in what advisor Joelle Keene said was a striking change of pace,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (6/11/24) reported. She told the wire service, “There have been difficult stories and difficult moments and conflicts and that sort of thing. We’ve always been able to work them out.”

Justifications for censorship

The administration’s justification for the censorship was twofold. The first reason for the censorship was that the pro-Palestine viewpoints were simply too hurtful for a community that was still in shock over the October 7 attacks against Israel by Hamas.

This is, to be quite blunt, demeaning to the students and the community. I was not much older than these students during the 9/11 attacks, but I spent that day and days after that at my student newspaper, the Michigan Daily. While our reporters piled into a car to drive to New York City, I joined my fellow editorial board members—Jews, Arabs and many others—in navigating a future of war, attacks on civil liberties and anti-Islamic hate.

And today, student journalists are no less important in this historical moment where students are standing up against the genocide in Gaza (USA Today, 5/2/24; AP, 5/2/24).

The Boiling Point is hardly pro-Hamas. As one of its editors, Tali Liebenthal, said in response to this point, it was indeed painful for the community to hear anti-Israel opinions, but “I don’t think that the Boiling Point has any responsibility to shield our readers from that pain.” The Shalhevet students, in the tradition of Jewish inquiry, do certainly appear able to explore the tough and difficult subjects of their moment.

But there’s a second, more banal reason for the censorship. Block told the Boiling Point, “My feeling is that this article would both give people the wrong impression about Shalhevet.” He added:

It would have very serious implications for whether they’re going to consider sending the next generation of people who should be Shalhevet students to Shalhevet.

Block is placing prospective parents’ sensitivities before truth and debate. He’s worried that families will see a quote in the paper they disagree with, decide the school is a Hamas hot house, and send their child for an education elsewhere. The suggestion is that the school’s enrollment numbers are more important, not just than freedom of the press, but than a central aspect of Jewishness: the pursuit of knowledge.

Would Block block articles exploring why ultra-religious Jews like Satmars (Shtetl, 11/22/23) and Neturei Karta (Haaretz, 3/27/24) oppose Zionism for theological reasons? We should hope a school for Jewish scholarship would be wise to value discussions of deep ideas over fear of offending potential enrollees.

Perverting ideals of openness

Intercept (6/3/24): “After the editors [of the Columbia Law Review] declined a board of directors request to take down the articles, the board pulled the plug on the entire website.”

The Boiling Point affair is indicative of a larger problem with a censorship that exploits the term “antisemitism” and a sensitivity to Jewish suffering to silence anything remotely critical of Israel’s far-right government. Raz Segal, a Jewish Israeli scholar of genocide, had his position as director at the Center of Genocide and Holocaust students at the University of Minnesota rescinded (MPR, 6/11/24) because he wrote that Israel’s intentions for its campaign in Gaza were genocidal (Jewish Currents, 10/13/23). The board of directors of the Columbia Law Review briefly took down the journal’s website in response to an article (5/24) published about the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians—after the piece had already been spiked by the Harvard Law Review (Intercept, 6/3/24).  The chair of the Jewish studies department at Dartmouth College was violently arrested during an anti-genocide protest (Jerusalem Post, 5/3/24).

The 92nd Street Y, a kind of secular Jewish temple of arts and culture in New York City, encountered massive staff resignations (NPR, 10/24/23) after it canceled a talk by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen because he had signed a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (London Review of Books, 10/18/23). The author of the American Jewish Committee’s definition of antisemitism admits that his work is being used to crush free speech (Guardian, 12/13/19; Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/27/24).

These are prominent institutions that are meant to be pillars of openness and discourse in a free society, yet that are perverting themselves in order not to offend donors, government officials and sycophantic newspaper columnists. And the victims of this kind of censorship are Jews and non-Jews alike.

From the highest universities down to high schools like Shalhevet, administrators are cloaking their worlds in darkness. The journalists at the Boiling Point are part of a resistance keeping free speech and expression alive in the United States.

Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR’s Jim Naureckas about the secret recording of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for the June 14, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

  Rolling Stone (6/10/24)

Janine Jackson: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, fresh off revelations of a “Stop the Steal”-denoting upside-down flag flying at his Virginia home while the Court was deciding whether to hear a 2020 election case, was captured on tape responding to a question about how to address the polarization between left and right in this country. Quote: “One side or the other is going to win. I don’t know, I mean, there can be a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised,” close quote. 

Given what we understand Alito sees as his side, how this sits with you has something to do with your understanding of the role of the Supreme Court, its ethics and accountability, and in terms of some justices, how much brazenness is too much? Joining us now to to think about it is FAIR editor Jim Naureckas. He’s here in studio. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jim Naureckas.

Jim Naureckas: Hey, it’s always great to be here.

JJ: Well, what do you think was actually revealed in this captured conversation? As CNN (6/12/24) said, Alito’s religious zeal, you know, he talks at one point about making the US a place of godliness. That’s been evident in his statements and his opinions. So what is noteworthy about this latest?

JN: I think there is a bit of a mask being taken off with this statement. If you look at his rulings, the way he votes, he clearly is coming from a place of Christian nationalism. I think that the people who are doing a read on his jurisprudence would agree on that. 

But it’s always framed in the idea of universal values, of constitutional principles. When he flies a flag endorsing the overthrow of the US government, he blames it on his wife. He always has an out, and I think he doesn’t have so much of an out here. When he says one side or the other is going to win, clearly he wants his side to win. He’s not a neutral observer on the sides. He’s on the side of what he calls “godliness.” 

I think that is important for us to recognize and important for journalists who are covering the Court to take these statements into account when they talk about the rulings that Alito authors and the votes he takes. They should be put in this context.

JJ: Well, absolutely, and that’s kind of the next thing I was going to say, because the filmmaker Lauren Windsor, you know, but we should know that when Alito was talking to her, she was just a woman that he was talking to at a public event, but she asked him about public trust in the Supreme Court, and he said he blames the media, quote, “because they do nothing but criticize us, and so they have really eroded trust in the Court,” close quote. Well, of course, what a lot of folks would say is the Court is eroding trust in itself, but building on what you’ve just said, a lot of folks might say, well, actually, elite media have, through commission and omission, been kind of propping up the idea that the Court is dispassionate, long past the idea where we’ve seen that that’s not true.

In a typical headline, the New York Times (6/14/24) obscures the partisan nature of a recent Court ruling. In the article, the paper writes that the 6-3 decision “split along ideological”—rather than partisan—”lines.”

JN: Yeah. When you see there’s a real difference in the way that journalists cover the Supreme Court versus Congress versus the White House. When Congress does something, they talk about how the Democrats voted and how the Republicans voted, and you can see that there’s generally a substantial difference along party lines. The president is identified by party, and a Democratic president does certain things differently than Republican presidents, hopefully. 

That is not usually the case when they’re discussing Supreme Court rulings. They don’t say “there was a six to three ruling from the Supreme Court. The six Republican appointed justices voted one way, and the three Democratic appointed justices voted the other way,” and they should. It’s a political branch of the government, like the other two branches of government. They are not applying universal principles as philosopher kings. They have, as Alito’s statements make very clear, partisan allegiances, and they have outcomes that they’re trying to achieve through their votes and through their rulings, and that should be made clear when journalists are talking about the Supreme Court.

JJ: Well, and finally and relatedly, Lauren Windsor explained in her interview with Rolling Stone why she chose to go to this elite event and record. And it’s because the Court is shrouded in so much secrecy and because it refuses to submit to accountability, which listeners will know all about, in the face of evidence of serious ethics breaches, and I think a lot of folks would recognize that. 

But I can also still hear folks saying, well, she did this secretly. If she’d only gone through proper channels to get this information, then we might take it more seriously. I mean, maybe that day has passed, but I do think that folks can recognize that you can’t just go up as a corporate reporter and expect Supreme Court justices to tell you what is really going on. So what do you say about this method of obtaining information?

Jim Naureckas: “I think that is important for journalists who are covering the Court to take these statements into account when they talk about the rulings that Alito authors and the votes he takes. They should be put in this context.”

JN: Well, it probably wasn’t George Orwell who said that journalism is what people don’t want reported; everything else is public relations. That is true to a great extent, that people need to have information that people in power are trying to keep from them, and sometimes you can’t get that information except by going undercover. There are things that happen behind closed doors that are said to people who are ideological compatriots that are not said to the general public. You don’t know what those things are unless you get behind those closed doors, and sometimes subterfuge is the only way to get behind those doors.

There has been a real shift in journalism, which used to celebrate undercover reporting and used to give awards to people who set up—there’s a famous example of a fake tavern set up in Chicago, it was a real tavern run by journalists to see how many bribes we demanded from them, and they got prizes for that. 

But starting with the Food Lion case where reporters went to a supermarket, got jobs there, found out the horrific way that meat was being handled and mishandled there, and a judge ruled against them. And ever since then, there’s been this idea that, oh, we’re really too ethical to do something like get a job in a supermarket to expose threats to public health. The pendulum really has shifted. I think it’s a shame, because I think that the public does have a right to know how supermarkets are tainting their food, and they have a right to know what Supreme Court justices are really thinking about the decisions that are going to affect all of our lives.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Jim Naureckas. He’s editor here at FAIR of the website FAIR.org and the newsletter Extra!. Thanks, Jim Naureckas, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JN: Thanks for having me on.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240621.mp3

 

Chicago Sun-Times (4/8/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump told a Las Vegas crowd earlier this month that, if elected, the “first thing” he would do would be to end the IRS practice of taxing tips as part of workers’ regular income. “For those hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy,” he said.  Labor advocates were quick to call it out as unserious pandering, particularly in the light of hostility toward efforts to provide those workers a livable basic wage.

Unfortunately, Trump can count on a general haziness in the public mind on the impact of “tipped wages,” more helpfully labeled subminimum wages. And that’s partly due to a corporate press corps who, through the decades-long fight on the issue, always give pride of place to the industry narrative that, as a Chicago Sun-Times headline said, “Getting Rid of Tipped Wages in Illinois Would Be the Final Blow to Many Restaurants.” And often lead with customers, like one cited in a recent piece in Bon Appetit, who proudly states that he only tips 10%, half today’s norm, because it’s what he’s always done, and “if servers want more, then they should put the same effort in that I took to earn that money.”

As president of the group One Fair Wage, Saru Jayaraman is a leading mythbuster on the history, practice and impact of tipping. CounterSpin talked with her in November 2015. We’ll hear that conversation again today, when much of what she shares is still widely unexplored and misunderstood.

Transcript: ‘A Woman’s Ability to Pay Her Bills Should Not Be Dependent on the Whims of Customers’

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240621Jayaraman.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of child labor.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240621Banter.mp3

 

Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Kennedy Smith about the proliferation and impact of chain dollar stores for the June 14, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240614Smith.mp3

As the American Prospect (1/19/24) reports, Dollar General has also been fined by New York and sued by Ohio and Missouri for business practices that harm consumers.

Janine Jackson: Some listeners may have seen the story of Dollar General stores in Missouri being caught cheating customers by listing one price on the shelf, then charging a higher price at checkout. It’s a crummy thing to do to folks just trying to meet household needs. And yet it’s just one of many harms dollar stores—some call them deal destinations—are doing to communities across the country. What’s the nature of the problem, and what can we do about it? 

Our guest has been tracking the various impacts of chain dollar stores and their proliferation, as well as what can happen when communities and policymakers fight back. Kennedy Smith is a senior researcher with the Independent Business Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. She joins us now by phone from Arlington, Virginia. Welcome to Counterspin, Kennedy Smith.

Kennedy Smith: Thank you.

JJ: Well, dollar stores are sort of like fancy restaurants. If they aren’t part of your life, you might not even physically notice them. But they’ve been proliferating wildly in recent years. In 2021, as the Institute’s report, “The Dollar Store Invasion,” begins, nearly half of new stores that opened in the US were chain dollar stores, a degree of momentum with no parallel in the history of the retail industry. 

Now, I want to talk through specific problems, but could you maybe start by talking about where these stores are and what’s giving rise to them, which connects directly to what they do?

KS: Basically, they are everywhere. They are in 48 states now. They haven’t quite made the leap yet to Hawaii and Alaska, but they began—the two major chains, Dollar General, which is headquartered in Tennessee, and Dollar Tree/Family Dollar, which is now in Virginia Beach, Virginia—began by radiating out from their headquarters. And so we see heavy concentrations of them sort of in the east and the southeast. They are now marching across the country and entering all kinds of markets. 

And they have slightly different profiles. Dollar General tends to be a little more rural. They tend to go into smaller rural communities. Dollar Tree tends to be more suburban, and Family Dollar tends to be located primarily in urban neighborhoods. 

And they are being fueled by a variety of factors, including consolidation in the grocery industry and people’s desire to find more affordable food and products in general are driving people to believe that dollar stores are offering them a better value. 

And in fact, that’s one of the tricks that the dollar stores play on people, is that they actually are getting poor value and usually paying more in a per ounce or per pound basis than they might be if they were shopping at a traditional, independently owned grocery store or hardware store or office supply store, whatever it might be.

JJ: It sounds like they’re filling a need, like they’re reaching to an overlooked group of people. And it reminds me a little of check-cashing stores, where folks who are oppressed economically in terms of their wages, so they don’t get to bank in a regular way, and then these fill-in spots show up and it’s perverse, you know. 

But it’s also just not how a lot of folks think things work. They see these things, oh, these are cheap stores. These are for folks who can’t afford as much as, you know, maybe some others. And this is filling their need. That’s exactly what it’s not doing. 

So let’s start on this “17 problems” that you engage in a pullout piece of the Institute’s work on this. What are some of the big things you lift up as the harmful impacts?

ILSR’s report on dollar store impacts

KS: Well, I should mention, to begin, that these are 17 of the problems that we hear mentioned most frequently, but there are plenty of others. And there are slight variations around the country. For example, in areas of the country that are susceptible to flooding and to hurricanes, there’s a lot more concern about the environmental impact of these stores and what it might mean in terms of stormwater runoff, because one of the problems with dollar stores in general is that they tend to have a very thin operating model. They’re thinly staffed. They look for inexpensive land. They build cheap buildings if they’re building new buildings. And so they’re not likely to want to afford to put in stormwater retention basins and things like that. So there’s some regional variations. 

But in general, the things that we find to be the biggest problems are, one, their economic impact on the community, and two, their sort of social impact on a community. In terms of the economy, they are a direct threat to independent grocery stores. And there are a number of studies now that have come out that have looked at what that impact is. 

There’s one that the USDA did last year, which found that basically grocery store sales will decline by 10 percent when a dollar store enters the market. There was one that was done by the University of Toronto and UCLA in 2022 that found after looking at 800-some dollar stores, that when you have three dollar stores within a two mile radius of one another, they’re likely to kill a grocery store that’s there. 

And that has a huge impact on a community because grocery stores are really community anchors in many ways and are responsible for providing their community members with healthy food as opposed to the sort of overly preserved things that you’re likely to get at a dollar store, like a box of macaroni and cheese or a box of sugary cereal or something like that. When a community loses its grocery store, it can be devastating. 

And the same thing can be true for some of the other categories, industry categories on which dollar stores tend to compete, like hardware and like office supplies and school supplies. Those are important anchor businesses for communities that people don’t want to lose. 

On the sort of social side of things, there are a number of problems and probably first and foremost is crime. Because they are so thinly staffed, dollar stores are easy targets for robberies. It’s very easy for someone to come in and just reach into the cash register, grab cash and leave. And communities complain about this all the time. I have literally hundreds of news articles that I’ve clipped about dollar store crime. 

They also have poor labor practices. They pay their workers less than the independently owned grocery stores that they’re threatening. They tend to promote workers to assistant manager relatively quickly, which means that they’re then exempt from overtime, and they make them work 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week. They’ve been sued several times, both of the major chains, successfully by groups of workers or former workers for wage theft for exactly that. 

There are other things, too. One of the things that we have observed and a researcher actually at the University of Georgia in the Geography Department has reported on and written about is that they tend to target black and brown neighborhoods. Dollar General, for example, 79 percent of its stores tend to be located in majority minority neighborhoods. And we think this is a little bit parasitic. And we also think that they’re looking for places where the community is likely not to have as much influence at City Hall as somebody in another neighborhood. And we think that’s just despicable.

JJ: Well, if I could just bring you back to that economic impact for a second, because it’s not that they are able to deliver better things cheaper, just to spell that out. That’s not what they’re doing.

A More Perfect Union investigation found that Dollar General frequently charges more than its competitors for staple goods but “masks the high cost from consumers by stocking smaller pack sizes.”

KS: Correct. No, they’re selling similar products, but the packaging that they’ll sell them in tends to be smaller. And therefore, on an ounce-by-ounce basis, we find that the products are often actually more expensive for consumers to buy. It’s a practice called “shrinkflation.” There are a couple of other names that it goes by—”cheater sizes.”

JJ: So it’s not, well, they just build a better mousetrap. That’s how capitalism works. That’s not what’s going on.

KS: Yeah. You know, it’s funny that you mention capitalism because in communities that are where a dollar store has been proposed to be built and the community kind of comes out and opposes it, the people who tend to support the idea of the dollar store coming in tend to say, well, that’s just capitalism. That’s just free market economics.

It isn’t. Free market economics are based on having a level playing field. And that’s why all of our major antitrust laws were developed a century ago, because we wanted for small businesses to be able to compete on the same playing field as bigger businesses. One of the things that dollar store chains often do is that they will go to their suppliers, their wholesalers, and say, we want you to offer this product to us, but not offer it to our competitors, do not offer it to grocery stores. Or we want you to make a special size for us of a package that no one else can get. And we can price it the way we want. 

Those are blatant violations of federal antitrust laws. And I think that on a federal level, we need to begin paying attention to that. And the same thing at the state level, while communities themselves are doing what they can to fight dollars for proliferation at the local level.

JJ: OK, I don’t shop at dollar stores. I’m just a taxpayer. Why should I care about the issue of dollar store proliferation as a taxpayer?

KS: Well, I think there are a number of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons I would think as a taxpayer is that tax revenue that would normally accrue to the community, and wages that would normally accrue to the community, are now leaving the community, and they’re going to a corporate headquarters where they’re being either reinvested in corporate expansion, or they’re being distributed to shareholders or being used to pay off their investors. 

There’s an example that we cite in one of our reports about Haven, Kansas, which had a local grocery store that was there that was paying $75,000 a year in property taxes. So the city was getting that revenue. A dollar store came in, a Dollar General store came in, and within a couple of years, the grocery store couldn’t hold on anymore. The dollar store had eked away just enough of its sales that it couldn’t hold on. And so it closed. The dollar store was paying $60,000 a year in property tax. So the city right off the bat is losing $15,000 a year in property tax revenue that it had before. 

But not only that, as a concession to attract the dollar store, the city council had agreed to basically rebate half of the municipal utility taxes that the dollar store developer would have paid for two years. That was $36,000. So now all of a sudden the grocery store is gone and the city is losing $51,000 a year in property tax revenue. 

And that’s just an example of tax revenue. We’re not even talking about the wage differential and the fact that dollar stores typically only have one or two staff employed at a time, whereas a grocery store might have 30 or 40 people employed. And the dollar store, Dollar General, is at the rock bottom of the 66 largest corporations in terms of hourly wages. So the community is just losing right and left.

JJ: Right. Well, what happens when communities recognize that, and they resist these dollar stores? I know that the Institute tracks that as well.

KS: Dollar General tends to work with developers who build buildings for them that they then lease for 15 years, usually with three five-year expansion options. And the developer is going to try to minimize costs. And so the developer tends to look for inexpensive land, which tends to be land that is often zoned for agricultural use, or on a scenic byway, or in some kind of rural area, or maybe on the edge of a residential neighborhood. 

And to do that, they have to go to the city generally and request a zoning variance. And that’s where the battles tend to develop, is people come out and say, no, we want this area to remain zoned like it is, because there was a reason for that, that we wanted it zoned that way. And we don’t want to change that. I’ve tracked 140 communities now that have defeated dollar stores. And in 138 of those, all but two, they’ve been defeated based on the city denying a zoning variance request. 

The other two—it’s something pretty exciting that’s happened recently. In Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana—which is where Hammond and Ponchatoula is, if you know Louisiana—last spring, a developer came to the Planning Commission and submitted plans to build a Dollar General store. It was an unzoned parcel of land. There was no zoning, so he wasn’t requesting a zoning variance. He simply had to have his building plans approved. 

The Planning Commission turned him down. And they turned him down based on their police power to protect the health, safety and welfare of the community, which is a completely novel approach. We had not seen that happen before. The developer appealed that to the parish council. The parish council supported the Planning Commission. 

The developer then sued. And last September, the trial took place. And then in November, the judge—in a, you know, this is a pretty conservative part of the country—the judge ruled in favor of the parish and said that they were completely correct in using their police power to protect the health and safety of the community by denying that developer the right to build a dollar store there.

JJ: Wow.

KS: This is a kind of groundbreaking thing. There’s another community that we found, Newton County, Georgia, used essentially the same approach. So we’re getting to have now sort of a body of case law that provides a precedent for a community saying, wait a minute, forget, I mean, zoning is one thing, but these stores are unhealthy for our community. They’re not good for the economy. They’re not good for jobs. They’re not good for the environment. They’re not good for crime. And we’ve had enough.

JJ: Well, it sounds as though that community involvement relies a lot on information and on advance information. They have to know that this is in the planning process to know about the points that they could intervene, which is wonderful. But it also suggests, as I know the work does, that there could be interventions from a higher level, including from the federal level. What do you see as potentially useful that could happen there?

KS: Well, at the federal level, we would, of course, like to see stronger and more vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws that we already have on the books. The Robinson-Patman Act, the Sherman Act are all laws that are there to prevent exactly what’s happening with dollar store proliferation. And states can also adopt those same laws at the state level to provide some protection there. And that may be, in some instances, easier than getting federal attention. 

States also are being pretty aggressive in looking at things like scanner errors, which you mentioned. In fact, the former attorney general of Ohio—well, first of all, the current attorney general of Ohio has investigated and fined Dollar General a million dollars for scanner violations. Basically, the price someone sees on the shelf is not the price they’re being charged by the scanner when they check out. The former attorney general of Ohio, a guy named Marc Dann, is now putting together a class action lawsuit against the dollar store chains for scanner errors, which he’s estimating Dollar General loan is making hundreds of millions of dollars annually in scanner errors because they’re so huge and they’re almost always in favor of the company and not the consumer. 

The adage is, “the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago.” And often communities don’t think about protecting themselves from this sort of proliferation, this kind of predatory business expansion until it’s too late. But for those who are seeing this happening around them in other communities and thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense to put some protection in place right away. 

And some of the things that communities are doing are things like what we call dispersal ordinances, which basically say you cannot build a new dollar store within X distance, two miles, five miles of an existing store so that we don’t have the market crowded with them. Or they’re putting in place ordinances like just happened in a town in Oregon that I saw that has put in place a formula business ordinance saying we want to have retail diversity in the community. We don’t want to have 10 identical pizza places. We don’t want to have five identical grocery stores. We want to have diversity. So therefore, we are fine with one dollar store, but not with five.

JJ: Well, finally, information seems key to all of this—information of the actual impacts of dollar stores and then about the possible levers of potential resistance. And that brings me back to news media and reporting. The report itself on the dollar store invasion got coverage, absolutely. But of course, the implications go well beyond covering the report itself as an event. What would you like to see finally more of or less of from news media on this set of issues?

Kennedy Smith: “I would like to see more in-depth coverage of the impact of dollar stores once they’ve been in a community for a while…. I don’t see much looking back and saying, oh, yeah, we lost Ford’s grocery store and we lost the Haven grocery store, and these are the breadcrumbs that led to that outcome.”

KS: That’s a great question. I think I would like to see more in-depth coverage of the impact of dollar stores once they’ve been in a community for a while. I don’t see much on that. I don’t see much sort of looking back and saying, oh, yeah, we lost Ford’s grocery store and we lost the Haven grocery store, and these are the breadcrumbs that led to that outcome. 

I’d also like to see more news media tying this to threats to democracy, because if we have major corporations that are able to basically extract this kind of money, this vast volume of money from communities and make it difficult for independently owned businesses to compete, then we’ve changed what the nature of capitalism is. And we need to get back to the roots of what democracy is about. And that really is about having a level playing field for small businesses, for every American to basically have the opportunity to create a business enterprise and thrive and reinvest in their community. And that’s being taken away from us.

JJ: Well, we’ll end it there for now. Kennedy Smith is a senior researcher with the Independent Business Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find a lot of work on dollar stores, along with much else on their site, ILSR.org. Kennedy Smith thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KS: Thank you so much, Janine.