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As the Democratic Party began to coalesce behind Kamala Harris, the New York Times‘ popular Morning newsletter (7/23/24) quickly put forward the knee-jerk corporate media prescription for Democratic candidates: urging Harris to the right.

Under the subhead, “Why moderation works,” David Leonhardt explained that “the average American considers the Democratic Party to be further from the political mainstream than the Republican Party.”

As evidence, he pointed to two polls. The first was a recent Gallup poll that found Trump leading Biden on the question of who voters agreed with more “on the issues that matter most to you.” The second was a 2021 Winston poll asking people to rate themselves on an ideological scale in comparison to Democratic and Republican politicians; people on average placed themselves closer to Republicans than to Democrats.

Of course, these polls, which ask only about labels and perceptions, tell you much more about the fuzziness—perhaps even meaninglessness—of those labels than about how well either party’s policy positions align with voters’ interests, and what positions candidates ought to take in order to best represent those voters’ interests. Responsible pollsters would ask about actual, concrete policies in the context of information about their impact; otherwise, as former Gallup editor David Moore has pointed out (FAIR.org, 2/11/22), they merely offer the illusion of public opinion.

For the New York Times‘ David Leonhardt (7/23/24), the first question about Kamala Harris is “whether she will signal that she’s more mainstream than other Democrats.”

And where do people get the idea that the Democratic Party is, as Leonhardt says, “radical,” and misaligned with them on important issues?

Of course, the right-wing media and right-wing politicians offer a steady drumbeat of such criticism, painting even die-hard centrists like Joe Biden as radical leftists. But centrist media play a starring role here, too, having long portrayed progressive Democratic candidates and officials as extreme and out of step with voters.

For instance, the Times joined the drumbeat of centrist media attacks on Sen. Bernie Sanders for supposedly being too far out of the mainstream to be a serious 2016 presidential candidate (FAIR.org, 1/30/20). Forecasting the 2016 Democratic primary race, the Times’ Trip Gabriel and Patrick Healy (5/31/15) predicted that

some of Mr. Sanders’ policy prescriptions—including far higher taxes on the wealthy and deep military spending cuts—may eventually persuade Democrats that he is unelectable in a general election.

As FAIR (6/2/15) noted at the time, most of Sanders’ key progressive positions—including raising taxes on the wealthy—were actually quite popular with voters. Cutting military spending is not quite as popular as taxing the rich, but it often outpolls giving more money to the Pentagon—a political position that the Times would never claim made a candidate “unelectable.”

Voters’ leading concern this election year (as in many election years) is the economy, and in particular, inflation and jobs. As most corporate media outlets have reported recently (e.g., Vox, 4/24/24; CNN, 6/26/24), economists are warning that Trump’s proposed policies—massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, as well as increased tariffs—will increase inflation. So, too, would deporting tens of millions of immigrants, as Trump claims he will do, as this would cause a major labor shortage in an already tight job market.

(It’s also worth noting here that, even without being given more context, a majority of respondents oppose Trump’s deportation plan—Gallup, 7/12/24.)

Representative democracy needs informed citizens who understand how well candidates will reflect their interests. Reporting like Leonhardt’s, using context-free polling and blithely ignoring the disconnect between what people concretely want and what candidates’ policies will do, only strengthens that disconnect and undermines democracy further.

As the New York Times (7/24/24) has elsewhere noted, crime rates are currently lower than they have been in more than a generation.

Believing he has established that Democrats in general are “radical” (or else believing it’s more his job to pretend they are than to dispel the notion), Leonhardt in the next section asks, how can Harris “signal that she’s more mainstream than other Democrats”?

He offers “five Democratic vulnerabilities,” the first of which he says is crime—”the most natural way for Harris to show moderation,” since she is “a former prosecutor who won elections partly by promising to crack down on crime. Today, many Americans are worried about crime.”

Again, Leonhardt takes a misperception among voters—that crime rates are elevated—and rather than attempting to debunk it based on data, which show that violent and property crime rates are lower than they’ve been in more than a generation (FAIR.org, 7/25/24), he allows the unchallenged misperception to buttress his move-to-the-center strategy recommendation.

Next is immigration, where Leonhardt wrote that, since

most Americans are deeply dissatisfied that Biden initially loosened immigration rules…I’ll be fascinated to see whether Harris—Biden’s point person on immigration—tries to persuade voters that she’ll be tougher than he was.

The truth is, it’s hard to get much tougher on immigration than Biden without going the route of mass deportation and caging children, as he kept in place many of Trump’s harsh refugee policies, much to the dismay of immigrant rights advocates. But few in the public recognize that, given media coverage that dehumanizes immigrants and fearmongers about the border (FAIR.org, 6/2/23, 8/31/23).

In the face of racist and misogynist attacks on Kamala Harris from the Republican Party (Atlantic, 7/25/24), Leonhardt demanded that Harris prove she’s not “quick to judge people with opposing ideas as ignorant or hateful.”

Leonhardt called inflation another “problem for Harris,” again, without pointing out the reality that a Trump presidency would almost certainly be worse for inflation. And he closed with the problems of “gender issues” and “free speech,” which both fall under the “woke” umbrella that the Times frequently wields as a weapon against the left (FAIR.org, 3/25/22, 12/16/22).

He argues that liberals are “outside the mainstream” in supporting “gender transition hormone treatment for many children,” which he claims “doctors in Europe…believe the scientific evidence doesn’t support.” Leonhardt is cherry-picking here: While some doctors in some European countries believe that—most notably doctors in Britain who are not experts in transgender healthcare—it’s not the consensus view among medical experts in either Europe or the United States (FAIR.org, 6/22/23, 7/19/24).

“If Harris took a moderate position, she could undermine Republican claims that she is an elite cultural liberal,” Leonhardt wrote. By a “moderate position,” Leonhardt seems to mean banning access to hormone therapy for trans youth—a decidedly right-wing political position that, through misinformed and misleading media coverage, particularly from the New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/11/23), has become more politically acceptable.

Finally, on “free speech,” Leonhardt wrote that “many Americans view liberals as intolerant,” noting that “Obama combated this problem by talking about his respect for conservative ideas, while Biden described Republicans as his friends.”

It’s a topsy-turvy world in which the Black female candidate, who has received so many racist and sexist attacks in the past week that even Republican Party leaders have asked fellow members to tone it down (Atlantic, 7/25/24), is the one being admonished to be tolerant and respectful.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2024)

This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump said, on Fox & Friends in 2020, that if voting access were expanded, meaning easing of barriers to voting for disabled people, poor people, rural people, working people…. If voting were made easier, Trump said, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Why wouldn’t news media label that stance anti-democratic, and shelve any so-called good-faith partisan debate? And call for the multiracial democracy we need? And illuminate the history that shows why we aren’t there yet?

Ari Berman has been tracking voter rights, and why “one person, one vote” is not the thing to memorize as a definition of US democracy, for many years now. He’s national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and his new book is called Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. We’ll talk about that with him today.

In a piece factchecking Donald Trump’s claims in his acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican convention, the New York Times‘ Steven Rattner (7/24/24) responded to Trump’s claim that “our crime rate is going up” by pointing out:

Crime has declined since Mr. Biden’s inauguration. The violent crime rate is now at its lowest point in more than four decades, and property crime is also at its lowest level in many decades.

The Times illustrated the point with this chart, which shows violent crime decreasing by 26% since President Joe Biden was inaugurated, and property crime going down 19%:

In a rational world, voters would be aware that crime went down sharply during the Biden/Harris administration, continuing a three-decade decline that has made the United States of 2024 far safer than the country was in 1991. To the extent that voters see national elected officials as responsible for crime rates, Biden and his vice president Kamala Harris would benefit politically from these trends.

One thing polling tells us is that leading news outlets do a poor job of informing voters about the crime situation (New York Times, 7/23/24).

But we don’t live in a rational world—so in the days after Harris became the apparent presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, she got a series of warnings from the New York Times.

“Today, many Americans are worried about crime,” David Leonhardt wrote in the Times‘ popular Morning newsletter (7/23/24). “Many voters are concerned about crime and public safety,” lawyer Nicole Allan wrote in a Times op-ed (7/23/24). “Ms. Harris, especially, will run into problems on immigration and crime,” Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote in another op-ed (7/23/24).

“Ms. Harris was a constant target last week at the Republican National Convention,” Jazmine Ulloa reported in a Times news story (7/21/24). “In panels and onstage, speakers tied her to an administration that they say has led to increases in crime and inflation.”

In none of these mentions did the Times‘ writers attempt to set the record straight on the actual crime situation in the country—that crime rates are low and heading lower. In the case of the news report, such an observation would likely be seen inside the Times as editorializing—a forbidden intervention into the political process.

But most people don’t get their ideas about how much crime there is by personal observation; with roughly 1 person in 300 victimized by violent crime over the course of a year, you’d have to know an awful lot of people before you would get an accurate sense of whether crime was up or down based on asking your acquaintances.

As with immigration, and to a certain extent with the economy, people get the sense that crime is a crisis from the news outlets that they rely on. If they’re being told that “many Americans are worried about crime”—then many Americans are going to worry about crime.

Research assistance: Alefiya Presswala

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Policy Studies’ Phyllis Bennis about Israel’s war on Palestinians for the July 19, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Al Jazeera (7/10/24)

Janine Jackson: “We must not lose sight of what is happening in Gaza, where an unprecedented humanitarian crisis continues to get even worse.” That recent statement from Sen. Bernie Sanders can be explored almost word by word. With zero cynicism at all, I wonder, who is “we,” exactly? What repercussions or responses accrue to a “humanitarian crisis” that differ from, for example, war crimes? And then, if “losing sight” is wrong, what has maintaining sight delivered?

Reports from just recent days are in of Israeli forces killing more than a hundred people in a southern Gaza designated safe zone, attacking schools where people were sheltered.

The Lancet reminds us that the roughly 40,000 people who have been reported killed in Gaza since last October should not be the number we hold in our heads, given not just the difficulty of data collection, but that armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. People dying from infectious disease and a lack of clean water are no less dead.

A numerical accounting of the toll of the current Israeli war on Palestinians may take years, but why should we wait? The effort to end it is now. So how and where does that happen? What needs to happen to get there?

We’re joined now by Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and author of numerous books, including the constantly updated Understanding the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.

Phyllis Bennis: Good to be with you, Janine.

The Hill (10/8/23)

JJ: Last October, you wrote that

while it’s necessary, condemning attacks on civilians isn’t enough. If we are serious about ending this spiraling violence, we need to look at root causes, and that means, hard as it may be for some to acknowledge it, we must look at the context.

Well, it’s now July 2024. We’re at where we’re at. Is there anything that you would add or change from that call to understanding, from last year?

PB: I think the only thing I would change is that we are now looking at almost 10 months of genocide. When I wrote that, back in October, it had just started, and we had no idea we would be still at work, still having been unable to gain even a ceasefire. Even a ceasefire remains out of reach.

Reuters (6/29/24)

What has changed is the language of the White House, the language of some in Congress. We hear President Biden now saying, “We need a ceasefire. We want a ceasefire.” But he keeps on transferring weapons, including the 500-pound bombs, these massive bombs that were temporarily paused a few weeks ago, along with the giant 2,000-pound bombs, one of which alone can wipe out an entire city block, destroy every building on the block, and kill every person in those buildings.

For the moment, those bombs are still being “temporarily paused,” maybe because in a recent Reuters report, we learned that the US had, since October, already transferred at least 14,000 of those MK-84 bombs, those 2,000-pound giant weapons of mass destruction, and the smaller, less dangerous 500-pound bombs, that maybe could only destroy half a block at one time, and maybe only half the people that were living in those houses. So, OK, that should be right, right?

The hypocrisy of it. Saying, “I want a ceasefire,” President Biden says, while he continues to transfer the weapons. And then he goes on to say, while he continues to enable this genocide by providing the weapons–which is all that Israel wants from him, they don’t care whether he says he wants a ceasefire or not; they want him to send the weapons, and he is sending the weapons. And then he says, “I’m the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody.” What kind of hypocrisy are we hearing here?

IslamiCity (7/19/24)

JJ: Right. Well, Ramzy Baroud just wrote recently about the importance of separating humanitarian efforts from political and military objectives, essentially using the survival of people as a bargaining chip. I feel that media—not media alone—but they’ve fuzzed up this understanding that when elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled, that we’re supposed to think about civilians being harmed, and they should be protected whenever.

But just to say, the international bodies that even just witness and record this carnage are themselves undermined.

PB: Absolutely.

JJ: And the idea is: It’s just every country against every other country–which, side note, would be demoralizing enough, even if it weren’t such an obvious lie, given that we know that commerce is global; we accept meta-national rules when it comes to corporate behavior. But here the international bodies that would say this is wrong, where are they?

PB: Well, you’re absolutely right. The international community, as it likes to be called—meaning the United Nations, the international courts, all of those institutions—have failed. In the main, they haven’t failed primarily for lack of trying. They certainly have not tried hard enough. But they have tried.

The problem is they have been undermined every step of the way by their most powerful member, which happens to be the government of the United States. We should not forget what Dr. King taught us, that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is our own government. He said that in 1967 at Riverside Church. I will say it again, today, so many years later. That has not changed.

Chatham House (1/26/24)

We do see, in the International Court of Justice, in the Hague, the extraordinary impact of South Africa’s initiative to challenge Israel directly, state to state, to say that Israel is violating the international convention against genocide. And after several weeks, on an expedited basis, the court came out and said, yes, this is plausibly genocide. And while it will take some time, usually months or years to make a complete and final determination, we are hereby ordering a set of things, that they ordered Israel to do, to make sure that the potential for genocide—or the actual genocide, they were leaving themselves that little wiggle room—but to make sure that that stopped, and they gave explicit orders, which Israel, again, simply ignored.

And what’s different this time, Janine, what you said is so important about other countries, as well as the international institutions, standing by and watching: One of the things that’s different here is that the international covenant against genocide, unlike most parts of international law that are very complicated, very hard to understand and really only apply very narrowly, the Genocide Convention specifically holds accountable every country that is a signatory, a party, to that convention. That includes the United States, ironically enough, includes Israel. But it says that every country who has signed on to that treaty has the obligation to make sure that it doesn’t get violated.

That was the basis for South Africa charging Israel with violating the covenant. But it also goes to every other country, including our own. So the Biden administration, aside from its active enabling of the genocide, is doubly responsible here, because it has an explicit, affirmative obligation to do everything in its power to stop the possibility of these attacks turning into genocide, or to stop them if they are indeed already genocide.

And the US answer to that requirement is to keep sending the weapons:  14,000 of these giant 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 of the smaller 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, a thousand bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 airdropped, small-diameter bombs, and more and more and more.

Al Jazeera (7/19/24)

JJ: In this context—and whatever we say is the latest news might not be the latest when folks hear it—but what I’m reading now says that the International Court of Justice, the top court of the UN, is going to issue in two days, on July 19, an opinion, a non-binding opinion, on the legality of Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land, which is clearly the context here, given our understanding that conflict didn’t start on October 7. Given what we’ve just said, what can we possibly imagine will come from that opinion from the ICJ?

PB: What we are going to hear, I anticipate, will be a full recognition of the main violations that Israel is committing in carrying out this 55-year occupation of Palestinian land, the West Bank, Gaza, occupied East Jerusalem.

That will not lead, I’m afraid, to a change on the ground. Israel has made clear it has no respect for the International Court of Justice. It has no intention of abiding by decisions of the International Court of Justice.

What we are going to hear is a globally legitimated, important, very important, judgment, which will be important for us in civil society to hold up as a tool in our own mobilization in our own countries. Those of us in the United States will have a new piece of evidence of the illegality of US arms to Israel, because of the illegality of the occupation that those arms are designed to maintain. That’s what makes it important. It’s going to be a tool for us.

Phyllis Bennis: “”In any country, there could be a trial begun, charges brought against those in Israel, in the government, in the military, in the settlements, in the corporations, who are enabling and profiting from this occupation.”

International law, like domestic law, frankly, is almost never self-enforcing. You can pass a law that says whatever you want, that murder is illegal, that’s good to say. That doesn’t stop somebody from killing someone, but it does allow accountability.

And this will allow accountability. Other countries, not the United States I’m afraid, but other countries that have a greater commitment to international law than this country does, will be able to use that judgment to, for example, use the concept of universal jurisdiction to say that those crimes, if indeed they are identified by the International Court of Justice as I anticipate, that those crimes are so serious that they can be adjudicated in any court in any country.

And that means that in any country, there could be a trial begun, charges brought against those in Israel, in the government, in the military, in the settlements, in the corporations, who are enabling and profiting from this occupation. And there can be papers issued that will hold them accountable, and mean that if they land in Paris or in Brussels or in Pretoria, or in countries anywhere in the world who take this up, that they could face arrest for these violations.

This is not the International Criminal Court, but the concept of universal jurisdiction means that any court can take up a case like this for these kinds of crimes. So I think it’s going to be a very important judgment, even though we can know ahead of time that Israel will certainly not abide by whatever it demands.

JJ: And I do want to say that I have seen media pay maybe more respectful attention to international bodies than in the past. It used to be that the UN was just kind of a joke, and they were just people who were trying to interfere with the US. And I feel, it’s impressionistic, but I feel like that is maybe shifting, for just the reasons you say.

PB: I think that’s absolutely right, and I think the South African initiative at the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, has played a huge role in that. I think people all around the world, including here in the United States, the most cynical, were cheering, and crying, tearing up, watching this dream team, extraordinary rainbow combination of people of the South African legal team argue their case passionately, but with great focus on the law. This was about the law. They were not using designer videos, or whatever, to emphasize the horror of what the genocide looks like on the ground. They were sticking to the law.

And it was a powerful description, and I think people all around the world were looking at that and saying, wow, here’s South Africa, a country of the Global South, that is suddenly taking the initiative in this institution that for so long was assumed to belong to the wealthy, colonial countries of the world, and now suddenly it’s being democratized. These institutions themselves are being democratized through this process. That’s enormously important.

New York Times (7/13/24)

JJ: Obviously, I think media are important. Sometimes, though, they seem like almost the last consideration. But I do know that in something like this, where you cannot avoid, unless you’re trying to avoid them, images of grief-stricken Palestinians holding their loved ones in their arms…

PB: Absolutely.

JJ: Media have to do a job to get you to deny the feeling that you have when you see those images.

And some of the work of that is this New York Times story on July 14, that straight up says, Hamas

hide under residential neighborhoods, storing their weapons and miles of tunnels and in houses, mosques, sofas, even a child’s bedroom, blurring the boundary between civilians and combatants.

And they conclude, “Israeli officials say that Hamas’ tactics explain why Israel has been forced to strike so much civilian infrastructure, kill so many Palestinians and detain so many civilians.” I don’t know how else you read that, except to tell you, that feeling you have of your heart breaking, you should ignore that, because whoever Israel kills deserved it.

PB: Yep. No, I think that’s absolutely right. That was not an accidental story. The timing was not accidental. The focus on that story was not accidental.

And I think that it also was very carefully written. It was written beautifully. It was a very powerfully written story. It was also written in a way that completely, carefully ignored, what does international law actually say? So Israel can say all it wants, “Well, we had no choice.” Israel had every choice in the world, and the choices it made violated a host of components of, if we just look at the Geneva Conventions, that say, among other things, you have to distinguish between civilian and combatants in who you target.

AP (7/13/24)

As we saw in this attack last week, there was an attack on, supposedly, one of the military leaders of Hamas, Mohamed Deif—that attack killed more than 90 Palestinian civilians, wounded more than 300. It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s true that Israel thought that Muhammad Deif was there. It is illegal to deliberately, knowingly, kill 90 civilians and injure 300 more because you think a military leader might be present. They don’t even allege that he was fighting at the time. That is completely illegal.

It’s illegal to attack hospitals. The fact that there may have been a command center in a tunnel below does not make it legal to destroy a hospital. It does not make it legal to destroy the headquarters of UNRWA, the only humanitarian organization with the capacity to actually get desperately needed humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.

None of these Israeli claims about “well, we have no choice”—the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas of the world, and it has been fenced off, walled off, and surrounded by soldiers. It’s the definition of a siege.

I think that many people believe, there’s this claim, that the occupation of Gaza ended in 2005, when the settlers and the soldiers were pulled out. That’s not true, because the definition of occupation in international law is not the presence of settler colonies, physically, or the presence of soldiers on the territory. It’s about control. And by building the wall, and having that wall surrounded by soldiers, Israel remains occupying the Gaza Strip. So you have an entire generation of people who have grown up in the Gaza Strip, because it has been besieged now for 17 years, who have never been outside that tiny strip of land, have been physically walled off like a siege of ancient times, and that was the condition in which this war is being fought.

Hamas has violated international law in a number of ways, in terms of its attacks using missiles that cannot be targeted against military targets. But the notion that there somehow is this choice of Hamas fighters to fight in the open, as if there is massive open space inside the Gaza Strip, this most crowded strip of territory in the world, it boggles the imagination. To anybody who’s ever seen Gaza, this notion that this is somehow a legitimate excuse, that, “Oh, well, it’s too crowded. We had no choice but to destroy all the infrastructure, all the buildings, the water treatment, the hospitals, all the universities, every museum, 70% of the schools.” This is a constant violation of international law, in which our own government and our tax money and our Congress and our president are directly and deeply implicated.

JJ: I thank you for that, and this would be the point where I would ask about hope and ways forward and what we could do, and I’ll ask that now, too.

Crowd in Freedom Plaza for the March on Washington for Gaza (1/13/24). Photo by Elvert Barnes.

PB: Yeah. I think we can never give up hope. What has been extraordinary in this 10 months has been to see the rising of an incredible, powerful, broad movement of human solidarity with the Palestinian population of Gaza. People who never really gave much thought to the Israel/Palestine question, to Palestinian lives, to Israeli occupation, suddenly—and, certainly, part of it is because of the media, social media and mainstream media, have had no choice, as you said earlier, Janine, but to portray the horror of this genocide. And people have responded as human beings, which is an amazing thing. It doesn’t happen all the time.

So we have to have hope in that. We have to know that we have managed to rebuild the definition of ceasefire, so that when we call for a ceasefire, and I’ve got to say the message discipline of this broad and largely unaccountable movement has been pretty extraordinary. Everybody is sticking to the demand: We need a ceasefire now. At the same time, we have managed to transform the understanding of, what does a ceasefire mean? It’s not just, stop firing for a few minutes while you exchange some hostages and then go back to war. It means a permanent stop to the firing. It means access, real access, to massive amounts of immediate humanitarian aid. And it means stop sending weapons.

So when we demand a ceasefire of the Biden administration, we’re demanding all those things. Unfortunately, when President Biden says, “We need a ceasefire,” he’s only talking about part of one of those three things. And he’s undermining the others by continuing to send the weapons. So that’s what we have to focus on. The hope is, we have more people supporting the rights of Palestinians to life, among other things; it’s huge, and the responsibility that comes with that hope is to keep up the demand for an immediate ceasefire, with all that that requires.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies. Thank you, Phyllis Bennis, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PB: Thank you, Janine.

Imagine that you’re the parent of a child who suffers from a rare mental health condition that causes anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. Psychiatric medications and therapy do not work for this condition.

There is a treatment that has been shown to work in adults, but there’s very little research in kids, apart from a few small studies that have come out of the Netherlands, where they are prescribing these treatments. Doctors in your own country, however, won’t prescribe it until your child is 18, to avoid any unwanted side effects from the medication.

Meanwhile, your child has suffered for years, and attempted suicide multiple times. As a parent, what do you do? Do you take your kid overseas, or let them continue to suffer?

“Awareness of transgender children is growing,” the Guardian (8/13/08) reported 16 years ago.

This is precisely the situation that parents of trans kids in Britain were facing 16 years ago, when the Guardian (8/13/08) ran a story on their efforts to get the country’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) to prescribe puberty blockers for their kids. The Guardian noted how grim the situation was for these kids and their parents:

Sarah believes that anyone watching a teenager go through this process would want them to have the drugs as soon as possible. Her daughter was denied them until the age of 16, by which point she already had an Adam’s apple, a deep voice and facial hair….

“It takes a long, long time to come to terms with. It took us about two years to stop crying for our loss and also for the pain that we knew our child was going to have to go through. No one would choose this. It’s too hard.”

Dr. Hilary Cass told the BBC (4/20/24) that “misinformation” about her work makes her “very angry.”

After years of struggle, UK parents successfully lobbied the NHS to start prescribing gender-affirming medical treatments for minors under 16 in 2011. Their success, however, was short-lived.

In April, NHS England released the findings of a four-year inquiry into GIDS led by Dr. Hilary Cass, a pediatrician with no experience treating adolescents with gender dysphoria. On the recommendation of the Cass Review, which was highly critical of adolescent medical transition, the NHS services in England, Wales and Scotland have stopped prescribing puberty blockers for gender dysphoria. The British government also banned private clinics from prescribing them, at least temporarily.

Though there is much more evidence now to support gender-affirming care than in 2008, there is also a much stronger anti-trans movement seeking to discredit and ban such care.

British media coverage has given that movement a big boost in recent years, turning the spotlight away from the realities that trans kids and their families are facing, and pumping out stories nitpicking at the strength of the expanding evidence base for gender-affirming care. Its coverage of the Cass Review followed suit.

US media, unsurprisingly, gave less coverage to the British review, but most of the in-depth coverage followed British media’s model. Underlying this coverage are questionable claims by people with no experience treating minors with gender dysphoria, and double standards regarding the evidence for medical and alternative treatments.

The most impactful—and controversial—recommendation of the Cass Review is that puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones on those under 16 should be confined to clinical research settings only, due to the supposed weakness of the studies underpinning gender-affirming treatments for minors, and the possibility of unwanted side effects:

While a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.

This stands in direct opposition to guidelines and recommendations from major medical associations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), which support gender-affirming medical interventions for youth.

WPATH (5/17/24) expressed bewilderment at the Cass Review’s approach, and noted that its reviews “do not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations” of those groups, which were updated in 2022.

So what could explain the divergence? For starters, the review took place in the context of a rising anti-trans culture in England, and the NHS took the highly unusual approach of excluding experts on pediatric gender-affirming care from the review.

At the same time, the Cass Review, and the NHS England Policy Working Group that preceded it, had clinicians on its team with ties to advocacy groups that oppose gender-affirming treatment for minors, so its bias was questioned even before the review was released. The Cass Review has been a major boon for these advocacy groups, as its recommendations are exactly what those groups have been calling for.

“It’s a bad-faith claim that we don’t have enough evidence for pubertal suppressants or gender-affirming hormones,” a Harvard Med School psychiatry professor told Mother Jones (5/10/24).

The systematic review on puberty blockers conducted by the Cass Review excluded 24 studies, with reviewers scoring this research as “low quality.” But Meredithe McNamara, assistant professor of pediatrics at Yale, told FAIR that the scale the Cass Review used to grade study quality is not typically used by guideline developers. Under this methodology, the authors excluded many studies from consideration for what she describes as “arbitrarily assigned quality.”

A recent white paper from the Yale Law School Integrity Project, co-authored by McNamara, explains the flaws more in depth:

They modified the scale in an arbitrary way that permitted the exclusion of studies from further consideration, for reasons irrelevant to clinical care. For instance, in the York SR on social transition, the modified NOS asked if study samples were “truly representative of the average child or adolescent with
gender dysphoria.” There is no such thing as the “average child or adolescent with gender dysphoria”—this is an inexpertly devised and meaningless concept that is neither defined by the authors nor used in clinical research. And yet it was grounds for excluding several important studies from consideration.

The Yale report highlights the problems that come from assigning authors who are unfamiliar with essential concepts in gender care. For example, puberty blockers are not intended to reduce gender dysphoria, but rather halt the effects of puberty. The systematic review looked at gender dysphoria reduction as a metric of the treatment’s success, however, which the Yale report says was an “inappropriate standard.”

Moreover, even studies scored as low quality by more standard scales are not uncommon in medicine, and do not mean “poor quality” (despite Cass’s slippage between the two) or “junk science.” Doctors can and do often make treatment recommendations based on evidence that is rated low quality. A 2020 study in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology (9/2/20) found that 53% of treatments are supported by either “low quality” or “very low quality” evidence. Many commonly prescribed antidepressants, for example, have low-quality evidence for use in populations under 18—but many families decide, with the help of a doctor, that it’s still the best choice for their child.

This is why the guidelines supported by WPATH do not deviate from the norms of medical practice in recommending puberty blockers based on the large amount of evidence we do have. As with all medical treatments, WPATH recommends doctors should inform patients and their parents of the potential risks and benefits, and allow them to decide what is best. This approach aligns with evidence-based medicine’s requirement to integrate the values and preferences of the patient with the best available evidence.

Of eight articles the Guardian ran on the Cass Review, only one (4/9/24) quoted any trans youth or their parents.

Cass also conducted a second systematic review on cross-sex hormones, which excluded 19 studies for being “low quality.” In spite of their exclusion, the systematic review still found “moderate quality” evidence for the mental health benefits of these treatments, a fact that Cass omits from her BMJ column (4/9/24) published concurrently with the review’s release, where she claims that pediatric gender medicine is built on “shaky foundations.”

These “shaky foundations” of “poor quality” evidence that Cass trumpeted were largely gobbled up by media, despite the criticisms of both expert groups like WPATH, and trans kids and their parents. Guardian readers almost certainly wouldn’t know that the amount of data we have on these treatments since the paper’s 2008 piece has expanded considerably: Every single one of the 103 studies on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors that the Cass Review found was published after 2008. That’s not the story that’s being told; in fact, it’s not even mentioned in the Guardian’s initial story (4/9/24) on the findings of the Cass Review, which put Cass’s “shaky foundations” quote in its headline.

That story exemplifies the problem with the frequent media scrutiny of evidence quality that is completely devoid of the circumstances under which trans youth and their parents have sought these treatments for more than a decade. In fact, these teens and their parents have been all but erased from the paper’s coverage.

The Guardian released eight stories and a podcast on the Cass Review in the first month of its coverage. Only two trans youth and one parent were quoted across these nine pieces.

Readers can’t fully understand why trans youth and their parents would seek out a treatment with “low-quality” or “moderate-quality” evidence without understanding their circumstances. And they can’t fully judge a policy decision to restrict these treatments without understanding how much more evidence we have now than we did when desperate parents were seeking them out abroad.

WBUR‘s interviewer (5/8/24) did not challenge Cass on her nonsensical statements, such as her assertion that “let[ting] young people go through their typical puberty” is the best way to “leave their options open.”

Some US outlets have, unsurprisingly, followed the British pattern in their coverage of the Cass Review, not questioning Cass’s tendentious interpretations, and sidelining the voices of trans youth and their parents.

Boston NPR station WBUR (OnPoint, 5/8/24) aired a lengthy interview with Cass. For almost two hours, host Meghna Chakrabarti gave Cass a friendly platform to pontificate on such matters as how pornography might be causing more kids to identify as trans, without asking her to substantiate her claims:

So we looked at what we understand about the biology, but obviously biology hasn’t changed suddenly in the last 10 years. So then we tried to look at, what has changed? And one is the overall mental health of teenage girls, in particular, although boys, to some degree. And that may also be driven by social media, by early exposure to pornography, and a whole series of other factors that are happening for girls.

While Chakrabarti raised some criticisms of the Cass Review, she never pressed Cass on her answers. For instance, when the host quoted WPATH’s statement that the Cass Review would “severely restrict access to physical healthcare for gender-questioning young people,” Cass suggested that trans youth will still be able to access treatment “under proper research supervision”—yet such research has yet to be announced. Chakrabarti did not press her on when these studies will start, what the criteria for participation will be, or what parents and kids are supposed to do in the meantime. Nor did she ask how long it will take to get into a study; currently the GIDS wait times are over six years.

Cass repeatedly argued that the key for youth seeking gender-affirming care was to “keep their options open.” Yet Chakrabarti never questioned how preventing young people from accessing puberty blockers helps achieve this, even when Cass argued that trans boys shouldn’t receive hormone treatment because male hormones “cause irreversible effects.” By this logic, the Cass Review should have required all trans girls to receive puberty blockers to prevent those same “irreversible effects.” Cass’s double standard also doesn’t take into account that estrogen puberty likewise causes irreversible effects that are not fully or easily reversible, such as height, voice and breast growth.

Incredibly, Cass described decisions about these treatments as very individual ones that need to be made with patients and doctors—which happens to be what WPATH recommends, and what the Cass Review has made virtually impossible. Cass told WBUR:

And for any one person, it’s just a careful decision about balancing, whether you have arrived at your final destination in terms of understanding your identity, versus keeping those options open. And that’s a really personal decision that you have to take with your medical practitioner, with the best understanding that we can give young people about the risks versus the benefits.

Rather than asking how exactly this squares with the Cass Review recommendations that have, at least for now, shut down all NHS medical gender-affirming care, Chakrabati changed the subject.

Chakrabarti’s segment also had a second part, which could have been used to interview an expert who disagreed with Cass’s findings. Instead, she interviewed two pediatric gender clinicians—one of whom, Laura Edwards-Leeper, had been a speaker at a conference against gender-affirming care in 2023—who offered no criticism aside from the fact that requiring mental health treatment for social transition would be impractical in the US, due to a lack of national healthcare.

“There are young people who absolutely benefit from a medical pathway, and we need to make sure that those young people have access,” Cass told the New York Times (5/13/24)—before adding, “under a research protocol,” even though such research has yet to be announced.

The New York Times (5/13/24), in a published interview conducted by reporter Azeen Ghorayshi, also ignored the realities facing trans kids in Britain as a result of Cass’s recommendations. Cass accused the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) of not being forthright about the evidence around gender-affirming treatments, and suggested its motivations are political:

I suspect that the AAP, which is an organization that does massive good for children worldwide, and I see as a fairly left-leaning organization, is fearful of making any moves that might jeopardize trans healthcare right now. And I wonder whether, if they weren’t feeling under such political duress, they would be able to be more nuanced, to say that multiple truths exist in this space—that there are children who are going to need medical treatment, and that there are other children who are going to resolve their distress in different ways.

Ghorayshi agreed with Cass, asking her how she would advise US doctors to thread this needle:

Pediatricians in the United States are in an incredibly tough position, because of the political situation here. It affects what doctors feel comfortable saying publicly. Your report is now part of that evidence that they may fear will be weaponized. What would you say to American pediatricians about how to move forward?

This entire line of questioning ignored that this issue is politicized in Britain as well. In March, former Prime Minister Liz Truss proposed a legislative ban on gender-affirming medical treatments for minors, which the government later implemented temporarily. The British government has also implemented recommendations that make social transition in schools extremely difficult. Ghorayshi could have pressed Cass on the political situation in her own country, rather than speculating on how doctors in the US are reacting to the one here.

Cass also presented the widely discredited theory that an exponential rise in the number of children and adolescents seeking gender-affirming care over the past decade is evidence of a “social contagion”:

It doesn’t really make sense to have such a dramatic increase in numbers that has been exponential. This has happened in a really narrow time frame across the world. Social acceptance just doesn’t happen that way, so dramatically. So that doesn’t make sense as the full answer.

This gigantic leap in logic goes completely without follow-up by Ghorayshi. Exponential rises can happen easily when a number is low to begin with. According to Cass’s own report, there were fewer than 50 referrals to GIDS in 2009. And while that number increased to 5,000 for 2021–22, this is 0.04% of the approximately 14 million people under the age of 18 in Britain.

Despite Cass’s claims to the contrary, these numbers could easily show that while very few adolescents were comfortable being out as trans at the outset of the 2010s, increased social acceptance has made that possible for more of them. Ghorayshi, however, does not press her to show any evidence for her highly unscientific theory.

A BBC report (5/7/24) cited Cass suggesting “‘evidence based’ treatment such as psychological support” as an alternative to puberty blockers, even though her review found no studies showing psychotherapy as an effective treatment for gender dysphoria.

One of the underlying problems with the Cass Review is that where it (dubiously) claims that medical interventions are not supported by evidence, it pushes psychotherapy as an effective treatment for gender dysphoria—with even less evidence. Most media have blindly accepted this contradiction.

In an article headlined “Cass Review Author Calls for ‘Holistic’ Gender Care,” the BBC (5/7/24) reported on Cass’s claim to the Scottish parliament implying psychotherapy and “medications” are “evidence-based” ways to treat gender-dysphoric children.

However, she told MSPs a drawback of puberty blockers, which she said had become “almost totemic” as the route to get on to a treatment pathway, was they stopped an examination of other ways of addressing young people’s distress—including “evidence-based” treatment such as psychological support or medication.

The BBC did not interrogate this claim. This is especially egregious in light of the fact that Cass’s own systematic review found no studies that show psychotherapy is an effective means of improving gender dysphoria. Moreover, it deemed nine of the ten studies of psychosocial support “low quality.”

Dan Karasic, a psychiatrist who has worked with patients with gender dysphoria for over 30 years, and an author on WPATH’s current treatment guidelines, told FAIR that there’s no evidence for her claim that psychiatric medications could be effective either:

There is absolutely no evidence to support Dr. Cass’s suggestion to substitute antidepressants for puberty blockers. It’s telling that Cass suggests an intervention utterly devoid of any evidence—antidepressants for gender dysphoria—over established treatments.

The Washington Post (4/18/24) featured an op-ed criticizing the “poor quality of evidence in support of medical interventions for youth gender dysphoria”—by someone pushing evidence-free psychotherapy treatment for youth gender dysphoria.

The Washington Post (4/18/24) accepted this same fallacy when it published an op-ed on the Cass Review by Paul Garcia-Ryan. Garcia-Ryan is the president of the organization Therapy First, which supports psychotherapy as the “first-line” treatment for gender dysphoria. Garcia wrote that in light of the Cass Review’s findings on the evidence behind gender-affirming treatments, psychotherapy needed to be encouraged:

The Cass Review made clear that the evidence supporting medical interventions in youth gender dysphoria is utterly insufficient, and that alternative approaches, such as psychotherapy, need to be encouraged. Only then will gender-questioning youth be able to get the help they need to navigate their distress.

Garcia-Ryan provides no evidence that psychotherapy is an effective alternative to the current treatment model that he is criticizing—which is no surprise, given the Cass Review’s findings. This is especially disturbing, given that his organization has published “clinical guidelines” for treating “gender-questioning” youth.

One of the case studies in the Therapy First’s guidelines involved an adolescent struggling with gender dysphoria, who described their family situation—where they don’t “feel understood and supported,” and their parents “don’t think trans exists”—to a therapist. The therapist then hypothesized that the gender dysphoria may be caused by an “oedipal process,” a subconscious infatuation with the father that the child “dealt with…by repudiating her femininity and her female-sexed body.”

Op-ed pages certainly exist to represent a diversity of viewpoints. But opinion editors have a duty to not let them be used for blatant misinformation. Though Garcia-Ryan protests that Therapy First is “strongly opposed to conversion therapy,” the sort of psychoanalysis he champions has a long, dark history of being used in conversion therapy. The American Psychoanalytic Association did not depathologize homosexuality until nearly 20 years after the American Psychiatric Association did.

The Washington Post (5/3/24) ran another pro-Cass op-ed from Benjamin Ryan, who it described as “covering LGBTQ health for over two decades”; it didn’t mention that much of that coverage has been in right-wing publications like the New York Sun and New York Post.

Rather than publishing any op-eds critical of the Cass Review for balance, the Washington Post (5/3/24) added a second op-ed a week later by freelance journalist Benjamin Ryan, who has recently published several pieces on trans issues for the conservative New York Sun and New York Post. Ryan criticized the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for being “notably silent” on Cass’s findings, and citing the fact that the only panel at its 2024 conference contained supporters of gender transition:

The program for the 2024 APA annual meeting lists only one panel that touches on pediatric gender-transition treatment, titled “Channeling Your Passion and ‘Inner Outrage’ by Promoting Public Policy for Evidence-Based Transgender Care.”

The panel notably includes Jack Turban, a University of California at San Francisco child psychiatrist and a vocal supporter of broad access to gender-transition treatment.

A letter to the editor in the Washington Post (5/10/24) noted that abstracts for the APA were due before the final Cass Review was published, so it would not have been possible to submit a panel examining its findings. This is something the Post could have easily factchecked.

In the US, gender-affirming care bans for minors have taken place amongst a similar backdrop of relentless media assault, based on similarly poor sources (FAIR.org, 8/30/23) and bad interpretations of data (FAIR.org, 6/22/23). The coverage of the Cass Review shows just how much US media have taken their cues from the Brits.

Research assistance: Alefiya Presswala, Owen Schacht

Electronic Intifada (7/15/24)

This week on CounterSpin: In March, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”

But as Greg Shupak writes, even as evidence accumulates, denial is becoming socially and journalistically acceptable. Soon after the UN special rapporteur on the right to food asserted that Israel’s forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza was genocidal, Jonah Goldberg took to the LA Times to assure readers that Israel’s actions do not “amount to genocide,” and such claims are based on “Soviet propaganda” and Holocaust denial.

Years from now, we’ll hear about how everyone saw the nightmare and everyone opposed it. But history is now, and the world is watching. We’ll talk about real-time efforts to address the Israeli war on Palestinians with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the shooting of Donald Trump.

Immediately after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, when little was known about the white male shooter (except that he was a registered Republican), right-wing politicians directly blamed Democratic rhetoric for the shooting.

“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Sen. J.D. Vance wrote on X (7/13/24), just days before Trump named him as his running mate:

The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.

(That Trump might be considered a fascist did not always seem so far-fetched to Vance; in 2016, he privately worried that Trump might become “America’s Hitler”—Reuters, 7/15/24.)

“For years, Democrats and their allies in the media have recklessly stoked fears, calling President Trump and other conservatives threats to democracy,” Sen. Tim Scott posted on X (7/13/24). “Their inflammatory rhetoric puts lives at risk.”

Rather than denounce both the assassination attempt and these hypocritical and opportunistic attacks on critical speech, the country’s top editorial boards cravenly bothsidesed their condemnations of “political violence.”

The Washington Post (7/14/24) described Trump’s exhortation to “remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness” as a call for “national unity.”

In an editorial headlined, “Turn Down the Heat, Let in the Light,” the Washington Post (7/14/24) praised Donald Trump for appearing to call for national unity. The Post wrote that the assassination attempt offered Trump the chance to “cool the nation’s political fevers and set a new direction.”

The editorial board quickly admonished both sides equally for “unthinkably uncivil” actions and “physical violence.” They pointed to protesters who “harass lawmakers, justices, journalists and business leaders with bullhorns at their homes,” universities that have “become battlegrounds,” and the “bipartisan hazard” of political violence, citing Nancy Pelosi’s husband and GOP Rep. Steve Scalise.

(The link the Post inserted leads to an earlier editorial in which they condemned peaceful protests outside Supreme Court justices’ houses as “totalitarian,” and recommended that the protesters be imprisoned—FAIR.org, 5/17/22).

New York Times editors, meanwhile, called the shooting “Antithetical to America” (7/13/24), a formulation clearly more aspirational than actual. “Violence is antithetical to democracy,” the editorial board wrote, acknowledging moments later that “violence is infecting and inflecting American political life.” They explained:

Acts of violence have long shadowed American democracy, but they have loomed larger and darker of late. Cultural and political polarization, the ubiquity of guns and the radicalizing power of the internet have all been contributing factors, as this board laid out in its editorial series “The Danger Within” in 2022. This high-stakes presidential election is further straining the nation’s commitment to the peaceful resolution of political differences.

It’s a remarkable obfuscation, in which responsibility is ascribed to no one and—as at the Post—everyone.

Is the shooting of a political candidate really “antithetical” (New York Times, 7/13/24) to a country with more guns than people, and 50,000+ gun deaths every year?

Curiously, the 2022 editorial series the Times cites (11/3–12/24/22) did make clear where most of the responsibility lay, explaining that “the threat to the current order comes disproportionately from the right.” It pointed out that of the hundreds of extremism-related murders of the past decade, more than three-quarters were committed by “right-wing extremists, white supremacists or anti-government extremists.” While there have been occasional attacks on conservatives (like the attack on a congressional baseball game that wounded Scalise), the Times noted,

the number and nature of the episodes aren’t comparable, and no leading figures in the Democratic Party condone, mock or encourage their supporters to violence in ways that are common from politicians on the right and their supporters in the conservative media.

But two years later, the Times, like the Post, carefully avoids bringing that much-needed clarity to the current situation and apportions responsibility for avoiding political violence equally to both sides:

It is now incumbent on political leaders of both parties, and on Americans individually and collectively, to resist a slide into further violence and the type of extremist language that fuels it. Saturday’s attack should not be taken as a provocation or a justification.

Of course, there’s a crucial difference between criticizing Trump and his allies for their anti-democratic positions and actions—which is what the Democrats and the left have done—and actually threatening and calling for violence, as the right has been doing.

The list of examples is nearly endless, but would prominently include Trump’s incitement of violence at the Capitol on January 6; his personal attacks on prosecutors, judges and politicians who have subsequently required increased security protections; and his refusal to rule out violence if he loses the 2024 election: “If we don’t win, you know, it depends.” His supporters have repeatedly called for armed uprisings after perceived attacks on Trump, including immediately after the assassination attempt.

That’s why it’s critical that leading newspapers push back against right-wing attempts to equate criticisms of Trump with calls for violence.

The Wall Street Journal (7/14/24), unsurprisingly, took this bothsidesism the farthest.

Leaders on both sides need to stop describing the stakes of the election in apocalyptic terms. Democracy won’t end if one or the other candidate is elected. Fascism is not aborning if Mr. Trump wins, unless you have little faith in American institutions.

We agree with former Attorney General Bill Barr’s statement Saturday night: “The Democrats have to stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy—he is not.”

Readers of those top US papers would have to look across the pond to the British Guardian (7/14/24) for the kind of clear-eyed take newspaper editors with concern for democracy ought to have: “There must also be care that extreme acts by a minority are not used to silence legitimate criticism.”

Research Assistance: Alefiya Presswala