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NPR is adding a new team of editors to give all content a “final review”—thanks to the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

After the public broadcaster came under right-wing scrutiny in the spring for supposed left-wing bias, NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin (NPR.org, 5/15/24) announced the organization would be adding 11 new oversight positions, though she wouldn’t say who would be funding them. The hires include six editors for a new “Backstop” team that will give all content, including content from member stations, a “final review” before it can be aired.

The CPB announced its role in a press release (10/18/24) that declared it was giving NPR $1.9 million in “editorial enhancement” funding to help NPR

further strengthen its editorial operations and meet the challenges of producing 24/7 news content on multiple platforms that consistently adheres to the highest standards of editorial integrity—accuracy, fairness, balance, objectivity and transparency, and the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.

A disgruntled NPR employee’s ax-grinding (Free Press, 4/9/24) prompted CPB to give nearly $2 million to keep an eye on NPR‘s politics.

That language reads as a direct response to the recent right-wing criticism. In April, former NPR business editor Uri Berliner published a lengthy essay in Bari Weiss‘s Free Press (4/9/24; FAIR.org, 4/24/24) arguing that NPR‘s “progressive worldview” influenced its journalism. Berliner’s essay centered around what he claimed was the “most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.”

Berliner was referring to the viewpoints of NPR journalists—he claimed he looked up the voter registration of NPR‘s Washington, DC, staff, and found no Republicans—but suggested that led to skewed reporting, including “advocacy” against Donald Trump.

NPR alum Alicia Montgomery (Slate, 4/16/24) penned a lengthy response to Berliner, noting, among other things, that staffers were “encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.” Indeed, during Trump’s presidency, NPR senior vice president for news Michael Oreskes (WUNC, 1/25/17; FAIR.org, 1/26/17) announced that NPR had decided not to use the word “lie”: “I think the minute you start branding things with a word like ‘lie,’ you push people away from you.”

Montgomery wrote that the real problem with NPR was

an abundance of caution that often crossed the border to cowardice. NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there, and calling it objectivity.

NPR‘s editor-in-chief Edith Chapin spun the installation of government-funded commissars  as “something positive for journalism” (Current, 5/20/24).

Despite the lack of merit to Berliner’s arguments, the GOP jumped at the opportunity to engage in their time-worn ritual of investigating public broadcasting’s “intractable bias,” demanding that NPR CEO Katherine Maher document and report the partisan affiliations of all news media staff of the past five years, as well as all board members (FAIR.org, 5/11/24).

Chapin, who in an internal email (X, 4/9/24) about Berliner’s attack stressed the need to serve “all audiences” and “[break] down the silos,” said Berliner’s piece and the scrutiny it prompted was “a factor” in her decision to add the editorial positions (Current, 5/20/24).

Under the new editorial organization, it appears that all reporting, whether produced by NPR or its member stations, will have to undergo final review by the “Backstop” team (which reports to Chapin herself) before it can be aired or published—which has some staff worried about bottlenecks as well as bias (New York Times, 5/16/24).

Looking at NPR‘s sources (e.g., FAIR.org, 9/18/18) consistently finds a bias not to the left, but to the center and right.

The CPB was created to insulate public broadcasters from political intimidation, offering a degree of separation from government pressures. But since its inception, it has instead been used as a political tool to push PBS and NPR to bend over backwards to programming demands from the right, which has developed a winning formula: accuse public broadcasters of liberal bias, threaten to cut CPB funding, allow it to be “saved” by extracting programming concessions—rinse and repeat (FAIR.org, 2/18/11).

As FAIR wrote 20 years ago (Extra!, 9–10/05), in the midst of that year’s right-wing assault on PBS:

With each successive attack from the right, public broadcasting becomes weakened, as programmers become more skittish and public TV’s habit of survival through capitulation becomes more ingrained.

Public broadcasting’s founding purpose was to promote perspectives that weren’t already widely represented in the media, yet it has consistently failed to live up to that mission. Some PBS and NPR programming tries to be faithful to that standard—particularly local programming from member stations—but FAIR studies (e.g., Extra!, 11/10, 11/10; FAIR.org, 9/18/18) have repeatedly shown that PBS viewers and NPR listeners often get the same, government-dominated voices and ideas they hear on other major media outlets.

Conservative voices in particular, in part because of right-wing pressure, have long found a welcoming home in public broadcasting, hosting PBS shows such as Firing Line, McLaughlin Group, Journal Editorial Report, Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered and In Principle. NPR focuses much more on straight news and cultural programming; a FAIR study (7/15/15) of NPR commentators found them to be almost entirely apolitical.

Sarah Jaffe (FAIR.org, 2/1/17): “The norms of ‘balance’ that for-profit media have relied on to avoid offending news consumers…seem utterly useless under an administration that considers lies simply ‘alternative facts.‘” 

Now we have the CPB providing funding to NPR to hire editors that will make sure its programming adheres to standards that include “objectivity,” “balance” and “the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.” NPR staffers have every right to be worried about that.

How will the new editors define these terms? FAIR has repeatedly pointed out that objectivity is a journalistic myth; subjective decisions are made every time one story is greenlighted over another, and one source is selected over another.

And if objectivity were possible, it certainly wouldn’t square with a journalistic notion of balance that orders offsetting coverage of Trump party lies with coverage of Democratic lies. It’s not hard for politicians to realize that if “balance” and “objectivity” mean passing along whatever powerful voices say without scrutiny, media will serve as a frictionless delivery system for whatever reality you choose to make up.

Public broadcasting was indeed created to promote diverse viewpoints. The 1967 Carnegie Commission that launched public broadcasting wrote that it should “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard,” and air programs that “help us see America whole, in all its diversity.” But as we’ve shown over and over, it’s not GOP viewpoints that are missing—it’s the perspectives representing the public interest, which are largely absent in corporate media, and which the new CPB funding is not designed to address.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR‘s public editor 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: NPR headquarters, Washington, DC (Creative Commons photo: Cornellrockey04)

Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights & Dissent’s Chip Gibbons about the Gaza First Amendment Alert  for the October 18, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: There is other news, of course, but we cannot avert our eyes from the genocide of the Palestinian people, and the spreading effects of that murderous effort—including the silencing of criticism or concerns from US citizens on US soil about actions being carried out in our name.

Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a journalist, researcher and a longtime activist. He’ll join us to talk about the things we’re not supposed to say and the lives we’re told not to care about—and why we must never stop saying and caring.

***

Democracy Now! (10/16/24)

The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases.

In Palestine, the death toll is exacerbated by displacement; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency, one of very few humanitarian organizations working still in the region. A real accounting would also include, not just those that we don’t yet know are dead, but the maimed, the orphaned, the starved, the homeless.

Democracy Now! recently spoke with a doctor from Gaza who said that he wishes that

Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head. When a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.

The New York Times has deemed such images too graphic to print—too horrific, in other words, to run alongside reporting that suggests, implies or outright states that those deaths are justified, they make sense or, minimally, they’re not worth stopping eating your buttered toast about.

As media critics, we look to Palestinians to represent Palestinian views, but it’s crucial that we not see the present moment as something happening to other people somewhere else. The repression of simple anti-genocide calls, the censorship, the firings, the disinformation, the malforming of concepts like antisemitism—these are problems for all of us, about all of us, that will influence all of us forever.

Gaza First Amendment Alert (10/16/24)

Defending Rights & Dissent, online at RightsAndDissent.org, have started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday. Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. He’s a journalist, researcher and a longtime activist. He joins us now by phone.

Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.

Chip Gibbons: Thank you for having me back. I always say CounterSpin is one of my favorite shows to do, and it is so vital, with the sorry state of corporate media in this country, that we have outlets like yours, because we would never get our message out. Occasionally, occasionally, we break through, and BBC or the Guardian or whoever will call us up, but it’s pretty bleak out there.

Like everyone else, every day I see the horrible images and news coming out of Gaza, now Lebanon and, who knows, maybe Iran next. Pictures of people being burned alive while they’re hooked to an IV. Stories about people being forced to flee or be bombed, then bombed while they flee, then corralled into a refugee center, and then bombed some more. It’s really, really horrific.

And in the midst of this horror show, this genocide that is quickly spiraling into a regional war, with obviously Israel as the aggressor and our government as the financier of it, we’re witnessing this global tidal wave of repression against people who are saying, “Hey, wait a moment. Let’s not drop bombs on children.” Journalists who show us what it looks like to drop a bomb on children are being assassinated.

Defending Rights & Dissent (8/10/23)

The young people on college campuses who want to simply peacefully raise their voice are hit with police batons, or have false charges against them. Journalists who report on the ground are killed by snipers and drones in their house. They get text messages telling them that their families will be killed.

And every day, our Congress votes to spend more money to fuel this, and sends these ridiculous letters to the IRS or the DoJ or the FBI, whomever else, telling them to crack down.

And I do want to note that this is a global problem. On October 17, 2024, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Irene Khan, presented to the UN General Assembly her new report on the impact of the conflict in Gaza on freedom of expression globally. And Defending Rights & Dissent submitted testimony, and is cited in it. So this is a global problem, and you wouldn’t really know it from much of the corporate media.

Chip Gibbons: “”We cannot say we are for press freedom when we are giving Israel the guns it assassinates Palestinian journalists with.”

We started the Gaza First Amendment Alert as a project to compile together in one place—I won’t say all of the political repression in the US, because there’s so much it’s impossible to include it all, but the vast majority of it. So attacks on press freedoms, attacks on protest rights, attacks on civil society and attacks on transparency, we are documenting in one place in a biweekly newsletter.

Every congressional office on the Hill received an invitation to subscribe to this letter. I think the only thing more dismal in this country than our corporate media is our Congress offices. I’m sorry, I’m laughing out of despair. And we sent it out to journalists to receive. But there’s also been a really strong outpouring of support from people who work on these issues, from activists who have signed up to receive this newsletter, and have talked about how valuable it is.

And, for the most part, it is focused on the repression in the US. The one exception is we are—because Israel uses US weapons to do so—continuing to monitor Israel’s killing, detention, maiming of Palestinian journalists and international journalists.

The Nation (8/16/24)

And as you know, Janine, because FAIR endorsed this project this summer, Defending Rights & Dissent led a call of over 100 journalists, including four Pulitzer Prize winners, to call on [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken to impose an arms embargo on Israel, because we cannot say we are for press freedom when we are giving Israel the guns it assassinates Palestinian journalists with.

So the bulk of this newsletter focuses on domestic oppression in the US, but we will, every biweekly period, for as long as that happens, monitor the killing of journalists. I would love to have an issue that doesn’t have that in there because no journalists were killed. But in working on the first issue, I had to keep going back and updating the section on the killing of journalists, again and again, because Israel just keeps doing it.

We have seen college students engaging in protests. One of the big things we intended to cover on the inaugural issue was what took place on the anniversary of the war. On October 7, many college students and others who wanted to show their sympathy for the Palestinian victims, their opposition to the war, wanted to hold a protest or vigils. And there was a coordinated effort, that we show in the newsletter, to suppress this.

Campus Crisis Alert (10/23/24)

I get the Anti-Defamation League Campus Crisis Alert newsletter, which is a great resource on political repression in the US. They don’t intend it as such, but I use it as such. And police departments get that. I know, thanks to a FOIA request filed by Iain Carlos at Noir News, that the Chicago Police Department gets this newsletter.

And like every day for a month, they encourage you to call colleges and send them letters and tell them, “We know colleges love free expression”—I’m not sure we know that anymore—but “even protected expression can create a hostile environment. Even permitted protests can create a hostile environment.”

And they are abusing civil rights law, which is very important. Abusing antisemitism to claim they have to clamp down on political speech, and then telling them you need to put in place a policy for October 7 on how or if—”if” was a big one—you permit protest. And then, of course, encouraging them to cooperate with law enforcement when campus policies are broken about expression.

And many of these campuses have put in very draconian anti-speech policies, policies that would be unconstitutional in any other context, and, if they are public schools, are unconstitutional.

Guardian (9/18/24)

And I think one of the big victories the ADL got was they got the University of Maryland to try to prohibit an interfaith vigil of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, an interfaith vigil mourning the Palestinian victims of this genocide. And the school initially approved it, there was mass public pressure against it, and then the school put together a policy that stated that you could only have “expressive events”—this is a new phrase that we hear a lot: “Expressive events.” “Expression policy…”

JJ: Right—what?

CG: Yes, events where people are expressing themselves. And some people have noted, some of these policies, when you start talking about expression, could be really rather broad.

But you couldn’t have any “expressive events” that were not initiated by the school. And, of course, that is unconstitutional. And Palestine Legal and CAIR took them to court, and the court allowed the vigil to take place. I saw pictures of it. I read news reports that there were a hundred or so students having an interfaith vigil, recognizing people who were slaughtered in a genocide.

An the interesting thing to me was that same day, there was a pro-Israel vigil as well, to mark the Israeli victims and civilians killed on October 7. And there was a member of Congress speaking at it, Steny Hoyer. And we hear again and again about outside agitators on the college campuses, Hillary Clinton, and I think Mike Johnson, basically in agreement that these kids wouldn’t be upset about people being burnt to death in tents with US weapons if it wasn’t for outside agitators, or nefarious Iranian influence. Or one place I saw was Cuban influence. You really are bringing out all of the bad guys.

Wall Street Journal (5/12/24)

JJ: Castro from the grave.

CG: Castro’s ghost, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Putin, China. Really, all of the evil-doers, maybe, are behind it, apparently.

And yet, when I looked at the vigil, it looked like—I didn’t do an investigation of everyone’s identity, but it looked like University of Maryland students. Whereas the counter vigil seemed to have a lot of pro-Israel advocates and a member of Congress at it.

So I don’t like the idea of outside agitators. You are allowed to invite prominent figures to your school to speak in solidarity with you. But if there’s outside agitators on the campus, who are they, right? Is it the college kids, or is it the members of Congress coming to call for their repression and champion a genocide? I think I know the answer to that.

And so, again, we’ve seen schools like Cornell suspend international students, and put them at risk of being deported. Right before we were about to go to print—not print, it’s an email newsletter; I’m using print in the figurative sense—that decision was reversed, and the student had a victory. But another student at the University of South Florida had to return to Colombia, because they were suspended for political speech.

So that’s where we’re at as a country. And, unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to have any shortage of news two weeks from now. In fact, we already have multiple stories that we are considering for the next issue, including the fact that—you’ll love this—the Heritage Foundation yesterday announced Project Esther, named after Queen Esther from the Bible, to allegedly combat antisemitism. But when you read the opening section of it, they’re talking about a network of “anti-Zionist,” “anti-American” Hamas supporters. So they really mean, as you know—I think most listeners know—they mean pro-Palestinian speech.

Intercept (2/21/24)

And we have members of Congress calling for—I mean, every week in Congress they send a new letter to a new agency, proposing some new bonkers act that they should take against Students for Justice in Palestine. This week, they want them to register under FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which is, I mean, FARA is a very broad law. It’s a law I’ve thought a lot about, but it makes zero sense in this context. SJP are not agents of a foreign power. And if you’re claiming that they’re agents of Hamas, which is what this letter claims, from Chuck Grassley and Ted Cruz, they’ve got a lot bigger problems than the FARA statute.

So if someone were an unregistered agent of Hamas, which no one we’re talking about is, they would not even be indicted under FARA, or asked to register to FARA. They would be charged under the Material Support statute, under the Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction.

Earlier this week, we saw a Palestinian prisoner-support NGO sanctioned under OFAC, which has for decades been used to punish people for giving humanitarian aid in the Occupied Territory, to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism; has not been used in many cases against actual terrorism, but against people who have views the government doesn’t like, cases like Holy Land Foundation, Sami Al-Arian; Muhammad Salah, the grocer from Illinois who was tortured by the Israelis when he was giving aid, and then became the first person ever sanctioned by the US as a terrorist within the US, a US citizen, he had all his assets frozen.

You’ll like this, Janine. Judith Miller participated in his interrogation, and talked about it in one of her books, because the Clinton administration denied the Israeli government’s claims that Hamas was essentially based in Chicago, and she believed Israel. So in order to help them out, she went and met with this American citizen they were torturing, and she gave the interrogator questions. And then the interrogator asked them And then she later testified at his trial that he wasn’t tortured by the Israelis, because she was there, and Judith Miller would have noticed the torture.

JJ: She understood.

Well, listen, as I get older, I recognize that there is a value in simply collecting the harms. You think that everybody knows and everyone will remember, and it’s just not true. There is a value in collecting the harms that are being done, and in showing their coherence and their purposiveness. It’s not random, it’s targeted and it’s principled, in a way that we understand that term.

And there is also tremendous value in lifting up the dissent, the resistance, so that we can never think, later or right now, that everyone is complicit, that no one is speaking out, even if not everyone feels really comfortably placed to do so. Propaganda is weakened when we have other avenues of information and communication. And that seems to be what your work, and particularly this new project, is about.

CounterSpin (2/26/16)

CG: And the flip side of the “everyone is complicit” argument is, people use it later to evade accountability. I mean, how many times can people say, “Oh, that or this politician or journalists supported the Iraq War, but there was no one against the Iraq War.”

I went to my first protest against the Iraq War in September 2005. I was a sophomore in high school. There were hundreds of thousands of people there. And we were all more right than the New York Times and MSNBC and Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney. Well, I think Dick Cheney knew what he was doing, but you know what I mean?

JJ: Yes. I was there too. Yeah…

CG: I know you were, I know you were. That’s, as I mentioned before, I first started reading FAIR back during the Bush years. Which we’re back in.

JJ: But the point is that some folks might say, “Oh, you’re doing a newsletter and you’re collecting instances of censorship and firing and repression, and that’s useful,” but it’s not just a collection, it’s also a tool. It’s also a way of speaking, yeah?

CG: Yes. And we’re definitely trying to get this newsletter to be a tool for journalists, to be a tool for congressional staff, to be a tool for other advocates. I mean, anyone can subscribe to it, and I think everyone can benefit from it. But we are doing extremely hard work behind the scenes to try to put it in front of people in the press, to try to put it in front of congressional offices, so they can’t say, “We didn’t know.”

Or they can use it as a resource. Because I know they’re getting the ADL stuff. I know they’re getting the Heritage Foundation stuff. We know police departments get that sort of stuff.

Al Jazeera (1/19/14)

And the other side is extremely well organized. I’ll never forget when I was in college, after the 2009 massacre/bombing/war in Gaza. I mean, I went and met with my congressman’s office, with just a staffer, with some other pro-Palestine activists. And the very first thing he says is, “We hear from AIPAC all the time. We never hear from you guys.”

JJ: Wow. That’s incredible. And that speaks to the need for organization and activism in this case.

And at the same time, we know that when we get organized, when we speak out, elite media will not necessarily hear that voice, or platform that voice.

And I’ll just ask you a specific question: FAIR and CounterSpin, we’ve noted a lot that corporate media cover election issues as though elections were something that happened to politicians, and not something that happens to all of the people that were affected. And with Gaza, with Palestine, with the genocide, the stakes can’t be higher. But how are you seeing Palestine covered as a campaign issue, and what would you do different there? What would you see differently there?

CG: I had to tune out most of the corporate media about a year ago, when I was watching CNN, and they ran this ad about Jake Tapper speaking truth to power. He says, “I have the greatest job in the world. I have powerful people on and ask them questions.” And then he came back from commercial break, he had a member of Congress on, and he goes, I don’t remember what member of Congress. He goes, “Oh, congressman so-and-so, students at Harvard just posted this on Instagram. Do you condemn it?” And I was like, “oh…”

JJ: And that’s news. Yeah.

CG: Speaking truth to power: When you have a member of Congress on, “will you condemn college students at Harvard?”

So it is interesting, because the way the media covers elections in its own right is its own problem. It’s just constantly pushing the candidates to be more warmongering. Maybe you saw that debate where the first question was, “Will you support a preemptive strike on Iran?”—a war crime. Will you support a war of aggression? Not a candidate answered it, I don’t believe. I believe they both gave nonsensical answers, because they had prepared opening remarks and they gave them.

Washington Post (10/22/24)

But again, there’s a real chance, and I say this because I’ve worked for a nonpartisan organization, but with that caveat, there’s real questions about how Biden’s blanket support for Israel will impact Harris’s electability. At the end of the day, the murder of Palestinian children is not merely an electoral calculation for the Democratic Party.

And I’ve seen some people in liberal and left circles sort of talk about this, it’s like, “Oh no, Biden’s making a bad electoral calculation,” and had zero humanity towards the Palestinian people, when the murder of the children should be stopped because we shouldn’t be murdering children. It’s not this sort of horse race. The horse race approach to genocide is just something I can’t stomach.

JJ: When I talk to people, they almost offer a Hail Mary, like: The students, the children will save us all; but who’s looking out for the students? Who’s looking out for the kids that somehow are going to save us from this war nightmare that we’re in? There are laws, there are policies, there are things that we can do besides saying, “Well, gee, I hope those kids aren’t too scared of going to jail. I wish ’em well.” Thoughts on that?

CG: Yeah, it is troubling. And if the students are all suspended and arrested and beaten up, they won’t be there to save us. So the student protestors need our solidarity, even if we don’t always agree with the choice of words, or always the choice of tactics. I mean, I was a college student once. I didn’t always make the best decisions.

But they’re out there trying to stop a genocide, in a society where 9/10ths of our Congress, 9/10ths of our local politicians and like 9.9/10ths of our media are all on board and fueling the flames. And they are getting beaten with batons. They’re getting arrested, they’re getting suspended, they’re getting deported. They don’t need our armchair expert analysis, they need our solidarity and our support, and they need us to get out on the streets too.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons. He’s policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org, and that’s the place where you can get their Gaza First Amendment Alert. Chip Gibbons, thank you so much for joining us once again on CounterSpin.

CG: Thank you for having me.

A spokesperson for Kansas City’s KCXL defended its former Radio Sputnik programming as “produced in Washington, DC, by American journalists who jumped at the chance to not be told what to report on by big media and big corporations” (Desk, 10/15/24).

Russian state radio network Radio Sputnik is off the air in the two markets on which it aired in the United States, and the cause of the closure is reportedly US government sanctions.

The Desk (10/15/24), quoting “one source familiar with the decision to wind down the network,” said “it was directly influenced by the US State Department’s imposition of new sanctions on Russia-backed broadcast outlets last month.”

“While Sputnik was not specifically named by the State Department,” the Desk reported, the sanctions  did hit Sputnik‘s parent company, a Russian government media agency called Rossiya Segodnya. This “made it difficult to continue leasing time on Washington and Kansas City radio stations where its programming was heard.”

The State Department (9/13/24) accused Rossiya Segodnya of carrying out “covert influence activities”; earlier (9/4/24), it had named Sputnik itself as well as Rossiya Segodnya as “foreign missions.” Significantly, the executive order under which Rossiya Segodnya was sanctioned extends penalties to the property of anyone who “acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly…any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.”

When Moscow does it, it’s “propaganda”; when Washington does it, it’s the Voice of America (10/16/24).

US government broadcaster Voice of America (10/16/24) said Sputnik‘s departure comes “after years of criticism that its local [Washington] radio station, WZHF, carries antisemitic content and false information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

The VoA did not offer any evidence of its claims of antisemitism, other than saying Jack Bergman, a Republican congressman from Michigan, “cited a steady stream of antisemitic tropes.” (Critical profiles of Sputnik‘s US programming have not previously charged it with antisemitism–Washington Post, 3/7/22; New York Post, 3/28/22.)

Sputnik’s departure from US airwaves is sudden but not unexpected. Communications lawyer Arthur Belendiuk, who has represented the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, has been trying to shut down Sputnik via the Federal Communications Commission since February (Radio and Television Business Report, 2/1/24).

Belendiuk maintains that the network “is in violation of commission rules for broadcasting ‘paid Russian state propaganda’” (Radio and Television Business Report, 10/16/24). He told FAIR that while he understood Sputnik had freedom of speech, he also had a “freedom to petition my government.” Bergman, the Republican congressmember, requested that the FCC take action against Sputnik (Inside Radio, 1/5/24).

The pressure has been building against the radio network for some time. VoA reported that the National Association of Broadcasters had issued a statement in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling on  “broadcasters to cease carrying any state-sponsored programming with ties to the Russian government or its agents.”

The Washington Post (3/7/22) also noted:

In 2017, three Democratic members of Congress sought an investigation into why it was still on the air despite evidence that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission at the time, Ajit Pai, declined to take action, saying the First Amendment would bar his agency “from interfering with a broadcast licensee’s choice of programming, even if that programming may be objectionable to many listeners.”

In 2020, the New York Times (2/13/20) called the arrival of Radio Sputnik in Kansas City “an unabashed exploitation of American values and openness.” Those loopholes have subsequently been closed.

I have been interviewed several times on Sputnik programs about my articles here at FAIR (e.g. By Any Means Necessary, 4/26/23, 5/27/23, 9/27/23). I have objected to much of the network’s coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which its website still calls a “special operation,” as if it’s gallbladder surgery. But I am open to talking as a source to many forms of media.

Sanctions that scare broadcasters against carrying Sputnik do carry a chilling effect on speech; if programmers know that a certain kind of content could open them up to government punishment, most are going to steer well clear of that content.

The feds have made it clear that their punishments are serious. In 2009, New York City small-business owner Javed Iqbal “was sentenced…to nearly six years in prison for assisting terrorists by providing satellite television services to Hezbollah’s television station, Al Manar” (New York Times, 4/23/09). This is an outlet that Middle East reporters constantly monitor, as they do with lots of other Middle East media.

The New York Times (2/13/20) called Sputnik “Russian agitprop,” carrying the message that “that America is damaged goods.” The Kansas City Star editorial board (3/4/22) said that listeners to KCXL, which carried Sputnik programming, were “bombarded with pro-Putin talk” thanks to Sputnik. The paper wondered why such programming was airing in the area. “Money talks,” the board said. “Or maybe we should say rubles.”

These critiques are hard to argue with, as you’d be hard-pressed to find investigations of the Russian government or its business elite in such media. Government broadcasters, whether it’s VoA or Sputnik, are not meant to be fair and balanced newsrooms, but vehicles to convey official thinking about the news to the rest of the world.

But Ted Rall, the cartoonist and political commentator who co-hosted the Sputnik show Final Countdown, challenged the idea that Sputnik’s content was government-managed. “We were no one’s dupes,” he wrote in an email to FAIR explaining the end of the network’s airing in the US:

I have worked in print and broadcast journalism for most of my life in a variety of roles at a wide variety of outlets, and I cannot recall an organization that gave me as much freedom to say whatever I felt like about any topic whatsoever.

He said that his show offered “an incredibly interesting, intelligent roster of political analysts,” which he believed were on par with “the finest journalists at NPR, the major broadcast networks or anywhere else.”

The president of the US equivalent of Radio Sputnik said that its operations being shut down in Russia “shows that Moscow considers independent reporting to be ‘an existential threat'” (RFE/RL, (2/20/24). So what does the shutting down of Sputnik show?

Belendiuk, for his part, called Sputnik’s content “divisive.” That’s a term that could be applied to lots of US radio content, like right-wing talk shows and religious broadcasting that consigns nonbelievers to Hell. The FCC’s Fairness Doctrine has been gone for a while (Extra!, 1–2/05; Washington Post, 2/4/21). At FAIR,we have long documented that US corporate media serve a propaganda function for the US government, much of it false or deceptive.

But when official enemy states treat US-owned outlets the way the US is treating Russia’s, that’s considered an assault on a free press. When the US’s anti-Russia broadcaster, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (2/20/24), was put on a government watch list that “effectively bans RFE/RL from working in Russia and exposes anyone who cooperates with the outlet to potential prosecution,” the outlet reported that its president, Stephen Capus, responded that “the move shows that Moscow considers independent reporting to be ‘an existential threat.'”

And when Russia barred a VoA reporter from entering the country, the CEO of the government agency that runs both VoA and RFE/RL, Amanda Bennett, told VoA (3/14/24):

The Russian government’s decision to ban VoA national security correspondent Jeff Seldin from its country echoes a growing wave of threats to press freedom by authoritarian regimes.

That’s heavy stuff, but ultimately the US is doing the same thing. In the case of Sputnik, sanctions seemed to have crushed the network. RT America fell without overt government pressure, as it shut down its operations after “DirecTV, the largest US satellite TV operator, stopped carrying RT America…a decision based on Russia’s attack on Ukraine” (CNBC, 3/3/22).

And the US State Department (1/20/22) said:

RT and Sputnik’s role as disinformation and propaganda outlets is most obvious when they report on issues of political importance to the Kremlin. A prevalent example is Russia’s use of RT and Sputnik to attempt to change public opinions about Ukraine in Europe, the United States, and as far away as Latin America. When factual reporting on major foreign policy priorities is not favorable, Russia uses state-funded international media outlets to inject pro-Kremlin disinformation and propaganda into the information environment.

Harsh, but again, this is what state broadcasters have been doing for decades, and if we as Americans dislike American outlets being blocked abroad, then we are, at this point, getting a taste of our own medicine.

Reporters Without Borders dropped the US’s press freedom ranking in 2024, “thanks in part to consolidation that has gutted local news and forced corporations to prioritize profits over public service” (Axios, 5/7/24).

Actions like the moves against Sputnik are troubling, and not just as another sign of a roiling new Cold War. While the US prides itself on being a model of free expression, journalists here have been concerned for some time now about the nation’s decline in press freedom (Axios, 5/7/24; FAIR.org, 3/16/21).

“In this situation, journalists should be absolutely terrified that the US government will come after them next,” Rall said. “President Biden unilaterally killed a media outlet with the stroke of a pen. Yes, it’s a foreign outlet, but the First Amendment is supposed to protect those.”

For FAIR, the action against Sputnik seems no less dangerous than local government attempts to silence even small domestic outlets like the Marion County Record (FAIR.org, 8/14/23) and the Asheville Blade (FAIR.org, 6/8/23). For example, the New York Times (10/21/24) recently fretted that former President Donald Trump’s statement that “CBS should lose its license” was a sign that if he is elected, he would pressure the FCC to revoke licenses of major network affiliate stations. The recent news about Sputnik makes that idea far more possible.

Rall added that he didn’t believe that the US government would stop after taking action against Russian outlets.

“Any effort at censorship is going to begin with the least popular victim and then creep and spread after that,” he said.

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” John Maynard Keynes made this observation in 1936, in his masterwork The General Theory. Nearly a century later, readers and viewers of corporate media face the same fate.

The fundamental problem confronted by these news consumers is not that corporate news outlets consult economists in their reporting; as experts in their field, economists often have important and worthwhile contributions to make. The problem is that these outlets consistently elevate the views of specific economists who serve particular ideological interests over the views of other economists, or even the academic profession as a whole.

Simon Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/19/15): “‘Mediamacro’…prefers simple stories to more complex analysis. As part of this, it is fond of analogies between governments and individuals, even when those analogies are generally seen to be false by macroeconomists.”

Consider the case of the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity mania that followed. The British economist Simon Wren-Lewis (London Review of Books, 2/9/15) has documented how media depictions of austerity diverged sharply from professional economists’ understandings and textbooks’ explanations of macroeconomics. His term for the media’s unique understanding of macroeconomics is “mediamacro,” which is characterized by an obsession with cutting the deficit over and above all other concerns.

In the wake of the banking crisis that followed the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007-08, and then the onset of the Eurozone crisis in 2010, standard textbook macroeconomics dictated a runup in the deficit to stimulate the economy out of a downturn. Corporate media, however, bought the arguments of political conservatives and a fringe of academic economists (who nonetheless held positions at prestigious universities), who maintained that austerity, specifically through spending cuts, could return the economy to health.

In the most notorious instance, corporate media outlets opportunistically promoted the findings of a 2010 paper, written by two Harvard economists, that were later famously invalidated due to an Excel error. As Paul Krugman noted in 2013 (New York Times, 4/19/13), this paper was controversial among economists from the start, but this did not stop corporate media from citing it—and its flimsy assertion that there existed a tipping-point for government debt at 90% of GDP, beyond which this debt supposedly imposed a major drag on economic growth—as gospel:

For example, a Washington Post editorial earlier this year warned against any relaxation on the deficit front, because we are “dangerously near the 90% mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth.” Notice the phrasing: “economists,” not “some economists,” let alone “some economists, vigorously disputed by other economists with equally good credentials,” which was the reality.

As Mark Copelovitch (SSRN, 10/27/17) has noted, “The single most important factor [in elevating falsehoods about austerity] has been the media’s willingness to embrace and promote these narratives, while largely ignoring the overwhelming empirical and historical evidence that austerity is deeply contractionary and counter-productive.”

In another instance recounted by Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/9/15), after the return of some growth in 2013 in Britain following the election of a Conservative government committed to austerity in 2010, the Financial Times editorial board (9/10/13) declared the Conservatives victorious in their political argument for austerity. This despite the fact that “less than 20% of academic economists surveyed by the Financial Times thought that the recovery of 2013 vindicated austerity.”

Such false right-wing narratives about macroeconomic policy came to dominate media discourse, not merely because political elites adopted these false narratives and thus made them newsworthy, but because corporate media outlets were compliant messengers for elite views and prescriptions.

Why does the media adopt “mediamacro” as its approach to coverage of the economy? One reason proposed by Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/9/15) is the influence of City of London (or, in the US case, Wall Street) economists, whose

views tend to reflect the economic arguments of those on the right: Regulation is bad, top rates of tax should be low, the state is too large, and budget deficits are a serious and immediate concern.

Moreover, the political leanings of corporate media outlets, whether or not they are made explicit, may encourage them to seek the expertise of economists of a particular ideological bent. These economists’ views may, in turn, be out of step with the academic mainstream on topics like austerity.

The corporate media’s tendency to elevate economists of a specific type hasn’t disappeared in the 2020s. With the onset of Covid and the spike in inflation that followed, media broke out their familiar playbook of consulting prominent economists with extreme, and business-friendly, positions.

The infamous example was the elevation of Larry Summers, who slammed Biden’s 2021 stimulus as “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years” and warned stridently of inflation (Washington Post, 5/24/21). When inflation rose to a high of just over 9% the next year, Summers was hailed by the media as “an oracle: the man who saw it all coming,” as Jacobin editor Seth Ackerman (2/13/23) sarcastically put it.

In one sense, it was true that Summers had seen inflation as a strong possibility, and he did deserve some credit for that. Other economists, notably Paul Krugman, had downplayed the possibility of a jump in inflation and had to eat their words (New York Times, 7/21/22). But the fact that Summers had gotten this one point right, after an illustrious career of getting things wrong, did not exactly justify his skyrocketing status as the go-to voice on inflation, or the heaps of at times fawning media coverage thrown his way (Wall Street Journal, 6/27/22; Fortune, 9/23/22).

Did it justify, for example, Summers garnering six times as many mentions as Krugman on top cable news channels from 2021 through 2023? A Nobel laureate and widely respected commentator, Krugman also happened to be the most prominent proponent of a more dovish, less austere approach to inflation. Though he failed to foresee the initial rise in inflation, Krugman accurately predicted, in contrast to Summers, that the US economy could achieve a “soft landing,” a fall in inflation without a substantial rise in the unemployment rate (New York Times, 5/18/23).

Meanwhile, Summers capitalized on his new status as economic prophet to insist that extreme pain was required to tame inflation. By mid-2022, he confidently proclaimed (Bloomberg, 6/20/22):

We need five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation—in other words, we need two years of 7.5% unemployment or five years of 6% unemployment or one year of 10% unemployment.

Like the views of extreme austerity advocates in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Summers’ views in 2022 were acutely out of sync with the mainstream among academic economists, as becomes apparent from surveys of professional economists taken over the course of the inflationary outbreak.

Financial Times/Booth survey of macroeconomists (9/13/22)

One FT/Booth survey taken in the fall of 2022 is particularly informative. It found that most economists thought that the Federal Reserve was on track to contain inflation with its pace of interest rate hikes. Specifically, when asked to react to the statement “Futures markets now suggest the Fed will raise the federal funds rate to about 3.9% by the end of 2022,” only 36% of economists classified the Fed’s actions as “too little too late and insufficient to help keep inflation under control.” The rest either thought that this policy path was sufficient to contain inflation (55%) or thought that it was overkill (9%).

When asked about the toll Fed policy would take on the labor market, academic economists took a moderate stance. Most agreed that the unemployment rate would peak below 6% and that a recession would last for less than a year. Incidentally, only a small minority of economists seem to have foreseen the possibility of inflation returning to target without a recession and with unemployment rising no higher than 4.3%, which is what in fact has occurred. But notwithstanding their apparent excess of pessimism, economists generally agreed that inflation would come under control with nowhere near the punishment Summers was prescribing.

To be fair, these economists were not asked directly what would be sufficient to contain inflation, and if asked directly, it is likely that some segment would have been in Summers’ camp—after all, about a third of the economists surveyed thought that the Fed was doing “too little too late.” But those backing Summers’ full diagnosis would be a fraction of those taking this minority view. So the central point that Summers was in the minority, and likely in quite a small minority, among professional economists is undoubtedly true.

Yet with his quasi-divine status granted by corporate media, Summers could pontificate freely about the need for mass suffering without fear of marginalization for lack of evidence or credibility. So when he prescribed 5% unemployment for five years, all that an outlet like Bloomberg (6/20/22) did was report on his views, no skepticism necessary. And no warning label stating: This is completely out of step with the academic mainstream. In effect, corporate media decided to once again cherry-pick expertise to legitimize austerity policies.

James K. Galbraith and Isabella Weber (Boston Globe, 8/22/24) : “Americans still have some common sense…. It shows that all of the efforts of free-market economists to beat it out of them have not yet worked.“

At the same time, alternatives to the dominant austerity paradigm have been treated with caution, if not outright hostility. The New York Times (8/15/24), for example, in a recent piece on Kamala Harris’s advocacy for anti-price-gouging legislation, did consult Isabella Weber, a progressive economist who has become well known for her work on profit-driven inflation. But her testimony was overshadowed in the piece by that of economists with more conservative takes on the issue.

Most notably, the Times relied heavily on the insights of Harvard economist Jason Furman, who helped lead the push for extreme austerity alongside Summers (Wall Street Journal, 9/7/22). His first quote in the article had a simple Econ 101 message: “Egg prices went up last year—it’s because there weren’t as many eggs, and it caused more egg production.” In other words, egg prices went up because of supply issues, and it’s good that prices went up because that spurred more egg production.

Unfortunately, this story doesn’t fit with the facts. Responding to this Furman quote, Weber and James Galbraith observed in a separate article (Boston Globe, 8/22/24):

In fact, US egg production peaked in 2019 and then fell slightly, through last year. Egg prices spiked from early 2022 to $4.82 a dozen on average in January 2023, before falling back again, with no gain in production. High prices did not stimulate America’s hens to greater effort. On these points, Furman laid an egg.

It might be assumed that the Times would engage in this sort of basic factchecking of its sources, and not leave it to two progressive economists writing in the Boston Globe to do that for them. But when the source is a Harvard economist who not too long ago was suggesting (wildly incorrectly) that unemployment would have to jump over 6% for two years to tame inflation (Wall Street Journal, 9/7/22), apparently skepticism is not in order.

Leaving little room to doubt the leanings of the Times reporters, the article ended with another quote from Furman, this time on Harris’s proposal to go after price gouging:

“This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” he said. “There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”

Conor Smyth (FAIR.org, 2/14/24): “For media outlets owned by the wealthy, there’s obvious utility in directing the conversation away from inequality and toward other concerns.”

If one of the main functions of the media is agenda-setting—deeming certain topics, like government debt, newsworthy and others, like inequality, not so much (FAIR.org, 2/14/24)—another primary function is legitimization: letting audiences know who they should trust and who they should treat with skepticism. Over the course of the recent bout of inflation, corporate outlets have made it clear that those economists who erred on the side of far-reaching austerity were worth listening to. The ones who dissented most strongly from the austerity paradigm were, for the most part, sidelined or only tepidly consulted.

The result has been a constrained debate. Extreme pro-austerity positions have enjoyed high visibility, while progressives have been relegated to the background. This is not because of an imbalance in the evidence. If anything, the side that has been arguing for anti-austerity measures to fight inflation, like temporary price controls, has more evidence for their claims than the side that’s backed harsh monetary austerity. They, at least, haven’t been proven embarrassingly wrong by the experience of the past couple years.

What could help explain the imbalance in coverage is instead the background of different sets of economists. Before being legitimized by corporate media, extremists for austerity like Summers and Furman were legitimized by political status—Summers served in top roles under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and Furman served as a key adviser to Obama. Progressives like Isabella Weber have not enjoyed similar political standing.

Thus, we can see a sort of chain of legitimization that runs from a political system dominated by economic elites to a media ecosystem owned by economic elites. If you can secure a top post in politics, it doesn’t matter whether you’re an extremist with views contradicting the consensus among academic economists. Your views should be taken seriously. For progressives, who have largely been excluded from elite politics in recent decades, serious skepticism is in order.

On the face of it, this system makes some sense. But think a little deeper and you can see an insidious chain servicing the dominant players in American society. That chain needs to be broken. Media outlets need to listen to the evidence, not the false wisdom of economists hand-picked by American elites.

Janine Jackson interviewed author and UC/Santa Barbara research professor emeritus George Lipsitz about the impacts of housing discrimination for the October 11, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Grist (3/10/15)

Janine Jackson: Some 10 years ago, food delivery service FreshDirect got more than $100 million of incentives to place a warehouse in a populated, poor, largely people of color community in the South Bronx, to bring heavy diesel truck traffic to asthma-inflicted neighborhoods already affected by waste treatment plants and high-traffic highways.

Groups like South Bronx Unite, like Good Jobs for NY, opposed these further health harms to the community, as well as the notion that a handful of insecure, poorly waged jobs could serve as compensation. South Bronx Unites’ Mychal Johnson said: “Of course we want jobs, but we should not have to choose between having a job and having clean air. If you can’t breathe, you can’t work.”

Now we understand that folks are working to reclaim pieces of the affected community called the Harlem River Yard, including allowing access to the Harlem River waterfront, access that’s been cut off to the public for a long time.

That’s just one of thousands of stories that exemplify the ways that racism inflects all kinds of decisions, policies, laws, that we’re told are, nowadays anyway, indifferent to race. That’s a mistaken notion that hobbles our ability to respond effectively to the interconnected harms of white supremacy and myriad US institutions that, to be real, harm everyone, and not just Black and brown people.

UC Press (2024)

George Lipsitz is research professor emeritus of Black studies and sociology at the University of California/Santa Barbara. He’s the author of many books, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and How Racism Takes Place among them.

His most recent book, that we’re here to talk about, is called The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth. It’s out now from University of California Press.

I will note that George was, for years, the chair of the board of the African American Policy Forum, where I also serve as a board member. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, George Lipsitz.

George Lipsitz: Thank you. So glad to be here.

JJ: Your new book addresses the interconnectedness of laws, policies and practices around housing that, without needing to be overtly coordinated, reinforce one another to produce and reproduce discriminatory outcomes. So we could really pull an opening thread anywhere here.

But when we talk about housing discrimination, I know that many folks’ minds go to redlining, where officially sanctioned protocols meant Black families just couldn’t buy homes in certain neighborhoods, and the thinking is, while certainly that had lasting impacts, it was years ago, and it’s been legally remediated by now.

So while the book talks, importantly, about the inadequacies of the ways that harms have been diagnosed and responded to, maybe we could just start with a breakdown of some of the multiple forms of discrimination in housing that that takes. Why is it that housing is at the center of the spider web of so many other discriminatory dangers?

George Lipsitz: “A lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing.”

GL: When I say the “danger zone is everywhere,” housing discrimination raises in peoples’ minds a direct act of discrimination, a refusal to rent or sell to a person of a targeted race, or the long effects of redlining. And these are still in effect, and they have an enormous impact on peoples’ life chances and opportunities. But a lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing.

I talk in the book about the ways in which low-ball home value appraisals of property owned by Black people hurt their ability to sell and refinance. And those same houses have artificially high property tax appraisals, which makes them pay a disproportionate share of taxation, makes them subject to tax lien foreclosures and auctions, which have been a massive transfer of wealth, especially in the last 10 years.

Housing discrimination puts people from aggrieved groups in what Tricia Rose calls “proximity to toxicity,” close to incinerators, toxic waste dumps, diesel fuels, pesticides.

CNN (3/6/15)

It also is enacted through a tax system that functions as an engine of racial inequality. Property tax relief in some cities for homeowners has meant that renters—and the city of Ferguson in Missouri is an example of this—are harassed by predatory policing that imposes arbitrary fines, fees and debts on them as a way to raise municipal revenue, to make up for the subsidies that are given to people who’ve been able to profit from housing discrimination.

And there’s also mass incarceration, a disabling process, a disease-spreading practice. It affects people’s nervous systems, and anxiety produces hypertension.

Even something like insurance, which appears to be race-neutral because it’s determined by algorithms, the algorithms are created by humans, and they basically make the success of past discrimination an excuse for continuing and extending it by equating Black people with risk.

I’ll give an example. One of the things that affects your credit score is the kind of loan that you got. And so if you got a subprime loan, even if you qualified for a prime loan, you’re considered to be a credit risk, but there was nothing wrong with your behavior. It was the discrimination of the loan that was given to you.

So I say that the danger zone is everywhere, that housing discrimination harms health and steals wealth. And as you said, it not only harms its direct victims, it also squanders the skills and abilities of the people whose lives are shortened because of it, misallocates resources, and it basically increases costs of insurance and healthcare, policing, for everyone.

JJ: Let’s spell just a couple of things out, first about health: Housing discrimination harming health is not limited to polluters, like I talked about FreshDirect, being placed in aggrieved communities. The impact of housing policy on health—there’s a number of other pieces to that, yes?

GL: You can be in an area that has no medical services. We found that areas that have concentrated poverty, and concentrated populations of people who can’t move elsewhere because of housing discrimination, have more pedestrian accidents. The street lighting is worse.

People who are renters in this age of incredible shortages of housing—and part of that is because of a massive buy-up of homes by private equity firms—can’t really bargain with their landlords. If your landlord is somebody you know, that’s one thing. If it’s a private equity company that has 20,000 or 30,000 residences, you may not even be able to find out the identity of that landlord. And then it becomes very difficult to say, “Repair the furnace, make sure that the electricity is safe, make sure that the water is OK, deal with the pests and rodents that are in this place.” So it creates health hazards inside the houses. It creates hazards outside the houses.

CBS (9/19/22)

Also, people who live in places where a lot of houses have been torn down—especially in a city like Detroit, where private equity firms have been buying them up and tearing them down—that produces dust, which young children bring into their homes from playing in the street, and it increases their likelihood of asthma and many other deadly diseases.

Farm workers constantly live in housing that is close to pesticides, close to pollution, but they also suffer from being in places that are food deserts, where you can’t get nutritious food, or food swamps, where you can only get non-nutritious food. And they also suffer from the lack of medical insurance, some of that caused by the high cost of housing. It means that rather than be evicted from their homes, they’ll forego necessary medicines and remedies that they would otherwise buy.

JJ: I don’t believe that people understand the interconnectedness of this, and I think that’s part of the way that we talk about things: Healthcare problems are one thing, housing problems are another thing. And if you disconnect those things, then you don’t get what’s happening. And that’s exactly what I think this book is getting at, is the way that these things are immediately connected. They have everything to do with one another.

For example, stealing wealth, which is the other part of the title: People think owning a home is central to the American dream, and it’s not just because you have a roof over your head. It’s because you have hereditary wealth. You now own a thing that you can transfer to your children, and that has everything to do with your sense of confidence in your life, and your ability to provide for folks, and your absence from, your distance from, precarity. All of these things are connected, which I think the book is trying to get at.

GL: Yeah, well, certainly these impediments to being able to inherit assets that appreciate in value, can be passed down across generations, it’s a massive transfer of wealth, and a tremendous injury that goes across generations. But it’s also a matter of: housing and healthcare are talked about separately, but they’re also talked about separately from education, from incarceration, from transportation, and yet they’re mutually constitutive.

Even within some of these fields, when people are trained in law, they focus on the tort model of injury. And this teaches them that discrimination has to be individual, intentional, interpersonal, and that it’s an aberrant practice in an otherwise fair market.

But, actually, this has nothing to do with the way housing discrimination works most of the time. Although there are 4 million instances of intentional, individual, interpersonal injuries every year, housing discrimination is also collective, cumulative, continuing. It produces inequalities that can’t be remedied one at a time.

Guardian (2/26/20)

And similarly with health, that we have an individualized model of health that imagines that people’s genetics, and whether they exercise and whether they eat healthy food, is the key thing in determining their health. But there are also collective issues, like sewage management, garbage collection, coal-burning furnaces and incinerators, lead in paint and gasoline.

All of these things have an impact on health, and they not only need to be studied together, but people involved in fair housing law have to think about health justice. People who are dispensing medical care need to think about the neighborhoods that their patients come from and return to, and the impact that those neighborhoods have on their health, and on the relations between parents and children, and on even whether people are considered valued in this society.

You live in a place that tells you you’re everybody’s lowest priority, you may not have a reason to want to be healthy. And then, if you add to that, the lack of physicians, the high cost of healthcare, the way in which pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies jack up the cost of healthcare, you’re basically engaged in a calculated cruelty in the organized abandonment of large numbers of people.

And this harm is most egregious on children, because they can’t defend themselves, because their physical systems are less able to deal with health menaces. And so we’re basically squandering a large part of the next generation in a country that is increasingly made up of people who are not white, and we’re basically setting those children up for failure. It’s like a time bomb that will go off in the future, and there’s a lot of foreseeable harm that could be prevented.

A key theory of pediatric care is that you don’t just remedy illnesses after they happen. You foresee them in advance and prevent them from happening. We could do that with the environment, we could do that with nutrition. We could do that with giving people a safe, affordable living environment. But we don’t do it, because there’s so much money to be made from injustice.

JJ: I do want to put folks onto the book The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, because there’s no way that we can address all of this in the time that we have. But I want to say, the book is enlightening about many things, and one of them is the importance of just the way that we look at, the way we see societal inequities, and the way we talk about them. And what you’re saying is we’re talking about rejecting this approach that addresses individuals as though they were divorced from community. We’re looking at individual actions by individual landlords, and not looking at systems, and that’s part of the problem.

GL: And this is what the law assumes, that an injury interrupts an otherwise just situation. You sue the individual perpetrator, you’re then made whole, and you go back to being fine.

But what if you’re not fine to begin with? What if there isn’t one individual perpetrator? What if it’s a conjuncture of obstacles in your way? Once you punish that one corporation, they declare bankruptcy, and they open up the next day with a different name.

And once the injured person wins a fair housing settlement, they go back into an innately unfair housing market, where they are disadvantaged in getting loans. They’re disadvantaged in getting insurance. They’re disadvantaged in their relations with the police. They’re disadvantaged in relation to the schools that their children are able to go to.

So multi-axis problems need multi-axis and intersectional solutions. And that means we need to work together. It means that there’s a limit to what any one of us can do as an individual to have good health or housing for ourselves, much less for the whole society.

And that’s why I try to stress in the book the emerging active and engaged public sphere constituency for good health and fair housing, and fair housing councils throughout the country, and advocates and attorneys who take on those cases, public health collectives, environmental justice organizing, community gardens, food co-ops, arts-based health projects like Building Healthy Communities in Boyle Heights, a whole series of community land trusts where people pool resources to take speculation out of the market.

And so people are mobilizing precisely because they realize that as an individual, there’s very little you can do. In the courtroom, the boardroom or the banker’s office, there are limits to what can be done.

Now there should be justice in all of those places, and individuals are entitled to good health, good housing, to the full benefits of civil rights law. But we also need to have an understanding that race itself is a political, not a biological, category, that it functions because people see things a certain way. Racism persists because people believe that people are members of different races, and we need to see racism as structural, systemic, collective.

And good health and good housing can’t just be left to be private commodities to be purchased. They’re public resources, and they need to be protected by the public, and nurtured and sustained.

LA Times (5/29/22)

JJ: I’ll only ask you one final question about news media, because we do see coverage, sometimes, about the difficulties of homelessness, or the problems of companies like Blackstone buying up homes. We see coverage. It’s just that it’s not connecting the dots. The story about why people are homeless is not connected to the story about venture capitalists buying up homes. It’s not connected.

And so to me, it’s what I call “narrating the nightmare.” Something terrible is happening, and look at these harmed people, but somehow we can’t name who’s behind it, or how it could be stopped. “But,” media say, “you can’t say we’re not acknowledging it because look at this one story where we said how harmful it is.”

And it drives me up a wall, because I know that reporters aren’t stupid, and I know that they’re not incapable of thinking systemically. I know they don’t think structural problems are boring, and I know that they don’t understand that regular people could grasp them.

So I guess what I’m saying is that corporate news media suffer from some of the same ailments that you are diagnosing in healthcare and housing, and could benefit from some of the same medicine, I guess.

New York Times (11/2/22)

GL: Yeah, and some of this has to do with the demographics of the news media industry, which is similar to the demographics of the legal profession and the medical profession. There aren’t enough people who have experienced discrimination directly.

But it’s also that a good plot has a beginning, a middle and an end. And so last year there were a number of stories about bias in home appraisal, in which Black families got a low appraisal for their home and they then got a white friend to sit in for them, and they took down the Jacob Lawrence paintings and the Toni Morrison books. And when it appeared that the home was owned by a white person, it was as much as $500,000 more.

I’m glad they covered this, and this is a good story. And Fair Housing groups have sued about appraisal discrimination, and the National Fair Housing Alliance has a whole campaign about it.

But nobody connected those instances to the systemic problems in the appraisal industry, which Elizabeth Korver-Glenn has written about in her book Race Brokers. They haven’t related that the low home value appraisals are connected to high property tax appraisals, as Andrew Kahrl points out in his great book The Black Tax. So the information is out there, but it’s just that they end the story too soon, and they assume things are going to be all right.

Lorraine Hansberry wrote this play called A Raisin in the Sun, which is about a Black family moving into a white neighborhood. And at the end of the play, the Black people are in the neighborhood, and critics said, “Oh, this is a happy ending.” And Lorraine Hansberry said, “Well, if you think that’s a happy ending, wait until they wake up the next morning and have bricks and rocks thrown at their house, and the neighbors don’t talk to them, and the police harass them.”

And so you can’t end the story too soon. We have to think about all these interconnections.

JJ: Absolutely. And we could and will continue this conversation much further.

But I just want to tell folks that we’ve been speaking with George Lipsitz. He’s research professor emeritus of Black studies in sociology at the University of California/Santa Barbara. And the book we’re talking about is called The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, and it’s available now from University of California Press. George Lipsitz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

GL: Thank you, Janine. I really appreciate the conversation.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Gaza First Amendment Alert (10/16/24)

The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases. In Palestine, the death toll is exacerbated by displacement; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRWA), one of very few humanitarian organizations working in the region.

A real accounting will also include not just those we don’t yet know are dead, but the maimed, the orphaned, the starved, the homeless.  Democracy Now! recently spoke with a doctor from Gaza who said that he wishes that “Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.”

The New York Times has deemed such images too graphic to print. Too horrific, in other words, to run alongside reporting that suggests, implies or outright states that those deaths are justified, make sense or, minimally, are not worth stopping eating your buttered toast about.

As media critics, we look to Palestinians to represent Palestinian views, but it’s crucial that we not see the present moment as something happening to Other People, Somewhere Else. The repression of simple anti-genocide calls, the censorship, the firings, the disinformation, the malforming of concepts like “antisemitism”—these are problems for all of us, about all of us, that will influence all of us forever.

Defending Rights & Dissent has started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday. Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a journalist, a researcher and a longtime activist.  He led a successful campaign to defeat a proposed unconstitutional anti-boycott bill in Maryland.

With less than a month until Election Day, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, sat down for an interview with Bill Whitaker on CBS‘s 60 Minutes (10/7/24). (Donald Trump backed out of a similar interview.)

Aside from one televised debate (ABC, 9/10/24), both Harris and Trump have given corporate news outlets remarkably few opportunities to press them on important issues. While Whitaker didn’t offer Harris many softball questions—and included some sharp interrogation on the Middle East—his focus frequently started from right-wing talking points and assumptions, particularly over immigration and economic policy.

FAIR counted 29 questions, with 24 of them going to Harris. Those questions began with foreign policy, which also accounted for the most policy-related questions (7). Whitaker also asked her five questions about the economy, four about immigration, and one more generally about her changed positions on immigration, fracking and healthcare. Seven of Whitaker’s questions to Harris were unrelated to policies or governing; of the five questions to Walz, the only vaguely policy-oriented one asked him to respond to the charge that he was “dangerously liberal.”

A Pew survey (9/9/24) shows little correlation between what voters care about and what 60 Minutes (10/7/24) asked Kamala Harris about.

Economic issues are a top priority for many voters. But rather than ask Harris about whether and how her plan might help people economically, or formulate questions to help voters understand the differences between Harris’s and Trump’s plans, Whitaker focused on two long-standing media obsessions: the deficit and bipartisanship (or lack thereof).

Whitaker first asked Harris: “Groceries are 25% higher, and people are blaming you and Joe Biden for that. Are they wrong?” It’s not clear that people primarily blame the administration for inflation, actually; a Financial Times/Michigan Ross poll in March found that 63% of respondents blamed higher prices on “large corporations taking advantage of inflation,” while 38% blamed Democratic policies (CNBC, 3/12/24).

Whitaker went on to list some of Harris’s more progressive economic proposals: “expand the child tax credit…give tax breaks to first-time homebuyers…and people starting small businesses.”

These are all generally politically popular, but Whitaker framed his question about them not in terms of the impact on voters, but the impact on the federal deficit, citing a deficit hawk think tank:

But it is estimated by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that your economic plan would add $3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. How are you going to pay for that?

There is a very popular assumption in corporate media that federal deficits are of critical importance—that is, when Democrats are proposing to provide aid and public services to people. When Republicans propose massive tax breaks for the wealthy and for corporations, the same media tend to forget their deficit obsession (FAIR.org, 1/25/21).

It is worth noting—since Whitaker did not—that the CRFB found that Trump’s plan, which follows that Republican playbook, would increase the debt by $7.5 trillion. One might also bear in mind that US GDP is projected to be more than $380 trillion over the next decade.

Dissatisfied with Harris’s rather oblique answer, Whitaker insisted: “But pardon me, Madam Vice President, the question was how are you going to pay for it?” When Harris responded that she intended to “make sure that the richest among us who can afford it pay their fair share of taxes,” Whitaker scoffed: “We’re dealing with the real world here. How are you going to get this through Congress?”

After Harris argued that congressmembers “know exactly what I’m talking about, ’cause their constituents know exactly what I’m talking about,” Whitaker shot back, “And Congress has shown no inclination to move in your direction.”

Sure, journalists shouldn’t let politicians make pie-in-the-sky promises, but it’s true that Harris’s proposals are supported by majorities of the public. Whitaker did viewers—and democracy—no favors by focusing his skepticism not on a corrupt system that benefits the wealthy, but on Harris’s critique of that system.

Serious efforts to count the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States show little sign of the “flood” touted by 60 Minutes (Pew, 7/22/24).

Whitaker’s framing was even more right-wing on immigration. His first question,  framed by a voiceover noting that “Republicans are convinced immigration is the vice president’s Achilles’ heel”:

You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers, and that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?

Whitaker is referring to Biden’s tightening restrictions so that refugees cannot be granted asylum when US officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed. It’s certainly valid to question the new policies; the ACLU (6/12/24) has argued they are unconstitutional, for instance.

But Whitaker clearly wasn’t interested in constitutionality or human rights. His questioning started from the presumption that immigration is a problem, and used the dehumanizing language that is all too common in corporate media reporting on immigrants (FAIR.org, 8/23/23):

Whitaker: But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?

Harris: It’s a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.

Whitaker: What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?

Harris: I think—the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, OK? But the—

Whitaker: But the numbers did quadruple under your watch.

As others have pointed out, using flood metaphors paints immigrants as “natural disasters who should be dealt with in an inhumane fashion” (Critical Discourse Studies, 1/31/17).

But Whitaker is also using a right-wing talking point that’s entirely misleading. Border “encounters” increased sharply under Biden, but these encounters, as we have explained before (FAIR.org, 3/29/24),

are not a tally of how many people were able to enter the country without authorization; it’s a count of how many times people were stopped at the border by CBP agents. Many of these people had every right to seek entry, and a great number were turned away. Some of them were stopped more than once, and therefore were counted multiple times.

In fact, only roughly a third were actually released into the country (Factcheck.org, 2/27/24).

Whitaker used these misleading figures to paint undocumented immigration as a crisis, which has been a media theme since the beginning of the Biden administration (FAIR.org, 5/24/21). In fact, the percentage of the US population that is unauthorized has risen only slightly—from 3.2% in 2019 to 3.3% in 2022, the latest year available—which is down from a peak of 4.0% in 2007 (Pew, 7/22/24).

Internal controversy over Tony Dokoupil’s  confrontational interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates (CBS Mornings, 9/30/24) may have given Bill Whitaker an opening to challenge Harris on whether she was too supportive of Israel.

Whitaker’s first questions to Harris, about the Middle East, represented a shift in tone from ABC‘s questioning at the September debate—where moderator David Muir asked Harris to respond to Trump’s charge that “you hate Israel.” Whitaker started his interview by pressing Harris about the United States’ continued support of Israel despite its recent escalations:

The events of the past few weeks have pushed us into the brink, if not into, an all-out regional war into the Middle East. What can Hthe US do at this point to prevent this from spinning out of control?

Harris repeated the Biden administration (and, frequently, media) line that Israel has a right to defend itself, while noting that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” and that “this war has to end.” Whitaker pushed back, pointing out that the United States is an active supporter of Israel’s military and, thus, military actions:

But we supply Israel with billions of dollars of military aid, and yet Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu seems to be charting his own course. The Biden/Harris administration has pressed him to agree to a ceasefire, he has resisted. You urged him not to go into Lebanon, he went in anyway. Does the US have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?

Whitaker continued with two more brief questions about the relationship with Netanyahu. It’s possible that his line of questioning was influenced by the controversy  within his network over CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil’s interview (9/30/24) with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, which pushed a pro-Israel line hard enough to prompt charges of unprofessionalism (FAIR.org, 10/4/24; Zeteo, 10/9/24).

The three other foreign policy questions concerned US support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Two of the three asked about ending the war: “What does success look like in ending the war in Ukraine?” and “Would you meet with President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a solution to the war in Ukraine?” The third asked whether Harris would “support the effort to expand NATO to include Ukraine.”

In contrast to the Middle East line of questioning, Whitaker did not push back against any of Harris’s answers, which expressed support for “Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s unprovoked aggression,” and to “have a say” in determining the end of the war.

The aftermath of two hurricanes supercharged by climate change didn’t prompt 60 Minutes to ask any questions about climate (CBS, 9/30/24).

Though Whitaker took time to ask Harris what kind of gun she owns and Walz whether he can be “trusted to tell the truth,” he didn’t ask a single question about abortion, other healthcare issues, the climate crisis or gun control. These are all remarkable omissions.

A Pew Research survey (9/9/24) found abortion was a “very important” issue to more than half of all voters, and to two-thirds of Harris supporters. But Whitaker asked no questions about what Harris and Walz would do to protect or restore reproductive rights across the US.

The healthcare system was another glaring omission by 60 Minutes, though it is voters’ second-most important issue, according to the same Pew Research survey; 65% of all voters, and 76% of Harris supporters, said that healthcare was “very important” to their vote.

Healthcare only came up as part of an accusation that “you have changed your position on so many things”: Along with shifts on immigration and fracking, Whittaker noted that “you were for Medicare for all, now you’re not,” with the result that “people don’t truly know what you believe or what you stand for.” Like a very similar question asked of Harris during the debate (FAIR.org, 9/13/24), it seemed crafted to press Harris on whether her conversion from left-liberal to centrist was genuine, rather than to elicit real solutions for a population with the highest healthcare costs and the lowest life expectancy of any wealthy nation.

At a moment when Hurricane Helene had just wreaked massive destruction across the Southeast and Hurricane Milton was already promising to deliver Florida its second devastating storm in two weeks, the lack of climate questions was striking. While voters tend to rank climate policy as a lower priority than issues like the economy or immigration, large majorities are concerned about it—and it’s an urgent issue with consequences that can’t be understated. Yet the only time climate was alluded to was in the flip-flop question, which included the preface, “You were against fracking, now you’re for it.”

Similarly, a mass shooting in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four people just over three weeks ago; as of this writing (10/15/24), the Gun Violence Archive reported that gun violence, excluding suicide, has killed 13,424 Americans this year. In 2019, the American Psychological Association reported that one-third of Americans said that fear of mass shootings stops them from going to certain places and events. In a Pew Research survey (4/11/24), 59% of public K-12 teachers said they are at least somewhat worried about the possibility of a shooting at their school, and 23% have experienced a lockdown.

Yet the two questions Whitaker asked about guns had nothing to do with these realities or fears, or what a Harris/Walz administration would do about them. Instead, he asked Harris, “What kind of gun do you own, and when and why did you get it?” (Harris answered, “I have a Glock, and I have had it for quite some time.”) Whitaker followed up by asking Harris if she had ever fired it. (She said she had, at a shooting range.)

Walz was mostly asked non-policy questions, things like “Whether you can be trusted to tell the truth,” and why his calling Republicans “weird” has become a “rallying cry for Democrats.”

In keeping with the media’s preoccupation with pushing Democratic candidates to the right, the governor was asked to respond to charges that he was “dangerously liberal” and part of the “radical left“: “What do you say to that criticism, that rather than leading the way, you and Minnesota are actually out of step with the rest of the country?”

The right-wing framing of many of the questions asked, and the important issues ignored, might make CBS think about how in step it is with the country and its needs.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Vera Institute of Justice’s Insha Rahman about the immigration conversation for the October 4, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Unfortunately, we can assume listeners know the popular right-wing lines: Immigrants—that’s shorthand for Black and brown immigrants—are criminals, violent drug criminals especially, but also they’re stealing jobs, draining social services and, in election season, we hear they’re voting illegally in large numbers, because they are, in some way, props for the Democratic Party.

Anyone who wants to dispute those noxious tropes can do so with a search engine. Harder to combat is the overarching and bipartisan framing of immigration and immigrants as a “problem.” How do we replace batting away the latest slur with the reality-based humane conversation we need to move us to the 21st century immigration and asylum policies we could have?

Insha Rahman is vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice and the director of Vera Action. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Insha Rahman.

Insha Rahman: Thanks for having me, Janine.

Guardian (9/15/24)

JJ: Rather than ask you to engage intentionally misleading anti-immigrant talking points, I wonder if you would talk a little about the impacts. What is the fallout of myths and misinformation that might sound laughable or dismissable to many of us—what’s the fallout in the lives of the communities that you work with?

IR: First of all, the Willie Horton playbook of exploiting voters’ fears about crime, and frankly the dog whistles about race and criminality, it’s nothing new. When I say Willie Horton, everybody knows the 1988 ad that was run and allegedly sunk Michael Dukakis’ Democratic bid for president, and it’s a playbook that is old, well worn. We’ve seen it every election cycle.

And so this year, in 2024, if you feel like you’re hearing about immigration and migrants and cats and dogs nonstop, it isn’t anything new. It is really just another page of the Willie Horton playbook.

And it’s not really about immigration or immigration policies. Every poll that we have done, that we have seen, has found that Americans, by and large, understand that immigration is a fundamental part of our society, of our economy, of our communities. We are a country of immigrants. But, when it is wrapped up in a fear of crime, and playing upon racist tropes about crime and criminality, that’s where it has political impact.

And the fallout, we can see: One of the most depressing and staggering polls that I’ve seen recently is that overall support for immigration, which used to be a majority of Americans, including independents and moderate voters, supported immigration to this country. They fundamentally believed immigration is a good thing for our communities, our families, our economy. Now that support has dipped, for the first time, to below 50%. And so there’s a real fallout in terms of support for policy that’s actually smart and sensible.

Christian Science Monitor (9/19/24)

And then we see it in very real ways in places like Springfield, Ohio, where there has been a lot of legal—I should say, legal—immigration of Haitian migrants to this country, who are fleeing really devastating circumstances in Haiti. We’re watching bomb threats in local schools, immigrant residents of Springfield feeling afraid. In fact, all residents of Springfield feeling afraid, because suddenly the city, that nobody had heard of until September 10 and the presidential debate, is literally in the Klieg lights, and everyday Americans and a lot of politicians are talking about Springfield. So much so that even the Republican governor of Ohio said, “Stop the fearmongering, stop the misinformation. We are just fine. What Springfield needs is our support and help, and not fearmongering and rhetoric about us.”

JJ: I think that media give inadequate attention to the carryover or bleed-through effects. It’s not to say that people who fall for anti-immigrant misinformation, they’re not asking folks before they harass them, “To be clear, you’re Haitian, right? You’re not Dominican. I don’t want to get my hatred wrong.” It’s treated as though these are targeted attacks, and as though they end when one particular incident is resolved, or when the cameras go away. But, of course, the impact on communities goes on and on.

IR: Yeah.

JJ: Changing facts on the ground with law, with policy, with institutional culture can save and can change lives. It does also work to shift the dialogue about what’s possible, about what life looks like after you change that law, for example. What are some of the legal or policy changes that you think could be important right now, that could shift the ground on immigration and asylum?

Washington Monthly (5/21/24)

IR: One of the things that we have seen there’s widespread support for, and that can be done, is just: when there are new immigrants to our cities, to our communities, we make sure that they have the ability to work. Work, employment, is life-changing for everybody, including US citizens and other members of the community, who benefit from more labor. Right now, in many parts of this country, we have more jobs than we have people to fill them, and immigration is a necessary thing; it’s why economists across the country, across the political spectrum, say we actually need immigration. We can’t build a wall and mass-deport people and shut down the borders, because we literally will have an economic crisis in this country. So employment is a really basic thing we can do.

Another thing is, sometimes people hear, folks who are coming to our cities, especially people who are bused up from Texas and other border states, Florida—people resent housing and services and making sure basic needs are met. Well, in fact, that is cheaper than the alternative. And it is good for all of us.

And it’s not for forever: If you help somebody get on their feet with some temporary housing for three to six months, they have a work permit in hand, they have a job, they will not need to be dependent on government services and resources. It is actually better for us to set people up for a small period of time for future success.

And we’ve watched some cities do that really well. For example, Boston did not engage in the kind of fear-mongering about “all these newly arrived migrants, it’s going to be the end of the city, it’s going to destroy us,” which is what we heard from a certain elected mayor in New York City. That wasn’t the approach that Boston took. And, in fact, they’ve had a lot of newly arrived migrants as well, and they’ve managed it. And you’ll see they have really good outcomes, and there’s generally a sense of positivity towards new arrivals there in a way that there simply isn’t in New York City.

Insha Rahman: “There’s some really clear policy things we can do for folks who have just come here, like work permits, like making sure there is transitional housing and support and services.”

And so, again, there’s some really clear policy things we can do for folks who have just come here, like work permits, like making sure there is transitional housing and support and services. All of that is a better investment in our communities and our economy than the alternative.

And then we see there’s always been and always will be widespread support for a path to citizenship and legalization for folks who have been here, who are part of the fabric of our communities. And so those are some of the things we could do literally immediately, but at the local level, in terms of cities and states.

And then what we need to see Congress do—and 10 years ago there was, in fact, bipartisan support for more paths to citizenship. And we need to bring the Overton window and shift it back to there, because that’s actually good for all of us.

And one other thing I’ll just mention as a policy point is, even under the law as it is—and I would say we need to update the immigration laws so that there’s more legal paths to citizenship for folks. But even with the laws that we have, making sure people have lawyers, they have some basic due process before they’re facing deportation, means many more people access the asylum laws, other forms of relief under current immigration law, which means it keeps people and families together, it keeps people in jobs.

My organization, the Vera Institute of Justice, we run a national program where we’re helping folks who are facing deportation have access to counsel, and literally people are 10 times more likely to win their case and be able to stay in the country, stay with their families, be in their jobs and in their communities, than if they have to go through deportation proceedings without a lawyer. And there’s no right to a lawyer in those proceedings. And that’s a really big problem for keeping families and communities together.

JJ: Just finally, what would you be looking for in a healthy public conversation about the changes we need to get from where we’re at to where we could be, and maybe who would be in that conversation that isn’t being heard from so much now?

IR: Too often, the conversation about immigration is dominated by politicians who are looking to score cheap political points. And if you listen to their rhetoric, they don’t have a single solution. Mass deportation is not a solution. Building a wall is not a solution.

New York Times (9/30/24)

And you know who actually has, and maybe they’re unlikely players in this, but folks who actually have very clear solutions for how we have a real and thoughtful conversation about immigration, that’s business owners and chambers of commerce. And, again, I made the point earlier that economists are like, “If we just shut down immigration, if we deport everybody, our economy will collapse.” Nobody understands that better than businesses and business owners, and they’re actually a really important voice in this conversation that often gets overlooked.

Just to go back to Springfield, Ohio, that we talked about, you actually saw the local chamber of commerce, and a number of different business owners, go out and speak publicly on the record, on the nighttime news and the newspaper and city council hearings, to say, “We need our immigrant workers and family members and community members, because they’re a vital part of our economy.”

So I actually think that’s a missing voice in this conversation that could help to bring the poles together, because the right likes business. I think the left can live with business, if business is coming at the issues in the right way. And I think there’s an opportunity to really actually bring people together, and have a more reasoned, thoughtful conversation about what the path forward is.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, and the director of Vera Action. Find their work online at Vera.org. Thank you so much, Insha Rahman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

IR: Thanks for having me, Janine.

What are the limits of free speech on a college campus? The New York Times has deployed one of its highest-ranking soldiers in the culture war against liberalism to remind us that the speech of white supremacists must be defended, but criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian human rights are going too far.

Times columnist John McWhorter, who teaches at Columbia University, is a part of the paper’s growing chorus of elite, pearl-clutching commentators (e.g., 6/7/18, 11/9/21, 3/18/23, 2/24/24) who blame society’s ills on an amorphous enemy of tyrannical “wokeness,” which McWhorter (3/21/23) presents as “an anti-Enlightenment program.” The Times embraces the idea, widespread in corporate media (Atlantic, 1/27/21; Newsweek, 7/25/23), that today’s social justice warriors are the true enemies of free speech.

John McWhorter (New York Times, 4/23/24): “Why do so many people think that weeklong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?”

McWhorter found a limit to free speech and academic freedom earlier this year. He wrote (New York Times, 4/23/24) that he decided not to subject his students to an exercise where they would listen to the sounds around them, because they would be forced to listen to pro-Palestine protesters’ “infuriated chanting.” He said:

Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans…. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus…. Why do so many people think that weeklong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?….

The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

He’s clearly trying to portray leftist protesters as hypocritical and applying double standards: They readily seek to shut down racist speech but find anti-Israel speech “permissible.”

Yet McWhorter himself, so quick to condemn what he says is “a form of abuse” of Jewish students through the “relentless assault” of protesters’ Israel-critical speech—and with no words of reproach for the school president’s decision to “crack down” on the protests and their freedom of expression—applies a very different standard when the campus speech in question is racist, sexist or homophobic.

For McWhorter (New York Times, 10/3/24), “upholding the ideals of free speech” requires not punishing a professor who publicly insults her Black students.

In sharp contrast to his denunciation of pro-Palestine protesters’ speech, McWhorter (New York Times, 10/3/24) offered a full-throated defense of Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who has been sanctioned by the school for “flagrant unprofessional conduct,” including “a history of making sweeping, blithe and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and immigration status,” as well as “breaching grade privacy requirements” (Wall Street Journal, 9/24/24).

A faculty panel unanimously recommended Wax be suspended for a year at half salary, publicly reprimanded and stripped of her named chair; Wax has appealed the recommendation and is still teaching.

Wax has said that the US is “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration” (CNN, 9/25/24). The Daily Pennsylvanian (8/10/17) wrote that, in an interview, Wax “said Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior”: “I don’t shrink from the word ‘superior’…. Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”

Wax made public comments about Black students’ grades that were both a violation of confidentiality and, according to the Penn law school dean, false (Vox, 2/16/23):

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.

The law professor has repeatedly invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to deliver guest lectures in her class, including this semester, after the faculty panel’s recommendation. She will be a featured speaker at a conference sponsored by Taylor’s white supremacist journal American Renaissance (Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/10/24)—where, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “racist ‘intellectuals’ rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.”

Given McWhorter’s previously stated belief that Jewish students shouldn’t have to listen to speech like “from the river to the sea,” one might expect that he would similarly condemn Wax’s subjection of her Black and brown students to eugenicist, white supremacist speech.

Instead, McWhorter uses the Wax affair to defend the right of free speech, a role he didn’t take on when his own school clamped down on anti-genocide protests (Columbia Spectator, 4/4/24). Her views might be “Outrageous, Demeaning, Dangerous,” his headline declared, but “She Shouldn’t Be Punished” for them.

“We regard this to be a case not of free speech, which is broadly protected by University policy…but rather of flagrant unprofessional conduct by a faculty member,” a U Penn faculty panel insisted (Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/10/24).

McWhorter, as a part of the anti-woke media movement to frame liberalism as the opponent of openness, accepts Wax as a victim of the cancel mob: “Her suspension,” he said, “is a kind of ritual act, an unconvincing performance of moral purity.”

He wrote: “Upholding the ideals of free speech means living with the discomfort—or even anger and injury—that offensive ideas can cause.”

The contrast with his earlier column is striking. If a Black or brown student is subjected to white supremacist speech, by his account, that student’s “discomfort—or even anger and injury” is their problem, and of less importance than protecting free speech. But if a white student is subjected to anti-Zionist speech, McWhorter considers it a “form of abuse” that they should not be expected to simply “be able to tolerate.”

Penn Provost John L. Jackson, Jr.’s statement on the matter makes clear that Wax isn’t being sanctioned for merely breaking liberal conventions of decorum. A faculty review board found that Wax “engaged in ‘flagrant unprofessional conduct’ that breached [her] responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal opportunity to all students to learn” from her (University of Pennsylvania Almanac, 9/24/24). The decision resulting from the investigation, to which the statement links, also says that the inquiry board decided against recommending a much tougher punishment, “namely, termination from her faculty position.”

McWhorter deems the disciplinary action “egregious,” yet he voiced no similar complaints about disciplinary actions taken by Columbia and other schools against pro-Palestine protesters. He was also quick to call for the ouster of Harvard President Claudine Gay, a Black scholar who had been hounded by right-wing congressmembers over allowing criticism of Israel on her campus (NPR, 12/12/23; FAIR.org, 12/12/23) before being pushed out in a plagiarism scandal. McWhorter (New York Times, 12/21/23) admitted that the school’s plagiarism “policy may not apply to the university’s president,” but said the vibes of the matter trumped procedure, saying “Gay would be denigrating the values of ‘veritas’ that she and Harvard aspire to uphold” if she stayed.

Columbia University’s suspension of the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters (Columbia Spectator, 11/29/23) apparently did not contradict “the ideal of free speech,” in McWhorter’s view, because the university had not “categorically prohibited criticism of Israel.”

McWhorter recognized the parallels between the Wax affair and the pro-Palestine protests, but insinuated the usual, and false, media equation between pro-Palestine and anti-Black speech that paints anti-Zionism as antisemitism (FAIR.org, 12/15/23). He wrote that the protests are another example in which universities have struggled with “identifying the line between legitimate protest and threats or harassment”:

Student clubs have been suspended, demonstrations have been pushed off campus and at least one professor has been fired for sharing anti-Israel sentiments. But no university has categorically prohibited criticism of Israel. That’s because, as uncomfortable as the debate about Israel can be, and as close to home as it hits for many students, letting them encounter ideas that differ from their own is an important part of their education that prepares them to take their place in a democracy.

The idea that racism is so uniquely toxic that it should be an exception to the ideal of free speech is not self-evident. It is specific to this moment, and will probably seem unwise and arbitrary to future chroniclers. Especially for universities, if exposing people to potential discomfort is permissible when it comes to geopolitics, then it must also be permissible when it comes to race.

McWhorter seems to be drawing a line between acceptable and unacceptable restrictions on speech: Suspending student clubs, “pushing” demonstrations off campus (with the help of police in riot gear) and firing professors for anti-Israel sentiments are apparently fine by McWhorter, whereas “categorical” prohibitions on anti-Israel speech would cross the line.

It’s remarkable that McWhorter doesn’t see that firing a professor over anti-Israel views is quite obviously a much harsher punishment than Wax faces—or that suspending a professor for a year for specific actions that harmed students is not a categorical prohibition on racist speech.

Natasha Lennard (Intercept, 5/16/24): “Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, academics…have been fired, suspended or removed from the classroom for pro-Palestine, anti-Israel speech.”

What’s more, while he claims there has been no blanket ban on pro-Palestine thought, there have been so many official actions against faculty and students that we now see an enormous chilling effect on speech.

McWhorter did link to the Intercept story (9/26/24) on the firing of a tenured professor at Muhlenberg College for having

shared, on her personal Instagram account…a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.

But there’s much more. New York University added “Zionist” to a list of “examples of speech that could violate the university’s Non-Discrimination and Anti-Harassment policies” (Washington Square News, 8/26/24), which has FAIR wondering what impact this might have on professors who teach Middle Eastern history.

Steven Thrasher, an acclaimed journalist who has commented here at FAIR, teaches social justice reporting at Northwestern University, where he may lose employment because of his activism against the genocide in Gaza. Democracy Now! (9/5/24) reported that the university “filed charges against Thrasher for obstructing police that were later dropped.” However, “students returning to Northwestern for the fall term will not see him in their classrooms, because he has been suspended as Northwestern says he is under investigation.”

Hyperallergic (9/20/24) reported that at Barnard College, the women’s college associated with Columbia, the administration sent

behavioral directives for Barnard employees, specifying that “messaging…supporting a geopolitical viewpoint or perspective while denigrating or remaining silent about an opposing geopolitical viewpoint or perspective” and posting political signs on office doors would go against the college’s community values.

Telling sociologists, historians, political scientists and anthropologists to refrain from “supporting a geopolitical viewpoint” is like telling a quarterback not to pass the football. Once again, this is the kind of directive that undoes the kind of open discourse McWhorter says he supports.

Radhika Sainath (Inside Higher Ed, 9/16/24): “Trying to appease pro-Israel forces by preventing protests against Israel’s brutal war in Gaza…colleges are rewriting policies that will have dire consequences on university life for years to come.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to campus repression of anti-genocide activists—many of whom are Jewish, despite McWhorter’s attempt to treat criticism of Israel as a form of anti-Jewish bigotry. Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, wrote about the widespread erosion of freedom on campuses this year at Inside Higher Ed (9/16/24):

Indeed, my office, Palestine Legal, is receiving a surge of reports of students being censored and punished as they return to school, often under the pretext that support for Palestinian rights (or wearing Palestinian keffiyehs, or scarves) violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by creating a hostile environment for Jews, even though Jewish students are at the center of many of the protests and wear Palestinian scarves. Often, no reason is given.

On one campus, students were slapped with conduct violations for writing an op-ed discussing a Gaza encampment in positive ways. Potlucks for Palestine have been canceled. Professors who reference Gaza or Palestine in their courses are told those courses are not fit for the curriculum, or having their syllabi scrutinized—or turned over to Congress in a manner reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Adjuncts have been fired. Tenure-track professors suspended. Tenured professors investigated.

If universities banned students from wearing Tibetan clothes or canceled “momo night” because these things might offend Chinese students, we could bet good money that McWhorter and the rest of the anti-woke pack would be up in arms, and rightfully so.

But McWhorter is only fighting to protect conservatives, which are classified as political victims in liberal academic society. We have come to expect such hypocrisy from the New York Times and other media’s anti-woke moral panic (FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 7/23/21, 11/17/21, 3/25/22). But it’s remarkable that McWhorter feels comfortable being so contradictory and misleading in disingenuous pursuit of “free speech.”

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This week on CounterSpin: For many people and for media, the idea of “racial discrimination in housing” invokes an image of individual landlords refusing to rent or sell homes to Black and brown people. But that understanding is so incomplete as to be harmful. A new book doesn’t just illuminate the thicket of effects of systemic racism as it affects where people live; it reframes the understanding of the role of housing—connecting housing injustice with health inequities and wealth disparities, as well as lifting up work that connects those “mutually constitutive” elements of what the author calls an “unjust, destructive and even deadly racial order.”

George Lipsitz is research professor emeritus of Black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He’s author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and How Racism Takes Place, among other titles. He joins us to talk about his new book: The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the port strike.