Feed aggregator

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

  Rolling Stone (6/10/24)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JN: Thanks for having me on.

Chicago Sun-Times (4/8/24)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kennedy Smith: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ILSR’s report on dollar store impacts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JJ: Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KS: Thank you so much, Janine.

One hundred years ago this month, I was reminded by Portside’s “This Week in People’s History” feature (5/29/23), a constitutional amendment passed both houses of Congress, with large majorities, and went to the states for ratification. It remains a proposal, not a law, to this day, because the necessary three-quarters of states didn’t accept it.

The proposal is the Child Labor Amendment, giving Congress authority to regulate “labor of persons under 18 years of age.”

Efforts to protect children from dangerous work continued anyway, of course, and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act included prohibitions on children under 14 working in most occupations. Separate rules have been crafted for agricultural jobs (which is its own story).

Notre Dame professor David Campbell (Washington Post, 4/23/23):  Because “a bill [that] will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions…sounds wildly unpopular…you have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights.”

In the last four years, state legislatures in at least 28 states have taken up proposals to roll back child labor protections; 12 states have passed such laws.

In April 2023, the Washington Post (4/23/23) reported on the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based think tank with a lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, that’s crucially behind these state-level moves to undermine rules to keep children from working long hours in dangerous conditions. The Iowa state senate had just approved an FGA-maneuvered bill letting children as young as 14 work night shifts.

Post reporters Jacob Bogage and María Luisa Paúl explained how the group has worked systematically, if stealthily, to push state policy to the right on things like restricting access to anti-poverty programs and Medicaid expansion.

Despite what is, on examination, a broad deregulatory agenda, the FGA, with some 115 lobbyists in 22 states, presents child worker bills as part of a cultural debate about “parental rights.” They aim to remove “the permission slip that inserts government in between parents and their teenager’s desire to work,” a representative said. One bill, in Georgia, would prohibit the state government from requiring a minor to obtain a work permit.

Besides a warning to legislators, such a report ought to have been a call to reporters: Beware of “grassroots” efforts that suspiciously mimic the goals and language of this right-wing interest group, with its undeclared intent to use popular concerns to advance private ends.

Steve Benen (MSNBC, 4/19/24): “Republican governance, especially at the state level, is increasingly invested in rolling back child-labor safeguards.”

Over a year later, child labor rules are still in the news: Early June saw a Labor Department lawsuit against Hyundai after a 13-year-old girl was found working a 50- to 60-hour week on an Alabama assembly line (CBS, 5/31/24). It “shocks the conscience,” said one official.

Before that, we had the Louisiana House voting to repeal the law requiring employers to give child workers lunch breaks (MSNBC, 4/19/24). Many of my child employees want to work without lunch breaks, claimed bill sponsor and Republican state representative and smoothie franchise owner Roger Wilder.

But what about the puppetmasters? A rough Nexis test I did found that over the last three months, a search for the term “child labor” in US newspapers gets 740 results. Add the words “Foundation for Government Accountability” and the number drops to 14.

Does every story on child labor need to mention the advocacy group? Of course not. But if you consider the rollback of child labor laws a problem, connected to other problems, then calling groups like them out adds something key to understanding that problem and how to address it.

Featured image: MSNBC depiction (4/19/24) of a child agricultural worker. An estimated 500,000 minors work in the farm sector in the United States, some as young as 12 years old.

Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Matt Gertz about Trump’s guilty verdict for the June 7, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

AP (5/31/24)

Janine Jackson: A Manhattan criminal court found Donald Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records. This ruling is clearly not the be-all, end-all of a legal redressing of Trump’s myriad crimes; he’s already been found liable in a civil trial for sexual abuse and defamation, and he’s facing another three trials for mishandling classified documents, conspiring to unlawfully change the outcome of the 2020 election, and encouraging the violent January 6, 2021, rampage at the US Capitol.

But commentary from much of the news media—where we learn about what’s happening, what it means, and what we might do about it—is platforming the idea that this might be a disputable issue, that has to do with personal feelings about this particular man. You could joke, “Tell me you’re moving the goalposts without telling me you’re moving the goalposts.” But there are real-world stakes here, and the contortions media are going through to make a convicted felon who boasts of his crimes one side of a reasonable debate is telling us something about Trump and his followers, sure, but it’s also telling us something about news media.

Matt Gertz is senior fellow at Media Matters for America; he’s been working on this issue, and he joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Matt Gertz.

Matt Gertz: Thanks so much for having me.

JJ: There seems to be an overarching conversation here, which is that if a legal process convicts someone you like, it must be a political—meaning partisan—action, only aimed at silencing a political opponent. I’m not sure that everyone advancing that idea right now is thinking, really, about the implications, that if you decide the law is just whatever you do or don’t like…. Is murder a crime? What if you like the person who did it, you know?

I want to talk through the specifics and the examples that Media Matters has been putting out, because concrete examples show us that we’re not just giving sweeping characterizations. But I just wanted to ask you, first, for your general response to the effort from some media to say that these crimes aren’t really crimes, it’s really just a political hit job. Are you surprised at all by that response?

Matt Gertz: “A good practice for the press would be to explain to their readers and to their viewers that what is coming from the right is totally false, that they are creating these conspiracy theories and this theory of politicized persecution for their own benefit.”

MG: Not really. I think that what we’ve seen over the last nine years, since Trump’s rise began, is that the mainstream press has a big problem coming out and being forthright about Donald Trump’s actions in cases where the right has rallied around him.

And at this point, what we see when we monitor the right-wing media, when we look at what Republicans are saying, is that they are four-square behind him. They are not only denying that he committed the crimes that he was convicted of; they are saying that he is the real victim here, that this is a politicized prosecution, and that now the only recourse is for Republicans to start throwing their own political opponents in jail.

Given the volume and the inflammatory nature of these claims that are coming from the right, I think a good practice for the press would be to explain to their readers and to their viewers that what is coming from the right is totally false, that they are creating these conspiracy theories and this theory of politicized persecution for their own benefit. But instead, what we tend to see is a lot of he-said, she-said coverage, in which there is a certain amount of credence being given to these claims, and that just lets them infest the public discourse in a way that is both unhelpful and, I think, in the longer term dangerous.

JJ: Let’s talk about a couple of the particular counter-narratives that we’re seeing now from right-wing media, to address them. One of them is that the charges against Trump are unprecedented, “nothing like this has ever happened before”; that’s one of the popular ideas, along with the idea that the jury and the judge are somehow tainted in some way. What are you seeing there?

MG: What’s unprecedented, obviously, is that a former president has been repeatedly charged with and, in this case, convicted of crimes. It’s also unprecedented for so many of a former president’s closest associates to be charged with and convicted of crimes, but that is also the case here.

What the right has needed to do, to deal with the fact that often Republican prosecutors and Republican investigators are finding all of this Republican criminality, is they’ve created this vast conspiracy theory, this idea of a “deep-state” plot to get to Donald Trump and everyone associated with him. The reality is much simpler: There are a lot of criminals around Donald Trump because he is an incredibly shady person.

And so what we’ve seen is a full-throttle, round-the-clock effort to try to undermine and delegitimize every aspect of, not only this prosecution, but the two federal probes and the one in Georgia that you alluded to earlier. In this case, that involves attacking not only the New York jury, not only the New York prosecutor, but also the judge, and really every aspect of this case. They leave no stone unturned in their efforts to defend Donald Trump.

CNN (4/7/24)

JJ: I can’t think of a time where someone would say, “Let me tell you what the child of the judge does, and therefore….” It just feels like untested waters that, I guess, I just wish journalists would step up to do more.

MG: I think that’s absolutely right. We really are in uncharted territory; when you see attacks coming in on particular jurors, which we saw early in the trial, and then the excuse-making after the fact that because the trial was in New York City, there was no way Donald Trump could get a fair trial. I mean, you’re really in pretty dangerous territory there.

I will note, by the way, that the claims that Donald Trump could not get a fair trial in New York City came almost immediately after the very same people were bragging about how many people were coming to Donald Trump’s rally in New York, and how he was going to make a real play at winning the state in the 2024 presidential election. You kind of have to pick a lane on that one, but I guess they feel like they can get away with it, because no one will call them on it.

JJ: And hypocrisy is apparently no longer a thing.

I just want to give you a chance to name some names. There are some particular actors and particular outlets that are in this business, and I know that Media Matters does work, not just doing broad, sweeping things, but actually giving examples of particular people, and I think that’s the value. You know, we’re not saying, “The right wing does this.” We’re saying, there are particular instances, and are there any that stand out for you?

New York Times (6/5/24)

MG: Sure. One of them, obviously, I would say Steve Bannon—who is the long-time Trump advisor, and host of the War Room podcast—he spent the days since the verdict making the case for the need for widespread prosecutions of Democrats as a matter of retaliation.

You also see it running the gamut on Fox News, but in particular people like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, are very invested in defending Trump on his conviction specifically.

And then you think about someone like Ben Shapiro—the Daily Wire co-founder—who was famously opposed to Donald Trump when he first ran for president back in 2016, but now, due to the incentives of the right-wing press, he’s come around, and said that the charges against Trump were spurious, and entirely made up so that the media and Joe Biden could claim that he’s a convicted felon, that this is all in evidence of incipient tyranny.

Really just a wild level of rhetoric going on through every aspect of the right, as they try to get around the fact that they’re supporting someone who has been convicted of felony charges.

JJ: Just to pivot for a second, and acknowledge the painful hilarity of the idea, and we kind of talked about it, but the idea that an appeal by Trump would be passed to the New York state’s appellate division, a branch of the New York Supreme Court—and “oh my God, they’re all Black women; obviously he won’t get a fair shake.”

Which, first of all, you’re telling on yourself with that, right? Like, obviously Black people and women would hate him because, you know, he’s just like Jesus Christ, who was famously hated by Black people and women.

But also, like so much that we’re seeing on our screens, it’s just not accurate. The women of color on the meme that people are looking at are five of 21 judges who could be selected to sit for the case. In other words, and maybe we’ve said it, but going bold on disinformation is part of the landscape now.

CNN (5/14/24)

MG: Absolutely, and because of the bifurcation of the news landscape, because you have Republicans bubbled off within their own media sphere, the contrary information doesn’t enter the bubble. They don’t get exposed to the facts or the contradictions that are inherent in what’s going on.

There’s been this big push that I mentioned to declare the Justice Department somehow politicized by Joe Biden, and that is happening at the same time when Joe Biden’s own son is on trial in a federal court for gun crimes. This is an investigation that was launched during the Trump administration, under a Republican attorney general and a Republican FBI director, and is currently carried out by a Trump appointee who Joe Biden kept on.

There’s just not a similar groundswell of people on the left or in the mainstream press who are desperately trying to defend every aspect of Hunter Biden’s life, and try to invalidate the entire judicial system for political gain, the way you see happening literally simultaneously regarding the Trump conviction.

JJ: My complaint about corporate news media right now is that I feel like they are just narrating the nightmare, and they don’t acknowledge how insufficient that is right now, in a society with democratic aspirations, as I say, that relies on public information to make choices. And it’s not about how I feel about a political person, it’s what I’m looking for from a press, and I just wonder, what do you think—you don’t need to name names, but what do you think responsible journalism would look like right now? We’ve said it’s contested waters, it’s difficult. It is a hard time, but what would be the role for independent, responsible journalism right now?

AP (8/29/23)

MG: I think it would be keeping the focus as much as possible on the stakes over the next several months. We are looking at an election where we have, on the one hand, a fairly normal set of politicians, and on the other hand, you have people calling for radical and dangerous changes at every turn. And I think giving people the full explanation, the implication of Trump’s worldview and the policy changes likely to happen if he becomes president, and has, as we might expect, much more leeway within his own party than he had during his last term, is crucial. I don’t think the American public is getting that sort of information about what the election might mean for themselves, and for the future of the country.

JJ: We’re not talking about Trump versus Biden. We’re talking about what journalists could do to lay clear what the information is, what’s at stake, what Trump has said he will do. You don’t have to be politically partisan to ask more of reporters.

MG: That’s absolutely right.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Matt Gertz; he’s a senior fellow at Media Matters for America. They’re online at www.MediaMatters.org. Matt Gertz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MG: Thank you for having me.

Rolling Stone (6/10/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote dozens of pages justifying his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, stating the Constitution does not confer the right to determine whether or when to give birth. None of those pages mention his intention to make the United States “a place of godliness,” or his belief that there can be no compromise on such concerns, because “one side or the other is going to win.” Yet those are thoughts Alito freely expressed with a woman he thought was just a stranger at a public event. So: Will elite news media now suggest we just go back to considering the Supreme Court a neutral body, deserving of life terms because they’re above the fray of politics? How long until we see news media take on this pretend naivete, and how much it’s costing us? Jim Naureckas is editor of FAIR.org and the newsletter Extra!. We talk to him about that.

Institute for Local Self-Reliance (2/28/24)

Also on the show: The news that “the economy” is doing great on paper doesn’t square with the tone-deaf messaging from food companies about mysteriously stubborn high prices: Kellogg’s says, sure, cereal’s weirdly expensive, so why not eat it for dinner! Chipotle’s head honcho says you are not, in fact, getting a smaller portion for the same price—but, you know, if you are, just nod your head a certain way. None of this indicates a media universe that takes seriously the widespread struggle to meet basic needs. Which may explain the failure to find the story in the upsurge in dollar stores, supposedly filling a void for low-income people, but actually just another avenue for ripping them off. We talk about that with Kennedy Smith from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Nicholas Kristof is that guy at the party who reminds you that you haven’t really lived. While you maintain a regular, nine-to-five existence, driving from Point A to Point B, the world has been Kristof’s oyster. With a fully stamped passport, the New York Times columnist can embarrass everyone with his tales from Africa and Asia, marking himself as a true global citizen who yearns for adventure.

Worse, he mobilizes exotic datelines as trump cards to back up his neoliberalism disguised as forward-thinking progressivism: Teachers unions are bad for kids (9/12/12), sweatshops are good for workers (1/14/09) and US imperialism can be a positive force (2/1/02). You, the provincial rube, simply can’t rebut him. “Oh, have you been to Cambodia? No? Well I have.”

Here at FAIR (11/4/21), we were relieved when he announced his resignation from the Times to run for governor of Oregon, taking his vacuous moralism and smug place-dropping to the campaign trail. Upon his disqualification from the election (OPB, 2/18/22), he returned to his coveted perch like he never left at all.

Nicholas Kristof (New York Times, 6/8/24) makes the liberal case for immigration restriction: “It’s better that the ladder be raised in an orderly way by reasonable people.”

Recently, he has jumped in (6/8/24) to defend President Joe Biden’s reactionary move to shut down the border and end asylum on a rolling basis.

The Biden order “would bar migrants from being granted asylum when US officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed” (AP, 6/5/24), a move many immigration advocates have branded as a capitulation to the xenophobic right (Reason, 6/4/24; Al Jazeera, 6/6/24) in his tough reelection campaign against former President Donald Trump (CBS, 6/9/24).

Conservative media weren’t buying it, however. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/4/24) said that the move “might help reduce the flow somewhat if they are strictly enforced, and at least he’s admitting the problem,” but worried that migrants “could still seek asylum at ports of entry using the CBP One mobile app, which would be excluded from the daily triggers.” The National Review (6/5/24) called it “too little, too late” for conservatives. The New York Post editorial board (6/9/24) said the president’s “BS border move has already failed.”

Kristof’s column, by contrast, serves as liberal media support for a policy that is cruel, hypocritical and a further indication that Biden’s only election tactic is to outflank Trump from the right. It is important to see how Kristof, and the Times, wield cosmopolitan journalistic instincts to defend closed borders, xenophobia and outright misinformation that serves the right.

Kristof saying that the US has “lax immigration policies” with a “loophole that allowed people to stay indefinitely” is a cruel misrepresentation of Biden’s border policy (LA Times, 2/24/23).

To start off, Kristof said the current code is flawed because of “a loophole that allowed people to claim asylum and stay indefinitely whether or not they warranted it.” This is a talking point made by anti-immigrant and right-wing groups, and claiming that this is a “loophole” implies that there is a flaw in the system that allows criminals to wiggle out of the law.

In fact, it is legal to come to the country to seek asylum. And the system is far less rosy for refugees than anti-immigrant activists—and now Kristof—portray it. Asylum-seeking families are often separated (LA Times, 2/24/23). And while seeking asylum is a guaranteed right under US and international law, the federal government has “severely restricted access to asylum at the border since 2016” according to the International Rescue Committee (7/1/22). The group explained:

A policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) or “Remain in Mexico” forced certain asylum seekers to wait out their US immigration court cases in Mexico with little or no access to legal counsel. Although a federal court blocked the Biden administration’s attempts to end this program, the Supreme Court later ruled in the administration’s favor. For over three years, MPP impacted more than 75,000 asylum seekers, requiring them to wait out their US court hearings in Mexico—mostly in northern border towns. There they faced the often impossible expectations to gather evidence and prepare for a trial conducted in English while struggling to keep their families safe.

Kristof acknowledged that he, as a white man, is an American because his Eastern European father was allowed into the country as a refugee in 1952. But he went on to say that the US today can’t “swing the doors open,” because “we’re not going to welcome all 114 million people around the world who have been forcibly displaced”—as if that’s the question the US faces, rather than the hundreds of thousands of people who actually seek asylum in the US each year. (Of course, Washington could help reduce the global refugee crisis by ending support for the wars, insurgencies and sanctions that to a great extent drive it.)

Wharton School professor Zeke Hernandez (Marketplace, 12/12/23): “When immigrants arrive, there are not just more workers that are competing with native workers, but there are more people who demand housing, entertainment, food, education. And so you need to hire more people to satisfy that bigger demand.”

Admitting that immigration has positive economic impact for the United States, Kristof went for the old line that these newcomers threaten US workers, and that “poor Americans can find themselves hurt by immigrant competition that puts downward pressure on their wages.” Exhibit A is an unnamed neighbor who was forced out of good working-class employment over the decades: “He was hurt by many factors—the decline of unions, globalization and the impact of technology,” Kristof said, but added that “he was also outcompeted by immigrants with a well-earned reputation for hard work.”

First, it is employers, not workers, who have the power to drive down wages. If there is a problem with immigrants being paid less, that’s an issue of exploitation. If Kristof thought about this a little bit longer, he’d realize he’s making an argument for equality among workers, not for dividing them against each other.

But this assumption that immigration depresses wages is itself dubious. The National Bureau of Economic Research (4/24) said:

We calculate that immigration, thanks to native/immigrant complementarity and college skill content of immigrants, had a positive and significant effect between +1.7 to +2.6% on wages of less-educated native workers, over the period 2000–2019, and no significant wage effect on college-educated natives. We also calculate a positive employment rate effect for most native workers.

Zeke Hernandez, professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, produced similar findings, noting that immigration causes the economies around these newcomer communities to grow (Marketplace, 12/12/23). And the libertarian Cato Institute (7/26/16) showed that unemployment is lower when immigration is higher.

Axios (3/13/24): “The immigration increase is a key part of the labor supply surge that helped bring down price pressures last year even amid the economy’s robust growth.”

Kristof also ignored that the current unemployment rate (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 6/7/24) is low at 4% and that, with high demand for labor, inflation-adjusted wages have risen 4.1% over the past year (AP, 6/7/24). Axios (3/13/24) reported that a

surge in immigration last year helps explain the economy’s striking resilience—and if sustained, could allow the job market to keep booming without stoking inflation in the years ahead.

Given that the corporate media have been constantly saying the country is facing a “border crisis,” these facts are hard to square with the notion that immigrants depress native-born workers’ wages.

Kristof went on to say that “native-born Americans may not be willing to toil in the fields or on a construction site for $12 an hour, but perhaps would be for $25 an hour.” Once again, if he really felt this way, then he’d be advocating for general wage hikes—for example, raising the federal minimum wage, which hasn’t gone up since 2009—as labor advocates demand, instead of calling for closed borders. But Kristof isn’t on the Times opinion page to advance labor’s interests.

And that’s when Kristof invokes a sort of liberal MAGAism, saying that while American workers are “self-medicating and dying from drugs, alcohol and suicide, shouldn’t we be careful about inflicting even more pain on them through immigration policy?” Immigrants—living, breathing people—are associated with non-living toxins, evoking the Trumpian smear that immigrants are disease-carrying vermin (Guardian, 12/16/23).

Victoria Sanford (BillMoyers.com, 11/17/17): “Then as now, the US is the engine generating migration through bad foreign policy decisions.”

And it still gets worse. Kristof said:

I’ve also wondered about the incentives we inadvertently create. In Guatemalan villages, I’ve seen families prepared to send children on the perilous journey to the United States, and I fear that lax immigration policies encourage people to risk their lives and their children’s lives on the journey.

I have not been to all the places Kristof has, but I’ve been to a few of them, including Guatemala. People leave these places for the US, not because it is so easy, but in spite of the fact that it is so difficult. They come because they are left with no choice but to leave violence, war and poverty behind.

When a man in Lebanon asked that I take him back with me to the US, he was jokingly invoking the reality that the immigration process is impossible without help. Nor did he think there were so many “incentives” beyond the fact that America’s promise of opportunity was an improvement over his broken country.

And it is curious that Kristof mentions Guatemala specifically. Had he read his own newspaper before writing this piece, he might have seen anthropologist Victoria Sanford (New York Times, 11/9/18; BillMoyers.com, 11/17/17) argue that Central Americans are fleeing the horrific crime that has manifested as a result of Washington’s Cold War interventions and current policies of militarism. Latin American studies professor Elizabeth Oglesby (Vice, 6/28/18) made a similar connection . That’s quite a bit of context to leave out.

Arun Gupta (Santita Jackson Show, 6/6/24): ““Biden is feeding into this white nationalism and saying that the solution is this Fortress America.”

I was recently on the Santita Jackson Show (KTNF, 6/6/24) to discuss the recent presidential election in Mexico (FAIR.org, 6/4/24). Joining us was independent journalist Arun Gupta, who has reported from the US/Mexico border for the Nation (4/21/20). He said that the violence of these lawless zones at the border, with migrants waiting to come into the US, will only become more chaotic and dangerous with this new policy.

“Biden is feeding into this white nationalism and saying that the solution is this Fortress America to protect us from these savage brown hordes,” Gupta said. Tens of thousands of migrants have been killed trying to get into the US, he added, and these refugee camps filling up along the border, where narco crime and corrupt police will take more control, will “become death camps.”

Kristof has spent his career telling American readers to care about wars and humanitarian crises abroad (New York Times, 2/6/10, 3/9/11, 6/16/14, 9/4/15, 5/15/24). Yet here he is, utterly indifferent to creating a humanitarian catastrophe right at his own country’s door, seemingly in order to run positive spin for an incumbent president who is eager to rise a few points in the polls.

In fact, Kristof ends with almost a parody of liberalism:

Are we, the people of an immigrant nation, pulling up the ladder after we have boarded? Yes, to some degree. But the reality is that we can’t absorb everyone who wants in, and it’s better that the ladder be raised in an orderly way by reasonable people.

In other words, when a Trumpian policy is practiced by a Democratic administration, it is somehow less horrendous. And Kristof fully admits, “as the son of a refugee,” he is selfishly cutting off people much like his father—except from the Global South, not from Eastern Europe.

And this sums up a very central problem with Kristof. For someone who uses globetrotting as his journalistic trademark, he advances a racist idea that the ability to travel and relocate are reserved for people like him—men of the Global North intellectual class and not the wretched of the earth beneath him.

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

Venezuelans will head to the polls on July 28 to choose their president for the 2025–30 term. Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro faces nine challengers as he runs for a third term.

Over the past 25 years of US-sponsored coups and economic sanctions, Western corporate media have always proven a reliable source of regime-change propaganda to back Washington’s policies (FAIR.org, 12/17/18, 1/25/19, 8/15/19, 4/15/20, 5/11/20, 1/11/23). Coverage builds to a frenzy around elections, whether driven by a (misguided) hope that US surrogates will win, or by a desire to delegitimize anticipated Chavista victories.

With two months to go, Western outlets are busy crafting familiar narratives, and leading the charge is the New York Times. Not busy enough with its genocide-endorsing coverage of Gaza, the paper of record was keen to back yet another key US foreign policy interest. In a flurry of recent articles, the Times laid down plenty of bias, distortions and outright lies.

The New York Times (5/6/24) sometimes seemed to think Venezuela’s president was named “Authoritarian.”

In less than one week, the New York Times published three articles about the upcoming Venezuelan election, all of which referred to Maduro as “authoritarian” in the headline, rather than by name, so readers immediately take note of the “bad guy”:

• “Meet the Candidate Challenging Venezuela’s Authoritarian President” (5/6/24)
• “Reality Show Contestants Compete for an Authoritarian’s Campaign Jingle” (5/9/24)
• “Can Elections Force Venezuela’s Authoritarian Leader From Power?” (5/11/24)

The Times’ Julie Turkewitz opened the third piece by claiming that Venezuelans are voting “for the first time in more than a decade…in a presidential election with an opposition candidate who has a fighting—if slim and improbable—chance at winning.”

This framing reinforces the common trope that Maduro’s May 2018 victory was “a sham” (New York Times, 5/11/24; Reuters, 5/17/24), “rigged” (New York Times, 5/6/24), “neither free nor fair” (BBC, 3/6/24) or “widely considered fraudulent” (France24, 3/12/24).

Most outlets have never bothered to back up the claims, but Turkewitz argued it was due to the opposition’s “most popular figures” being barred from running. What she did not mention was that the highest-profile of these figures, far-right politician Leopoldo López, had been convicted of trying to violently overthrow the elected government (Venezuelanalysis, 6/13/17, 2/16/15). The other candidate the Times was presumably referring to, Henrique Capriles—who lost elections in 2012 and 2013—was banned for administrative malpractice while holding public office (Venezuelanalysis, 4/11/17).

The hardline opposition, in coordination with Washington, was wedded to election boycotts and insurrection efforts. The Trump administration reportedly went so far as to threaten to sanction opposition frontrunner Henri Falcón if he did not boycott the election. Juan Guaidó, tapped a few months later to lead a self-proclaimed, US-backed “interim government,” was perfectly free to have run for president in 2018.

The Miami Herald (5/6/24) counts chickens that are far from hatching.

Fast forward six years, and the New York Times (5/11/24, 5/16/24) and other establishment outlets (Miami Herald, 5/6/24; Bloomberg, 5/17/24) seem excited by the hardline opposition’s electoral prospects, telling readers that candidate Edmundo González is leading in the polls, but that the Venezuelan government will not accept the results. In fact, the track record of the past 25 years is that Chavismo has always conceded in the contests it has lost, whereas the opposition and its media backers, when they are defeated at the polls, inevitably cry fraud, to the tune of zero evidence (FAIR.org, 1/27/21, 12/3/21, 11/20/20, 5/23/18).

Pundits are basing their current optimism for their candidate on a historically biased and unreliable polling industry, ignoring polls that predict a similarly lopsided victory for Maduro.

The New York Times (5/11/24) also made reference to the “enormous” turnout in the opposition’s October primaries, suggesting that this presaged a large anti-Maduro vote in the general election. Put aside the fact that the primary figures were shrouded in doubt, and that the organizing commission never released detailed results; the turnout claimed by the opposition was 2.3 million people, in a country with an adult population of 20 million. The governing Socialist Party, by comparison, has 4 million registered members.

Finally, there is also wonderment at the size of opposition rallies (AP, 5/18/24; New York Times, 5/16/24). Not only is crowd measurement a very inexact science, the context is erased by ignoring the constant, massive pro-government mobilizations taking place as well.

It was not Maduro that blocked María Corina Machado from running (Bloomberg, 3/16/24), but Venezuela’s Supreme Court, which upheld her ban on running for office, citing her support for US sanctions, among other disqualifications.

Alongside prematurely cheering an opposition victory, the paper of record has been preparing arguments to dismiss the results should Maduro win. The key one is centered on US favorite María Corina Machado, who is said to be “barred by the government”—or by Maduro himself—from running, a lazily dishonest description common to many corporate outlets (New York Times, 5/11/24, 5/16/24; AP, 5/18/24, 2/28/24; Bloomberg, 3/16/24; Washington Post, 4/17/24).

A far-right zealot and heiress from Venezuela’s elite, Machado has long been a corporate media favorite (New York Times, 11/19/05). She has always been depicted as a champion of democracy despite participating in coup attempts, going on record as endorsing a foreign invasion, and allegedly receiving direct funding from the US.

Machado’s disqualification is the smoking gun used to justify Washington’s reimposition of oil sanctions (more on that below), and to prove that Maduro has not followed through on supposed commitments to hold the “free and fair elections” agreed to with the US-backed opposition in Barbados in October 2023. This is false on two counts.

For starters, many Western sources blatantly lie by stating that the Barbados Agreement allowed Machado to run for president (Washington Post, 4/17/24; New York Times, 4/17/24; Reuters, 4/17/24, 4/12/24; CNN, 1/27/24; BBC, 1/30/24). What the document explicitly says is that anyone could be a candidate, provided that they fulfill the requirements established by Venezuelan law and the constitution to run for office. In Machado’s case, she was already serving a political ban, and there was nothing in the agreement suggesting it would be lifted.

Secondly, the Venezuelan government and opposition delegations from the Barbados accords agreed on a procedure for disqualified candidates to appeal before the Venezuelan Supreme Court (Venezuelanalysis, 12/1/23). Machado—under pressure from the US, it’s suspected—filed her appeal. And an appeal, by definition, can be rejected. The Supreme Court pointed to corrupt actions and the jeopardizing of Venezuelan assets abroad to uphold her exclusion (Venezuelanalysis, 1/27/24).

When the same party controls Congress and the White House in the United States, you won’t find the New York Times (5/11/24) complaining that the president has the legislature, the military and the country’s budget “in his grip.”

Apart from misrepresenting the case of one of Venezuela’s most anti-democratic figures, the New York Times (5/11/24) marshaled other arguments to dismiss a potential Maduro victory in advance:

Ahead of the July 28 vote, Mr. Maduro, 61, has in his grip the legislature, the military, the police, the justice system, the national election council, the country’s budget and much of the media, not to mention violent paramilitary gangs called colectivos.

Leaving aside the demonized colectivos and the misconceptions surrounding Venezuelan media (FAIR.org, 5/20/19), the rest of the list is astounding. The legislature was won by the Socialist Party in the 2020 elections, and has the prerogative to appoint Supreme Court justices and the Electoral Council. Corporate pundits would presumably never write that a US president “has Congress in his grip.”

What is worse is Turkewitz’s dismay at Maduro wielding the constitutional responsibilities belonging to the president. The Venezuelan president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and appoints the interior minister who runs the police. And somehow media stenographers expect Venezuela’s elected leader to share control of the budget with the US’s chosen surrogates.

This Spanish-language AP piece (2/9/24) retracted a misrepresentation that the New York Times (5/11/24) repeated three months later.

But the pinnacle of poor journalism in the May 11 Times piece was the following paragraph:

Mr. Maduro has hardly indicated that he is ready to leave office. He promised a large crowd of followers in February that he would win the election “by hook or by crook.”

It is unclear why the New York Times writer would expect someone campaigning for reelection to “indicate…he is ready to leave office.” However, it is the second sentence that is an absolute fabrication. In said rally, Maduro is clearly talking about defeating US- and opposition-led coup efforts “por las buenas o por las malas”—the Spanish idiom the Times translates as “by hook or by crook.”

In the video linked, uploaded by a Venezuelan journalist precisely to clarify the context of those words, Maduro lists anti-democratic plots going back to 2002, and vows that the country’s “civilian-military” unity will defeat any possible coup attempt “por las buenas o por las malas”—”by any means necessary,” one might say. There is no reference to the upcoming elections at all.

The Associated Press (2/9/24) had months ago misused the Venezuelan president’s words in the same way. After widespread criticism, the news service attached a note to the Spanish-language report: “The Associated Press improperly used a quote from President Nicolás Maduro as if he had said it in connection with the upcoming presidential election.” That didn’t stop the Times from committing the exact same misrepresentation three months later.

Reuters (4/17/24) reported that the Biden administration was reimposing sanctions on Venezuela “in response to President Nicolas Maduro’s failure to meet his election commitments.” But the Barbados Agreement did not commit the government to allow any candidate to run, but only those who met legal and constitutional qualifications—and it asked all parties “to respect and comply with the electoral regulations and the decisions of the National Electoral Council.”

The US is not only pushing opposition candidates in Venezuela; it’s also using economic sanctions to undermine Maduro’s presidency. Following the Barbados agreement in October, the US agreed to allow transactions with the Venezuelan oil sector for six months. But US officials claimed that the Maduro government had not fulfilled its commitments and reimposed its sanctions against Venezuela’s oil industry on April 18. In tandem, corporate media reintroduced its whitewashing and endorsement of deadly coercive measures (FAIR.org, 6/13/22, 6/4/21).

The New York Times and Turkewitz (5/11/24) rolled out some of the main tropes that downplay those sanctions, writing that “Maduro blames sanctions” for the country’s economic troubles. This formulation places the idea that sanctions hurt the Venezuelan economy in the mouth of the demonized Maduro, when even US officials are on the record saying that sanctions are meant to cause economic pain.

The Times went on to say that “the government has been choked” by US sanctions. The implication is that only Venezuela’s leaders are affected by sanctions. But as the Center for Economic and Policy Research (4/25/19) has demonstrated, they are a “collective punishment” that has caused tens of thousands of deaths per year. Yet Turkewitz failed to explain their economic impact on Venezuelans, who widely condemn them—as does most of the international community.

One coordinated mistruth spread by the Times (4/17/24, 5/16/24) and others (e.g., Reuters, 4/17/24, 5/11/24; BBC, 1/30/24) is that crushing US sanctions against Venezuela only began in 2019. In fact, the Trump administration levied financial sanctions against the oil industry in mid-2017 that sent output plummeting. The goal of that media obfuscation is far from subtle: absolve Washington of responsibility for Venezuela’s economic troubles, especially the fall in oil production.

Turkewitz’s article matter-of-factly stated that a Maduro victory on July 28 will “intensify poverty” in Venezuela. Turkewitz is either taking for granted that US economic aggression will continue—without explaining that to readers—or is convinced that Washington’s adversaries are predestined by nature or fate to ruin their economies. Venezuela is in fact set for a fourth straight year of economic growth, despite the multi-billion dollar impact of US sanctions. The only thing that seems to always intensify is the New York Times’ imperialist propaganda.

The biggest outside spender in the 2022 Democratic primaries was an unlikely group: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. This year, AIPAC—a group backed by Republican mega-donors that is devoted to maintaining strong US support for the far-right government of Israel—is going even bigger, aiming to spend a cool $100 million via its super PAC, the United Democracy Project.

If the Koch brothers quietly spent millions to sway Democratic primaries, their chosen candidates would be tarred. Same goes for Big Oil, the NRA and other right-wing special interests. But AIPAC is an exception to this rule.

“AIPAC [is] the biggest source of Republican money flowing into competitive Democratic primaries this year,” Politico (6/9/24) reported. AIPAC’s UDP is “by far the biggest outside group in Democratic primaries, with more money flowing from UDP than the next 10 biggest spenders combined.”

Despite being conservative donors’ preferred instrument for hijacking Democratic primaries, UDP is described in media reports as “pro-Israel,” often with little said of its right-wing funding. This glaring omission provides AIPAC with cover to play in Democratic primaries in ways other right-wing groups can’t.

The Washington Post (5/14/24) waited until the 21st of 28 paragraphs to mention that Elfreth (right) had gotten $4.1 million in support from an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC—almost as much as rival Harry Dunn raised altogether.

I recently watched this play out in a nearby congressional district. On May 14, many Democratic primary voters went to the polls without knowing that a leading candidate for Maryland’s safely blue 3rd Congressional District, state Sen. Sarah Elfreth, was backed by right-wing billionaires via AIPAC’s super PAC.

Voters were kept in the dark thanks to deficient reporting. A Washington Post (5/14/24) story on election day, for example, waited until the 21st paragraph to mention that UDP had spent over $4 million on the race; then the Post quickly added: “United Democracy Project says it takes money from Republicans and Democrats.”

That last statement is technically true, and also deceiving.

While UDP’s funders hail from both parties, they share an elite status: Nearly 60% of them are CEOs and corporate honchos, In These Times (6/3/24) found. “But in no world could you even call this a bipartisan group of benefactors. It’s Republicans who know what they’re doing,” wrote Slate’s Alexander Sammon (2/7/24), in a story headlined, “There Sure Are a Lot of Republican Billionaires Funding the Democratic Primaries.” Sammon found that only one of the top ten donors to UDP “can even plausibly be called a regular Democratic booster.”

Among those Republican billionaires, as researched by the muckraking news outlet Sludge (3/4/24): Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, who’s given UDP $3 million and donated around $65 million to Republican groups over the past decade, including $17 million to Trump super PACs; hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who’s given UDP $2 million and contributed millions more to Republican causes (and lavished gifts on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito); and WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, UDP’s top funder at $5 million this cycle, who’s bankrolled groups that support Israel’s illegal settlements.

Despite its heavy Republican funding, UDP spends almost exclusively in Democratic primaries. (UDP’s parent organization, AIPAC, has a less exclusive focus and backs many Republicans— including over 100 congressmembers who voted to overturn the 2020 election—through a separate political action committee.)

In the May 14 story, however, the Post never used its own authoritative voice to convey the above facts to readers—many of whom, as Democratic primary voters, would be alarmed to learn that right-wing donors were quietly backing a Democratic candidate. By playing dumb to Sarah Elfreth’s conservative support, the Post slyly helped her win.

The Washington Post (5/14/24) made Elfreth’s acceptance of “dark money” an accusation leveled by her opponent Harry Dunn (right)—and quoted another source saying Dunn complaining about it was “exactly what is broken with Washington.”

Of course, newspapers are supposed to be evenhanded, so the Post gave Elfreth’s opponent space to call out AIPAC’s millions—but even here, the coverage was slanted.

UDP’s massive spending “prompted the Dunn campaign to accuse Elfreth of taking ‘dark money’ and lumping her in with far-right Republicans,” the Post reported.

By having Harry Dunn—and not the Post itself—call out Elfreth’s Republican support, the Post turned an explosive issue into a mere allegation from a political opponent.

Then the Post went further, seeking to invalidate not only Dunn’s statement, but the candidate himself. (Dunn is a former Capitol Police officer who won national acclaim for fighting off January 6 insurrectionists.)

The Post wrote:

The Dunn campaign’s efforts to link Elfreth—an established Democrat—to Trump supporters rubbed some Maryland politicians the wrong way. “It just is exactly what is broken with Washington and not what will lead to a more productive US Congress,” said Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson…[who] said the insinuation reflected Dunn’s inexperience in politics.”

The Post story, while troubling, wasn’t exceptional. If anything, the Baltimore Banner’s coverage was worse.

The Baltimore Banner (5/12/24) dismissed criticism of Elfreth’s AIPAC help, saying that “criticizing an opponent’s money is nothing new.”

In the month leading up to the primary, UDP spent over $100,000 a day boosting Elfreth. This prompted other candidates to call out the influx of outside Republican money. But their protests elicited little more than a yawn from the Banner’s Rick Hutzell (5/12/24). “Criticizing an opponent’s money is nothing new,” he wrote.

Hutzell then took to lecturing Elfreth’s opponents, although not with much accuracy. “It’s not dark money,” he insisted. “UDP discloses its donors.”

At least Hutzell got the second part right.

“UDP is legally obligated to disclose its direct donors,” wrote HuffPost’s Daniel Marans (4/3/24), “but it may receive donations from corporations and nonprofits whose funders are not public.”

In other words, a donor who wished to provide Elfreth with anonymous support could’ve done so by having a non-disclosing entity, like AIPAC, forward their donation to UDP.

“If these MAGA donors funneled their money through AIPAC or any other nonprofit, then the individual donors would not be identified,” Craig Holman, a campaign finance expert with Public Citizen, told FAIR. “This is dark money in the truest sense of the word.”

The Guardian (5/14/22) suggested that AIPAC’s intervention in Maryland’s 3rd district House race might have been motivated to block labor lawyer John Morse, a minor candidate who made Gaza a central issue of his campaign—though the third-place candidate, state Sen. Clarence Lam, was also more critical of Israel than AIPAC would have been comfortable with.

Why AIPAC was involved in this race in the first place was a bit of a mystery, as the two leading candidates, Elfreth and Dunn, held seemingly indistinguishable views on Israel.

When asked about this, a UDP spokesperson (Guardian, 5/14/22)  said there were “some serious anti-Israel candidates in this race, who are not Harry Dunn, and we need to make sure that they don’t make it to Congress.”

But UDP didn’t specify who was on its naughty list. Meanwhile, the race was already down to a two-way contest by the time UDP unleashed its millions, so all UDP was doing at that point was thwarting Dunn, who’s also pro-Israel.

Even Elfreth was confounded by UDP’s efforts, or so she claimed. Asked why the group was boosting her, Elfreth told the Banner, “I honest to God have no idea.”

No idea? Four months before announcing her candidacy, Elfreth took her first trip to Israel on what sounds like an AIPAC junket. She visited “a kibbutz that was [later] attacked by Hamas on October 7, an Iron Dome battery, a Hezbollah tunnel on the Lebanese border, the West Bank and religious sites,” Jewish Insider (4/3/24) reported.

In endorsing Elfreth, Pro-Israel America PAC, an AIPAC-adjacent group, wrote, “Sarah has traveled to Israel on a life-changing trip that will forever influence her worldviews.” The group quoted Elfreth as saying, “[I] walked away knowing that I believe—after millennia of the world turning its back on the Jewish people—that the State of Israel has the right to exist and to defend itself.”

Whether or not Elfreth was clueless about AIPAC’s support, one thing was clear: She was determined to keep its millions flowing her way. At an April debate with 16 hopefuls on stage, “moderators asked the candidates if they would swear off corporate PAC money,” Maryland Matters (4/18/24) reported. “Only Elfreth stayed seated.”

She was smart to do so, as AIPAC’s millions can prove decisive. They certainly did two years ago in a neighboring congressional district.

Intercept (7/20/22): Donna Edwards’ “past refusal to unconditionally support funding that enables Israel’s ongoing occupation and destruction of Palestinian communities was more than enough to draw the ire of the conservative pro-Israel donors who mobilized to defeat her.”

In 2022, Donna Edwards was poised to reclaim the House seat she’d vacated six years earlier. “Then the ads started pouring in,” the Intercept (7/20/22) reported:

[UDP] spent $6 million on television spots, mailers and other media…. Other pro-Israel organizations pitched in about $1 million more. The result was one of the most expensive congressional primaries in history, with nearly all of the money coming from outside the district over the course of only a few weeks.

Amid the $7 million onslaught, Edwards’ lead vanished. She lost the Democratic primary to prosecutor Glenn Ivey, who was quick to thank AIPAC after his win.

I keep thinking back to this election and wondering, what if reporters had called out AIPAC for hijacking this local race? At the very least, it would have made it harder for the group to get away with doing the same thing two years later, on behalf of Elfreth.

AIPAC’s continued ability to steal Democratic primaries rests on a collective amnesia setting in after each election. Unfortunately, reporters have proven willing to do their part to make this happen.

Last month, the moment Elfreth won, what little coverage there was of AIPAC lessened.

Take the May 14 Post story discussed above. While AIPAC appeared in its tenth paragraph, once Elfreth won, the story was rewritten, and AIPAC dropped down to the 21st paragraph.

AP‘s story (5/14/24) on Elfreth’s victory mentioned her “endorsements from the state’s teachers union and environmental groups”—but not AIPAC, which provided almost three-fourths of the money spent on behalf of her campaign.

That was better than an AP story (5/14/24) the Post ran, which didn’t mention AIPAC at all.

A Baltimore Sun (5/15/24) story belatedly noted AIPAC’s role, but only after portraying Elfreth as a victim of big money by comparing her to Angela Alsobrooks, a candidate who was up against the biggest self-funder in Senate primary history, liquor store magnate David Trone. “Not only were Elfreth and Alsobrooks…up against nationally known figures…they both also trailed their opponents in fundraising,” the Sun reported. This is only true if you don’t count the help UDP gave Elfreth; counting that money, which the Sun did later mention, she had a spending advantage of more than $1 million.

But once again, it was the Banner that took the cake. In Hutzell’s post-election story (5/17/24), Elfreth was the victim, having been forced to endure TV ads attacking “her over a pro-Israel super PAC spending millions to support her without her knowledge.”

It’s not until the 35th paragraph that Hutzell bothers to name AIPAC, and only in the context of how Elfreth is going to be, of all things, a champion for campaign finance reform.

She wants to pick up where US Rep. John Sarbanes, the man she hopes to succeed, left off on campaign finance reform. Elfreth makes this last pledge without irony, given the criticism she received for the more than $4.5 million that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent on her behalf.

With coverage like this, come 2026, AIPAC will be positioned to continue manipulating Democratic primaries by quietly weaponizing right-wing dollars.

“UDP’s heavy reliance on right-wing (even hard-right) oligarchs comes into stark relief when looking at its most elite donors,” an In These Times analysis (6/3/24) found.

What’s so cynical is that UDP isn’t upfront about why it’s spending millions in Democratic primaries—at least not until after the election is over.

In explaining its support of Elfreth, UDP highlighted domestic issues, listing abortion rights, climate change and domestic violence—issues that are unlikely to matter much if at all to UDP’s Republican donors. The millions of dollars in ads UDP aired for Elfreth didn’t mention Israel; just like the group’s ads against Donna Edwards from two years earlier. “They know that Israel is not a winning issue,” said James Zogby (In These Times, 6/3/24).

But the moment the election was over, AIPAC declared that Elfreth’s win showed that it’s progressive “to stand with the Jewish state as it battles aggression from the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies.”

In backing Elfreth, AIPAC’s right-wing donors knew exactly what they were doing. And so did Elfreth, notwithstanding her claims of ignorance. Reporters knew the score, too, even if their coverage didn’t reflect that. The only ones kept in the dark were voters.

As the world watched on social media and responded in outrage, US corporate media, once again, provided cover for the perpetrators of Israel’s genocide. 

CounterPunch (5/31/24): “When the Israeli bombs strafed the safe zone, the plastic tents caught fire, sending flames leaping two meters high, before the melting, blazing structures collapsed on the people inside, many of them children who’d just been tucked in for the evening.”

Over the Memorial Day weekend, Israel bombed starving Gazan refugees crowded in tents in Rafah, where Israel had told them to go. As Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch, 5/31/24) wrote, leaflets dropped in Rafah a few days before told them to go to “Tel al-Sultan through Beach Road,” an area set up by the UNRWA refugee agency and designated a UN humanitarian safe zone. The leaflet added, “Don’t blame us after we warned you.”

Nevertheless, without warning, Israel hit the camp with at least eight  missiles  spreading fire though the encampment of plastic tents (Quds News, 5/26/24). Some refugees burned to death, mostly women and children, leaving them dismembered and charred.

The world saw the terror of the massacre on international and social media. Images showed the area of the strike engulfed in flames as Palestinians screamed, cried, ran for safety and sought to help the injured. “They told people to move there then killed them,” Richard Medhurst (5/28/24) posted.

A boy cries in horror and fear as he watches his father’s tent burn with him inside. A man holds up the body of his charred, now-headless baby, wandering around, not knowing what to do or where to go. An injured, starving child convulses in pain as a medic struggles to find a vein for an IV in her emaciated arm (Al Jazeera, 5/27/24).

Al Jazeera (cited by Quds News, 5/26/24) quoted a Civil Defense source: “We believe that the occupation army used internationally prohibited weapons to target the displaced in Rafah, judging by the size of the fires that erupted at the targeted site.”

US news media reported the tent massacre, some more truthfully than others. But most establishment media repeated Israel’s false claims that it was an accident, weaving disinformation messaging into toned-down descriptions of the scene. With confused syntax, they omitted words like “genocide,” “massacre” and “starvation.” Most left out the language of international law that is best able to explain the unprecedented crimes against humanity that Israel is committing. Corporate reporting left the tent massacre devoid of context and empathy, ignored actions that need to be taken, and ultimately facilitated the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

By being embedded with Israeli forces, NBC (5/28/24) presented news literally from the IDF point of view.

When NBC News (5/28/24) reported from Gaza that “Israeli tanks reached the city center for the first time, according to NBC News‘ crew on the ground,” it failed to say that the NBC crew was embedded with Israel’s invading force.

The same sentence continued that Israel was “defying international pressure to halt an offensive that has sent nearly 1 million people fleeing Rafah.” But Israel was not just “defying…pressure”; it was in violation of a direct order from the International Court of Justice ICJ to halt its attack on Rafah. Yet NBC reporters rode into Rafah with an army that was ignoring international law to commit further genocide in Gaza.

Compare NBC’s words to those used by Ramy Abdu (5/26/24), chair of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, who posted: “In the deadliest response to the International Court of Justice’s decision, the Israeli army targeted a group of displaced persons’ tents in Rafah, killing approximately 60 innocent civilians so far.”

In a post, Francesca Albanese (5/26/24), UN special rapporteur for human rights in Palestine, included International actions that needed to be implemented:

The #GazaGenocide‌ will not easily end without external pressure: Israel must face sanctions, justice, suspension of agreements, trade, partnership and investments, as well as participation in int’l forums.

Such sanctions are rarely discussed in establishment media, but are becoming more urgent, given the New York Times report (5/29/24) that Israel intends to extend the genocide through the remainder of 2024. Though the Times reported on the global outrage and demonstrations against the Rafah massacre, the words “genocide” and “massacre” were not used, nor was there any mention of the possibility of sanctions against Israel.

X (5/27/24)

Instead of sourcing the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice or any humanitarian actors in the region, NBC (5/28/24) quoted a UN National Security Council spokesperson:

Israel has a right to go after Hamas, and we understand this strike killed two senior Hamas terrorists who are responsible for attacks against Israeli civilians…. But as we’ve been clear, Israel must take every precaution possible to protect civilians.

Israel’s claim that it killed two Hamas leaders became the rationale for the strike, which was repeated extensively on corporate media. Over NBC‘s images of burning tents and killing scenes, the header read, “Dozens killed in Gaza tent camp in an airstrike targeting two Hamas commanders.”

The dead were connected to Hamas whenever possible. At the bottom of the video, the subtitles listed numbers of dead, followed with, “according to the emergency services in Hamas-run Gaza.”

Human rights attorney and Rutgers academic Noura Erakat (5/27/24) exposed the attempt to link murdered children to Hamas. Over the picture of a burned baby, she posted these harsh words:

Have you ever seen a burnt baby? Can you imagine her final, gaping screams? And all Israel had to tell you was “Hamas,” so you look at her and shrug. Your willful ignorance is genocidal.

CounterPunch (5/31/24) quoted Jeremy Konyndyk, former head of disaster relief for US Agency for International Development, saying, “Bombing a tent camp full of displaced people is a clear-cut, full-on war crime” who added, “Even if Hamas troops were present, that does not absolve the IDF of the obligation to protect civilians. It does not turn a tent camp into a free fire zone.”

Al Jazeera+ media critic Sana Saeed (X, 5/27/24) called the writers of such headlines “propagandists for genocide masquerading as journalists.”

On NBC (5/28/24), under the footage of the burning horrors of Rafah, the chyron read, “Netanyahu: Deadly Strike a Tragic Incident.”

In response to Israel’s “accident” claim, journalists, activists and social media users, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, reacted with incredulity and withering criticism of those who asserted it. That was the reaction Axios reporter and CNN analyst Barak Ravid (5/27/24) received when he posted, “Breaking: Netanyahu says the airstrike in Rafah on Sunday was ‘a tragic mistake,’ and adds that it will be investigated.” Katie Halper (5/27/24) replied to Ravid with, “Nice to see you using your position as a journalist to do comms for the Israeli government.”

And Tlaib (5/27/24) commented:

This was intentional. You don’t accidentally kill massive amounts of children and their families over and over again and get to say, “It was a mistake.” Genocidal maniac Netanyahu told us he wants to ethnically cleanse Palestinians.

She ended with the question, “When are you going to believe him?”

Sana Saeed (5/27/24), media critic for Al Jazeera+, posted the front pages of four print publications that repeated Netanyahu’s accident claim. The New York Times used “Tragic Accident,” while “Tragic Mistake” was preferred by Time magazine, Forbes and the AP. Over the headlines, she called them “propagandists for genocide masquerading as journalists.”

The second paragraph of CNN‘s report (5/28/24) featured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim: “Despite our best effort not to harm those not involved, unfortunately a tragic error happened last night.”

But CNN (5/28/24) seemed to be vying for Most Valuable Propagandists by elaborating on the unlikely details offered by the IDF to describe the official Israeli version of what happened. It began with Netanyahu speaking to the Knesset: “Despite our best effort not to harm those not involved, unfortunately a tragic error happened last night. We are investigating the case.”

After four paragraphs of details of the massacre—“burned bodies, including those of children, could be seen being pulled by rescuers from the wreckage”—CNN returned to the justifications. The long, breathless chain of details began:

A US official told CNN Monday that Israel had told the Biden administration it used a precision munition to hit a target in Rafah, but that the explosion from the strike ignited a fuel tank nearby and started a fire that engulfed a camp for displaced Palestinians and led to dozens of deaths.

But the claims could not be confirmed; “It’s what Israel shared with us,” the official said.

But the attack on Rafah was in no way a single “precision” “hit,” as numerous sources reported that multiple bombs hit the camp. And Al Jazeera (5/27/24) reported that Israeli drone strikes also hit the Kuwaiti Hospital, the only functioning hospital in the area, killing two medics. It also pointed out that no notice to evacuate came before the strike.

In an X post (5/27/24), Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill noted the shifting narrative coming from Israel:

Netanyahu now admits Israel carried out the horrifying bombings that incinerated human beings in Rafah last night and turned a refugee camp into hellfire. I assume all the people who claimed it was actually a failed Hamas rocket attack will now rush to correct themselves.

As we observed after the flour massacre (FAIR.org, 3/22/24), Israel’s string of differing false statements immediately following a massacre is an IDF propaganda strategy designed to confuse and delay. Focusing on changing falsities distracts from the massacre and turns the cameras away from the horrible images of US-supplied weapons slaughter. In this way, massacres become normalized.

Repeating and discussing the ever-changing Israeli disinformation of denial, discussing weapons and official statements, also allows US corporate media to avoid easily observed patterns of Israel’s ongoing massacres, in addition to drawing public attention away from the suffering. But on social media, the raw footage and cries of outrage by users indicate that the manufactured emotional distance collapses online.

Some users expressed extreme distress after prolonged viewing of such imagery. One Palestinian organizer (5/27/24) said:

I’m shaking uncontrollably since last night. I can’t get the beheaded baby that was burned alive. The woman’s screaming out of my head. The decomposed bodies of babies out of my head. The girl whose body was stuck to a wall. Hind’s final message to PRCS…. And now. How do you watch all this and not feel your soul dead?

The daughter of Palestinian refugees posted (5/27/24):

The flour massacre, the tents massacre, the hospital massacre, the refugee camp massacre, the “safe corridor” massacre, the endless massacres, in homes, on the streets, in tents, on foot— eight months of massacre after massacre after massacre.

Another user (5/27/24) asked, “Why do so many Israeli mistakes involve launching multiple missiles at people they’ve assured are in safe zones?”

It was the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (2/29/24) that exposed US corporate media reporting as repeated propaganda in a piece titled, “In Netanyahu’s Israel, the Rafah Horror Was Neither ‘a Mishap’ nor Exceptional.” The editorial scoffed at the use of “tragic mishap” to describe the “horrific incident.” It observed that “it took Netanyahu 20 hours to produce the disgraceful statement, which, as usual, lacked any shred of regret over the death of ‘noncombatants.’”

Haaretz derided the “willful media blackout regarding the scope of death and destruction over the last eight months.” Skeptical about the assertion that “it was not expected to cause damage to noncombatant civilians,” the paper observed that, if true, “this involves an ongoing failure at the strategic level.”

LA Progressive (6/7/24): “In response to this massacre…the best US spokespeople could muster was to urge Israel to be ‘transparent’ about the assault.”

By May 29, US corporate media began to report extensively that the Israeli bombs dropped on Rafah that burned Palestinian refugees alive were made in the US. A  munitions fragment was filmed by Palestinian journalist Alam Sadeq, and was posted on X (5/27/24) by former US Army explosive expert Trevor Ball two days earlier. Much was made of the fact that the ordinance was smaller than the usual 2,000-pound bombs used to destroy Gaza, and were the preferred bombs the Biden administration had sent to Israel.

As the New York Times (5/29/24) put it, “US officials have been pushing Israel to use more of this type of bomb, which they say can reduce civilian casualties.” The lengthy report included a drawing of the bomb, the details of its manufacture, and assertions that its use by Israel indicated they tried to kill fewer civilians. Gone were any mention of the “tragic mistake,” and the “exploded fuel tank,” forgotten as yesterday’s fake news.

But a lengthy back-and-forth about how the fire could have started failed to point out the obvious, which comes only at the very end when a retired US Air Force sergeant observes, “When you use a weapon that’s intended as precision and low–collateral damage in an area where civilians are saturated, it really negates that intended use.”

As Israel’s atrocities continue to mount in Gaza, the LA Progressive (6/7/24) wrote that though Biden claimed to care about the loss of civilian life in Gaza, and that an Israeli attacked on Rafah would be a “red line,” “events of the past weeks have demonstrated that none of these claims are in fact true.” It added that a month ago, Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement “that looked a lot like the ceasefire agreement now being promoted by the Biden administration,” but Israel responded by rejecting that agreement as well.

In addition, Israel closed off the border area between Israel and Egypt, cutting off any aid or supplies from coming into famine-ravaged Gaza. The authors concluded, “What has transpired is a horrifying series of massacres against civilians, which the Biden administration continues to try to downplay, excuse and explain away.”

Over the last eight months, US establishment media have helped Biden “explain away” such  atrocities. They have not stopped repeating Israel’s propaganda, and have acted as willing conduits for Israeli disinformation. It is past time they stopped doing so, and started reporting on what is actually happening on the ground in Gaza, not through the eyes of the IDF.