FAIR

 

UOL (4/11/24)

Libertarian pundit Michael Shellenberger on April 3 tweeted a series of excerpts from emails by X executives, dubbed “Twitter Files Brazil”, which alleged to expose crimes by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Moraes, he claimed, had pressed criminal charges against Twitter Brazil‘s lawyer for its refusal to turn over personal information on political enemies. Elon Musk quickly shared the tweets and they viralized and were embraced by the international far right, to the joy of former President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters.

A week later, Estela Aranha, former secretary of digital rights in the Brazilian Justice Ministry, revealed rot at the heart of Shellenberger’s narrative. The only criminal charge filed against Twitter Brazil referenced in the leaked emails was made by the São Paulo district attorney’s office, after the company refused to turn over personal data on a leader of Brazil’s largest cocaine trafficking organization, the PCC. Shellenberger had cut the section of an email about a São Paulo criminal investigation and mixed it with communications complaining about Moraes on unrelated issues.

Pressed by Brazilian reporters, Shellenberger wrote: “I regret my my mistake and apologize for it. I don’t have evidence that Moraes threatened to file criminal charges against Twitter‘s Brazilian lawyer.”

The following interview with Estela Aranha was conducted on April 13, 2024.

Brian Mier: What was your role in Brazil’s Ministry of Justice? Please give an example of a project you worked on.

Estela Aranha

Estela Aranha: I started as special advisor to the minister of justice for digital affairs. Later, I was appointed secretary of digital rights. One project that I helped coordinate, along with other departments in the Ministry of Justice and the Federal Police, was called Operation Safe Schools, which was created to prevent school massacres.

In March 2023, a series of attacks and random child murders began in schools across the country, and thousands of school massacre threats vitalized in the social media. This created a generalized mood of panic and hysteria. Users were spreading images of school attackers with the goal of spreading terror. Consequently, increasing numbers of panicked parents pulled their children out of school.

In addition to spreading images of school killings, people were working online to encourage others to commit similar attacks. We began to monitor this phenomenon on the social media networks, and our initial analysis showed that neo-Nazi groups were encouraging attacks on April 20, because it was the anniversary of Columbine, and the Columbine massacre was committed on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. They were contacting children and teenagers online and trying to encourage them to attack other children in schools.

It was a national issue that paralyzed the country. In some cities during the week before April 20, only 20% of children were attending school because of the generalized sense of panic.

Operation Safe Schools worked in partnership with social media companies so that content inciting school killings would be properly moderated. We created a reporting channel. All reports were analyzed. The operation was huge, in terms of the number of people involved and the intelligence deployed.

We had very significant results, including 360 arrests. Not all, but the vast majority of people who were involved in these threats and these attacks, and who we had evidence would commit this type of crime—people who were arrested with detailed plans, weapons, masks, everything—were affiliated with clandestine neo-Nazi groups. Everyone who advocated Nazism was also reported to the police, and these individuals were detained and charged, according to due process, because advocating for Nazism is a crime in Brazil.

NPR (4/15/23)

BM: Did you ask social media companies to remove user profiles during this operation?

EA: Yes. We met with representatives from all the social media companies—we spoke with all of them. The only one that didn’t engage in dialogue was Telegram. During our the first meeting, Twitter initially resisted. It didn’t want to remove them. We were talking about profiles that were promoting very realistic attacks on schools.

I said, “I’m talking to you because there are profiles of actual terrorist personas. They are fake profiles using the names and faces of school massacre terrorists that post videos with songs that say, ‘I’m going to get you kids, you can’t run faster than my gun.’ There are video clips that show the terrorist’s picture and then show real school massacres.”

The Twitter representative said that this did not violate their terms of use. After strong push-back from the minister of justice and social pressure, including from users of its own platform, Twitter changed its policy and collaborated with the investigation.

BM: Do you think there was a positive effect in de-platforming those people? Did it reduce the risk for children?

EA: Of course. These were people sharing videos promoting and glorifying the perpetrators of school massacres. Imagine a teenager who already has issues and suffers from bullying, who is bombarded with images glorifying school massacres and messages like, “Look, this guy is awesome. Look what he did!”

Some kids will say, “Great. Nobody respects me, I don’t know what to do, so I’ll do this to be respected.”

All the guys who were arrested, who left letters or made statements, summed it up like this: “I was despised, nobody cared about me. I’m going to do this to show that I’m tough, that I’m somebody.”

They thought they were doing it to get revenge, to be glorified, to be seen differently. Any material that glorifies terrorism, whether it’s a school attack or any kind of terrorist attack, leads some people to think it’s good to commit a terrorist act. This is scientifically proven, by the way.

The other thing about this wave of school massacre threats is that it created an atmosphere of fear. If you logged onto Twitter or any social network at the time, started seeing these crimes, these scenes, how were you going to send your children to school? We had many parents who kept their children out of school during the whole three weeks of the crisis.

Imagine the impact on people’s lives without being able to send their children to school. Imagine the mothers who depend on sending their children to school in order to work, to have a normal life. There were thousands of testimonies of children crying, saying, “I’m going to be stabbed at school.”

Imagine the psychological impact—school should be a safe place for children, right? Imagine a parent who browses on any social network like Twitter and sees a bunch of people promoting terrorism in schools. What parent would send their child to school after that? What child would feel comfortable and want to go to school? This created an impact on the entire Brazilian society. Mothers couldn’t work and daughters were terrified to go to school. School ceased to be a place where children felt safe—they started to be afraid of it.

BM: How did you discover that Michael Shellenberger was lying in the so-called “Twitter Files”?

EA: I am lawyer and digital rights specialist, and I began working in the Justice Ministry shortly after the period from which the emails used in “Twitter Files Brazil” were selected. I am familiar with all of those cases and decisions. I am familiar with all the rulings in my field that are in circulation. As a lawyer who is part of a group who specializes in this area—and they’re aren’t many of us—we obviously share, discuss and debate all of these cases and rulings. I remember the case filed by the São Paulo Public Prosecutor’s Office against Twitter, because we all talked about it when it happened.

So when I read the email excerpts that Michael Shellenberger posted, I immediately saw that they had been manipulated. I immediately knew what decision each email fragment referred to. I am familiar with all the important rulings on social media networks that happened during the time period of the emails. The moment I saw it I thought, “No, that never happened,” because I follow this very closely—it’s my job.

When I read it, I said to myself, “This is wrong.” He was speaking incorrectly, and this is why I complained about it online. I knew they had fabricated a false narrative, because I know all of the cases that they cherry-picked their text fragments from. They stitched together excerpts. Anyone who doesn’t know what they’re referring to could believe them. But I know about all the cases, because I am a dedicated lawyer. There is no case in my area that I don’t study, in order to understand what is happening. There is nothing they presented in the “Twitter Files” that I hadn’t been closely following.

BM: Musk and Shellenberger are alleging that the Brazilian government is violating the right to freedom of expression. But it seems that the arguments they make are based on US law. What are some differences in freedom of expression laws between Brazil and the US?

EA: There are several universal rights in each country or region, and in each legal tradition. I will speak about Brazil. Both legislation and doctrinal legal tradition—the interpretation of doctrine, as well as jurisprudence—are very different here. The right to freedom of expression in the United States is a right that is held above other rights—it is broader.

My colleagues who know more about American law than me tell me that, for example, the United States has never managed to criminalize revenge porn—when you expose intimate data of a former partner from whom you separated. This speaks legions about the breadth of freedom of expression that exists in the United States. It is not absolute, but it is a very broad right.

In Brazil, as in Europe, freedom of expression is an essential right that is equal to other essential rights. If you try to use one right to infringe upon another right, you will face limitations. All rights are weighed side by side, and there is proportionality in the scope of how much you can interfere.

For example, advocating for Nazism is illegal in Brazil, because it is considered to be such a harmful discourse that it must be preemptively prohibited. That doesn’t exist in the United States. Racist insults are crimes, as is discrimination against the LGBTQ+ population. There are several forms of speech that are illegal. And there are some types of speech that are not inherently illegal, but can lead to lawsuits for moral damages in certain cases.

This gradation obviously depends on the legal good that we are protecting. For example, advocacy for a crime, in general, is considered a form of criminal speech. So it is prohibited; it has to be taken out of circulation. Also, you cannot make threats.

Shellenberger mixes all kinds of unrelated things together in his “Twitter Files.” He mixes things from criminal cases, things from the São Paulo public prosecutors office, electoral crime investigations, and inquiries from the the Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court.

Freedom of expression has many restrictions in our electoral law framework, because we have other values that take precedence—for example, the equilibrium of an election. We have laws guaranteeing balanced elections and integrity of the electoral system itself.

The practice that is common in the United States, of a candidate paying for a lot of campaign advertising, is not allowed in Brazil. There is a system of free electoral advertising space. It is pre-divided among the candidates. Candidates cannot take out any advertisements over their established time limits, even if they can pay for it.

The circulation of all campaign materials is highly regulated. There are spending caps on election campaigns. TV stations cannot give more airtime to favor one candidate over another. There always has to be equivalence.

It is clear that a tightly regulated election system like ours has rules to protect it. During our election seasons, which typically last for less than four months, governmental agencies pull information down from their websites, leaving nothing but emergency or public utility information, because otherwise it could interfere with the electoral process by favoring government officials who are running for office. This could interfere with the balance of the election. It is also illegal to run negative campaign adds.

There are a lot of rules that are very different from the United States. You cannot, for example, use knowingly false information in election campaigns. This is a crime in Brazil. If candidates make patently false statements, the media cannot replicate the information.

This always leads to a lot of electoral court rulings and, during 2022, they weren’t only made in favor of President Lula. Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign successfully petitioned the court to remove several of Lula’s campaign ads and numerous social media posts by Lula supporters. There are thousands of court rulings demanding removal of advertising materials in every election campaign in Brazil. This is absolutely normal here.

But Micheal Shellenberger has decided to use US laws regarding freedom of expression to criticize decisions based on Brazilian law, made by our electoral courts. Shellenberger is using a totally different concept, which he even mentioned when he testified in a hearing in the Brazilian Senate this week. Advocacy for Nazism is tolerated in the United States. In Brazil, it is not. We have a very different system. He cannot use American legislation as a measuring rod to claim that a Brazilian court ruling is wrong.

There is a lot of deliberate confusion in “Twitter Files Brazil.” He grabs a lot of things and mixes them to create his narrative and arguments. He claimed that Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes threatened to arrest Twitter‘s lawyer, and then he was forced to admit that it wasn’t true. It’s obvious that he mixed different things together on purpose. It makes no sense to say that Moraes is breaking the law—he isn’t. His rulings are legal according to Brazilian law.

The other thing that I think is relevant to mention is that in Brazilian law, judges can order precautionary measures, that we call “atypical,” to prevent further threats to rights from materializing. This is what Alexandre de Moraes has used in some of his rulings. This institution of Brazilian law is called the general precautionary power of the judge.

BM: What do you think is the real goal of these attacks made by Elon Musk and Michael Shellenberger and their allies?

 

Elon Musk (Creative Commons photo by Tim Reckmann)

EA: Shellenberger and Musk are working hand in hand, and I’m sure their goal is to be players in the US elections, and that’s why they have joined the international far right. Obviously they have chosen Brazil because it is also an important player in the international far right. They have taken advantage of all this discourse about regulating social media, which Musk obviously opposes. But I think their immediate goal is to attack the established powers in Brazil.

Our far right was completely isolated, because its main leader is Bolsonaro and he couldn’t lead, because he was cornered: the criminal investigations against him for crimes that have been proven, thanks to very robust investigations by the Federal Police. He was powerless, because the whole coup plot has been uncovered by the Federal Police. He really tried to implement a coup d’état, together with military leaders, and there were direct actions, like the attack on the Federal Police headquarters the day Lula arrived in Brasilia to sign documents in preparation for his inauguration.

This attack was very serious, but some people seem to have already forgotten it. I was there. I personally witnessed a car full of jerry cans filled with gasoline parked in front of a gas station, and later jerry cans full of gasoline were found in the hotel where Lula was staying. There was an attempted bombing in Brasilia airport on Christmas, which only failed to explode because the detonator didn’t work. Then we had the attack on January 8, which was also very serious.

So at the moment when were were managing to finally hold the main leaders of this attempted coup accountable, Elon Musk and Michael Shellenberger came onto the scene to attack the institutions that are prosecuting them, to usurp their power so they can’t convict them anymore. That was clearly their short-term goal, and in the long run, Elon Musk obviously wants to be a player in the international far right, and interfere in elections around the world, especially in the US.

BM: Do you think they are trying to implement a coup?

EA: That’s part of it. The far right tried and never gave up on it. I was in the Ministry of Justice at the time, and we worked hard to contain the subversive elements that continued after January 8, 2023. After they began being held accountable, their activities decreased. But they want to reignite that flame by preventing Bolsonaro from being held accountable, by delegitimizing our court system. Of course, that’s part of the coup movement.

I think their first goal is to strengthen the far-right leadership again, because today they are weakened, they have no firepower to carry out this coup. That’s why they stepped in. They want to strengthen these leaders who are cornered, because they are being held responsible for the coup attempt.

This interview was originally posted on De-Linking Brazil (4/18/24), Brian Mier’s blog on Substack.

 

The post ‘I Knew They Had Fabricated a False Narrative’: <br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>Interview with Estela Aranha on 'Twitter Files Brazil' appeared first on FAIR.

 

A New York Times staffer told the Intercept (4/15/24) that the paper was “basically taking the occupation out of the coverage, which is the actual core of the conflict.”

New York Times editors issued a memo to staffers that warned against the use of “inflammatory language and incendiary accusations on all sides”—but the instructions offered by the memo, which was leaked to the Intercept (4/15/24), seemed designed to dampen criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza and to reinforce the Israeli narrative of the conflict.

Among the terms the memo tells Times reporters to avoid: “Palestine” (“except in very rare cases”), “occupied territories” (say “Gaza, the West Bank, etc.”) and “refugee camps” (“refer to them as neighborhoods, or areas”).

These are all standard terms: “Palestine” is the name of a state recognized by the United Nations and 140 of its 193 members. The “occupied territories” are the way Gaza and the West Bank are referred to by the UN as well as the United States. “Refugee camps” are what they are called by the UN agency that administers the eight camps in Gaza.

The memo discourages the use of the terms “genocide” (“We should…set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation”) and “ethnic cleansing” (“another historically charged term”).

Genocide is defined by the Genocide Convention as certain “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” These acts include “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The International Court of Justice ruled in January that it was “plausible” that Israel was in violation of the Genocide Convention (NPR, 1/26/24). A US federal judge has likewise held that “the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law” (Guardian, 2/1/24).

“Our problem is not allowing the exit, but a lack of countries that are ready to take Palestinians in,” Netanyahu told a Likud ally (Mondoweiss, 12/28/23) “And we are working on it.” At the New York Times, you aren’t supposed to call this “ethnic cleansing.”

“Ethnic cleansing” does not have a legal definition, but surely the Israeli military campaign that has displaced 85% of Gaza’s population, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promises he is “working on” the “voluntary emigration” of that population (Mondoweiss, 12/28/23), qualifies under any reasonable standard.

In contrast to its take on “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” the memo contends that “it is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of October 7″; the words “fighters” or “militants,” however, are discouraged for participants in those attacks. This is the opposite of the approach taken by outlets like AP (X, formerly Twitter, 1/7/21) and the BBC (10/11/23); John Simpson, world affairs editor for the latter, calls “terrorism” a “loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally.”

Also on the Times‘ list of approved language: “the deadliest attack on Israel in decades.” Reporters are apparently not offered any superlatives to use to describe the Israeli assault on Gaza, such as “among the deadliest and most destructive in history” (AP, 12/21/23), or the most “rapid deterioration into widespread starvation” (Oxfam, 3/18/24), or “the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history” (New Yorker, 3/21/24).

“Our goal is to provide clear, accurate information, and heated language can often obscure rather than clarify the fact,” says the memo, written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling and international editor Philip Pan, along with their deputies. “Words like ‘slaughter,’ ‘massacre’ and ‘carnage’ often convey more emotion than information. Think hard before using them in our own voice.” The memo asks, “Can we articulate why we are applying those words to one particular situation and not another?”

As FAIR noted in a new study (4/17/24), the Times does apply “heated language” in a decidedly lopsided manner. When Times articles used the word “brutal” to describe a party in the Gaza conflict, 73% of the time it was used to characterize Palestinians. An analysis by the Intercept (1/9/24) of Gaza crisis coverage in the Times (as well as the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal) found that

highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like “slaughter,” “massacre” and “horrific” were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around.

“Horrific” was used by reporters and editors nine times as often to describe the killing of Israelis rather than Palestinians; “slaughter” described Israelis deaths 60 times more than Palestinian deaths, and “massacre” more than 60 times.

ACTION:

Please ask the New York Times to revise its guidance on coverage of the Gaza crisis so that it is no longer banning standard descriptions and placing the most accurate characterizations of Israeli actions off limits.

CONTACT:

Letters: letters@nytimes.com
Readers Center: Feedback

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

Featured image: The New York Times Building (Creative Commons photo: Wally Gobetz)

 

The post ACTION ALERT: NYT’s War on Words: Avoid ‘Palestine,’ ‘Genocide,’ ‘Ethnic Cleansing’  appeared first on FAIR.

A FAIR study finds that since October 7, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal have overwhelmingly applied the term “brutal” to violence committed by Palestinians rather than by Israelis. In doing so, journalists helped justify US support for the assault on Gaza and shield Israel from criticism, particularly in the early months of the onslaught.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has been nothing if not “brutal.” The indiscriminate use of US-supplied artillery that shred Palestinian bodies and bury them alive under rubble has killed at least 33,000, mostly women and children. The blockade of food and water into Gaza has caused the sharpest decline of a population’s nutrition status on record. Marauding Israeli soldiers frequently post videos on social media (Al Jazeera, 1/18/24) mocking people whose homes they have destroyed, and in many cases have killed—playing with children’s toys, fondling women’s underwear (Mondoweiss, 2/19/24). The total variety of indignities that characterize the “brutal” human toll in Gaza are too numerous to summarize here.

But to US newspapers, brutality appears to be less about actions or outcomes than about identity.

Attributing ‘brutality’

FAIR recorded each instance in which the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal used the word “brutal” (or variants like “brutally,” “brutality” etc.) to characterize Palestinians or Israelis, over the five-month period from October 7 to March 7.

Using the search terms “brutal” and “Israel” in the Nexis and Factiva news archiving services, FAIR distinguished between characterizations made by sources and those in a journalist’s own voice. When the word was used by a source, FAIR noted their occupation. FAIR also noted if a “brutal” claim came in an opinion piece or a news story. 

If an occurrence of “brutal” was not clearly attributed to a party in the conflict, it was labeled “unattributed” and not included in the data analysis. For instance, the statement “most news and commentary describes the war in Gaza as the latest brutal episode in the conflict between Israelis and Arabs” (Wall Street Journal, 11/6/23) does not clearly attribute “brutal” to a particular side. On the other hand, if a statement called both parties “brutal”—such as a Palestinian source’s statement, “Fear makes us brutal to each other” (New York Times, 1/31/24)—then it was counted as two instances, one for each party.

Total characterizations

Looking at all attributions, 77% of the time when the word “brutal” was used to describe an actor in the conflict, it referred to Palestinians and their actions. This was 73% of the time at the Times, 78% at the Post and 87% at the Journal. Only 23% of the time was “brutal” used to describe Israel’s actions—even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.

Out of the 350 “brutal” mentions that were analyzed, 246 came from straight news stories—in quotes from sources and in journalists’ own words—while 104 came from op-eds. The lopsided rate at which “brutal” was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories: 77% of “brutal” mentions in news reports and 77% in op-eds were applied to Palestinians.

That publications were just as likely to describe Palestinians, as opposed to Israelis, as “brutal” in a straight news story versus an op-ed indicates a blurred distinction between these categories. Describing violent actors or their actions as “brutal,” after all, is an opinion, not a fact. That opinion may be well-justified, but it remains subjective.

The New York Times, in fact, distributed an internal memo in November (leaked to the Intercept, 4/15/24) instructing reporters to refrain from using “incendiary” language in their reporting on the war on Gaza, because “heated language can often obscure rather than clarify.” The memo highlighted the risks of double standards, asking, “Can we articulate why we are applying those words to one particular situation and not another?” 

Our study found a clear pattern of the tendentious word “brutal” being applied overwhelmingly to one side of the conflict, supporting the concerns that Times staffers expressed to the Intercept that the memo—which also prohibited the use of the term “occupied territory”—reflected a deference to Israeli talking points under the guise of journalistic objectivity. 

Reflexive inoculation

It took until the week of November 25 for the Times and December 2 for the Post to publish more characterizations of Israel as “brutal” than of Palestinians in a week. But that inversion only happened a few more times. From that point on, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to over 30,000 and children began to die not just from bombs but also famine, the frequency of “brutal” characterizations at the two papers dropped overall, and Palestinians were still more likely than Israel to be called “brutal” each week. 

Meanwhile, as “brutal” references diminished at the Journal as well, there was virtually no shift in its application. From the week of December 9 through the end of the collection period, the Journal only characterized Israel’s actions as “brutal” once—versus seven times for Palestinian actions.

Much of the imbalance has to do with how often journalists reflexively—and lazily—inject “brutal” into phrases like “in the wake of Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel” (e.g., New York Times, 10/30/23, 1/2/24) or “following Hamas’s brutal assault” (e.g., Washington Post, 10/17/23, 10/19/23). Reporters seemed to want to inoculate themselves against charges of being insufficiently anti-Hamas, while at the same time giving their audience the semblance of context.

BBC (2/29/24)

We now know that some of the most horrific atrocity claims that came out of Israel following the October 7 attack were fabrications or embellishments: There were no beheaded babies (FAIR.org, 3/8/24), there’s no evidence of systematic rape by Hamas (Electronic Intifada, 1/9/24; Intercept, 2/28/24) and at least some of the bodies burned beyond recognition—both Israeli and Palestinian—were killed by Israeli weapons (FAIR.org, 2/23/24). 

But assume that journalists didn’t know this. Isn’t Israel’s well-documented intent to collectively punish the entire 2.2 million person population of Gaza through indiscriminate bombing and starvation, killing more children under the age of 10 than the number of people (soldiers and civilians) killed in total in the October 7 attack, at least equally deserving of the label “brutal”?

That top US newspapers have used the term more than three times as much to describe Palestinian actions than Israeli ones—a cruel inversion of the actual death toll of the conflict—illustrates that their humanitarian concerns are not universal. 

Consider the actual meaning of “brutal,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “suitable to one who lacks intelligence, sensitivity or compassion: befitting a brute,” and “typical of beasts.” These newspapers’ selective use of the word echoes Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s statement that Palestinians are “human animals.” 

‘Brutal’ attack, ‘massive’ response

This New York Times editorial (11/25/23) referred to “the brutal attack by Hamas on October 7 and the massive Israeli retaliatory assault on Gaza.”

Statements characterizing the October 7 attack as “brutal” were often followed by neutral descriptions of the Israeli assault, even in articles ostensibly concerned with the Palestinian situation. 

A piece by the Times’ editorial board called “The Only Way Forward” (11/25/23), for example, laid out the paper’s view of how to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict. It used “brutal” to describe Palestinian actions, but the more neutral “massive” to describe Israeli ones:

The brutal attack by Hamas on October 7 and the massive Israeli retaliatory assault on Gaza have already led to too much death and destruction, and have ignited communal hatreds in the United States and beyond.

The Post (11/27/23) used a similar frame:

Israel has mounted a massive assault on the densely populated Gaza Strip, killing more than 13,000—including thousands of children—since October 7, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a brutal cross-border assault on Israel, killing about 1,200 people—including dozens of children—and taking about 240 people into Gaza as hostages.

Note that the assault that by the Post‘s own reckoning killed two orders of magnitude more children was not the one that the paper thought deserved the label “brutal.”

The Journal (10/17/23) used the same frame in an op-ed headlined “Israel Must Follow the Laws Hamas Violates: But the Jewish State Isn’t Culpable for Its Enemy’s Using Gazans as Human Shields”:

The brutal slaughter of Israeli civilians has thrown Hamas’s advocates on the defensive, but if Israel is blamed for massive civilian casualties, this could change.

These statements, which range from stale lamentations of the conflict’s death toll to purely aesthetic concern for Israel’s public image, seem sympathetic at first blush. In fact, they really act as a sort of stress-test for the dehumanizing logic underpinning Western reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza, especially in the first few months after October 7. 

In these cases, affective language is still only applied to Palestinian, not Israeli, violence. The extreme gore in Gaza that the world bears daily witness to apparently did not warrant a description as emotive as “brutal.” And whatever concern these publications may have for Israel’s victims isn’t enough for them to openly question, in a meaningful and timely way, whether Israel’s stated goal of destroying Hamas is its actual one. 

Describing Israel’s actions as a “response” to “brutal” Palestinians helps paint a picture in readers’ minds that the scale of destruction in Gaza is an unfortunate but natural result of the October 7 Hamas attack—as though Israeli forces hadn’t killed more than 10,000 Palestinians, including more than 2,000 children, prior to October 7 in the 21st century. Add to this the logic of the “human shields” excuse, and it suggests that there’s no Palestinian death toll high enough to merit rhetorical condemnation from these publications.

‘A brutal, ugly, inhumane people’

The sources quoted by the Times, Post and Journal, when they called one side of the conflict “brutal,” were talking about Palestinians 64% of the time. But that was less lopsided than when reporters for those papers were applying the term in their own voice—when they used “brutal” 83% of the time in reference to Palestinians. 

The Times, which urged its journalists not to use emotional phrases in their own voice, or “even in quotations”—suggesting there might be more leeway in such an instance–once again did not follow its own guidelines. When the paper used the term “brutal,” reporters applied it to Palestinian actors or actions 79% of the time when writing in their own journalistic voice, and 61% of the time in quotations.

Wall Street Journal editors (12/14/23) said President Joe Biden was “right to say” that “Hamas” was “a brutal, ugly, inhumane people” who “have to be eliminated.”

Two categories of sources were the most frequently quoted: foreign government officials and US government officials, which made up 28% and 27% of total sources, respectively. Quotes from foreign government officials were roughly evenly split between calling Palestinians and Israelis “brutal.” These sources included Israeli Defense Force officials, on the one hand, who made statements like “Hamas seeks to deliberately cause the maximum amount of harm and brutality possible to civilians” (Washington Post, 11/10/23). On the other hand, President Lula Da Silva of Brazil (New York Times, 2/18/24) remarked on Israel’s actions, “I have never seen such brutal, inhumane violence against innocent people.”

Quotes from US government officials included statements from President Joe Biden (Wall Street Journal, 12/14/23): “Nobody on God’s green Earth can justify what Hamas did. They’re a brutal, ugly, inhumane people, and they have to be eliminated.” National security advisor Jake Sullivan (New York Times, 11/28/23) described Hamas as the “architects” of a “brutal, bloody massacre.”

The only two US government sources to call Israelis “brutal” were Sen. Bernie Sanders (Washington Post, 1/4/24), who called Israeli violence an “illegal, immoral, brutal and grossly disproportionate war against the Palestinian people,” and the White House interns who issued a statement (Wall Street Journal, 12/8/23) saying they were “horrified” by both the “brutal October 7 Hamas attack” and “the brutal and genocidal response by the Israeli government.” 

As FAIR (3/18/22) has noted, the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrated Western media’s capacity to cover civilian suffering with sensitivity and empathy—when that suffering is caused by an official US enemy. But with military campaigns waged by the US and its allies, media’s humanitarian concerns tend to fade. The uneven deployment of “brutal” seems like a clear case of Western media not just shielding a US ally from justifiable criticism, but actively inciting public hatreds of Palestinians by portraying their violence as exceptionally inhumane despite paling in comparison to that of their colonial oppressor.

Research assistance: Phillip HoSang

The post ‘Brutal’ Is a Word Mostly Reserved for Palestinian Violence appeared first on FAIR.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Black Alliance for Peace’s Chris Bernadel about Haiti for the April 12, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240412Bernadel.mp3

 

Chicago Tribune (3/27/24)

Janine Jackson: Columnist Clarence Page reflects US liberal media’s understanding of Haiti with a piece headlined “Haiti’s Tragic History Just Keeps Repeating Itself.” “The Biden administration,” Page writes, “shows little appetite to become deeply immersed in perennially troubled Haiti.” And “it’s no secret that many Americans have grown weary of trying to solve too many of the world’s problems.”

The Hill notes that more than 5 million Haitians, out of a population of 11 million, are at stage three and four levels of hunger—the fifth stage being famine. The US, described as “one of the largest donors for Haiti,” is reporting difficulties in delivering aid, but bravely plans “no change in strategy to address the crisis.”

A piece in the Plain Dealer suggests why we should care: Haiti’s “economic, social and environmental meltdown” is “sure to reach our shores.”

So, yes, you can learn something about Haiti’s current crisis, and the US view of it, from the news media. What you won’t learn about are the roots of the crisis, much less how they can be traced back to the US.

Chris Bernadel works with the Black Alliance for Peace Haiti/Americas Team and the Haitian grassroots organization MOLEGHAF. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chris Bernadel.

Chris Bernadel: Thank you for having me; I’m glad to be here.

JJ: The first, if not the only, thing that many US citizens will take away from media coverage about Haiti today is that “gang violence” is terrorizing the capital, Port-au-Prince. But when Americans think about gangs, their image is generally of poor, young, probably urban people, disaffected, unemployed, who are just grabbing whatever weapons they can and sticking up people on the street for money and for kicks. But that doesn’t really properly convey who the gangs right now in Haiti are, or where they come from, does it?

CB: No, not at all. And in the history of Haiti, there have been a number of times when armed groups have been involved in the political situation. These armed groups, or paramilitaries, as I like to call them, are funded by the ruling elite of Haitian society, the ruling elite that controls the ports, families like the Bigio family, and they’re made up of many of the young men from the poorest areas of the Haitian capital and other parts of Haiti. But many of the members and leadership of these groups are former police, former military; some of them have military training. So to call them gangs is a mistake. And I would say the proper characterization is paramilitary groups, armed groups, and they’re carrying out the interests of the ruling Haitian financial elite who have controlled Haiti’s economy for a long time.

JJ: Haiti doesn’t manufacture guns, right? So the guns are coming from somewhere else.

CB: Exactly. The guns are coming from the United States. Most are coming through Miami, through these privately owned ports, or ports that are owned by these wealthy families, and they’re being disseminated around the poor neighborhoods in order to try to carry out the political objectives of different sections of Haiti’s ruling elite. So they’ll arm one group to attack another group, and they’ll have groups protect certain areas and not go into other areas. But these armed paramilitary groups, for the most part, are carrying out the interests of the ruling elite.

The Hill (4/3/24)

JJ: Let’s talk about the so-called political landscape. The Caribbean Community and Common Market, CARICOM, has put forth a proposal for a transitional government that The Hill, just for one example, says “will be key to efforts to put Haiti on the path to restore security and wrestle control back from the gangs.”

You’ve already complicated the “gangs” part of that, but what is the response of Haiti advocates to this CARICOM proposal, both what it says and the way it came about?

CB: This CARICOM proposal is a new face for the same process, the same kind of thing that’s been going on. The main issue with Haiti, the main problem in Haiti, are not these armed groups, not these paramilitaries, as is being portrayed. The main problem continues to be what it’s been, specifically, since the 2004 coup d’etat against Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

So the main problem in Haiti is the international community, the so-called Core Group, US foreign policy implementing their will in Haiti, and not allowing for Haitian society to develop a government and a civil society that serves their interest and their needs. The constant interventions, starting with the MINUSTAH intervention in 2004 that lasted into 2017, which pretty much laid the ground for the crisis we have in Haiti today. That situation removed all of what was left of a legitimate Haitian government. We went from a period where we had around 7,000 elected officials to today, where we have zero elected officials in power.

Politico (5/4/15)

We’ve gone from one version of the PHTK to another to another, first one being delivered to us by Hillary Clinton, when she flew into Haiti to ensure that Michel Martelly would be able to pursue the presidency, and then followed by Jovenel Moïse, and then with Ariel Henry. And now that they’ve forced Ariel Henry to step down, in order to implement this transitional council, we’re seeing more of the same. These are the same political actors, the same political class that the Haitian people have shown time and time again they do not trust, and they see them as foreign actors, people acting on the behalf of foreign interests.

JJ: I know that a lot of listeners don’t know the deep history of US intervention in Haiti, and international intervention in Haiti. I would ask them to look back to 1791 and George Washington’s promise to help the French quell “the alarming insurrection of the Negroes.” Or they can look up the 1915-to-1934 occupation, or right up to the 2015 Politico headline calling Bill and Hillary Clinton “The King and Queen of Haiti.”

But it is, of course, as you’re saying, the 2004 coup—the role of that can’t be overstated. And I guess what I want to say is, if you have an illegitimate result, an illegal action, and then that leads to other illegal actions, it doesn’t get cleansed along the way because the facts on the ground change. There is no way to understand Haiti’s present without understanding its history.

Chris Bernadel: “The problem in Haiti is…the way that the economy has been artificially propped up to support foreign enterprises.” (image: The Narrative)

CB: Exactly. And the problem in Haiti is the socioeconomic problem, as far as the structure of Haiti’s economy, the way that the economy has been artificially propped up to support foreign enterprises and carry out the interest of the Core Group, primarily France, Canada, the United States. And also, the United States, using the 2019 Global Fragility Act, has plans to carry out further intervention in Haiti, and to further diminish the sovereignty of the Haitian people, by implementing more unelected governments, putting people into position without any legitimacy, without any constitutional reasoning, without any constitutional legality, they’re putting these people into office.

And what’s even more outrageous, now that the CARICOM community is acting in the same way that the Core Group has been acting in Haiti, they placed a requirement on all members of this so-called transitional council, where they must accept foreign military intervention in order to be a part of this council.

So this council is a US idea, and is being dictated by the United States and the State Department, as well as CARICOM, and it’s not in the interest of the Haitian people. The Haitian people have already rejected many of these actors that are taking seats on this council. A requirement to be in this Transitional Council, who will be selecting the next leader, the de facto leader of Haiti, is to accept this foreign military occupation, this occupation that the US has been trying to arrange, that has been characterized by some as a “UN intervention,” but it is not a UN intervention.

The UN won’t be sending in anyone. The US got the Security Council to rubber stamp this Kenyan police force that they’re funding to come into the country.

And so with the disaster that was the MINUSTAH occupation of 2004 to 2017, where they unleashed cholera into the country and killed over 10,000 people, as many as 30,000 people, killed by cholera released into the country by UN peacekeepers, so-called.

Now the US, for this intervention that they’re planning, it won’t even be a UN force officially. So whatever accountability that came along with a UN force being sent to the country, now that won’t even be there.

They were attempting to get a Kenyan force brought into the country, and they’ve faced some roadblocks with that, political and logistical, I’m sure. And now they are propping up this council to cover up for what they were trying to do under Ariel Henry, which they now see wasn’t possible. They’re trying to do the same thing now under this council that they’re controlling.

JJ: With the Global Fragility Act, supposedly it’s about countries that are “prone to instability” or something—I don’t know what the language says—without any understanding of what it is that is introducing instability to these places. And this is a new face. But what I hear you saying is, it’s a new face on an old story. Really, it’s the same thing.

CB: Exactly right. So-called fragile states, countries prone to instability, conflict and poverty, are being framed as threats to US security. And the Global Fragility Act is a means for them to more easily send out their resources and institutions from the Defense Department, the State Department, USAID and the Treasury, so-called international allies and partners, to deal with these situations.

Democracy Now! (3/11/24)

So this is just a new form of what they did in 1915, when they invaded the country and had to come up with excuses and reasons to cover up their real motivations. Same thing in 2004, when they did the coup d’etat against Aristide. And now again, we’re seeing the same type of intervention into Haitian politics, Haitian society, where the Haitian people, the masses of Haitian people, who for years have been coming out into the streets demanding a transition to a democratic government that represents their interest, the United States and their allies are doing the same thing they’ve been doing this whole time, implementing a foreign force, implementing foreign control over Haitian government and policy. And the results won’t be any different.

Now what we’re seeing with the so-called gangs, what we call armed groups and paramilitaries, are another way to find a reason to intervene into the country. But it’s not just as simple as that, because the dynamics of Haitian society, where you have a tiny ruling class propped up by this international community, but that really runs things from the shadows, and plays the role of doing the dirty business for the US, for the imperialist powers of the world, to control and dominate Haitian society. They have, in the past and today, found it convenient to fund armed groups, desperate young men in poor neighborhoods, but also, like I mentioned earlier, people who come from the military or the former military, people who come from the police, to enact their interest and will in this situation.

JJ: I think folks are going to read media, and they’re going to hear talk about the transitional committee and government, and all of these machinations, as being about supporting Haitian sovereignty. And “sovereignty” is thrown around with reference to officials who have been essentially appointed or installed by the US and international powers. And so every time we talk about “sovereignty” in Haiti, we’re kind of reifying this fiction of what’s going on, yeah? It’s deeply misleading.

CB: Yes, that’s exactly right. They did this with Ariel Henry, where they propped up Ariel Henry for months and months and months, even though the people of Haiti were demonstrating in the streets, coming out against every policy that he ever put out, coming out against the de facto ruler that was imposed on them that had no constitutional authority. And when they reached the end of that rope, when they saw that the situation had gone too far, and the armed groups had taken the step to actually keep Henry from reentering the country, they now have transitioned to a new strategy with this presidential council, or this transitional council, which will be more of the same.

JJ: Let me ask you, finally, what do real ways forward look like, and what must they include?

CB: Real ways forward must include the Haitian people being able to take control of this transition process. After the assassination of Jovenel Moïse, and even before that, like we spoke about before with the coup d’etat against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Haitian government, the Haitian state, has been pretty much destroyed by foreign powers. And the Haitian people have the right to go through their own process, their own domestic process, to develop a solution.

Black Alliance for Peace (2/24/24)

There are Haitian political organizations, like MOLEGHAF, who are on the ground, working with workers, students, people in the neighborhoods affected by some of this violence. There are other organizations throughout the country.

And another thing, as well: Haiti is not just Port-au-Prince. There are many other regions where the security situation is not the same, but the political and economic situation, due to the situation in the capital Port-au-Prince, is deteriorating. But not the entire country is in the same situation as Port-au-Prince.

But the Haitian people have the will and the right to work through their own process, to come up with a transition to get back to a constitutional government and a sovereign democratic state, where they can make decisions for themselves.

So it’s up to us, allies of the Haitian people, to call out the US, to see through their different tactics, like what they want to do with the Global Fragility Act, what they’ve been doing with this transitional council, their plans to bring Kenyan troops into Haiti as a blackface cover for US imperialism. We have to call them out. We have to hold them accountable, and we also have to support organizations in Haiti like MOLEGHAF. And we have to support the Haitian people in general, to allow them the space to develop a transition, to develop a solution to these problems. And they can do it.

The United States, the foreign powers, the Core Group will continue to intervene and try to control the process. But as we’ve seen, things have gotten out of hand; they can’t predict what’s going to happen next and they can’t control the situation. So they’re trying to look for new versions of the same solution they’ve always proposed to the situation, which is them dominating.

So now the Haitian people have an opportunity to develop their own processes, their own solutions, and it’s going to be up to them. All we can do is keep the US government out of it and try our best to keep the US government from overthrowing whatever democratic, sovereign form of Haitian government that can come out of that process.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Chris Bernadel from the Black Alliance for Peace Haiti/Americas Team, as well as MOLEGHAF, a Haitian grassroots organization. You can find information about what we’re talking about online at BlackAllianceForPeace.com. Chris Bernadel, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

CB: You’re welcome.

 

 

The post ‘Interventions Laid the Groundwork for the Crisis in Haiti Today’<br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Chris Bernadel on Haiti appeared first on FAIR.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240412.mp3

 

Washington Post (3/25/24)

This week on CounterSpin: US corporate media’s story about Haiti is familiar. Haiti, according to various recent reports, has “whipped from one calamity to another.” The country is a “cataclysm of hunger and terror,” “teetering on the brink of collapse,” “spiraling deeper into chaos” or else “descending into gang-fueled anarchistic chaos.” It’s “become a dangerously rudderless country.” According to one Florida paper’s editorial: “Haiti’s unrest” is now “becoming our problem,” as Floridians and the US “struggle to help people in Haiti, although history suggests there are no answers.”

Or, well, there is one answer: The Washington Post made space for a former ambassador to explain that 20 years ago in Haiti, “the worst outcomes were avoided through decisive American intervention. Today’s crisis might require it as well.”

At this point, the Austin American-Statesman’s “Haiti Cannibalism Claims Unfounded” might pass for refreshing.

AP had a piece that actually talked to Haitians amid what is indeed a deep and deepening crisis. A grandmother told the wire service, “We’re living day-by-day and hoping that something will change.”

We talk about what has to change—including, importantly, Western media presentations that ignore or erase even recent history—with Chris Bernadel, from the Black Alliance for Peace‘s Haiti/Americas Team and Haitian grassroots group Moleghaf.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240412Bernadel.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Elon Musk vs. Brazil.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240412Banter.mp3

The post Chris Bernadel on Haiti appeared first on FAIR.

 

“We can’t go beyond the laws of a country,” Musk has said (Wall Street Journal, 4/8/24)—unless, of course, he doesn’t like the government making the laws.

Elon Musk, the right-wing anti-union billionaire owner of Twitter (recently rebranded as X), has cast his defiance of a Brazilian judicial ruling as a free speech crusade against censorship. Such framing is, of course, bullshit. It is instead a political campaign by a capitalist to use social media to reshape global politics in favor of the right. And it’s important that we all understand why that is.

As Reuters (4/7/24) reported, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered “the blocking of certain accounts” on Twitter, prompting Musk to announce that Twitter would defy the judge’s orders “because they were unconstitutional.” He went on to call for Moraes’ resignation.

It isn’t clear which accounts are being targeted, but the judge is investigating “‘digital militias’ that have been accused of spreading fake news and hate messages during the government of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.” He’s also probing “an alleged coup attempt by Bolsonaro.”

The AP (4/8/24) then reported that the judge opened up an inquest into Musk directly, saying the media mogul “began waging a public ‘disinformation campaign’ regarding the top court’s actions.”

Musk claimed that he’s doing this in the name of free speech at the expense of profit, saying “we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there” (Wall Street Journal, 4/8/24). He added that “principles matter more than profit.”

Michael Shellenberger (Public, 4/8/24), an enthusiastic pro-Musk pundit, was less restrained, saying the judge “has taken Brazil one step closer to being a dictatorship.” To Shellenberger, it’s “clear that Elon Musk is the only thing standing in the way of global totalitarianism.”

‘Par for the course’

Verge (1/25/23): “The documentary’s ban isn’t an example of Musk violating a vocal ‘free speech absolutist’ ethos. It’s a reminder that Musk has always been fine with government censorship.”

Anyone with a memory better than Shellenberger’s will recall that Musk’s Twitter has been all too eager to censor content at the request of the Indian government, including a BBC documentary that was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Verge, 1/25/23). India under Modi, who heads the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP party, has seen a steep decline in press freedom, worrying journalists and free speech advocates (New York Times, 3/8/23; NPR, 4/3/23; Bloomberg, 2/25/24). At the same time Musk was pretending to defend free speech in Brazil, he was bragging about traveling to India to meet with Modi (Twitter, 4/10/24).

Musk suppressed Twitter content in the Turkish election in response to a request from Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, saying the “choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?” This move, he insisted, was “par for the course for all Internet companies” (Vanity Fair, 5/14/23). Turkey, with its laws against insulting the Turkish identity (Guardian, 11/16/21), is a country that is almost synonymous with the suppression of free speech—it ranks 165 out of 180 on Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index. Yet Musk didn’t seem to feel the need to intervene to save democracy through his social media network.

The impact of Musk’s decision to censor Twitter when it comes to Turkey and India isn’t just that it exposes his duplicity when it comes to free speech, but it robs the global public of vital points of view when it comes to these geopolitically important countries. In essence, the crime is not so much that Musk is hypocritical, but that his administration of the social media site has kept readers in the dark rather than expanding their worldview.

Grappling with balance

AP (10/25/22) reported that Brazilian social media posts claimed that Lula “plan[ned] to close down churches if elected” and that Bolsonaro “confess[ed] to cannibalism and pedophilia.”

The context in Brazil is that in the last presidential election, in 2022, the leftist challenger Lula da Silva ousted the incumbent, Bolsonaro (NPR, 10/30/22), who has since been implicated in a failed coup attempt that closely resembled the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol (Reuters, 3/15/24). Ever since, tech companies have bristled at Brazil’s attempt to curb the influence of fake news, such as a bill that would put “the onus on the internet companies, search engines and social messaging services to find and report illegal material” (Guardian, 5/3/23).

Brazil experienced a flurry of disinformation about the candidates in the run-up to the election, inspiring the country’s top electoral court to ban “false or seriously decontextualized” content that “affects the integrity of the electoral process” (AP, 10/25/22).

The Washington Post (1/9/23) reported that social media were “flooded with disinformation, along with calls in Portuguese to ‘Stop the Steal,’” and demands for “a military coup” in response to a possible Lula victory. And while these problems existed in various online media, a source told the Post that this occurred after Musk fired people in Brazil “who moderated content on the platform to catch posts that broke its rules against incitement to violence and misinformation.”

While Turkey and India are brazenly attempting to suppress opinions the government doesn’t like, a democratic Brazil is grappling with how to balance maintaining a free internet while protecting elections from malicious interference (openDemocracy, 1/3/23).

Despotic future

Brazilian Report (4/9/24): “Billionaire Elon Musk joined this week a campaign led by the Brazilian far-right to characterize Brazil as a dictatorship.”

Lula’s victory, in addition to being a source of hope for Brazil’s poor and working class (Bloomberg, 4/25/23), was seen as a blow to the kind of right-wing despotism espoused by people like Bolsonaro, who represents a past of US-aligned terror-states that use military force to protect US interests and suppress egalitarian movements in the Western Hemisphere (Human Rights Watch, 3/27/19). As Brazilian Report (4/9/24) put it, Musk has joined a “campaign led by the Brazilian far right.”

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal (4/10/24) noted that Musk’s tussle in the Brazilian judiciary was an extension of his alignment with the Brazilian right:

Supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who gave Musk a medal during his visit in 2022 to announce plans to install satellites over the Amazon rainforest, have reveled in Musk’s defiance, declaring him a “hero,” as the dividing lines in Brazil’s culture wars deepen.

Erdoğan and Modi represent more successful iterations of neo-fascist ideology over liberal democracy. The dystopian societies they oversee make up the political model that the MAGA movement would like to impose in the United States, where a caudillo is unchecked by independent courts, the press and other civil institutions, while rights for workers and marginalized groups are eviscerated.

Musk isn’t simply displaying hypocrisy when he pretends to fight for free speech in Brazil while Twitter censors speech when it comes to India and Turkey. If anything, he is being consistent in his quest to use his corporate wealth to alter the political landscape against liberal democracy and toward a dark, despotic future.

The post Musk Is Consistent in His Opposition to Internet Democracy appeared first on FAIR.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Robert Weissman about the Boeing scandal for the March 29, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240329Weissman.mp3

 

CNN (3/25/24)

Janine Jackson: Boeing CEO David Calhoun is going to “step down in wake of ongoing safety problems,” as headlines have it, or amid “737 MAX struggles,” or elsewhere “mishaps.”

Had you or I at our job made choices, repeatedly, that took the lives of 346 people and endangered others, I doubt media would describe us as “stepping down amid troubles.” But crimes of capitalism are “accidents” for the corporate press, while the person stealing baby formula from the 7/11 is a bad person, as well as a societal danger.

There are many reasons that corporate news media treat corporate crime differently than so-called “street crime,” but none of them are excuses we need to accept.

Public Citizen looks at the same events and information that the press does, but from a bottom-up, people-first perspective. We’re joined now by the president of Public Citizen; welcome back to CounterSpin, Robert Weissman.

Robert Weissman: Hey, it’s great to be with you.

American Prospect (10/31/19)

JJ: Boeing is a megacorporation. It has contractors across the country and federal subsidies out the wazoo, but when it does something catastrophic, somehow this one guy stepping down is problem solved? What happened here versus what, from a consumer-protection perspective, you think should have happened, or should happen?

RW: Well, I think the story is still being written. Folks will remember that Boeing was responsible for two large airliner crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed around 350 people. The result of that, as a law enforcement matter, was that Boeing agreed to a leniency deal on a single count of fraud. It didn’t actually plead guilty; it just stipulated that the facts might be true, and promised that they would follow the law in the future. That agreement was concluded in the waning days of the Trump administration.

Fast forward, people will remember the recent disaster with another Boeing flight for Alaska Airlines earlier this year, when a door plug came untethered and people were jeopardized. Luckily, no one was fatally injured in that disaster.

But the disaster itself was exactly a consequence of Boeing’s culture of not attending to safety, a departure from the historic orientation of the corporation, and, from our point of view, directly a result of the slap-on-the-wrist leniency agreement that they had entered after the gigantic crashes of just a few years prior.

So now the Department of Justice is looking at this problem again. They are criminally investigating Boeing for the most recent problem with Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. And we are encouraging, and we think they are, looking back at the prior agreement, because the prior agreement said, if Boeing engages in other kinds of wrongdoing in the future, the Department of Justice can reopen the original case and prosecute them more fully–which it should have done, of course, in the initial instance.

Public Citizen (3/25/24)

JJ: Let’s talk about the DoJ. I’m seeing this new report from Public Citizen about federal corporate crime prosecutions, which we think would be entertained in this case, and particularly a careful look back at choices, conscious choices, made by the company that resulted in these harms. And this report says the DoJ is doing slightly more in terms of going after corporate offenders, but maybe nothing to write home about.

RW: Right. There was a very notable shift in rhetoric from the top of the DoJ at the start of the Biden administration, and not the normal thing you would hear. Much more aggressive language about corporate crime, and holding corporations accountable, and holding CEOs and executives accountable.

However, that rhetoric hasn’t been matched in good policymaking, and we had the lowest levels of corporate criminal enforcement in decades in the first year of the administration. We gave them a pass on that, because that was mostly carrying forward with cases that were started, or not started, under the Trump administration. But we’ve only seen a slow uptick in the last couple years. So it has increased from its previous low, but by historic standards, it’s still at a very low level, in terms of aggregate number of corporate criminal prosecutions.

By the way, if people are wondering, what numbers are we talking about, we’re talking about 113. So very, very few corporate criminal prosecutions, as compared to the zillions of prosecutions of individuals, as you rightly juxtaposed at the start.

JJ: And then even, historically, there were more corporate crime prosecutions 20 years ago, and it’s not like the world ended. It didn’t drive the economy into the ground. This is a thing that can happen.

Robert Weissman: “There’s no sense in which holding corporations accountable for following the law is going to interfere with the functioning of the economy.”

RW: Correct. The corporate criminal prosecutions don’t end the world, and moreover, corporate crime didn’t end. So we ought to have more prosecutions than we have now. I mean, we’re just talking about companies following the law. This is not about aggressive measures to hold them accountable for things that are legal but are wrong, which is, of course, pervasive. This is just a matter of following the law. There’s no sense in which holding corporations accountable for following the law is going to interfere with the functioning of the economy. It doesn’t diminish the ability of capitalism to carry out what it does. In fact, following the rule of law, for anyone who actually cares about a well-functioning capitalist society, should be a pretty core principle, and enforcement of law should be a core requirement.

JJ: And one thing that I thought notable, also, in this recent report is that small businesses are more likely to face prosecution. And that reminds me of the IRS saying, “Well, yeah, we go after low-income people who get the math wrong on their taxes, because rich people’s taxes are really complicated, you guys.” So there’s a way that even when the law is enforced, it’s not necessarily against the biggest offenders.

RW: Yeah, that’s right. Although the numbers are so small, that disparity isn’t quite that stark. I think the big thing that illustrates your point, though, is the entirely different way that corporate crime is treated than crime by individual offenders, street offenders.

First of all, the norm for many years has been reliance on leniency agreements. So not even plea deals, where a corporation pleads down, or a person might plea down the crime to which they are admitting guilt. But a no-plea deal, in which they just say, “Hey, we promise to follow the law going forward in the future, and if we do, you won’t prosecute us for the thing that we did wrong in the past.”

Human beings do not get those kinds of deals, except rarely, in the most low-level offenses. But that’s been the norm for corporations, for pervasive offenses with mass impacts on society, sometimes injured persons, and instances where the corporations, of course, are very intentional about what they’re doing, because it’s all designed based on risk/benefit decisions about how to make the most profit. The sentences and the punishments for corporations in the criminal space and for CEOs in the criminal space are just paltry.

JJ: So if deterrence, really genuinely preventing these kinds of things from happening again, if that were really the goal, then the process would look different.

RW: It would look radically different. I think that there’s a lot of data when it comes to so-called street crime. You need enforcement, obviously, against real wrongdoing, but tough penalties don’t actually work for deterrence. It’s just not what the system is, in terms of the social system and the cultural system, people deciding to follow or not follow the law and so on.

But for corporations, deterrence is everything. They are precisely profit-maximizing. They’re the ultimate rational actors. If the odds are good that they will be caught breaking the law and suffer serious penalties, then they will follow the law, almost to a T. So this is the space where deterrence actually would work, and we see criminal deterrence with aggressive enforcement and tough penalties really missing from the scene.

And this Boeing case is the perfect example. The company was responsible, through its lax safety processes, for two crashes that killed 350-plus people; they got off with a slap on the wrist. As a result, they didn’t really feel pressure to change what they were doing, and they put people at risk again. If they had been penalized in that first instance, I think you would’ve seen a radical shift in the company, much more adoption of a safety culture. We would have avoided this most recent mishap.

Seattle Times (2/26/24)

JJ: Let me, finally, just bring media back in. There was this damning report from the Federal Aviation Administration last month, and the reporting language across press accounts kind of incensed me.

This is just the Seattle Times: “A highly critical report,” they said, “said Boeing’s push to improve its safety culture has not taken hold at all levels of the company.” “The report,” the paper said, “cites ‘a disconnect’ between the rhetoric of Boeing’s senior management about prioritizing safety and how frontline employees perceive the reality.”

Well, this is Corporate Crime 101. I mean, there are books written on this. It’s not a disconnect: “Oh, the company’s at war with itself; leadership really wants safety really badly, but the workers just aren’t getting it.”

This is pushing accountability down and maintaining deniability at the top. So the CEO doesn’t have to say, “Oh, don’t follow best practices here.” They just need to say, “Well, we just need to cut costs this quarter,” and everybody understands what that means. Anybody who’s worked in a corporation understands what “corporate climate” means.

And so I guess my hopes for appropriate media coverage dim a little bit when there is so much pretending that we don’t know how decision-making works in corporations, that we don’t know how corporations work, when I know that reporters do.

RW: Yeah, well, I’ll just say that is so 100% correct in characterizing what happened at Boeing, because not only is that fake, and obviously culture is set from the top, this is a place where the culture of the workers and the engineers wants to, and long did, prioritize safety. They’re the ones who’ve been calling attention to all the problems. So it’s management that’s preventing them from doing their jobs, which is what they want to do.

Public Citizen (3/18/19)

I think in terms of how media talks about this, I agree with your point, and I think the reporting on Boeing has been pretty good in terms of documenting what happened. But what is often missing from even really good reports in mainstream news media is the criminal justice frame.

Now, admittedly, that partially follows from the failure of the Department of Justice to treat it as a criminal matter seriously, but I think it does change the way people think about this stuff. If you call it a crime, it’s exactly as you said, it’s not errors, it’s not just lapses. It’s certainly not mistakes. These are crimes, and they’re crimes with really serious consequences, in this case, hundreds of people dying.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Rob Weissman, president of Public Citizen. You can find their work on Boeing and many, many other issues online at citizen.org. Robert Weissman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RW: Great to be with you. Thanks so much.

 

The post ‘Punishments for Corporations and CEOs Are Just Paltry’: <br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Robert Weissman on Boeing scandal appeared first on FAIR.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240405.mp3

 

Popular Information (4/4/24)

This week on CounterSpin:  In the final quarter of 2023, after-tax corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion. As reported by Popular Information, corporate profit margins were at a level not seen since the 1950s, as increases in prices have outpaced increases in costs—which Capitalism 101 says shouldn’t happen, because competing companies are supposed to step in with lower prices and grab some market share, right? What’s different now? Well, abject greed, abetted by policy and whistled past by the press corps. As one economist put it, “If people are paying $3 for a dozen eggs last week, they’ll pay $3 this week. And firms take advantage of that.” One reason we have details on “greedflation” is the work of the Groundwork Collaborative. We spoke with their economist and managing director of policy and research, Rakeen Mabud, a few months back. We hear some of that conversation again this week.

Transcript: ‘It’s Important to Focus on Big Companies Using the Cover of Inflation to Jack Up Prices’

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240405Mabud.mp3

 

Photo: Elvert Barnes

Also on the show: While much else is happening, we can’t lose sight of the ongoing assault on reproductive freedom, in other words basic human rights, being given tailwind by the Supreme Court. Advocates warned that overturning Roe v. Wade would not be the end, and it wasn’t. The court is now entertaining challenge to the legality of the abortion medication mifepristone, used safely and effectively for decades, including invoking the 1873 Comstock Act, about sending “obscene materials” through the mail. The Washington Post has described it as a “confusing legal battle,” but CounterSpin got clarity from the Guttmacher Institute’s Rachel K. Jones last year. We hear that this week as well.

Transcript: ‘People Who Don’t Support Abortion Ignore the Science and the Safety’

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240405Jones.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at NBC’s unhiring of Ronna McDaniel.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240405Banter.mp3

 

The post Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation, Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone appeared first on FAIR.