FAIR

 

Ken Klippenstein, an independent reporter operating on Substack and an investigative alum of the Intercept, announced (Substack, 9/26/24) that he had been kicked off Twitter (now rebranded as X). His crime, he explained, stemmed from posting the 271-page official dossier of Republican vice presidential candidate’s J.D. Vance’s campaign vulnerabilities; the US government alleges that the information was leaked through Iranian hacking. In other words, the dossier is a part of the “foreign meddling campaign” of “enemy states.”

Klippenstein is not the first reporter to gain access to these papers (Popular Information, 9/9/24), but most of the reporting about this dossier has been on the intrigue revolving around Iranian hacking rather than the content itself (Daily Beast, 8/10/24; Politico, 8/10/24; Forbes, 8/11/24). Klippenstein decided it was time for the whole enchilada to see the light of day:

As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I’ll let it speak for itself.

“The terror regime in Iran loves the weakness and stupidity of Kamala Harris, and is terrified of the strength and resolve of President Donald J. Trump,” Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, responded when I asked him about the hack.

If the document had been hacked by some “anonymous”-like hacker group, the news media would be all over it. I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combating foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know.

The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement that alleged Iranian hacking (9/18/24) was “malicious cyber activity” and “the latest example of Iran’s multi-pronged approach…to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our electoral process.”

Where’s the beef?

Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 9/26/24) argued that the Vance dossier ” is clearly newsworthy, providing Republican Party and conservative doctrine insight into what the Trump campaign perceives to be Vance’s liabilities and weaknesses.”

The Vance report isn’t as salacious as Vance’s false and bizarre comments about Haitians eating pets (NPR, 9/15/24), but it does show that he has taken positions that have fractured the right, such as aid for Ukraine; the report calls him one of the “chief obstructionists” to providing assistance to the country against Russia. It dedicates several pages to Vance’s history of criticizing Trump and the MAGA movement, suggesting that his place on the ticket could divide Trump’s voting base.

On the other hand, it outlines many of his extreme right-wing stances that could alienate him with putative moderates. It says Vance “appears to have once called for slashing Social Security and Medicare,” and “is opposed to providing childcare assistance to low-income Americans.” He “supports placing restrictions on abortion access,” and states that “he does not support abortion exceptions in the case of rape.”

And for any voter who values 7-day-a-week service, Vance “appears to support laws requiring businesses to close on Sundays.” It quotes him saying: “Close the Damn Businesses on Sunday. Commercial Freedom Will Suffer. Moral Behavior Will Not, and Our Society Will Be Much the Better for It.” That might not go over well with small business owners, and any worker who depends on their Sunday shifts.

‘Took a deep breath’

The Washington Post (8/13/24) suggested that Vance dossier was different from Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails in 2016 because of “foreign state actors increasingly getting involved” in US elections.

Are the findings in the Vance dossier the story of the century? Probably not, but it’s not nothing that the Trump campaign is aware its vice presidential candidate is loaded with liabilities. There are at least a few people who find that useful information.

And the Washington Post (9/27/24) happily reported on private messages Vance sent to an anonymous individual who shared them with the newspaper that explained Vance’s flip-flopping from a Trump critic to a Trump lover. Are the private messages really more newsworthy than the dossier—or is the issue that the messages aren’t tainted by allegedly foreign fingerprints? Had that intercept of material involved an Iranian, would it have seen the light of day?

In fact, the paper (8/13/24) explained that news organizations, including the Post, were reflecting on the foreign nature of the leak when deciding how deep they should report on the content they received:

“This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of the Post. Instead, “all of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.”

Double standards for leaks

Politico (10/7/16) quoted a Clinton spokesperson: “Striking how quickly concern about Russia’s masterminding of illegal hacks gave way to digging through fruits of hack.” This was immediately followed by: “Indeed, here are eight more e-mail exchanges that shed light on the methods and mindset of Clinton’s allies in Brooklyn and Washington.”

There seems to be a disconnect, however, between ill-gotten information that impacts a Republican ticket and information that tarnishes a Democrat.

Think back to 2016. When “WikiLeaks released a trove of emails apparently hacked from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman email account, unleashing thousands of messages,” as Politico (10/7/16) reported, the outlet didn’t just merely report on the hack, it reported on the embarrassing substance of the documents. In 2024, by contrast, when Politico was given the Vance dossier, it wrote nothing about its contents, declaring that “questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents” (CNN, 8/13/24).

The New York Times and Washington Post similarly found the Clinton leaks—which were believed at the time to have been given to WikiLeaks by Russia—far more newsworthy than the Vance dossier. The Times “published at least 199 articles about the stolen DNC and Clinton campaign emails between the first leak in June 2016 and Election Day,” Popular Information (9/9/24) noted.

FAIR editor Jim Naureckas (11/24/09) has written about double standards in media, noting that information that comes to light through unethical or illegal means is played up if that information helps powerful politicians and corporations. Meanwhile, if such information obtained questionably is damaging, the media focus tends to be less on the substance, and more on whether the public should be hearing about such matters.

For example, when a private citizen accidentally overheard a cell phone conversation between House Speaker John Boehner, former Speaker Newt Gingrich and other Republican congressmembers, and made a tape that showed Gingrich violating the terms of a ethics sanction against him, news coverage focused on the illegality of taping the conversation, not on the ethics violation the tape revealed (Washington Post, 1/14/97; New York Times, 1/15/97).

But when climate change deniers hacked climate scientists’ email, that produced a front-page story in the New York Times (11/20/09) scrutinizing the correspondence for any inconsistencies that could be used to bolster the deniers’ arguments.

When Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Michael Gallagher wrote a series of stories about the Chiquita fruit corporation, based in part on listening without authorization to company voicemails, the rest of the media were far more interested in Gallagher’s ethical and legal dilemmas (he was eventually sentenced to five years’ probation) rather than the bribery, fraud and worker abuse his reporting exposed.

Meet the new boss

Musk personally ordered the suspension of the account of antifascist activist Curt Loder, the Independent (1/29/23) revealed, noting that “numerous other accounts of left-leaning activists and commentators have been suspended without warning.”

There’s a certain degree of comedy in the hypocrisy of Klippenstein’s suspension. Since right-wing billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, he has claimed that his administration would end corporate censorship, but instead he’s implemented his own censorship agenda (Guardian, 1/15/24; Al Jazeera, 8/14/24).

The Independent (1/29/23) reported that Musk “oversaw a campaign of suppression that targeted his critics upon his assumption of power at Twitter.” He

personally directed the suspension of a left-leaning activist, Chad Loder, who became known across the platform for his work helping to identify participants in the January 6 attack.

Al Jazeera (2/28/23) noted that “digital rights groups say social media giants,” including X, “have restricted [and] suspended the accounts of Palestinian journalists and activists.” Musk has likewise fulfilled censorship requests by the governments of Turkey (Ars Technica, 5/15/23) and India (Intercept, 1/24/23, 3/28/23), and is generally more open to official requests to suppress speech than Twitter‘s previous owners (El Pais, 5/24/23; Washington Post, 9/25/24).

Meanwhile, Musk’s critics contend, he’s allowed the social network to be a force multiplier for the right. “Elon Musk has increasingly used the social media platform as a megaphone to amplify his political views and, lately, those of right-wing figures he’s aligned with,” AP (8/13/24) reported. (Musk is vocal about his support for former President Donald Trump’s candidacy—New York Times, 7/18/24.)

“Twitter Antisemitism ‘Skyrocketed’ Since Elon Musk Takeover—Jewish Groups,” blasted a Newsweek headline (4/25/23). Earlier this year, Mother Jones (3/13/24) reported that Musk “has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents…spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers.”

‘Chilling effect on speech’

The message Ken Klippenstein got from X announcing he had been kicked off the platform.

Now Musk’s Twitter is keeping certain information out of the public view—information that just happens to damage the presidential ticket he supports. With Klippenstein having been silenced on the network, anyone claiming X is a bastion of free speech at this point is either mendacious or simply deluded.

Klippenstein (Substack, 9/26/24) explained that “X says that I’ve been suspended for ‘violating our rules against posting private information,’ citing a tweet linking to my story about the JD Vance dossier.” He added, though, that “I never published any private information on X.” Rather, “I linked to an article I wrote here, linking to a document of controversial provenance, one that I didn’t want to alter for that very reason.”

The journalist (Substack, 9/27/24) claims that his account suspension, which he reports to be permanent, is political because he did not violate the network’s code about disclosing personal information, and even if he did, he should have been given the opportunity to correct his post to become unsuspended. “So it’s not about a violation of X’s policies,” he said. “What else would you call this but politically motivated?”

Klippenstein is understandably concerned that he is now without a major social media promotional tool. “I no longer have access to the primary channel by which I disseminate primarily news (and shitposts of course) to the general public,” he said. “This chilling effect on speech is exactly why we published the Vance Dossier in its entirety.”

UPDATE: Klippenstein (Substack, 9/29/24) reports that his publication of the Vance dossier is being censored not only by X, but by Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google as well: “The platforms said that the alleged Iranian origin of the dossier — which no one is calling fake or altered — necessitated removing any links to the document.”

 

A US circuit court panel appears ready to uphold a federal law that would effectively ban the popular social media network TikTok because it’s owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The legal attacks on the video platform—which FAIR (8/5/20, 5/25/23, 11/13/23, 3/14/24) has written about before—are entering a new phase, in which judicial interpreters of the Constitution are acting as Cold War partisans, threatening to throw out civil liberties in favor of national security alarmism.

Earlier this year, despite widespread protest (Guardian, 3/7/24), President Joe Biden signed legislation forcing TikTok’s owner “to sell it or face a nationwide prohibition in the United States” (NBC, 4/24/24). Advocates for the ban charge that data collection—which is a function of most social media networks—poses a national security threat because of the platform’s Chinese ownership (Axios, 3/15/24).

Given that TikTok is a global platform, with 2 billion users worldwide, demands that ByteDance sell it off are in effect another name for a ban; an analogy would be Beijing allowing Facebook to operate in China only if Meta sold the platform to a non-US company.

‘Foreign adversary controlled’

The Wall Street Journal (9/18/24) stood up for the government’s right to ban speech it doesn’t like, i.e. that of “foreign adversaries.”

Now TikTok is fighting for its right to remain unbanned in the US court system, taking its case straight to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals. All three of the judges, two of whom were Republican appointees, questioned TikTok’s plea that free speech was at stake. The discussion suggested that the ban will survive the appeal, and ultimately be decided by the right-wing-stacked Supreme Court.

The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial (9/18/24) praising the TikTok ban and the judges who appear ready to validate it, said:

But Congress didn’t restrict speakers on TikTok. What’s really at issue is Chinese control of the app, and TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. TikTok is welcome to keep operating and its users to keep posting. The law merely says TikTok cannot do so while remaining what Congress calls a “foreign adversary controlled application.”

The DC Circuit’s panel grasped this distinction. Judge Douglas Ginsburg wanted to know “why this is any different, from a constitutional point of view, than the statute precluding foreign ownership of a broadcasting license?” Good question.

Ginsburg’s question isn’t as “good” as the Journal thinks it is. Broadcast licenses are finite, as there are only so many FM radio slots in a given geographical location, which requires government management of that limited space. That just isn’t the case with global internet-based media, which have heretofore been accorded the same strong First Amendment protections that pertain to print publications, not the lesser shield granted to broadcast media.

The editorial went on to quote TikTok’s lawyer saying “‘lots of US speakers,’ including Politico, are owned by foreign entities” prompting Rao to reply, “But not foreign adversaries.” Sri Srinivasan, a third judge on the panel—appointed by Barack Obama, and well-known for his bipartisan appeal (NPR, 5/23/13)—also followed the logic of the “China exception” to free speech, asking whether a Chinese-owned entity should be banned if the US were to go to war with China (Reuters, 9/17/24).

‘Skeptical’ of free-speech argument

“When you have speech in the United States, our history and tradition is we do not suppress that speech because we don’t like those ideas,” a lawyer for TikTok argued (Roll Call, 9/16/24).

Few other outlets outright agreed with the judges, but many reported that the judges were “skeptical” or showed “skepticism” of the free-speech argument (NBC, 9/16/24; Washington Post, 9/16/24; Roll Call, 9/16/24), while Politico (9/16/24) and the New York Post (9/16/24) said the judges “grilled” the app’s lawyer.

The leaders of the ominously titled House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party filed an amicus brief (8/2/24) with the appeals court, saying the law does “not regulate speech or require any social media company to stop operating in the United States,” because it is “focused entirely on the regulation of foreign adversary control.”

This, right here, is key. China is officially designated as an “adversary,” along with Iran and Cuba, despite the fact that China and the US have formal diplomatic relations and do billions of dollars in trade. The suggestion is that US citizens can and should be denied access to news and views that are tied to so-called adversary countries.

Iran’s Press TV is no objective media outlet by any measure, but would be important viewing for anyone who wants to further understand the Middle East, the same way one might explore Israel’s Haaretz or Qatar-based Al Jazeera. Its website is currently operational, but in 2021 the US government seized “33 Iranian government-affiliated media websites,” including that of Press TV (Al Jazeera, 6/23/21).

FAIR (8/5/20) has raised the concern that if TikTok is banned because of its Chinese affiliation, then Chinese newspapers and broadcasters, which many people rely on to inform themselves of the Chinese government perspective, could also be censored. These outlets have been feeling federal heat ever since the US State Department, in a move reminiscent of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, forced Chinese state media outlets to register as foreign agents (ABC, 2/18/20; FAIR.org, 2/28/22).

Unpopular censorship

Support for banning TikTok has fallen from 50% in March 2023 to 32% in July/August 2024 (Pew, 9/5/24).

Unsurprisingly, the potential ban of the fourth-most popular social media platform in the US is unpopular with the public. Pew Research (9/5/24) reported: “The share of Americans who support the US government banning TikTok now stands at 32%. That’s down from 38% in fall 2023 and 50% in March 2023.”

That’s not surprising given that users say a ban “would hurt countless people and businesses that rely on TikTok for a significant portion of their income,” according to AP (3/16/24). “TikTok has become an unrivaled platform for dialogue and community.”

Many Americans are turning to the network for news (Bloomberg, 9/17/24). And TikTok has also been cited for being an important communications tool for labor unions (Vice, 5/7/21; Wired, 4/20/22; Fortune, 9/1/22) and other progressive causes (Politico, 3/27/22; Nation, 1/25/23).  It is easy for some people to disregard the platform as a space for silly videos and memes made purely for entertainment, but clearly it has much more social utility than the scoffers realize.

TikTok (3/21/23) claims 150 million users in the United States; its users are disproportionately young, female, Black and Latine (Pew, 1/31/24). Pulling the plug on such an operation would be as disruptive as suspending postal operations—which, of course, is also on the conservative agenda (New Yorker, 5/2/20).

‘Demanding legal scrutiny’

“Millions of Americans use TikTok every day to share and receive ideas, information, opinions and entertainment from other users around the world, and that’s squarely within the protections of the First Amendment,” noted EFF (6/27/24).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a press release (6/27/24) that its amicus brief, which was joined by other media freedom groups, addressed the First Amendment concerns of the law:

​​The amicus brief says the Court must review the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act—passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in April—with the most demanding legal scrutiny, because it imposes a prior restraint that would make it impossible for users to speak, access information and associate through TikTok. It also directly restricts protected speech and association, and deliberately singles out a particular medium for a blanket prohibition. This demanding First Amendment test must be used even when the government asserts national security concerns.

The argument in favor of this law boils down to McCarthyite anti-China xenophobia: America’s most sacred liberty must be abandoned out of fear of the Red Menace. The paranoia manifests in other ways, too: State governments, mostly those controlled by Republicans, are enacting laws against land ownership by Chinese citizens (Politico, 4/3/24).

The House of Representatives has passed legislation that would authorize “more than $1.6 billion for the State Department and USAID over the next five years,” part of which would “subsidize media and civil society sources around the world that counter Chinese ‘malign influence’ globally,” reported Responsible Statecraft (9/11/24). The outlet added, “It’s possible that the program could in some cases be used to subsidize covert anti-Chinese messaging,” reminiscent of “the way Russia is accused of covertly funding anti-Ukrainian messaging by US media influencers.”

Spies don’t need TikTok

TikTok is directly owned by TikTok Inc., a US-based company that is ultimately owned by ByteDance, a company incorporated by Chinese investors in the Cayman Islands. As Chicago Policy Review (7/26/24) noted, “If the CCP wanted TikTok to steal Americans’ data, it would not have chosen this corporate structure that is designed to insulate TikTok from Chinese influence.”

Even Washington Post columnist George Will (5/15/24), one of the loudest conservative voices in US media, framed the “national security” issue with TikTok as a weak and vague excuse to subvert free speech. “Respect for the First Amendment has collapsed, and government has a propensity for claiming that every novel exercise of power legitimates the next extension of its pretensions,” he said. “TikTok will not be the last target of government’s desire to control the internet and the rest of society’s information and opinion ecosystem.”

And the “national security” concerns of the US government (Bloomberg, 7/27/24) don’t hold water. The Citizen Lab, published by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, issued a report (3/22/21) on both TikTok and another ByteDance app, Douyin. The report found that both apps “do not appear to exhibit overtly malicious behavior similar to those exhibited by malware.” Researchers did not “observe either app collecting contact lists, recording and sending photos, audio, videos or geolocation coordinates without user permission.”

More recently, the Chicago Policy Review (7/26/24), published by the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, found that the corporate structure of ByteDance does not indicate that China’s Communist Party has firm control on day-to-day operations as the US government contends. Further, it argued that party or government control of TikTok would have little value for Beijing:

First, China has little incentive to spy on ordinary Americans, since most data has no national security relevance. Second, the Chinese Communist Party does not need to subjugate TikTok to spy on the social media of powerful Americans. Chinese state intelligence can obtain valuable information by monitoring users’ behavior and posts on TikTok and other social media applications. Banning TikTok would not solve the problem of foreign intelligence agencies gathering social media data.

At the same time, Republicans pretend to care about free speech in social media when it comes to claims that Facebook is icing out conservative voices (New York Post, 9/16/24), decrying fact-checking and content moderation by a private entity as censorship. Those sanctimonious appeals to constitutional liberty ring hollow when all the branches of government are working to destroy an entire network.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240927.mp3

 

Al Jazeera (9/20/24)

This week on CounterSpin: On September 17, thousands of handheld pagers exploded simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria. The next day, it was hundreds of walkie-talkies—part of an Israeli attack, intended for Hezbollah, that Israel’s defense minister called “the start of a new phase in the war.” Media dutifully reported the emerging toll of dead and wounded, including many civilians, including children. Harder to capture is the life-altering impact of such a terror attack on those it doesn’t kill.

As every day brings news of new carnage, US citizens have a duty not to look away, given our government’s critical role in arming Israel and ignoring its crimes, and in misleading us about what they know and intend. Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and journalism professor at New York University, and former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday. He joins us to talk about the latest events and media response.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240927Bazzi.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Rashida Tlaib, banned books and deportation.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240927Banter.mp3

 

 

A Scripps/Ipsos poll (9/18/24) reported that “a majority of Americans support mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.” The phrasing dovetails with the Trump campaign’s promise that such a deportation is exactly what a second Trump administration would undertake.

Numerous other media outlets (e.g., C-SPAN, CBS News, Reuters, among many others) immediately reported on the findings, given their political significance. “Donald Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan Is More Popular Than You Think,” was Newsweek‘s headline (9/18/24).

An examination of the poll questions and results, however, suggest that this measure of “public opinion” can hardly be taken seriously, because most people display a lack of engagement and, perhaps more importantly, understanding of the issue. By exploiting this lack of information, the pollsters create the illusion of strong public support.

Unengaged—but opinionated?

Questions in the poll address several different aspects of immigration, but it’s worth noting this one: “How closely are you following the news on the following topics: The immigration situation at the US/Mexican border?” Just 23% said “very closely.” Another 36% said “somewhat closely,” and 40% admitted “not very” or “not at all closely.”

In short, a significant portion of the respondents in the poll is unengaged on this issue, while only a quarter is “very” engaged. Yet the poll presents over 90% of its respondents as having meaningful opinions about immigration questions.

Beyond people’s lack of engagement—which suggests that whatever opinions most of them give are not terribly strong—the Scripps/Ipsos poll also shows that the people it polled lack basic knowledge about the policy issue. This is made plain by responses to a question designed to find out how much people knew about responsibilities for immigration Kamala Harris had been assigned as vice president:

Which of the following, if any, best describes your understanding of Kamala Harris’ responsibilities as vice president, specifically as it relates to the issue of immigration?  She is responsible for securing the southern border 17% She is responsible for addressing the reasons why migrants leave their home countries for the US 10% Some mix of both 28% She has little to no responsibility 24% Don’t know/no response 22%

 

If a person is engaged and informed on the immigration situation at the US/Mexico border, they surely will know the answer to this question. Yet a mere 10% of the respondents chose the option that comes closest to explaining her responsibilities, which is highlighted in yellow: to address the reasons why migrants leave their home countries for the US.

KFF polling (9/24/24) indicates that many Americans are unsure about what is and isn’t true about immigration.

Granted, it’s a difficult time to be informed about immigration in this country. A recent KFF poll (9/24/24) found that a large majority of adults have heard false information from elected officials or candidates, such as the claim that “immigrants are causing an increase in violent crime in the US” or that “immigrants are taking jobs and causing an increase in unemployment for people born in the US.” And many of them—51% and 44%, respectively—think those false claims are “definitely” or “probably” true. (Both are also key talking points for the Trump campaign—as is the claim that Harris has been in charge of the southern border under Biden.)

The news outlets that are supposed to inform the citizenry about issues of public concern haven’t been much help. A FAIR examination (5/24/21) of establishment immigration coverage found it was characterized by “hyperbole about recent migration trends and an inexcusable lack of historical context.”

But rather than take its respondents’ overwhelming inability to answer a factual question about immigration policy as demonstrating a lack of information and understanding, Scripps framed it in its press release (9/18/24) as merely another opinion: “Voters couldn’t agree on Harris’s role on immigration policy, with 17% saying they believe she is responsible for securing the US/Mexico border and 20% unsure.”

Masking apathy

Despite the large segment of the polled population that was shown to be disengaged on the immigration issue, and the overwhelming number who had no idea what Harris’ responsibilities on immigration were, the poll reported 97% with an opinion on whether there should be a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants:

To what extent do you support or oppose the following: The mass deportation of undocumented immigrants? Strongly support 30% Somewhat support 24% Somewhat oppose 20% Strongly oppose 23%

 

Of course, people can have opinions even if they have little to no information. But in that case, it’s important to at least give respondents an explicit opportunity to acknowledge they don’t have an opinion. The “forced-choice” question above provides no such explicit option.

The Scripps headline (9/18/24) neglected to clarify that mass deportation has “strong support” from less than a third of the public.

And although Scripps characterized the results as showing “strong support” for the proposal—”Though It Has Strong Support, Experts Say Mass Deportation Would Take Herculean Effort” was its headline (9/18/24) over a write-up of the poll—in fact, as the table illustrates, the results show only 30% with “strong support.”

As I explained in a different article for FAIR (9/28/23), people who indicate that they only “somewhat” support a policy proposal typically admit that they really don’t care one way or the other—that they would not be “upset” if the opposite happened to the position they just expressed. The “somewhat” option allows the unengaged to give an opinion and do their “job” as a respondent, even though they are not committed “strongly” to that view.

The table above shows that approximately half of the poll’s respondents felt strongly about their views—30% in favor, 23% opposed, with roughly the other half unengaged. Those results probably overstate somewhat the degree of public engagement, but it is much more realistic than the notion that 97% of Americans have a meaningful opinion on immigration policy.

Moreover, even many of those who report feeling “strongly” about it quite likely have no conception of what a “mass deportation” would mean. Instead of asking a vague question to an underengaged and underinformed public, the poll could have examined their understanding of the issue. It could ask respondents what the term means to them, how many immigrants would be involved, what they know about what undocumented immigrants actually do in this country, what impacts they think the deportation of immigrants might have. Asking these kinds of questions—rather than simply polling a campaign slogan—would have more honestly examined what people actually think about the issue.

The fundamental problem with public policy polling by the media is that they really don’t want to tell the truth about the American public—that on most issues, large segments of the public are simply too busy to keep informed and formulate meaningful opinions. Given that media’s prime function is to give the public the information it needs to make informed choices about civic issues, such disengagement is a warning that news outlets are not doing their job adequately.

But rather than take the public disconnect as an impetus to do better, media give us example after example of how “public opinion” polling can give the illusion of a fully engaged and informed public. By now, we should all know better.

Featured image: A Scripps video (9/18/24) falsely claims that the outlet’s poll found “strong support for mass deportations.”

 

CNN‘s Jake Tapper took a baseless accusation made on X and elevated it to a national story, smearing Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib as antisemitic.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Detroit Metro Times, 9/13/24) described the indicted protesters as “people that just want to save lives, no matter their faith or ethnicity.” 

In an interview with the Detroit Metro Times (9/13/24), Tlaib accused Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel of “biases” in her prosecution of pro-Palestinian protesters and not other protesters:

“We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest,” Tlaib says. “We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”

Tlaib went on to blame the influence of academic officials for the prosecutions: “I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on her to do this, and she fell for it.”

It’s a pretty straightforward charge that drew no particular notice for many days. A week later, Nessel—who is Jewish—posted on X (9/20/24): “Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as attorney general. It’s antisemitic and wrong.”

‘Quite an accusation’

Referring to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s prosecution of pro-Palestine protesters, Jake Tapper (CNN, 9/22/24) asserted that “Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that…she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not.”

Nessel’s accusation is clearly groundless, as anyone reading Tlaib’s actual quote can see. But CNN‘s Jake Tapper (9/22/24), interviewing Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, presented the false accusation as fact, and used that newly invented fact to try to force Whitmer to condemn Tlaib for something she didn’t do.

Tapper quoted only one sentence from the Metro Times report—the one beginning “it seems the attorney general decided…”—followed by Nessel’s accusation. Tapper then asked Whitmer: “Do you think that Tlaib’s suggestion that Nessel’s office is biased was antisemitic?”

When Whitmer tried to avoid the bait, Tapper pressed on:

Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law, and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not. That’s quite an accusation. Do you think it’s true?

Contrary to Tapper’s assumption, some of the protesters charged by Nessel are, in fact, Jewish (CAIR, 9/23/24).

Tapper’s remarkable misrepresentation had ripple effects in corporate media, as other journalists (and their editors) repeated the smear without bothering to do any factchecking. Jewish Insider‘s Josh Kraushaar (9/22/24) reported on Tapper’s interview and mischaracterized Tlaib’s Metro Times interview as having “claimed that Nessel is only charging the protesters because she’s Jewish.” (The article later changed the word “claimed” to “suggested,” as if that were more accurate.)

CNN‘s Dana Bash (9/23/24) brought Tapper’s interview up on air the next day, comparing Whitmer’s response to Sen. Tom Cotton refusing to condemn Donald Trump’s declaration that if he loses, “it’s the fault of the Jews.” CNN political director David Chalian responded, perpetuating the smear as fact: “It’s not very hard to say that Rashida Tlaib saying that Dana Nessel is pursuing charges because she’s Jewish is an antisemitic thing to say.”

‘Never explicitly said’

USA Today‘s Ingrid Jacques (9/24/24) charged Tlaib with antisemtism even after Metro Times (9/23/24) confirmed that Tlaib never referred to Nessel’s ethnicity.

The Metro Times published a factcheck (9/23/24) the day after Tapper’s interview, calling the characterization “spurious,” and clarified that “Tlaib never once mentioned Nessel’s religion or Judaism.” It noted that “Metro Times pointed out in the story that Nessel is Jewish, and that appears to be the spark that led to the false claims.”

But even after that piece should have put the issue to rest, USA Today published a column by Ingrid Jacques (9/24/24) that repeated the falsehood in its very headline: “Tlaib Makes Antisemitic Comments Again.”

Tapper’s initial segment warranted an on-air correction and apology. Instead, he doubled down, bringing on to discuss the matter the next day (9/23/24) the very person who initially smeared Tlaib. Only after giving Nessel a platform to repeat her baseless charge—”Clearly, she’s referencing my religion as to why she thinks I can’t be fair,” Nessel said—did Tapper tell viewers that he “misspoke” in the previous day’s segment, explaining, “I was trying to characterize [Nessel’s] views of Tlaib’s comments.”

He then asked Nessel:

What do you make of those today, noting that Congresswoman Tlaib never explicitly said that your bias was because of your religion, and so it’s unfair for you to make that allegation?

“Explicitly”? Tlaib never said it, period, which is what any responsible journalist would point out.

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

You can also sign a petition calling on CNN to retract its false report.

Debates over whether Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s economic proposals constitute Communist price controls or merely technocratic consumer protections are obscuring a more insidious thread within corporate media. In coverage of Harris’s anti-price-gouging proposal, it’s taken for granted that price inflation, especially in the grocery sector, is an organic and unavoidable result of market forces, and thus any sort of intervention is misguided at best, and economy-wrecking at worst.

In this rare instance where a presidential hopeful has a policy that is both economically sound and popular, corporate media have fixated on Harris’s proposal as supposedly misguided. To dismiss any deeper discussion of economic phenomena like elevated price levels, and legislation that may correct them, media rely on an appeal to “basic economics.” If the reader were only willing to crack open an Econ 101 textbook, it would apparently be plain to see that the inflation consumers experienced during the pandemic can be explained by abstract and divinely influenced factors, and thus a policy response is simply inappropriate.

Comrade Kamala?

When bad faith critics call Harris “Communist,” maybe don’t misrepresent her policies as “price controls”? (Washington Post, 8/15/24)

For all the hubbub about Harris’s proposal, the actual implications of anti-price-gouging legislation are fairly unglamorous. Far from price controls, law professor Zephyr Teachout (Washington Monthly, 9/9/24) noted that anti-price-gouging laws 

allow price increases, so long as it is due to increased costs, but forbid profit increases so that companies can’t take advantage of the fear, anxiety, confusion and panic that attends emergencies. 

Teachout situated this legislation alongside rules against price-fixing, predatory pricing and fraud, laws which allow an effective market economy to proliferate. As such, states as politically divergent as Louisiana and New York have anti-price-gouging legislation on the books, not just for declared states of emergency, but for market “abnormalities.”

But none of that matters when the media can run with Donald Trump’s accusation of “SOVIET-style price controls.” Plenty of unscrupulous outlets have had no problem framing a consumer protection measure as the first step down the road to socialist economic ruin (Washington Times, 8/16/24; Washington Examiner, 8/20/24; New York Post, 8/25/24; Fox Business, 9/3/24). Even a Washington Post  piece (8/19/24) by columnist (and former G.W. Bush speechwriter) Marc Thiessen described Harris’s so-called “price controls” as “doubling down on socialism.”

What’s perhaps more concerning is centrist or purportedly liberal opinion pages’ acceptance of Harris’s proposal as outright price controls. Catherine Rampell, writing in the Washington Post (8/15/24), claimed anti-price-gouging legislation is “a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food…. At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding.” Rampell didn’t go as far as to call Harris a Communist outright, but coyly concluded: “If your opponent claims you’re a ‘Communist,’ maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.”

Donald Boudreaux and Richard McKenzie mounted a similar attack in the Wall Street Journal (8/22/24), ripping Harris for proposing “national price controls” and thus subscribing to a “fantasy economic theory.” Opinion writers in the Atlantic (8/16/24), the New York Times (8/19/24), LA Times (8/20/24), USA Today (8/21/24), the Hill (8/23/24) and Forbes (9/3/24) all uncritically regurgitated the idea that Harris’s proposal amounts to price controls. By accepting this simplistic and inaccurate framing, these political taste-makers are fueling the right-wing idea that Harris represents a vanguard of Communism.

To explicitly or implicitly accept that Harris’s proposal amounts to price controls, or even socialism, is inaccurate and dangerous. Additionally, many of the breathless crusades against Harris made use of various cliches to encourage the reader to not think deeper about how prices work, or what policy solutions might exist to benefit the consumer.

Just supply and demand

“According to the Econ 101 model of prices and supply, when a product is in shortage, its price goes up to bring quantity demanded in line with quantity supplied.” This is the wisdom offered by Josh Barro in the Atlantic (8/16/24), who added that “in a robustly competitive market, those profit margins get forced down as supply expands. Price controls inhibit that process and are a bad idea.” He chose not to elaborate beyond the 101 level.

The Wall Street Journal (8/20/24) sought the guidance of Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, who is indeed the author of the most widely used economics textbook in US colleges. He conceded that price intervention could be warranted in markets with monopolistic conditions. However, the Journal gently explained to readers, “the food business isn’t a monopoly—most people, but not all, have the option of going to another store if one store raises its prices too much.” Mankiw elaborated: “Our assumption is that firms are always greedy and it is the forces of competition that keeps prices close to cost.”

Rampell’s opinion piece in the Washington Post (8/15/24) claimed that, under Harris’s proposal, “supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would.” Rampell apparently believes (or wants readers to believe) that grocery prices are currently set by nothing more than supply and demand.

The problem is that the grocery and food processing industries are not competitive markets. A 2021 investigation by the Guardian (7/14/21) and Food and Water Watch showed the extent to which food production in the United States is controlled by a limited group of corporations:

A handful of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80% of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans…. A few powerful transnational companies dominate every link of the food supply chain: from seeds and fertilizers to slaughterhouses and supermarkets to cereals and beers.

While there is no strict definition for an oligopolistic market, this level of market concentration enables firms to set prices as they wish. Reporting by Time (1/14/22) listed Pepsi, Kroger, Kellogg’s and Tyson as examples of food production companies who boasted on the record about their ability to increase prices beyond higher costs during the pandemic.

Noncompetitive market conditions are also present farther down the supply chain. Nationally, the grocery industry is not quite as concentrated as food production (the pending Kroger/Albertsons merger notwithstanding). However, unlike a food retailer, consumers have little geographical or logistical flexibility to shop around for prices. 

The Herfindahl Hirschman Index is a measure of market concentration; markets with an HHI over 1,800 are “highly concentrated.” 

The USDA Economic Research Service has found that between 1990 and 2019, retail food industry concentration has increased, and the industry is at a level of “high concentration” in most counties. Consumers in rural and small non-metro counties are most vulnerable to noncompetitive market conditions. 

The Federal Trade Commission pointed the finger at large grocers in a 2024 report. According to the FTC, grocery retailers’ revenue increases outstripped costs during the pandemic, resulting in increased profits, which “casts doubt on assertions that rising prices at the grocery store are simply moving in lockstep with retailers’ own rising costs.” The report also accused “some larger retailers and wholesalers” of using their market position to gain better terms with suppliers, causing smaller competitors to suffer.

Unchecked capitalism is good, actually

If one still wishes to critique Harris’s proposal, taking into account that the food processing and retail industries are not necessarily competitive, the next best argument is that free-market fundamentalism is good, and Harris is a villain for getting in the way of it.

Former Wall Street Journal reporter (and mutual fund director) Roger Lowenstein took this tack in a New York Times guest essay (8/27/24). He claimed Harris’s anti-price-gouging proposal and Donald Trump’s newly proposed tariff amount to “equal violence to free-market principles.” (The only violence under capitalism that seems to concern Lowenstein, apparently, is that done toward free enterprise.) 

Lowenstein critiqued Harris for threatening to crack down on innocent, opportunistic business owners he likened to Henry Ford (an antisemite and a union-buster), Steve Jobs (a price-fixing antitrust-violator, according to the Times—5/2/14) and Warren Buffett (an alleged monopolist)–intending such comparisons as compliments, not criticisms. Harris and Trump, he wrote, are acting 

as if production derived from central commands rather than from thousands of businesses and millions of individuals acting to earn a living and maximize profits.

If this policy proposal is truly tantamount to state socialism, in the eyes of Lowenstein, perhaps he lives his life constantly lamenting the speed limits, safety regulations and agricultural subsidies that surround him. Either that, or he is jumping at the opportunity to pontificate on free market utopia, complete with oligarchs and an absent government, with little regard to the actual policy he purports to critique.

A problem you shouldn’t solve

Roger Lowenstein (NYT, 8/27/24) informed unenlightened readers that high food prices are “a problem that no longer exists.”

Depending on which articles you choose to read, inflation is alternately a key political problem for the Harris campaign, or a nonconcern. “Perhaps Ms. Harris’s biggest political vulnerability is the run-up in prices that occurred during the Biden administration,” reported the New York Times (9/10/24). The Washington Post editorial board (8/16/24) also acknowledged that Biden-era inflation is “a real political issue for Ms. Harris.”

Pieces from both of these publications have also claimed the opposite: Inflation is already down, and thus Harris has no reason to announce anti-inflation measures. Lowenstein (New York Times, 8/27/24) claimed that the problem of high food prices “no longer exists,” and Rampell (Washington Post, 8/15/24) gloated that the battle against inflation has “already been won,” because price levels have increased only 1% in the last year. The very same Post editorial (8/16/24) that acknowledged inflation as a liability for Harris chided her for her anti-price-gouging proposal, claiming “many stores are currently slashing prices.”

It is true that the inflation rate for groceries has declined. However, this does not mean that Harris’s proposals are now useless. This critique misses two key points.

First, there are certain to be supply shocks, and resultant increases in the price level, in the future. COVID-19 was an unprecedented crisis in its breadth; it affected large swathes of the economy simultaneously. However, supply shocks happen in specific industries all the time, and as climate change heats up, there is no telling what widespread crises could envelop the global economy. As such, there is no reason not to create anti-price-gouging powers so that Harris may be ready to address the next crisis as it happens.

Second, the price level of food has stayed high, even as producer profit margins have increased. As Teachout  (Washington Monthly, 9/9/24) explained, anti-price-gouging legislation is tailored specifically to limit these excess profits, not higher prices. While food prices will inevitably react to higher inflation rates, the issue Harris seeks to address is the bad-faith corporations who take advantage of a crisis to reap profits.

Between January 2019 and July 2024, food prices for consumers increased by 29%. Meanwhile, profits for the American food processing industry have more than doubled, from a 5% net profit margin in 2019 to 12% in early 2024. Concerning retailers, the FTC found that

consumers are still facing the negative impact of the pandemic’s price hikes, as the Commission’s report finds that some in the grocery retail industry seem to have used rising costs as an opportunity to further raise prices to increase their profits, which remain elevated today.

In other words, Harris’s proposal would certainly apply in today’s economy. While the price level has steadied for consumers, it has declined for grocers. This is price gouging, and this is what Harris seeks to end.

Gimmicks and pandering

Once the media simultaneously conceded that inflation is over, and continued to claim inflation is a political problem, a new angle was needed to find Harris’s motivation for proposing such a controversial policy. What was settled on was an appeal to the uneducated electorate.

Barro’s headline in the Atlantic (8/16/24) read “Harris’s Plan Is Economically Dumb But Politically Smart.” He claimed that the anti-price-gouging plan “likely won’t appeal to many people who actually know about economics,” but will appeal to the voters, who “in their infinite wisdom” presumably know nothing about the economic realities governing their lives.

The Washington Post editorial board (8/16/24) wrote that Harris, “instead of delivering a substantial plan…squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.” Steven Kamin, writing in the Hill (8/23/24), rued “what this pandering says about the chances of a serious discussion of difficult issues with the American voter.”

Denouncing Harris’s policies as pandering to the uneducated median voter, media are able to acknowledge the political salience of inflation while still ridiculing Harris for trying to fix it. By using loaded terms like “populist,” pundits can dismiss the policy without looking at its merits, never mind the fact that the proposal has the support of experts. As Paul Krugman (New York Times, 8/19/24) pointed out in relation to Harris’s proposal, “just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it’s a bad idea.”

If a publication wishes to put the kibosh on a political idea, it is much easier to dismiss it out of hand than to legitimately grapple with the people and ideas that may defend it. One of the easiest ways to do this is to assume the role of the adult in the room, and belittle a popular and beneficial policy as nothing more than red meat for the non–Ivy League masses.

Inflation and economic policy are complicated. Media coverage isn’t helping.

Perhaps the second easiest way to dismiss a popular policy is to simply obfuscate the policy and the relevant issues. The economics behind Kamala Harris’s proposed agenda are “complicated,” we are told by the New York Times (8/15/24). This story certainly did its best to continue complicating the economic facts behind the proposal. Times reporters Jim Tankersley and Jeanna Smialek wrote that

the Harris campaign announcement on Wednesday cited meat industry consolidation as a driver of excessive grocery prices, but officials did not respond on Thursday to questions about the evidence Ms. Harris would cite or how her proposal would work.

Has the meatpacking industry become more consolidated, contributing to “excessive grocery prices”? The New York Times (8/15/24) couldn’t be bothered to do basic reporting like checking the USDA website—which, in addition to showing clear consolidation, also noted that evidence suggests there have been “increased profits for meatpackers” since 2016.

Generally, when the word “but” is used, the following clause will refute or contradict the prior. However, the Times chose not to engage with Harris’s concrete example and instead moved on to critiquing the vagueness of her campaign proposal. The Times did the reader a disservice by not mentioning that the meat industry has in fact been consolidating, to the detriment of competitive market conditions and thus to the consumer’s wallet. Four beef processing companies in the United States control 85% of the market, and they have been accused of price-fixing and engaging in monopsonistic practices (Counter, 1/5/22). However to the Times, the more salient detail is the lack of immediate specificity of a campaign promise.

Another way to obfuscate the facts of an issue is to only look at one side of the story. A talking point espoused by commentators like Rampell is that the grocery industry is operating at such thin margins that any decrease in prices would bankrupt them (Washington Post, 8/15/24). Rampell wrote:

Profit margins for supermarkets are notoriously thin. Despite Harris’s (and [Elizabeth] Warren’s) accusations about “excessive corporate profits,” those margins remained relatively meager even when prices surged. The grocery industry’s net profit margins peaked at 3% in 2020, falling to 1.6% last year.

This critique is predicated on Harris’s policies constituting price controls. Because Harris is proposing anti-price-gouging legislation, the policy would only take effect when corporations profiteer under the cover of rising inflation. If they are truly so unprofitable, they have nothing to fear from this legislation.

The other problem with this point is that it’s not really true. The numbers Rampell relied on come from a study by the Food Marketing Institute (which prefers to be called “FMI, the Food Industry Association”), a trade group for grocery retailers. The FTC, in contrast, found that 

food and beverage retailer revenues increased to more than 6% over total costs in 2021, higher than their most recent peak, in 2015, of 5.6%. In the first three-quarters of 2023, retailer profits rose even more, with revenue reaching 7% over total costs.

Yale economist Ernie Tedeschi (Wall Street Journal, 8/20/24) also “points out that margins at food and beverage retailers have remained elevated relative to before the pandemic, while margins at other retailers, such as clothing and general merchandise stores, haven’t.” In other words, if you look at sources outside of the grocery industry, it turns out the picture for grocers is a little rosier.

British economist Joan Robinson once wrote that the purpose of studying economics is primarily to avoid being deceived by economists. It takes only a casual perusal of corporate media to see that, today, she is more right than ever.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240920.mp3

 

The Brainwashing of My Dad (2016)

This week on CounterSpin: Springfield, Ohio, schools are facing bomb threats because some people believe that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating dogs and cats. According to candidates for the country’s highest offices, and the KKK flyers showing up around town, this means that these legal immigrants should be pushed out of the country—or, no doubt, in the minds of inspired vigilantes, much worse.

We spoke with filmmaker, activist and author Jen Senko in April 2023. The Brainwashing of My Dad—Jen Senko’s film and the book based on it—are an effort to engage the effects of that yelling, punching down, reactionary media. We’ll hear our conversation with her this week on CounterSpin.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240920Senko.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of Donald Trump’s threat to democracy.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240920Banter.mp3

 

 

Janine Jackson interviewed the University of Guelph-Humber’s Gregory Shupak about the Palestinian genocide for the September 13, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240913Shupak.mp3

 

Janine Jackson: The September 11 New York Times reports a fatal Israeli airstrike hitting part of the Gaza Strip that Israel had declared a humanitarian zone. On a separate matter, we read that Secretary of State Antony Blinken rebuked Israel for the killing in the West Bank of 26-year-old US human rights activist Aysenur Eygi.

While it relayed terrible news, the Times story also contained the mealy-mouthing we’re accustomed to. Blinken rebuked Israel’s killing Aysenur Eygi “after the Israeli military acknowledged that one of its soldiers had probably killed her unintentionally.” People did dig with their bare hands through bomb craters in the dark to search for victims, but “health officials in Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and combatants when reporting casualties.” And while it notes that the UN and other rights organizations have said “there is no safe place in Gaza,” the Times repeats that “Israel insists that it will go after militants wherever it believes them to be.”

What’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank is horrific, the possibility of an expanded war in the Middle East is terrifying, but for elite US news media, it’s as though war in the Middle East, and Palestinians being killed, is such a comfortable story that there’s no urgency in preventing the reality.

Joining us now to talk about this is media critic, activist and teacher Gregory Shupak. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and he’s author of the book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Gregory Shupak.

Gregory Shupak: Hi.

New York Times, 9/10/24

JJ: So the New York Times September 10 had a story about how health workers are trying to vaccinate children in northern Gaza against polio, but supplies of fuel and medicine are being obstructed by Israeli forces, including one convoy of UN groups that was held at gunpoint for eight hours. So the meat of the Times story is here:

The Israeli military said in a statement that it had intelligence suggesting that there were “Palestinian suspects” with the convoy, but did not say what they were suspected of doing. In another statement on Tuesday, it said that “Israeli security forces questioned the suspects in the field and then released them.” The episode highlighted the challenges facing humanitarian efforts, like the vaccination campaign, and what UN officials say is increasing Israeli obstruction of aid deliveries to Gaza.

So Israel holds up a humanitarian group at gunpoint for eight hours, and they don’t offer anything resembling a reason, and the upshot is “this highlights challenges”; “UN officials say” that this is an obstruction of aid. Knowing reporters, we know that some of them are saying, “Look how we pushed back against Israel here. We said they couldn’t say what the suspects were suspected of.”

But it doesn’t read as brave challenging of the powerful to a reader. And of course we know that that language is a choice, right? So what are you making of media coverage right now?

GS: Two main observations come to mind, not specifically with regard to the story you’re talking about–although that does continue, as you said, the longer-term trends of this mealy-mouthed refusal to just report what has flatly and plainly and obviously happened, and who’s responsible for it. But setting that aside, I would note a couple of other things that have troubled me.

One is that I think so much of the Palestinian issue right now has just been metabolized into US election coverage, so that most of what the public is getting on the issue is “how is the political theater going to be affected by the fact that a genocide is occurring in which the US is a direct participant?” rather than more urgent questions, such as “how can this genocide be immediately stopped?” So I think that that’s a real case of focusing on the wrong question.

I think, likewise, you get some attention to, “Well, how is the Harris campaign going to suffer because the Biden administration, of which she’s a part, has alienated so many Arab and/or Muslim voters in the United States because of the Gaza genocide?” Again, that just reduces the Palestinians and their supporters amongst Arabs and Muslims–not to say that there aren’t many other segments of American society that do support Palestinians to one extent or another–they’re just here reduced to, “Well, how’s this going to factor into the electoral calculation?”

And so that, I think, is, again, really not at all adequate to the challenge of responding to one of the worst series of massacres that we’ve seen since World War II. In fact, the UN special rapporteur just the other day, said that this is the worst campaign of deliberate starvation since World War II. So just treating this as a subset of US domestic politics is not proportional to the severity of what’s unfolding.

The second observation I was going to make is that I think, to a really, really depressing extent, the mass murder of Palestinians, the mass starvation of Palestinians, the total destruction of essentially every structure in Gaza by this point, it’s becoming a “dog bites man” story, in that it’s just become, and I hate to use the word “normalized,” because I think it’s totally overused these days, but this is sort of a case study where it’s barely even newsworthy, that really just shocking atrocities are dropping day by day.

So last week, Israel bombed a shelter within the compound of the Al-Aqsa hospital, I believe it’s the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in Deir al-Balah, and this has, as far as I can tell, effectively zero coverage in major English-language American or Western media broadly. But, again, that is a real travesty to just allow this to not be a leading story every day because it keeps happening; in fact, the fact that it keeps happening ought to be in itself proof of how dire and urgent these matters are.

JJ: You wrote for Electronic Intifada back in July about how even after credible source after credible source confirms that Israel is carrying out a genocide against Palestinians, you said “we find ourselves living through a mass public genocide denial,” and without at all trying to be coy, I wonder, are we now at acceptance?

GS: Yeah.

JJ: Now it’s just kind of a factor. And I wrote down “dog bites man” because it very much gives that feeling of, “Oh, well, these folks are at war with one another. That’s just a normal story.”

Gregory Shupak: “It’s got very little to do with religion and everything to do with geopolitics and capitalism and colonialism.”

GS: Yeah, and first of all, genocide can and should never be just a normal story, but that is very much what it’s being treated like. And second of all, it’s also: yes, brutal, violent oppression of Palestinians has been the case since Israel came into existence in 1948, and, in fact, in the years leading up to it, there were certainly steps taken to create the conditions for Israel. So it is a decades-old story, but there is a kind of hand-waving that creeps into public discourse, and I think does underlie some of this lack of attention to what continues to happen in Gaza and the West Bank.

In reality, this is a very modern conflict, right? It’s a US-brokered, settler-colonial insurgency/counterinsurgency. It’s got very little to do with religion and everything to do with geopolitics and capitalism and colonialism. But it’s easier to just treat it as, “Oh, well, these backwards, savage barbarian and their ancient, inscrutable blood feuds are just doing what they have always done and always will. So that’s not worthy of our attention.” But that, aside from being wildly inaccurate, just enables the slaughter and dispossession, as well as resistance to it, to continue.

JJ: Finally, to promote the idea or to support the idea that this genocide is kind of OK, or par for the course, anyway, and that protesting it is misguided, or worse–that requires mental gymnastics, including charges of antisemitism against Jewish people. Jewish people are leaders in the opposition to Israel’s actions, including on college campuses. And I would encourage folks to read Carrie Zaremba’s piece on Mondoweiss about the lengths that university administrators are going to right now to crack down on and impossibleize dissent and political expression.

But the point is, we still see the dissent. So even the problems that we’re talking about, that media are ratifying and pushing out day after day, people are seeing through them, and there is dissent. And I just wonder what your thoughts are, in terms of, maybe not to use the word hope, but where do you see the resistance happening? You’re a college professor.

GS: Certainly on campuses and many other places as well. Labor organizations: there was a coalition here called Labor for Palestine, and I know there are similar outfits in the United States and other parts of the world. Religious organizations of all sorts, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, likely others as well.

I would, in addition, say that certainly, in terms of just getting out analysis and information, that one of the very few advantages or bright spots that we have, I think now as compared to the past, is that it is easier for independent sources like FAIR, Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss and others to circulate quickly to wide audiences. And that, I think, has been a big reason why the Palestinian counternarrative has been able to puncture, I think, the public consciousness more so than it could in the past. I think it’s totally the independent educational efforts by the Palestine solidarity movement that has done that.

Wall Street Journal, 2/2/24

And one major tool at their–perhaps I will dare say our–disposal is independent media, because this is where you’re getting much more information, much more accurate information, and much more rigorous analysis than the fluff and pablum that you get on the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, much less the blood-curdling racism you get on the Wall Street Journal and its editorial pages. So I think that this era does have one serious advantage, and that’s that outlets like those that I’ve mentioned have a much greater capacity to reach people who might not otherwise be exposed to this anti-Zionist narrative.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Gregory Shupak. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber, and his book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media is still out now from OR Books. Greg Shupak, thanks so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

GS: Thanks for having me.

 

 

Janine Jackson interviewed author Robert Spitzer about the history of gun regulation for the September 13, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240913Spitzer.mp3

 

Janine Jackson: Our guest began a piece for Time Magazine:

Soon after these fearsome weapons began to circulate in society, they developed a notorious reputation. Developed for the battlefield, these guns in civilian hands became the tools of choice in gruesome, highly publicized shootings. Calls for their restriction or banishment escalated, and state legislatures moved to enact new laws.

The kicker is that he’s talking about the 1920s and the tommy gun, the Thompson machine gun.

Today’s opponents of efforts to quell gun violence with regulation often hand-wave toward US history—the Founding Fathers, the Second Amendment—to bolster their case. And that can be persuasive, if it’s unchecked.

Checking it is what Robert Spitzer does. He’s adjunct professor at College of William and Mary School of Law, and professor emeritus of political science at SUNY Cortland. He’s the author of numerous books, including, most recently, The Gun Dilemma, from Oxford University Press. He joins us now by phone from Williamsburg, Virginia. Welcome to CounterSpin, Robert Spitzer.

Robert Spitzer: Good to speak with you.

JJ: Dispelling myths about the history of guns is important at any time, but it’s crucial right now, as the Supreme Court has explicitly inserted historicity into our ability to make decisions about the place guns have in society. Can I ask you to explain the 2022 Bruen decision, and your reaction to it? What should folks know?

Slate, 10/21/15

RS: The 2022 Supreme Court Bruen decision was extremely important, and for a couple of reasons. The first was that it expanded the definition of Second Amendment rights, saying that average people now have a Second Amendment right to carry guns with them, out in society, for personal self-protection.

The other big point from the Bruen decision was that the Supreme Court recast the basis for judging the constitutionality of modern gun laws, and the new standard is that they have to be grounded in some kind of historical tradition of regulating weapons. So lawyers, historians and others have been scrambling since 2022 to examine old gun laws, to try and see if there are analogs or similar laws that compare to modern firearms laws, to try and justify and support the constitutionality of those modern laws.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, the decision is a terrible decision, in part because it’s ahistorical. For example, weapons-carrying was widely regulated, restricted and even barred in early America. In fact, from the 1600s to the start of the 20th century, every single state in the Union had restrictions against the concealed carrying of dangerous weapons, including, but not limited to, handguns or pistols. So to say that that is now protected under the Second Amendment, based on a reading of history, has history upside down.

Moreover, this history standard is riddled with vagueness, and it has opened the door to not only a flood of challenges of existing gun laws—laws that had been accepted without question before 2022—but it has also led to contrary conclusions, where judges in one place will decide that historically analogous laws do support the constitutionality of a modern law, and other judges ruling the exact opposite.

JJ: So there’s no need to automatically exalt any resort to history, as I think you’ve said, when we know the time in which it was forged. But in the case of guns, if I can just draw you out, it doesn’t even square, because as your work explains, gun rights have always been paired with regulations. Talk a little more about that.

Robert Spitzer: “Firearms and other weapons were regulated more strictly in the country’s first 300 years than in the last 30 years.”

RS: Many people think that in the old days, in the early decades and centuries of the country’s founding, that everyone owned guns, that everybody was skilled in the use of guns—or at least adult white men—and that there were no gun restrictions or weapons restrictions to speak of until you get into the 20th century.

And, really, my research has found and demonstrated that the opposite is true. In many respects, firearms and other weapons were regulated more strictly in the country’s first 300 years than in the last 30 years. From the 1600s, 1700s to the 1800s, states, colonies and localities enacted literally thousands of weapons laws of every imaginable variety. I mean, you would be hard pressed to come up with a gun regulation idea today that didn’t exist 100, 150, 200 years ago.

Today, in America’s politicized environment, the antagonists in the gun debate view a gain for one side as a loss for the other, what they call a zero sum game. But that was not how gun rights and gun rules were thought of in most of our history. The two were perfectly compatible. Sure, you’d have clashes at times, but they did not pose the kind of polarizing political paralysis, in terms of the gun issue, that seems to exist today.

JJ: Maybe you’ve answered this, but as a researcher on the actual history of gun restrictions existing alongside the ability to own guns, what role do you see misinformation or misunderstanding playing in this country’s evident inability to take meaningful steps? And how could media or journalists help in that regard?

RS: I think there is considerable misunderstanding about our own past, and the very idea that you might impose regulations on dangerous weapons doesn’t mean that you’re eliminating them entirely. It means that the government is doing the most important job that any government has, which is to protect the lives, health and safety of its people. That’s the single most important purpose of government.

And, of course, in a democratic society, you want to protect and guarantee individual rights and freedoms and the rest. But the idea that these two are mutually exclusive when it comes to gun laws is just a fallacy.

And I think that the news coverage—and I will say, I think news coverage has gotten better, in terms of reporting the knowledge that people have gained regarding our own gun past—needs to try and set aside the old kind of Wild West image of our frontier. Certainly it was an untamed piece of geography and period of time, but if you think of the West of the 19th century, far more people died from disease, died from accidents, died from malnutrition than ever died from guns, frankly. And there were far, far, far fewer actual gunfights in the Wild West than is depicted or has been depicted in popular culture.

So it’s important to set aside the popular-culture imagery of our historical past, whether it’s the colonial era or the 19th century Western lands, and understand that not only were guns strictly regulated—as I mentioned, every state in the country had restrictions on the concealed carrying of weapons by the start of the 20th century—but those weapons not only included guns, but also included knives and clubs. Over 40 states, for example, had restrictions on the books regarding what were called Bowie knives, the famous large-bladed knife named after the adventurer Jim Bowie.

And the idea that knives of a class called “fighting knives,” the idea that over 40 states restricted those things, is one indication that public safety was indeed a top concern, and our forefathers and foremothers well-recognized and understood that dangerous weapons were dangerous, and that you were not depriving people of rights if you regulated them, restricted them, and imposed laws pertaining to, let’s say, the time, place and manner for carrying weapons, or other kinds of restrictions.

JJ: Maybe it follows naturally, but listeners may know of the recent statement from the US surgeon general declaring gun violence a public health crisis, in recognition of the impacts of gun violence, beyond those that are killed—to the wounded, to the families, to the communities, to mental and emotional health. That whole framing is very much at odds with the ownership conversation about individual rights.

Can I ask you, finally, do you see ways forward that engage all of this? Or are we on maybe separate but complementary tracks, in terms of concrete ways forward? What would you like to see?

KFF, 7/8/22

RS: I think there are a number of ways forward, and I would note, at the outset, that I think the public health and medical communities have contributed significantly an important knowledge and research about the consequences of guns and violence.

Guns are uniquely destructive. They wreak more havoc on the body than any other interpersonal weapon. Any surgeon could tell you that, the people who staff emergency rooms could tell you that. It is a public health problem, crisis, and I think it’s appropriate and beneficial that those communities have become involved in writing about, researching and talking about the public health consequences, adverse consequences, of prolific firearms.

Beyond that, there are many public policy alternatives that demonstrably and measurably can reduce, and have reduced in places where they existed, gun harm and gun violence. And most people have heard of things like red flag laws, or universal background checks, or licensing schemes, and other kinds of laws. Some states have those, some states don’t.

What is needed most, of course, is for the federal government to act more aggressively with respect to those or other gun policy areas. And that’s been extremely difficult, because of the very close competition between the Republicans and Democrats at the national level, in Congress and in the presidency.

But the states that have adopted stricter laws with respect to guns and gun violence have lower crime rates, lower suicide rates, lower homicide rates than states that have not adopted those sorts of measures. So we know they can make a difference.

Yes, there are a great many guns in America. There are more guns than Americans, but most of them are owned by a minority of the country; that is, not every home in America has a gun, far from it.

And the average gun owner wants to do the right thing and the responsible thing. And when you talk to gun owners, and get past their instinctive suspicion of the phrase “gun control” or “gun policy,” and talk about, “Well, what do you think should be the public policy?” What you find is that most gun owners actually support most of the policy ideas to restrict and reduce gun harm that we are talking about in society today. So I think that all suggests some positive and constructive ways that the country can move forward.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Robert Spitzer, of William and Mary School of Law and SUNY Cortland. The Gun Dilemma is out now from Oxford University Press, and the ninth edition of his book The Politics of Gun Control is out this year from Routledge. Thank you so much, Robert Spitzer, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RS: My pleasure.

 

 

A New York Times investigation (9/15/24) has given us great insight into Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who—unlike the president and the speaker of the House—enjoys a great deal of shielding from press scrutiny. The paper reported that when a flurry of cases about the January 6 attempted insurrection at the Capitol reached the court, the “chief justice responded by deploying his authority to steer rulings that benefited [former President Donald] Trump.”

The paper’s investigation drew “on details from the justices’ private memos, documentation of the proceedings and interviews with court insiders” from all partisan stripes. They spoke, reporters Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak said, “on the condition of anonymity because deliberations are supposed to be kept secret.”

It was splashed on the cover of the Sunday print edition for good reason: The Supreme Court is a mysterious institution, and Roberts has long been thought of as a more temperate and prudent judicial conservative, a breed apart from the partisan hacks appointed by Trump. The investigation gives us some illustration of what happens behind closed doors, and drives home the point that Trump has benefited legally from the normal channels of American power, not just the followers of his MAGA cult.

‘Damaging to the comity’

The Wall Street Journal (9/15/24) called the New York Times report (9/15/24) on the Trump immunity deliberations “slanted in the way readers have come to expect from the Times.”

Roberts is probably not a happy man these days. Joining him is the Wall Street Journal, which continues to drive home the point that Supreme Court operations, for the sake of the republic, must be hidden from the public and remain a murky affair. Anyone shining the light too brightly is burning through the Constitution.

In an editorial (9/15/24), the paper said that the most “damaging to the comity at the court…are leaks about the internal discussions among the justices.” The editorial board said that an “account of the private conversation among the justices after an oral argument…is a betrayal of confidence that will affect how the justices do their work.” It speculated that this “leak bears the possible fingerprints of one or more of the justices.”

Much of the editorial is a defense of the conservative justices in the Trump cases, as is the paper’s partisan lean. But it goes further, saying that the “intent” of the Times investigation “is clearly to tarnish the court as political, and hit the chief in particular.” It went on:

The story in the Times is part of a larger progressive political campaign to damage the credibility of the court to justify Democratic legislation that will destroy its independence. That this campaign may have picked up allies inside the court is all the more worrying. We are at a dangerous juncture in American constitutional history, and Mr. Trump isn’t the only, or the greatest, risk.

In the rest of the Murdoch-owned press, the New York Post editorial board (9/16/24) republished snippets of the Journal editorial and Fox News (9/16/24) also bashed the leaks.

‘Malice aforethought’

For Alan Dershowitz (Wall Street Journal, 10/30/22), the public doesn’t have a right to know that their reproductive rights are about to be taken away, but they do have a right to know who would dare inform them of such a thing.

A news article painting the Supreme Court as a politicized part of government in 2024 is a little like a scientific inquiry into whether water is wet (CounterSpin, 5/19/23), and it’s easy to disregard the Journal’s anger at the Times as a mixture of partisan feuding and journalistic envy.

But something else is at work: The Journal has a track record of advocating that the court operate without public scrutiny. When Politico (5/2/22) reported that a draft court decision would soon overturn Roe v. Wade, the Journal went into attack mode.

Trump-defending legal scholar Alan Dershowitz took to the Journal (10/30/22) to advocate finding out who the leaker was, saying, “Learning and disclosing the source of the leak would strengthen the high court by preventing future breaches.” In a later piece (2/1/23), Dershowitz asserted that “the argument for compelled disclosure is strong because the source didn’t seek to expose any wrongdoing by the government.”

In direct response to the Politico report, the Journal editorial board (5/3/22) called the leak “an unprecedented breach of trust, and one that must be assumed was done with malice aforethought.” It added that the response to the report was “intended to intimidate the justices and, if that doesn’t work, use abortion to change the election subject in November from Democratic policy failures.” A Journal op-ed (6/24/22) called the leak an “act of institutional sabotage.”

Sheltered from citizens

What is going on here is a seemingly bizarre, but not unprecedented, case of a journalistic institution opposing the actual act of real journalism. When the Guardian (6/11/13) reported on widespread National Security Agency surveillance, thanks to a leak by Edward Snowden, or when Chelsea Manning was sentenced for leaking intelligence information to Wikileaks (PBS, 8/21/13), a few journalists absurdly asserted that both the leakers and the outlets acted irresponsibly in exposing secret documents (FAIR.org, 5/1/15, 1/18/17, 5/25/17,  4/1/19).

But other than spot news, journalism is the publishing of materials that weren’t meant to be public. Reporters commonly get their scoops because someone in power gave them a heads up that shouldn’t have happened—a tip on a grand jury indictment, details of an upcoming corporate merger, etc.

Like its campaign against the leak to Politico, the Journal’s outrage against the Times story isn’t just rooted in its allegiance to conservative policy-making in all three branches of government. The editorial reaction here is the defense of the idea that the court is not a normal branch of government, that it is an esoteric council of secret elites who must operate in the shadows away from the citizenry and, of course, the press.

In other words, the Journal is against, of all things, journalism that exposes how powerful institutions function.

Featured image: New York Times photo illustration from its report (9/15/24) on Chief Justice John Roberts’ deliberations.

 

 

Following the Democratic National Convention, the New York Times’ “Critic’s Notebook” (8/23/24) published an analysis of Vice President Kamala Harris’ pantsuit choices during the event.

“For the most important speech of her life, the presidential candidate dressed for more than identity politics,” read the subhead.

“In the end, she did not wear a white suit,” the piece began, later explaining the linkage between the color and its symbolism of women’s solidarity. Fashion critic Vanessa Friedman outlined the significance of Harris’ navy blue suit choice in accepting the Democratic nomination.

The New York Times (8/23/24) said that Kamala Harris came to her convention speech “dressed for more than identity politics.”

“Ms. Harris made a different choice. One that didn’t center her femininity—or feminism (that’s a given)—but rather her ability to do the job,” Friedman wrote, as if those points were mutually exclusive.

A politician’s fashion choices are undoubtedly symbolic. Friedman has also recently published pieces about Donald Trump’s use of his suits to define patriotism (6/14/24), JD Vance’s use of his beard to portray traditional masculinity (7/18/24) and Tim Walz’s use of rugged clothing to define his “regular guy” image (8/22/24).

In each of these instances, the white male politician is using his style to communicate a message about his—and his constituents’—identities. But only in the piece about Harris’ clothing choice does Friedman use the term “identity politics,” lauding her for not defaulting to “when in doubt, women wear white!”

In fact, a FAIR study of US newspapers found the overwhelming majority of times the vague term “identity politics” was mentioned, it was referring to Democrats and the left.

What is identity politics?

Even though the right has taken to derogatorily using it against the left, “identity politics” is commonly understood to mean forming political alliances based on identities like religion, ethnicity and social background.

That definition applies equally to MAGA Republicans’ explicit or implicit appeals to white, Christian and traditional gender identities as it does to the left’s emphasis on ethnic, sexual and religious minorities. The DNC and RNC’s pep-rally atmospheres are both designed to project unity under political—and politicized—identities.

But a FAIR study of newspaper coverage during the weeks of the Republican and Democratic national conventions found that news media largely peddle the right-wing application of the term. A search of Nexis’ “US Newspapers” database for the phrase “identity politics” during July 14–21 and August 18–25  turned up 52 articles (some of which were reprints in multiple outlets) that related to the major parties, their conventions, and their presidential and vice presidential candidates.  Forty-five of those articles used the term to refer to Democrats and the left, four used the term to refer to Republicans and the right, and three referred to both groups.

A New York Times opinion piece by Maureen Dowd (8/23/24) was one of the 45 articles that associated “identity politics” with Democrats and/or the left. It applauded Harris for how little she discussed her identity, except for promising that she’d sign a bill restoring abortion rights.

“Aside from that, she barely talked about gender and didn’t dwell on race, shrewdly positioning herself as a Black female nominee ditching identity politics,” Dowd wrote.

Harris “dwelling” on her race and gender—as someone who would be the first woman, first South Asian and second Black president in the country’s history—would have been poor judgment, Dowd implied.

“While the left is trying to divide us with identity politics,” the Arizona Republic (7/16/24) quoted an RNC speaker, “we believe that America is always, and should be, one nation under God.”

However, in two Arizona publications (Arizona Republic, 7/16/24, 7/19/24; Arizona Daily Star, 7/20/24), another woman emphasized her lived experience as “a single mother” to uphold her support of Trump—without the term “identity politics” being assigned to her. Instead, Sara Workman, one of the “everyday Americans” who spoke at the RNC, was quoted assigning it to Democrats:

“While the left is trying to divide us with identity politics, we are here tonight because we believe that America is always, and should be, one nation under God,” she said.

The irony of criticizing “identity politics” while invoking a line in the Pledge of Allegiance that was added to the oath in 1954 to assert the country’s Christian supremacy was lost on the outlets that published this quote.

Similarly, a piece referencing Vance playing up his “working-class roots” and “rags-to-riches” upbringing not only didn’t acknowledge the “identity politics” in such a presentation, but granted space to another Republican source to use the label derogatorily against the left (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/17/24). RNC committee member Harmeet Dhillon, was quoted saying Trump’s decision to pick the white, male Vance instead of “a woman or a minority” was “a sign of maturity and confidence in our party being able to succeed based on our ideas, not on identity politics.”

The ‘balance’ double standard

Another concerning idea echoed in the press was the assertion that Harris, simply by being a woman of color, would alienate white male voters, and therefore thank goodness she chose a white man as her running mate!

In the Detroit Free Press (8/22/24), a Republican wrote that Harris needed to “commit to ending identity politics” to get her vote.

In a commentary for the Detroit Free Press, headlined “Five Things Harris Can Do at DNC to Make This Michigan Never-Trump Republican Vote Democrat” (8/22/24), guest columnist Andrea Bitley listed “commit[ting] to ending identity politics” as one of her stipulations. It’s “historic” that Harris is a “woman of color,” Bitley wrote, then connected that to an important qualification: “However, returning to the heart and soul of democracy and broad-based politics that don’t play favorites with niche groups will make casting my vote easier.”

Bitley’s implication is that being Black, South Asian or a woman itself requires special effort to avoid pandering to identity groups—and ignores Donald Trump’s playing favorites with the extremely niche group of billionaires he counts himself among.

Before Harris officially became the Democratic nominee and announced Walz as her running mate, the Lexington Herald Leader (7/21/24) in Kentucky discussed the possibility of another white man, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, becoming the VP pick.

“If you’re looking to balance a ticket that’s headed by the first Black and South Asian woman presidential nominee, then having a young white guy provides pretty good balance,” Al Cross, longtime Kentucky political journalist and observer, told the outlet. He added, “We live in an era of identity politics, and his identity is a white guy.”

The New York Times (7/21/24) also reported:

Well aware of the cold reality of identity politics, Democrats assume that if Ms. Harris, the first Black and Asian American woman to be vice president, were nominated to the presidency, she would most likely balance her ticket with a white man.

In other words, the press regularly advises Harris to avoid identity politics at all costs—except when the identity being favored is white male.

These pieces did at least acknowledge that white and male are identities, but didn’t acknowledge the double-standard of Harris being called to “balance” her ticket out with a white man, when the last 43 of 46 presidencies have been held by white men with white male running mates.

Both-sidesing

Some say Donald Trump is a “threat to democratic values”; others say “identity politics” (and federal regulation) are the “true threat” (Boston Globe, 7/21/24).

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe equated the dangers of “identity politics” to Trump’s threat to democracy. Guest columnist (and former Washington bureau chief) David Shribman (7/21/24) quoted Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner:

The Republicans believe the country is halfway to the Soviet gulag. The Democrats believe the country is halfway to Adolf Hitler. They both see this election in apocalyptic terms.

Shribman continued:

Both sides—those who believe Donald Trump represents a threat to democratic values, and those who believe that identity politics and an inclination toward a highly regulatory federal government are the true threat—consider this year’s election a moment that will define the country for a generation.

People on the left believe Trump’s America is “halfway to Adolf Hitler” because many of his supporters are literal neo-Nazis. They believe Trump is a threat to democratic values because he encouraged his followers to carry out a deadly insurrection on the Capitol after he could not accept that he lost the 2020 election, and he is preparing to overturn the 2024 vote.

People on the right see the US as “halfway to the Soviet gulag” because…Democrats want you to acknowledge slavery and respect they/them pronouns?

This false equivalence is dangerous, and it is difficult to understand how white supremacy, a worldview based entirely on race, is not considered “identity politics” in this case.

Rare mentions of the right

Tressie McMillan Cottom (New York Times, 8/19/24): J.D. Vance’s evasions on his “childless cat ladies” line “reveal the wink-wink of today’s egregious right-wing identity politics and point to the ways that this election’s identity politics might play out through innuendo and metaphor.”

Out of the four articles that used the term “identity politics” to refer to the right, three were from New York Times writers.

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom (8/19/24) referred to the “egregious right-wing identity politics” in the context of Vance’s uncreative—and Gileadean—attacks on “childless cat ladies.” The Times‘ TV critic (7/19/24) also referenced the performance of macho male identity politics at the testosterone-laden displays at the RNC, saying, “This is what male identity politics looks like.”

Lydia Polgreen interrogated the derogatory application of the term “DEI candidate” to Harris, arguing that if Harris is a “DEI candidate,” so is Vance (New York Times, 7/21/24). Polgreen argued:

All politics is, at some level, identity politics—the business of turning identity into power, be it the identity of a candidate or demographic group or political party or region of the country.

Pointing out that white is a race, male is a gender and identity plays into all politics are arguments missing from most of the coverage, which failed to truly interrogate what people really mean when they apply these terms only to people of color and other minorities.

The fourth piece applying “identity politics” to the right came from the right-wing Washington Times (7/16/24) under a headline declaring that Black Republican speakers at the RNC “Put Identity Politics to Rest”—after leaning on their family “histories” that included slavery, cotton picking and “the  Jim Crow South.” “That was where the identity politics ended,” the paper assured readers.

Invisible identities

Race theorists like john a. powell have long interrogated the idea of whiteness and maleness being treated as “invisible” defaults:

White people have the luxury of not having to think about race. That is a benefit of being white, of being part of the dominant group. Just like men don’t have to think about gender. The system works for you, and you don’t have to think about it…. The Blacks have race; maybe Latinos have race; maybe Asians have race. But they’re just white. They’re just people. That’s part of being white.

Harris as vice president is a “symptom” of the Democrats’ “perspective…based on identity politics.” (San Diego Union Tribune, 7/21/24).

This belief that the normal, default human form is white and male is what allows people like Tom Shepard, a longtime San Diego political consultant quoted in the San Diego Union Tribune (7/21/24), to imply that Harris being chosen for the 2020 ticket as vice president is merely a symptom of the Democratic Party’s embrace of identity politics, and one of the “fundamental problems” with the party’s policy:

The Democratic Party, for all of its strengths, has over the last several decades kind of developed a perspective that is based on identity politics, and the reason that Kamala Harris was on the Democratic ticket as vice president is, at least in part, a symptom of that approach.

It’s the same reason why terms like Critical Race Theory (CRT), Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI), “diversity hire” and “identity politics” are used derogatorily against people of color, women and sexual minorities, disabled people and other underrepresented groups that dare to attempt to achieve equity with white men (CounterSpin, 8/8/24; FAIR.org, 7/10/21).

Without specificity in definition and equal application to either party’s politicking based on identities, “identity politics” becomes yet another dog-whistle used against those who simply dare to not be white or male.