Once again, US media is helping take pressure off of the White House by parroting US officials and pro-Israel talking heads insisting that the president is more or less helpless to stop anything Israel is doing in the Middle East, up to and including their ongoing mass starvation campaign and genocide in Gaza. 

“‘He’s a madman’: Trump’s team frets about Netanyahu after Syria strikes,” Axios’s Barak Ravid breathlessly reported on July 20. “Trump was agitated all around…in a call with Bibi,” alleged Sohrab Ahmari, citing “sources in and near the administration.” 

“Trump’s frustration with the devastation in Gaza is real,” Semafor insists. “After angry call from Trump, PM says Israel deeply regrets mistaken shelling of Gaza church,” The Times of Israel claimed on July 18. “Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel: Trump administration has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in recent days,” The Wall Street Journal reported on July 26. 

If this particular genre of reportage looks familiar it’s because it’s a pared-down version of a PR campaign pushed out by former President Biden, his aides, and pro-Israel media allies. I wrote about the trope—Fuming/Helpless Biden—in both TRNN, and, in greater detail, for the Nation the following year. Now that it’s spanned party and administration we can simply call it Fuming/Helpless President. Put simply: it’s any report, analysis, or opinion that describes the president as unable to do anything to stop Israel from committing war crimes or end the genocide overall or, relatedly, any reporting that gives readers the impression that not only is the president helpless, but is very upset/angry/sad at not being able to change Israel’s behavior. It’s an essential media convention because it allows the president to continue all material support to Israel—the endless flow of bombs, military and intelligence support, vetoes at the United Nations—while distancing themselves from the deep unpopularity of Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate bombing and mass starvation. 

The primary conduit for Fuming/Helpless President nonstories is Axios’s Ravid, who, as I noted in the Nation last year, had written 25 different examples of this genre up to that point for then-President Biden, quoting either US officials directly or a string of anonymous “US officials”—often as alleged scoops—claiming that Biden and White House officials were some variation of “breaking with Netanyahu,” “increasingly frustrated,” “running out of patience,” or “deeply concerned” about civilian casualties. Ravid, a former member of Unit 8200, Israel’s “secretive cyber warfare unit,” was awarded for his endless Fuming/Deeply Concerned reports with the White House Correspondents’ Association’s award for journalistic excellence in April 2024. 

Ravid has emerged again as the most aggressive practitioner of the Fuming/Helpless President routine for the new Trump administration. In just the last two weeks, he has published:

• Israel bombs Syrian capital despite U.S. pressure to “stand down” July 16 2025
• “He’s a madman”: Trump’s team frets about Netanyahu after Syria strikes July 20 2025
• White House confirms Trump objected to Israeli strikes in Syria July 21 2025
• Trump team rethinks Gaza strategy after six months of failure July 26 2025
• Trump says kids in Gaza are starving in break with Netanyahu July 29 2025

What Ravid did for Biden he is now doing for Trump, permitting the White House to distance itself from the more extreme and unpopular of Israel’s policies while maintaining the status quo of unfettered material support. Obviously, demand for this genre of low-effort propaganda is far less than it was under Biden, especially when 71 percent of Republicans continue to support Israel’s genocide. But there is a nontrivial faction of MAGA media world—from Tucker Carlson to Theo Von to Dave Smith—that have pushed back on the president’s lockstep support. They have done so for many reasons—principled libertarianism, humanitarian instincts, or, in Tucker’s case, genuine white nationalism—but there’s a modest revolt in the ranks nonetheless, and one that increasingly needs to be damped down by the Trump-aligned Right. 

No doubt feeling the heat from this contingent, and recognizing that being associated with countless images of emaciated and maimed children is not good for the brand in general, the White House and zionist groups in their orbit have dusted off the Biden-era playbook of Helpless/Frustrated President and seek to use it to distance Trump from the horrors emanating from Gaza just as the Biden White House did with great success. It’s easy, low effort, panders to antisemitic tropes of our otherwise benevolent leaders being manipulated by a foreign other, and provides what any head of a criminal enterprise seeks: plausible deniability. 

Trump’s passing acknowledgement Monday that there’s mass starvation in Gaza was widely reported as a “break from Netanyahu” despite it being pure rhetoric. “What reporting in Gaza shows amid Trump’s break from Netanyahu on starvation,” NPR tells its listeners. “Trump, breaking with Netanyahu, acknowledges ‘real starvation’ in Gaza,” Politico insists. “Trump raises pressure on Netanyahu, Israel,” the Hill reports. 

This narrative, born entirely from off-the-cuff comments by Trump, was quickly rejected by US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee who, it’s worth noting, is playing to a different audience. Huckabee went on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” Tuesday, and when asked about the supposed “break” with Netanyahu said, “Let me assure you that there is no break between the prime minister of Israel and the president. Their relationship I think to be stronger than it’s ever been. And I think the relationship between the US and Israel is as strong as it has ever been.”

So why did so many mainstream outlets rush to distance Trump from the horrific images of starving children coming out of Gaza of starving children? Because preservation of American Innocence is an ideological force greater than common sense and “mounting tensions” between US Presidents and Netanyahu is a genre of reportage requiring little evidence and even less effort. 

Another recent masterclass in Fuming/Helpless President stenography is a front page story in the Wall Street Journal, “Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel: Trump administration has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in recent days,” by Shayndi Raice and Alexander Ward. The article is littered with every cliche of the genre: Fuming Behind Closed Doors (“The Trump administration in recent days has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in Syria and Gaza”), Trump Forced to Do Israel’s Bidding Against His Will (“So far, they see Netanyahu leading Trump to act against his instincts”), and Out of the Loop (“The White House said this past week that Trump was “caught off guard” by the bombing in Syria and the strike that hit the Catholic church.”)

The piece even doubles as a means for ex-Biden officials Amos Hochstein and Phil Gordon to wash their hands of Gaza and insist they, too, were powerless, helping Trump officials and allies paint a picture of a White House getting run over by an increasingly powerful and willful ally. Kamala Harris foreign policy adviser Phil Gordon, who, on the eve of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, explicitly promised to never condition aid to Israel, wants WSJ readers to know that Trump is unable to do anything to “rein in” Israel for the same reason Biden was:  

Others say the reality of the relationship is far more complex. While the U.S. sells Israel advanced weapons and actively defends it against attacks, no American president would fully cut off the support to send Israel a message. Netanyahu knows this and operates knowing he can’t really lose U.S. backing for whatever it does. “Every president thinks they have some ability to constrain him and shape him, and they do,” said Philip Gordon, who in the previous administration was national-security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris. “But in the end, Netanyahu is an experienced, wily actor, and knows he can get away with a lot.”…

But this, of course, is simply argument by tautology: “No American president would fully cut off the support to send Israel a message” is a moral choice Biden and Trump decided to make, not a law of nature. It’s not imposed upon them by any outside force. They are not “forced” to back Israel anymore than any war criminal is forced to carry out any war crime in the history of war crimes. They support Israel because, despite some bickering around the margins over tactics and PR, they agree with and support what Israel is doing. This basic fact is simply hand-waved away, lampshaded with a throwaway line by friendly reporters about how the US cannot ever possibly condition aid to Israel without any explanation, treated as an unquestioned axiom. 

But it’s not. Both Trump and Biden are and were more than capable of “reining in” Israel. They can do so by conditioning military support or cutting it off altogether. But clearly laying out how those conditions would work is awkward and associates the US government, and leadership in both parties, with the 21st century’s most horrific and well documented genocide. A much easier approach, consistent with the increasingly popular Politics of Feigned Helplessness, is to manage perception and use court reporters to wash one’s hands of the consequences of their policies and actions. Actually cutting off Israel is difficult and would require a president who opposes what they’re doing. It’s far easier to paint the most powerful empire in the history of the world as bumbling, out of the loop, getting “played” by a country the size of New Jersey, and ultimately frame the US as a spectator that funds and arms countless war crimes but, somehow, is not responsible for any of them.  

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.

Another day, another unhinged racist screed from Republicans in Congress that results in virtually no mainstream media coverage because the target is a Muslim-American. 

Tuesday night, in response to a post on X/Twitter from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that echoed the International Criminal Court’s designation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal, Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) posted on X/Twitter. “I’m sure it is difficult to see us welcome the killer of so many of your fellow Muslim terrorists,” he wrote. “The only shame is that you serve in Congress.” 

The statement follows a long pattern of targeted racist harassment and incitement from Reps. Fine and Nancy Mace (R-SC). And, just like all previous racist attacks, it did not merit coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, or CBS network news, or on-air coverage at CNN. The only coverage Fine’s bigoted rant solicited were short write-ups in Politico, Reuters, and CNN.com, and NBC News web only, and the only substantive coverage was from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who did an 8 minute, 41 second segment detailing Fine’s long history of incitement.

Adding urgency to the violent rhetoric is the fact that Omar was among the Minnesota officials who appeared on target lists compiled by accused murderer Vance Boelter, who allegedly assassinated Democrats in a shooting spree last month.

Unlike Fine’s previous racist screeds, this one at least resulted in condemnation from Democratic leadership in the House. Previous racist social media posts merited no such response. But Fine’s latest rant—in concert with the killing of Minnesota progressives last month—appears to have been a bridge too far, even for the normally silent and cynical Democratic leadership. 

In the past, Fine has called Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) ​“a terrorist” who ​“shouldn’t be American.” (Tlaib was born in Detroit, Michigan). He said Tlaib and Omar ​“might consider leaving before I get [to Congress]. #BombsAway.” He has advocated running over and killing pro-Palestine protesters, called Palestinians ​“animals,” referred to Muslims as ​“rapists,” and openly cheered starving civilians in Gaza. In May, Fine attacked Tlaib on X/Twitter, writing in response to her condemnation of Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza, ​“Tell your fellow Muslim terrorists to release the hostages and surrender. Until then, #StarveAway.” In June, Fine’s colleague Mace told the PBD Podcast she wanted to “send Ilhan Omar Back To Somalia,” in response to Omar’s criticisms of Trump’s immigration crackdowns. She later doubled down on X/Twitter: “Omar clearly has more loyalty to the corrupt hellhole she came from than to the country she was elected to serve.” 

None of these attacks merited any mainstream media coverage—much less any sustained outrage or condemnation. The only reason the latest round of incitement got a handful of blurbs in Politico and CNN.com and (belatedly) a segment on MSNBC is likely because Democrats finally condemned them. And that’s all. Crickets from the New York Times, Washington Post network news, and CNN.

This raises the question: What would Fine or Mace have to say to justify actual media outrage? Actual sustained coverage? These attacks are not subtle or reliant on dog whistles. They’re out in the open, proudly hateful, and an invitation for their proudly bigoted social media followers to double down. 

Contrast this media silence after months of sustained racist incitement against Reps. Omar and Tlaib with the week-long media meltdown last September when Tlaib suggested that Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed charges against pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Michigan because she was potentially biased against pro-Palestine protesters. ​“We’ve [protested for] climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs,” Tlaib told the Detroit Metro Times. ​“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.”

This comment turned out to be entirely correct. The Nessel-led prosecution arrested seven pro-Palestine protesters in a pre-dawn raid in April and the charges were later dropped after Nessel was pressured to recuse herself for anti-Palestinian bias. But at the time, despite the interviewer himself defending Tlaib, the congresswoman’s remarks solicited a full-blown “antisemitism” scandal meriting coverage in USA Today, Newsweek, Fox News and The Free Press, and culminating in a smear campaign by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, which outright asserted Tlaib was an anti-Jewish bigot. This was is addition to the countless articles and segments in the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, Axios, CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, CBS News, and ABC News in late 2023 lamenting Tlaib’s alleged “antisemitism” because she defended the term ​“from the River to the Sea” as a call for equality and freedom in Palestine.

Tapper, who hosts two influential cable news shows—his daily weekday show The Lead, and the Sunday morning agenda-setting news program State of the Union—is the most nakedly hypocritical commentator in all of media. He effectively manufactured the “antisemitism” scandal targeting Tlaib last September out of whole cloth, outright lying about her in an interview with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. “Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting,” Tapper somberly said on air, “that [AG Nessel] shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish”—which is not at all what Tlaib said. A smear neither Bash nor Tapper ever apologized for or retracted, only opaquely saying they “misspoke” in a throwaway line days later. 

Since this shameful, false smear of Tlaib, there’s been a half-dozen racist attacks on Tlaib and her Muslim colleague in Congress by Fine and others, and has Tapper done a single segment on it? He has not. He did, however, find time last night to platform the  head of pro-Israel pressure group ADL Jonathan Greenblatt so he could (again) defend Musk’s neo-Nazi gesture from Trump’s inauguration and accuse the largest union in the country, the National Education Association, of “antisemitism” for cutting ties with the ADL over its promotion of anti-Palestinian racism and Israeli foreign policy. Tapper also conspicuously failed to ask Greenblatt about a recent high profile rebuke of Greenblatt by Yehuda Cohen, father of Israeli captive Nimrod Cohen, who accused Greenblatt of fabricating a story about his family to promote “cheap patriotism” and “endless war in Gaza.”

Defending the expression “from the River to the Sea” and noting allegations—entirely correct, it turns out—of anti-Palestinian bias from a state prosecutor results in weeks-long media scandal, meltdowns, cable news mentions, pundit commentary, and congressional censures. Yet out-in-the-open anti-Muslim bigtory and calls for violence against sitting members of Congress are barely mentioned at all. The double standard—which, as Zeteo’s Prem Thakker notes, isn’t really a double standard since only one side is actually being bigoted—could not be more obvious. The question is, why? 

The reason is that “antisemitism” scandals in our media are almost never about combating the very real dangers of antisemitism. They’re about disciplining critics of Israel. They’re about using the language of liberalism against liberalism, protecting US and Israeli regional hegemony by attacking anyone undermining its ideological underpinnings. Meanwhile, actual racism, actual incitement, and actual defamation of Muslim-Americans solicits a yawn because it poses no challenge to US and Israeli national security interests and, in key ways, assists them by stoking the anti-Muslim racism essential for its maintenance. It’s an inconsistency that has always been present, but with the latest crop of cartoonishly racist MAGA trolls in Congress, the glaring double standard has grown wider and more obvious. The question is whether anyone in mainstream media, beyond a one-off segment on MSNBC, will note it, much less gin up a scandal over it.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.

As I wrote for TRNN back in February, mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos is now completing the full ideological take over of the US’s second-most influential newspaper’s opinion section. But, like all good right-wing takeovers, it’s important for those engaging in said right-wing takeover that you not think of it as right-wing, or them as agents of right-wing ideology but, instead, above such petty, small-minded, and worldly matters. They are not only not right-wing—they really, really need you to know they exist above and outside of ideology. 

On Wednesday, the Washington Post named the Economist’s Washington correspondent Adam O’Neal as its next opinion editor. In his announcement on Twitter, O’Neal parroted his new boss’ words from last February almost verbatim, telling Post readers in a chummy front-facing camera announcement that:

[Washington Post opinion page writers and editors are] going to be stalwart advocates of free markets and personal liberties. We’ll be unapologetically patriotic too. Our philosophy will be rooted in fundamental optimism about the future of this country. What we won’t be are people who lecture you about ideology or demand you think certain ways about policy.

(This phrasing is copy and pasted from Bezos’ announcement five months ago that the Post opinion section will work in “support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”)

To recap: Post opinion section writers will be “stalwart advocates of free markets” and be “unapologetically patriotic” but also not “lecture [us] about ideology.” The obvious flaw in this plan, of course, is that advocating for “free markets,” e.g. capitalism and patriotism, e.g. advocating for US supremacy, is very much an ideological position.. One may think they are inarguably cool and self-evidently awesome but they, nonetheless, are ideological conceits requiring ideological production and reproduction. 

Despite the second-richest person in the world and his new mercenary mouthpiece’s implied claims to the contrary, “free markets” and “patriotism” are not organic features of reality like gravity or the cosmological constant, but ideological constructs. And requiring opinion writers embrace these ideological constructs, as slippery and vague as they may be, is an ideological litmus test for writing for Bezos’ publication. The Post opinion page revamp is thus an explicitly right-wing project designed to advance the ideologies of capitalism and US hegemony.

So the question is: why is someone working for Toyota, walking around a Toyota car lot wearing a Toyota polo shirt walking up to me on the showroom floor and giving me a speech about how they don’t like cars, car companies, or driving? Why are right-wingers so concerned about not being perceived as such, but instead presenting themselves as post-ideological arbiters of “open debate” indifferent to the very thing they’ve been hired to do? 

There are many reasons—some cynical, some psychological—but before we detail these, let’s examine the long, strange history of right-wing media personalities suspiciously insisting to their audiences, over and over again, that they are, in fact, ideology-free truth-tellers. It’s a subject I’ve long been fascinated with, having done two podcast episodes on this and related topics. Since the 1990s, it’s been a consistent feature of conservatives to lay claim to post-ideology. Bill O’Relly insisted he wasn’t conservative or Republican. “I’m not a political guy in the sense that I embrace an ideology… I’m an independent thinker, I’m an independent voter, I’m a registered Independent,” he told NPR’s Terry Gross in 2003. “I basically look at the world from the point of view of let’s solve the problem, right? Whatever the problem is, let’s find the best solution to it. And if the solution is on the left, I grab it. If it’s on the right, I grab it.” 

Glenn Beck made this his whole schtick as well. “You’ve lived your whole life in a responsible way,” the former Fox News huckster told his audience in 2009 while promoting the GOP’s Tea Party rebrand. “You’ve been concerned about this country through the last administration, in this administration. If you’re like most people, both administrations, it’s not about politics, you actually believe in something, and you thought for a while there, your politicians did as well.”

It’s not about going after Democrats, it’s about going after both parties. But then Beck, like O’Rielly and dozens before them, invariably proceeded to go after Democrats 98% of the time. It’s a popular posture. Everyone from Bill Maher to Andrew Yang to Bari Weiss to Republican Senator Rand Paul—who wrote a book called “Taking a Stand: Moving Beyond Partisan Politics to Unite America,” in which he claimed to go “beyond the left-right paradigm kind of thinking,”—has embraced this branding: I don’t do ideology, they consistently remind us, I’m a political actor unmoored from your oppressive labels—a maverick, a rogue, an independent iconoclast.  

The most infamous recent example of this phenomenon is Elon Musk who—while openly promoting white nationalist bile on social media, bashing minorities, trans people and women, doing nazi salutes during Trump’s inauguration––continued to insist he wasn’t right or left wing, but instead a secret third thing. “I’m probably left of center on social issues and right of center on economic issues,” the sage-like enlightened centrist Musk claimed in late 2023, right before he dumped $250 million into successfully reelecting Donald Trump.  

Obviously, the type of right-wing of each right-winger who claims They Don’t Do Ideology varies. There are differences between Fox News MAGA nationalism, Musk’s internet-addled neonazism, Maher’s glibertarian Zionism, Yang’s Silicon Valley techno-authorianism, neoconservatism, and what will likely be Jeff Bezos’ preferred flavor of right-wing—Club for Growth Republicanism promoting low taxes and generic Bush-era patriotism. But the new Washington Post op-ed section will no doubt be welcoming to all of the above while excluding those on the left, e.g. those who think “free markets” and “patriotism” are fraught concepts worthy of critique rather than mantras to mindlessly embrace or, at the very least, empty buzzwords that are the intellectual equivalent of Gerber apple-chicken pouches. 

Interestingly, this is not, for the most part, a pathology on the left. I am a leftist, I write for left-wing outlets. I say so openly. Just the same, liberals are almost always openly liberal, openly Democrats. They wear their ideological preferences on their sleeve. Of course they’re ideological, because to do politics at all is inherently ideological. To be human is to be ideological. To deny this obvious fact, outside of being, say, a ‘neutral’ reporter who has to fake neutrality for professional reasons, isn’t just dishonest, it’s insulting to everyone’s intelligence. 

Alas, being conservative is to be on the side of the establishment, of the powerful, of the billionaire class who O’Neal is literally parroting. It’s both inherent in the American cultural self-image, but also a necessary component of media branding, to perceive one’s self and one’s media project as not on the side of power. In a country of 330 million self-perceived free-thinking rebels—including, most gratingly, all of our mega-billionaires—all ideological formations must therefore present as edgy and subversive, as speaking truth to the powerful, even those openly marionetting for the world’s second-richest person. 

It’s impossible to conceive of someone worth $250 billion taking over a publication and re-making it into his own image and telling the public, “I am a very rich person who wants to produce content that reinforces the ideology that permitted and continues to permit my obscene wealth and power.” This would be cartoonishly evil and undermine the efficiency of said ideological output. So, instead, we must continue to play this bizarre game where open promoters of right-wing ideology, of oligarchical power and control, of US global hegemony, are presented as free-thinkers allergic to ideology rather than public relations agents working on behalf of the most banal and ubiquitous of ideologies—American conservatism—in open service of their corporate and billionaire patrons. 

As monied control over our media and the platforms required for their distribution grows tighter and tighter, this post-ideological “open debate” schtick grows more and more tedious and insulting to everyone’s intelligence. Advocating for “free markets” is obviously ideological. Promoting American “patriotism” is obviously ideological. If the super-rich are going to use media and social media as their ideological play toys, to promote their preferred worldview, the least they can do is have the decency to be honest about this fact, rather than smothering their right-wing rebrands in faux neutral, above-the-fray smarm.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.

Jake Tapper has sunk his teeth into the most Jake Tapper of stories. At present, he is in the midst of an aggressive book promotion tour of his co-authored “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” where he finds himself pontificating on how the media “missed” the Biden aging story, waxing poetic about how “politicians lie, White Houses lie, power is an aphrodisiac. We need to all remember that and not take at face value anything we’re told.” 

I won’t run through the well-worn criticism of Tapper’s self-serving about-face, namely from right-wing media, which has correctly noted that Tapper was one of the very people he’s now criticizing. This isn’t a criticism Tapper has sufficiently addressed—he told Piers Morgan on Monday that he “wished [he] had covered the story better.” But it’s also not the most interesting, or relevant, part of Tapper’s book tour and the broader recriminations of the Biden aging story. The right gets to ding Tapper and many in mainstream media as phony blowhards, and that’s a clean hit (though these same right-wing media personalities are, of course, notably silent on Trump’s visible cognitive decline). But what’s more useful analysis, and more illustrative of how the corporate media functions, is that the Biden aging story, such as it is, is the perfect low-calorie pseudo-scandal. It is, in other words, the platonic Jake Tapper Story.   

What do I mean by that? First, let’s lay out some basic facts: Was Biden in visible cognitive decline for years? Yes. Did outlets like CNN take part in downplaying and covering it up in service of power? Almost certainly. Is this story, as Tapper told Piers Morgan, “maybe even worse than Watergate”? Possibly, but not in the way Tapper means it. Watergate, despite being used as a synonym for major political scandal, was a ticky-tack transgression compared to Nixon’s myriad war crimes and illegal military actions in Southeast Asia. Watergate was broadly understood to just be the lowest-hanging fruit—evidence of a much broader regime of elite corruption and lawlessness. 

What is the Biden aging story evidence of? Tapper never really says beyond bromides about “power corrupting.” As with Watergate, Biden’s inner circle covering up Biden’s rapid mental decline probably doesn’t crack top five most offensive things Biden did, chief among them wholeheartedly supporting a genocide in Gaza for 15 months. And this is what makes it the perfect Jake Tapper story.

As I laid out in a Citations Needed podcast episode about Tapper’s schtick back in 2018, the platonic Jake Tapper story is one where he can look adversarial and play the role of Handsome Newsman Speaking Truth To Power while harping on a story that, when it’s all said and done, offends no traditional centers of power, namely corporate interests or the military state (and its attendant pro-Israel lobby).

This is Tapper’s wheelhouse. But this time, he’s not attacking Democrats from the right. He’s attacking Democrats from an even better place—nowhere—in what amounts to a post-ideological process criticism. Yes, Biden World lying about the President’s declining mental state had disastrous consequences for Democrats, but it’s a years-old story, and involves nothing systemic except for broader concerns over gerontocracy (which, despite their occasional merits, also neatly avoid any discussion of class conflict). And Tapper is effectively taking on a man nearing the end of his life, long after he’s out of power. 

This is consistent with Tapper’s usual sweet spot of attacking Democrats from the right for being insufficiently pro-empire or pro-austerity. Tapper rose the ranks of Salon, ABC News, and eventually CNN by hounding the Obama White House, and Democrats in general, over a wholly fabricated “debt crisis.” He then proceeded to repeatedly attack the Squad in bad faith as a matter of course and spent weeks mugging over Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021, removing the fourth wall altogether and producing a two hour prime time special promoting a Stabbed in the Back myth for the Biden White House.

Meanwhile, as I detailed in part for The Nation last year, in over 15 months of co-hosting the influential Sunday news show State of the Union during the Gaza genocide under Biden, Tapper never once platformed a single Palestinian guest, while giving ample platform to a revolving door of Biden officials, Israeli spokespeople, and two softball interviews with Israeli Prime Minister—and fugitive from international justice—Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Consistent with his yawning through the genocide under Biden, Tapper mostly ignores it under Trump and only chimes in to frame the latest Israeli war crime in terms favorable to Israel. Even worse than never bothering to interview a single Palestinian, his Sunday news show, since Israel recommenced its genocide on March 18, hasn’t brought up Gaza as a topic once. In nine episodes, nine hours of “agenda-setting” Washington programming, Tapper and co-anchor Dana Bash have not broached the subject of Gaza at all, despite the fact that the United States is directly involved in the killing over of 1,309 children and injuring 3,738 more, and arming and funding a deliberate hunger campaign that Human Rights Watch, and over 760 other human rights groups, call “the deliberate starvation of a civilian population as a method of warfare.” 

And when Gaza is mentioned on Tapper’s other program—his afternoon show, The Lead—Tapper dutifully parrots the Israeli line, including prefacing any story about Israel bombing hospitals and schools with the baseless conspiracy theory that “Hamas regularly takes shelter in hospitals and schools.” As I noted last month, Tapper led the media charge last September fabricating an “antisemitism” scandal out of whole cloth to smear Rep. Rashida Tlaib (which he sheepishly walked back but never apologized for), while letting Tlaib’s Republican colleagues repeatedly smear her as a “terrorist” without an ounce of pushback. Indeed, Tapper has long run down the list of insipid pro-Israel talking points without any meaningful criticism of its apartheid system or its recent, openly genocidal policies beyond the safe and ponderous noncriticism of “are you killing too many civilians?” handwringing. 

So Tapper has found the great scandal of the Biden years, and it is, of course, not one that upsets anyone at the Pentagon, the US Chamber of Commerce, the editorial boards of the New York Times or the Atlantic or AIPAC. The Biden aging story is the perfect pseudo-scandal for corporate media, and thus the perfect Jake Tapper story: vaguely true, but ultimately of peripheral importance, scapegoating a handful of Biden flunkies and, most important of all, it allows Tapper to polish his Speaking Truth to Power brand without speaking truth to anyone in a position of actual power. 

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.

Freedom House, the $94 million, nominally independent “human rights” NGO, has been suspiciously quiet as the Trump administration disappears, imprisons, and deports activists opposing the US and Israel’s assault on Gaza. 

The arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil on March 8 kicked off an harrowing wave of free speech suppression aimed at those protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Over 300 high-profile arrests and deportation threats followed Khalil, including that of Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, who has been rotting in a prison for 41 days for simply writing an op-ed critical of Israel in a student paper. She is being held in gulag-like conditions in a Louisiana prison, far from her family, despite the fact that the State Department’s own internal report found she broke no law. Since March 8, Freedom House has published dozens of reports, essays, blog posts, articles, media quotes and social media posts. But, strangely for an alleged human rights group, none have mentioned the White House’s unprecedented crackdown on free expression.

Freedom House’s own website makes clear that defending “free speech” is central to its mission. “Free speech and expression is the lifeblood of democracy, facilitating open debate, the proper consideration of diverse interests and perspectives,” they wax romantically. Which makes it all the more strange they have said nothing about these textbook cases of criminalizing freedom of expression. 

TRNN reached out to Freedom House several times for comment on their silence, or to explain why they haven’t issued a statement of solidarity with any of those who disappeared for Gaza activism, but the organization did not return our emails. Freedom House receives over 80% of its budget from the US State Department and, by its own admission, has been hit hard by Trump’s cuts to foreign aid. In their statement asking for private donors to fill the void left by the Trump cuts, they hinted at one reason why they are silent on Trump’s authoritarian crackdown—it seems only “America’s adversaries” can be authoritarian, not the US or its allies. “Freedom House has been severely impacted by the disruption of US foreign assistance,” they wrote, “and the termination of critical programs that Congress funded to counter America’s authoritarian adversaries and support the global struggle for democracy.”

So what happens when the US is the authoritarian in question? It seems the response is to simply act like the draconian suppression of speech doesn’t exist. Trump’s crackdown on Gaza activists isn’t the first time the US has been authoritarian, of course. The US has long had the world’s largest prison population by a wide margin, long had a deeply racist and unequal justice system, long visited authoritarian violence and economic hardship on other countries—including the underlying genocide in Gaza in question. 

But Trump’s deportation and imprisoning of people for—by the White House’s own admission—pure political speech marks a meaningful escalation that is clearly in conflict with Freedom House’s already limited, negative rights framework of “freedom.” Plenty of other freedom of speech organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights have aggressively defended Khalil and others by filing lawsuits, issuing statements, and making clear where they stand. Why hasn’t an organization with tens of millions of dollars like Freedom House done the same?

The answer is obvious: Freedom House is not an independent organization. They are, and always have been, a soft power organ of the US State Department that uses the thin patina of independence to meddle and concern troll the human rights abuses of “foreign adversaries” while downplaying and whitewashing those by the US and its allies. Israel, for example, always gets their nice green “free” label despite currently carrying out what Amnesty International labels a “genocide” and militarily occupying 4.5 million Palestinians who, even before Oct. 7, were either subject to decades of siege in Gaza or brutal occupation in the West Bank. But don’t worry, Freedom House bifurcates the West Bank from Israel’s score. Why? It’s unclear. Israel has waged a decades-long occupation of Palestine, where the freedom of movement, commerce, food, everyday internal travel, and basic human dignity of Palestinians is subject to the whims of Israeli leaders, but, Freedom House has to get that score above 70 and bestow Israel with a nice green label, lest they get angry phone calls from Congress and the White House.

The silence from the risibly named “Fred Hiatt Program to Free Political Prisoners” program housed within Freedom House is the most conspicuous. We tried to reach them specifically for comment, but they also did not respond to our request. The program is named after the late Washington Post columnist Fred Haitt, whose most impactful contribution to American politics was lying and lobbying for the Invasion of Iraq both in his personal capacity and as editorial page editor at the Post. Which is the perfect face of an organization entirely neoconservative in its feigned concern for “freedom,” a selective tool of shallow moralizing unconcerned with introspection or criticism of the myriad ways the United States suppressed freedom of speech and human rights. Even when Trump comes into office and unleashes an unsophisticated, explicitly illiberal attack on basic liberal rights, Freedom House can’t bring itself to release a token statement or half-hearted condemnation to maintain the pretense of independence. Instead, its reaction is cowardly silence and moving on to condemn safe, official Bad Guy Countries like China and Cuba.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.

On March 18 Israel broke the Gaza ceasefire and recommenced its full scale assault, siege, and bombing of Gaza. Since then, over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed and the humanitarian situation is as desperate as ever. Watching mainstream media, however, one would hardly notice. 

While US media outlets continue to report below the fold on the daily airstrikes, they are no longer treated as major stories meriting emphasis and urgency. This is especially true for the New York Times and TV broadcast news, which have all but forgotten there’s an unprecedented humanitarian crisis ongoing in Gaza–still funded and armed by the US government. 

The paper of record, the New York Times, ran a front page story March 19, the day after Israel broke the ceasefire and killed hundreds in one day, but didn’t run a front page story on Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza in the 13 days since. (They ran a front page story on April 3 that centered Israel’s military “tactics” in Gaza but didn’t mention civilian death totals.) The Times did find room on March 27 for a front page image of anti-Hamas protests in Gaza which, of course, are a favorite media topic for the pro-genocide crowd as they see it as evidence their “war on Hamas” is both morally justified and, somehow, endorsed by Palestinians themselves. 

Like the New York Times, the nightly news shows–CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and ABC World News Tonight–covered the initial bombing and breaking of the ceasefire the day after (ABC News’s lede after Israel killed 400+ in under 24 hours: “What does this mean for the hostages?”), but have subsequently ignored Gaza entirely, with one notable exception. CBS Evening News did a 4-minute segment on March 26 on “allegations” Israel was using Palestinians, and Palestinian children in particular, as human shields and even this was front loaded with bizarre denunciations of Hamas “using human shields”:

Most conspicuous of all was the total erasure of Gaza from the “agenda-setting” Sunday news programs that are designed to tell elites in Washington what they should care about. Gaza wasn’t mentioned once on any of the Sunday news shows–ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and NBC’s Meet the Press, and CNN’s State of the Union–for the weeks of March 23 and March 30. Despite Israel breaking the ceasefire on Tuesday March 18 and killing more than 400 Palestinians–including over 200 women and children–in less than 24 hours, none of the Sunday morning news programs that have aired since have covered Gaza at all. 

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said yesterday that at least 322 children had been killed and 609 injured since Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18. 

Whereas the media approach during the Biden years was to spin, obfuscate, blame Hamas, and help distance the White House from the images of carnage emanating from Gaza by propping up fake “ceasefire talks,” the media approach now that Trump is doubling down on Biden’s strategy of unfettered support for genocide appears to be to largely ignore it. 

All indications are that Israeli officials were banking on US news outlets normalizing the ongoing genocide of Gaza, assuming–correctly, as it turns out–that the death and despair would become so routine it would take on a “dog bites man” element. Combined with the nonstop “flood the zone” strategy of the Trump White House as it attacks dozens of perceived enemies at once, the US-backed genocide in Gaza is now both cliche and low priority. 

By way of comparison, the Sunday shows, nightly news shows, and the front page of the New York Times ran wall-to-wall coverage of the Yemen-Signal group chat controversy. Obviously, administration officials using unsecured channels to discuss war plans is a news story (though not nearly as important as the war crimes casually being discussed) but the fact that Israel recommenced its bombing, siege, and starvation strategy on an already decimated population is, objectively, a more urgent story with much higher human stakes. 

Indeed, Palestinians reporting from Gaza say the situation is as dire as it’s ever been. Israel cut off all aid on March 2 and the bombings have been as relentless and brutal as any time period pre-ceasefire. Meanwhile, with Trump openly endorsing ethnic cleansing, “debates” around how best to facilitate this ethnic cleansing are presented as sober, practical foreign policy discussions–not the open planning of a crime against humanity. “You mentioned Gaza,” Margaret Brennan casually said to Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, the last time Gaza was mentioned on CBS’s Face the Nation, March 16. “I want to ask you what specifics you are looking at when it comes to relocating the two million Palestinians in Gaza. In the past, you’ve mentioned Egypt. You’ve mentioned Jordan. Are you talking to other countries at this point about resettling?” 

Witkoff would go on to say Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza would “lead to a better life for Gazans,” to which Brennan politely nodded, thanked him and moved on. Watching this exchange one would hardly know that was being discussed–mass forceable population transfer–is a textbook war crime. Recent revelations by the UN that aid workers had been found in a mass grave have also been ignored by broadcast news. 15 Palestinian rescue workers, including at least one United Nations employee, were killed by Israeli forces “one by one,” according to the UN humanitarian affairs office (OCHA) and the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS). This story has not been covered on-air by ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, or CNN. 

The ongoing suffering in Gaza, still very much armed and funded by the White House, continues to fade into the background. It’s become routine, banal, and not something that can drive a wedge into the Democratic coalition. This dynamic, combined with US media’s general pro-Israel bias, means the daily starvation and death is not going to be making major headlines anytime soon. It’s now, after 18 months of genocide, just another boring “foreign policy” story. 

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.

Mega billionaire Jeff Bezos made news yesterday by formally announcing the parameters of the Washington Post opinion section in clear ideological terms, making explicit what has long been implicit in corporate media and, like then-New York Times opinion editor James Bennet did seven years ago when he said that the New York Times was  “pro-capitalism,” effectively doing my job for me. 

“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” the Amazon founder and executive chairman wrote in an open letter to Post employees. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

As I wrote in 2018 when Times opinion editor James Bennet said in a closed-door meeting with staffers that the Times was a “pro-capitalism” newspaper, “Media criticism is, more often than not, a practice of inference: seeing patterns and inferring from those patterns the political make-up of media. Occasionally, however, decision-makers from major media outlets come right out and openly declare their ideology.” 

Bezos has done us a favor by removing the mystery and inference and cheeky “open debate” pretense from the process of inferring the ideological perimeters of corporate media and laid it all out bare.

Obviously this dictate is, in theory, limited to the opinion section, not the news section, but those working on the other side of the firewall will no doubt take a hearty hint––if they didn’t the last time Bezos explicitly interfered in the opinion output of the paper. The fact is that, compared to peer outlets, the Washington Post’s current national labor coverage, while by no means aggressively anti-capitalist, is robust and generally favorable to workers. Reporters such as Lauren Kaori Gurley and Jeff Stein and columnist Perry Bacon Jr. have done excellent work highlighting the plight of Amazon employees and those on the business end of US sanctions, often in direct contradiction to Bezos’ bottom line and ideological preferences. While the Post’s local metro coverage, as I’ve documented, has often doubled as an Amazon lobbying front, its national coverage has often remained independent of the billionaire’s direct control. Indeed, the Post’s newly anointed chief economics reporter Jeff Stein publicly criticized his boss yesterday morning, writing on social media: “Bezos declaration Massive encroachment by Jeff Bezos into The Washington Post’s opinion section today – makes clear dissenting views will not be published or tolerated there I still have not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side of coverage, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side I will be quitting immediately and letting you know.”

One wants to be careful not to totally trivialize this escalation. While it is making explicit what has largely been implicit in corporate media, it appears to be removing even token and limited dissent. In some ways this could accelerate a long-overdue erosion of corporate media’s image as independent of owner influence; on the other hand it may just further codify corporate media’s drift to the right and awaken nothing but more open oligarch-endorsed fascism. 

It’s a more open right-wing drift that’s manifesting as well with liberal news channel MSNBC this week, as the Comcast-owned network laid off big name personalities Joy Reid and Ayman Mohyeldin—who, incidentally, were the two best anchors on the topic of the Gaza genocide—in exchange for mid-tier Biden alum Michael Steele and Jen Psaki. Reid and Mohyeldin were, by no means, meaningfully subversive or existentially critical of Biden and his support for genocide (and Reid has a long history of smearing left-wing candidates in sloppy and dishonest ways) but, compared to their media peers, they ran sympathetic and nuanced segments that laid out the human stakes of Israel’s myriad war crimes. This isn’t a narrative being retconned after their firing either. I said this in October of last year, highlighting Mohyeldin and Reid explicitly, when publishing a comprehensive study of cable news’s Gaza coverage for The Nation. 

Bezos’ on-the-nose power grab over the ideological output of the Washington Post’s opinion output is useful to analyze, as well, in the context of the media meltdown over then-candidate for president Bernie Sanders’ 2019 suggestion the Post’s coverage of him was, in the aggregate, more negative because the Post was owned by a billionaire. Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron called it a “conspiracy theory,” and CNN handwrung over the claim for days, with its anchors saying it was “dangerous.” NPR, like CNN, predictably drew facile equivalence with Donald Trump’s anti-media rantings. On its face, Sanders’ claim is fairly banal and obvious: clearly media outlets will reflect the ideological preferences of those who own them. There will be exceptions, there will be a scattering of dissenting voices—all sophisticated media understands the importance of permitting 10% dissent—but, generally, being owned by the world’s third-richest person will result in a specific ideological output, in the aggregate. 

Bezos making this influence explicit could perhaps reduce some of this feigned indignation and pearl clutching when those on the Left dare suggest that having a handful of corporations and billionaires own our major media outlets limits the scope of debate and coverage of the news, or that capital-owned media will necessarily result in a media that favors the interests and ideology of capital. Yes it’s not neat and clean, yes there are exceptions, and no it’s not the top-down cartoon version of censorship and control we grew up learning about reading 1984—but concentrated wealth curating and dictating how the public interprets the world is inherently anti-democratic. A major media owner worth $235 billion saying the quiet part out loud is menacing, yes, and certainly portends a dark next few years. But in some ways it’s refreshing and—if we approach the broader corrosive nature of oligarch-owned media with open eyes—could be a first step towards a vision of how media can challenge the interests of capital rather than serve as its ideological play toy.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza showed a consistent bias against Palestinians, according to an Intercept analysis of major media coverage. 

The print media outlets, which play an influential role in shaping U.S. views of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, paid little attention to the unprecedented impact of Israel’s siege and bombing campaign on both children and journalists in the Gaza Strip. 

Major U.S. newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7. Pro-Palestinian activists have accused major publications of pro-Israel bias, with the New York Times seeing protests at its headquarters in Manhattan for its coverage of Gaza –– an accusation supported by our analysis.

The open-source analysis focuses on the first six weeks of the conflict, from the October 7 Hamas-led attacks that killed 1,139 Israelis and foreign workers to November 24, the beginning of the weeklong “humanitarian truce” agreed to by both parties to facilitate hostage exchanges. During this period, 14,800 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children, were killed by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Today, the Palestinian death toll is over 22,000.

The Intercept collected more than 1,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times about Israel’s war on Gaza and tallied up the usages of certain key terms and the context in which they were used. The tallies reveal a gross imbalance in the way Israelis and pro-Israel figures are covered versus Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices — with usages that favor Israeli narratives over Palestinian ones.

This anti-Palestinian bias in print media tracks with a similar survey of U.S. cable news that the authors conducted last month for The Column that found an even wider disparity.

The stakes for this routine devaluing of Palestinian lives couldn’t be higher: As the death toll in Gaza mounts, entire cities are leveled and rendered uninhabitable for years, and whole family lines are wiped out, the U.S. government has enormous influence as Israel’s primary patron and weapons supplier. The media’s presentation of the conflict means there are fewer political downsides to lockstep support for Israel. 

Coverage from the first six weeks of the war paints a bleak picture of the Palestinian side, according to the analysis, one that stands to make humanizing Palestinians — and therefore arousing U.S. sympathies — more difficult. 

To obtain this data, we searched for all articles that contained relevant words (such as “Palestinian,” “Gaza,” “Israeli,” etc.) on all three news websites. We then parsed through every sentence in each article and tallied the count of certain terms. For this analysis, we omitted all editorial pieces and letters to the editor. The basic data set is available here, and a full data set can be obtained by emailing ottoali99@gmail.com.

Our survey of coverage has four key findings.

Disproportionate Coverage of Deaths

In the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, the words “Israeli” or “Israel” appear more than “Palestinian” or variations thereof, even as Palestinian deaths far outpaced Israeli deaths. For every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once. For every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times — or a rate 16 times more per death that of Palestinians. 

“Slaughter” of Israelis, Not Palestinians

Highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around. (When the terms appeared in quotes rather than the editorial voice of the publication, they were omitted from the analysis.)

The term “slaughter” was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and “massacre” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. “Horrific” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4. 

One typical headline from the New York Times, in a mid-November story about the October 7 attack, reads, “They Ran Into a Bomb Shelter for Safety. Instead, They Were Slaughtered.” Compare this with the Times’s most sympathetic profile of Palestinian deaths in Gaza from November 18: “The War Turns Gaza Into a ‘Graveyard’ for Children.” Here “graveyard” is a quote from the United Nations and the killing itself is in passive voice. In its own editorial voice, the Times story on deaths in Gaza uses no emotive terms comparable to the ones in its story about the October 7 attack. 

The Washington Post employed “massacre” several times in its reporting to describe October 7. “President Biden faces growing pressure from lawmakers in both parties to punish Iran after Hamas’s massacre,” one report from the Post says. A November 13 story from the paper about how Israel’s siege and bombing had killed 1 in 200 Palestinians does not use the word “massacre” or “slaughter” once. The Palestinian dead have simply been “killed” or “died” — often in the passive voice. 

Children and Journalists

Only two headlines out of over 1,100 news articles in the study mention the word “children” related to Gazan children. In a notable exception, the New York Times ran a late-November front-page story on the historic pace of killings of Palestinian women and children, though the headline featured neither group. 

Despite Israel’s war on Gaza being perhaps the deadliest war for children — almost entirely Palestinian — in modern history, there is scant mention of the word “children” and related terms in the headlines of articles surveyed by The Intercept. 

Meanwhile, more than 6,000 children were reported killed by authorities in Gaza at the time of the truce, with the number topping 10,000 today.

Despite Israel’s war on Gaza being perhaps the deadliest war for children in modern history, there is scant mention of the word “children” in headlines.

While the war on Gaza has been one of the deadliest in modern history for journalists — overwhelmingly Palestinians — the word “journalists” and its iterations such as “reporters” and “photojournalists” only appears in nine headlines out of over 1,100 articles studied. Roughly 48 Palestinian reporters had been killed by Israeli bombardment at the time of the truce; today, the death toll for Palestinian journalists has topped 100. Only 4 of the 9 articles that contained the words journalist/reporter were about Arab reporters.

The lack of coverage for the unprecedented killing of children and journalists, groups that typically elicit sympathy from Western media, is conspicuous. By way of comparison, more Palestinian children died in the first week of the Gaza bombing than during the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, yet the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times ran multiple personal, sympathetic stories highlighting the plight of children during the first six weeks of the Ukraine war. 

The aforementioned front-page New York Times report and a Washington Post column are rare exceptions to the dearth of coverage about Palestinian children.

As with children, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times focused on the risks to journalists in the Ukraine war, running several articles detailing the hazards of reporting on the war in the first six weeks after Russia’s invasion. Six journalists were killed in the early days of the Ukraine war, compared to 48 killed in the first six weeks of Israel’s Gaza bombardment.   

Asymmetry in how children are covered is qualitative as well as quantitative. On October 13, the Los Angeles Times ran an Associated Press report that said, “The Gaza Health Ministry said Friday that 1,799 people have been killed in the territory, including more than 580 under the age of 18 and 351 women. Hamas’s assault last Saturday killed more than 1,300 people in Israel, including women, children and young music festivalgoers.” Notice that young Israelis are referred to as children while young Palestinians are described as people under 18. 

During discussions around the prisoner exchanges, this frequent refusal to refer to Palestinians as children was even more stark, with the New York Times referring in one case to “Israeli women and children” being exchanged for “Palestinian women and minors.” (Palestinian children are referred to as “children” later in the report, when summarizing a human rights groups’ findings.) 

A Washington Post report from November 21 announcing the truce deal erased Palestinian women and children altogether: “President Biden said in a statement Tuesday night that a deal to release 50 women and children held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners detained by Israel.” The brief did not mention Palestinian women and children at all.

Coverage of Hate in the U.S.

Similarly, when it comes to how the Gaza conflict translates to hate in the U.S., the major papers paid more attention to antisemitic attacks than to ones against Muslims. Overall, there was a disproportionate focus on racism toward Jewish people, versus racism targeting Muslims, Arabs, or those perceived as such. During the period of The Intercept’s study, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times mentioned antisemitism more than Islamophobia (549 versus 79) — and this was before the “campus antisemitism” meta-controversy that was contrived by Republicans in Congress beginning the week of December 5.

Despite many high-profile instances of both antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism during the survey period, 87 percent of mentions of discrimination were about antisemitism, versus 13 percent mentions about Islamophobia, inclusive of related terms. 

A projection declares the Washington Post “complicit in genocide” during a march for Gaza on a worldwide day of action for Palestine, October 12, 2023.

When Major Newspapers Fail

Overall, Israel’s killings in Gaza are not given proportionate coverage in either scope or emotional weight as the deaths of Israelis on October 7. These killings are mostly presented as arbitrarily high, abstract figures. Nor are the killings described using emotive language like “massacre,” “slaughter,” or “horrific.” Hamas’s killings of Israeli civilians are consistently portrayed as part of the group’s strategy, whereas Palestinian civilian killings are covered almost as if they were a series of one-off mistakes, made thousands of times, despite numerous points of evidence indicating Israel’s intent to harm civilians and civilian infrastructure.

The result is that the three major papers rarely gave Palestinians humanizing coverage. Despite this asymmetry, polls show shifting sympathy toward Palestinians and away from Israel among Democrats, with massive generational splits driven, in part, by a stark difference in news sources. By and large, young people are being informed of the conflict from TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, and older Americans are getting their news from print media and cable news. 

Biased coverage in major newspapers and mainstream television news is impacting general perceptions of the war and directing viewers toward a warped view of the conflict. This has led to pro-Israel pundits and politicians blaming pro-Palestinian views on social media “misinformation.” 

Analysis of both print media and cable news, however, make it clear that, if any cohort of media consumers is getting a slanted picture, it’s those who get their news from established mass media in the U.S.   

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Adam Johnson.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s response to Jake Tapper that her proposals would save far more than they cost was ruled to be not an answer at all by Tapper’s colleague Chris Cillizza (CNN, 9/18/18).

Jake Tappers’ career is inextricably linked to America’s so-called longest running war. His travels there and book–turned–Hollywood film detailing his exploits are how, more than any other beat, he polished his reputation as a Serious Journalist, and not just another pretty suit behind a desk. He’s reported dozens of stories on the conflict, done book events, tweeted nonstop for years about the war in Afghanistan, and done scores of segments on the conflict, including a two-hour primetime special earlier this month lamenting “what went wrong” in the war for the United States.

The second-most essential beat to cementing his gravitas has been his Very Serious concern about debts and deficits—i.e. grilling liberals, leftists and progressives for over 20 years about “how they will pay for” broad social welfare programs.

Suspiciously, these two primary Tapper beats have never crossed paths. Which is strange, because, as a new Brown University study shows, the post-9/11 wars have cost the Pentagon $14 trillion, one-third to one-half of which went to US military contractors. That’s between $4.6 trillion and $7 trillion, just on contractors for the post-9/11 wars. In one year alone—fiscal year 2020—the study finds that Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in contracts from the Pentagon.

The Afghanistan War was itself a huge expense. A separate study from Brown University finds, “Since invading Afghanistan in 2001, the United States has spent $2.3 trillion on the war, which includes operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

So what has Tapper highlighted to show the risks of runaway government spending? Let us examine items that have compelled Tapper to ask, “How will we pay for it?”

• Medicare for All
• Federal right to housing
• Federal jobs guarantee
• Tuition-free public college
• Canceling all student loan debt
• The Obama stimulus package

Here he is grilling New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over several of the items, all in one clip:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defends an estimated $40 trillion price tag for progressive policy programs, including Medicare for all https://t.co/ZqR6WWpmI2 pic.twitter.com/JoDDeIq712

— CNN (@CNN) September 16, 2018

Sarah Lazare (In These Times,  3/2/20) noted that debate moderators “are saying we can afford policies that spread militarism—but not those that protect human life.”

Tapper has used some of the biggest platforms possible to engage in this line of questioning. As Column contributor Sarah Lazare noted in March 2020, “Night one of the second democratic debate, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked four questions in close succession, grilling candidates on how Medicare for All would be paid for.” In just one example, he said to then-candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, “At the last debate, you said you’re, quote, ​‘with Bernie on Medicare for All’”:

​Now, Senator Sanders has said that people in the middle class will pay more in taxes to help pay for Medicare for all, though that will be offset by the elimination of insurance premiums and other costs. Are you also, quote, ​”with Bernie” on Medicare for All when it comes to raising taxes on middle-class Americans to pay for it?

As Lazare noted in the piece, there were zero questions asked to the centrist Democrats on stage how they planned on “paying for” their support for large military budgets and wars.

Now, let us examine the items Tapper has never asked they would pay for it (costs over 20 years)

• Annual 700+ billion defense budgets us (~$14 trillion)
• Iraq War ($2 trillion)
• Afghanistan War ($2.3 trillion)
• ISIS war ($14 billion)
• The CIA ($300 billion)

An audit of transcripts, tweets and articles authored by Tapper reveals no questions over deficit concerns for these big ticket items.

The reason for this glaring inconsistency is that high-profile media brands like Tapper simply do not view the expense of empire maintenance to be debatable, contestable or subject to critical analysis. This expense just is—like gravity or the universal constant. These institutions exist, always have existed, and are beyond the realm of politics. Whereas programs that house the homeless, feed the poor, combat climate chaos, provide childcare, educate people, build roads and schools, and provide jobs for the working class are “expensive” “progressive” “wishlists” with “price tags” that need to be constantly justified item by item to the half cent.

Never mind that, year after year, the Pentagon can’t complete a basic audit and can’t account for $21 trillion in spending. The real drivers of our deficit are dreaded liberal programs. The banal and unremarkable war machine whose bloat and borderline criminal waste is rubber stamped every year by Congress and corporate media alike requires no such interrogation.

Along with schlocky, mugging Troop Defender, Concerned Deficit Scold is how Tapper rose to prominence at CNN. While at ABC News, Tapper would make presser spectacles out of his Deep Worry over the national debt, grilling Obama press secretary Jay Carney over the Obama Stimulus (a stimulus we now know was way too small), while engaging in facile—and incorrect—comparison to family budgets borrowed directly from Pete Peterson front groups:

.@jaketapper cut his centrist bona fides during the Tea Party years by–

1. earnestly acting like GOP cared about deficits
2. pushing ideological cartoon agitprop about ‘national budget as family budget’
3. Moral preening at WH pressers over national debt pic.twitter.com/Tx8UN1JmFL

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) November 18, 2017

So where is the deep concern after this high-profile recent study found that we spent $14 trillion on wars since 2001? What about these costs which we will “pass down to our children”? Where is Tapper hauling in war hawks lobbying to stay in Afghanistan, like senators Lindsey Graham and Bob Menendez, demanding they explain “how they will pay for it”? No such spectacle will be forthcoming, because that which props up the unquestionable axioms of US militarism is simply taken for granted, while that which provides for the poor, unhoused and vulnerable is a “wishlist” in need of a rigorous 10-point program detailing a plan for complete fiscal solvency.

This post originally appeared on Column (9/14/21), a media criticism and political analysis Substack newsletter written by Adam Johnson with contributions from Sarah Lazare.

The post Why Jake Tapper Never Asks How We Pay for War appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Adam Johnson.