“What Will Chris Smalls Do Next?” asked New York (7/16/22). Apparently it didn’t like the answer.

US media know who Chris Smalls is.

• The New York Times (4/6/22) ran a profile: “Christian Smalls Is Leading a Labor Movement in Sweats and Sneakers.”
• New York (7/18/22) put him on its cover, saying, “Chris Smalls Did the Impossible: Organize an Amazon Warehouse.”
• “He Was Fired by Amazon Two Years Ago,” an NPR report (4/2/22) declared. “Now He’s the Force Behind the Company’s First Union.”
• “He Came Out of Nowhere and Humbled Amazon,” read a Time headline (4/25/22). “Is Chris Smalls the Future of Labor?”

Last week, Smalls took on another Goliath. As part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, he tried to deliver life-saving aid—including food and baby formula—to the people of Gaza, who are suffering from a severe famine deliberately engineered by the Israeli government.

The Handala, the ship carrying the aid, was illegally seized in international waters by Israel’s military, and Smalls was singled out for violence, choked and kicked by Israeli soldiers, apparently because he’s Black. Past attempts to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza have been dealt with even more harshly by Israel: In 2010, 57 activists aboard the aid ship Mavi Marmara were shot—nine of them killed—on their way to Gaza (Guardian, 6/4/10).

A near-complete blackout

The IDF targeting the one Black man on the aid ship is sadly unsurprising,” noted the New Republic (7/29/25), “as is the lack of uproar from US politicians and large media outlets.”

A popular political figure dramatically assaulted trying to save lives: Sounds like a newsworthy story, doesn’t it? But Smalls’ mission, his brutal detention and his subsequent release got next to no coverage in US corporate media.

He was covered in the British Guardian (“US Labor Activist Chris Smalls Assaulted by IDF During Gaza Aid Trip, Group Says,” 7/31/25). He was covered in progressive US outlets like Common Dreams (6/26/25), the New Republic (7/29/25) and Democracy Now! (7/31/25).

He was covered by outlets with a Black or Mideastern focus (Grio, 7/29/25; Black Enterprise, 7/30/25; Ebony, 7/31/25; Middle East Eye, 7/29/25; Middle East Monitor, 7/30/25).

But as independent labor reporter Mike Elk (Payday Report, 7/29/25) pointed out:

Despite Smalls having been profiled by every major media outlet in the US when he successfully led the union drive at Amazon, not a single major media outlet has covered his violent detention by the IDF.

In fact, the only news report we could find in a general-interest US news outlet was from Smalls’ hometown paper, the Staten Island Advance (7/29/25), which reported that a “Staten Island Labor Leader Was Reportedly Detained in Israel After Gaza-Bound Aid Vessel Was Intercepted.”

Regular readers may recall a similar news blackout, not quite as absolute, when Greta Thunberg, probably the most famous climate activist in the world, was blocked by Israel from delivering aid to Gaza on another Freedom Flotilla ship (FAIR.org, 6/5/25).

Characters that corporate media once found fascinating, risking their lives to save innocents: It would be hard to make up a story with more dramatic potential. Yet corporate media knew that these were stories to steer clear of—almost unanimously, in Smalls’ case.

The only thing worse than war crimes

“The government…recently accused Harvard of civil rights violations,” the New York Times (7/28/25) reported—without explaining that this mean allowing anti-genocide protests to make pro-Israel students feel uncomfortable.

The reason, of course, is the corporate media’s longstanding bias toward Israel—something FAIR (e.g., 8/22/23; Extra!, 11–12/93, 1–2/01, 9/14) has been documenting for decades. But it’s still puzzling; obviously, not every negative story about Israel gets killed. US media have even begun to gingerly acknowledge that Gaza is on the brink of mass starvation—with varying degrees of admission of Israel’s responsibility for this (FAIR.org, 7/29/25).

But even as media admit that Palestinian children are dying for lack of food, people who risk their lives to try to feed them aren’t treated as heroes—or even as curiosities. It’s as if, however bad Israel’s actions are, trying to stop or counteract them is somehow worse—even shameful, something to avert one’s eyes from.

It’s the only way to make sense of the continuing debate over academia’s response to the pro-Palestine protests that roiled campuses in 2024. The New York Times (7/28/25) recently reported:

Harvard University has signaled a willingness to meet the Trump administration’s demand to spend as much as $500 million to end its dispute with the White House…more than twice as much as the $200 million fine that Columbia University said it would pay when it settled antisemitism claims with the White House last week.

The “antisemitism claims” referred to here amount to accusations that these and other colleges did not do enough to squelch the protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza—which has since been identified as a genocide by prominent human rights groups like Amnesty International (12/5/24), Human Rights Watch (12/19/24) and B’Tselem (7/28/25).

Where is the debate over whether universities went too far in suppressing the free speech rights of students who were opposed to genocide? That seems like a discussion we’re never going to have. Apparently the only thing worse than crimes against humanity is trying to stop them.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Jim Naureckas.

President Donald Trump on July 4 signed into law an omnibus reconciliation bill, branded in MAGA propaganda (and much of corporate media) as the “Big Beautiful Bill.” The legislation scraped up just enough votes to narrowly pass in both chambers of the Republican-controlled Congress, with 51 to 50 votes in the Senate and 218 to 214 in the House.

The focal point of the bill is a $4.5 trillion tax cut, partly paid for by unprecedented slashes in funding for healthcare and food assistance. The wealthiest 10% will gain $12,000 a year from the legislation, while it will cost the lowest-earning 10% of families $1,600 annually. Media addressed the fiscal aspects of the bill, though more often through a fixation on the federal debt rather than looking at the effect of the budget on inequality (FAIR.org, 7/17/25).

But it’s not just a question of money. Many of the bill’s key provisions—including Medicaid, SNAP and clean energy cuts, as well as handouts to the fossil fuel, military and detention industries—will be literally deadly for people in the US and abroad, in both the near and long term.

FAIR’s Belén Fernandez (7/9/25) closely examined the dramatic lack of coverage of the vast expansion of the government’s anti-immigrant capacities. But the deadly consequences of the other aspects of the bill were also remarkably underexplained to the public.

To see how major media explained the contents and consequences of the reconciliation bill to the public before its enactment, FAIR surveyed New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and NPR news coverage from the Senate’s passage of the final version of the bill on July 1 through July 4, the day Trump signed the bill into law. This time frame, when the actual contents of the bill were known and the House was deliberating on giving it an up or down vote, was arguably the moment when media attention was most critical to the democratic process.

‘We all are going to die’

This USA Today article (7/1/25) was one of the more informative in detailing the impact of the bill, but it still fell short of detailing the projected cost in human lives.

While corporate media reported that the finalized bill with the Senate’s revisions would significantly cut healthcare funding to subsidize the tax breaks, they rarely explained the social consequences of such cuts. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the bill will reduce $1.04 trillion in funding for Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program over the next decade. This will strip health insurance from 11.8 million people.

The New York Times (7/1/25), acknowledging these statistics, quoted Democrats who opposed the bill due to “the harmful impact it will have on Medicaid,” and who noted that people will soon “see the damage that is done as hospitals close, as people are laid off, as costs go up, as the debt increases.”

But the outlets in our sample, at this crucial time of heightened attention, failed to mention the most significant consequence of cutting Medicaid: death.

These outlets (New York Times, 5/30/25; NPR, 5/31/25; CNN, 5/31/25;  Washington Post, 6/1/25) had all earlier acknowledged what the Times called Sen. Joni Ernst’s (R-IA) “morbid” response to her constituents’ concerns about deaths from Medicaid cuts: “Well, we all are going to die.”

But as the House deliberated on whether these cuts would become law, these outlets failed to reference credible research that projected that the large-scale loss of health insurance envisioned by the bill would have an annual death toll in the tens of thousands. One USA Today piece (7/1/25) did headline that “Trump’s Tax Bill Could Cut Medicaid for Millions of Americans,” but didn’t spell out the potential cost in human lives.

Before the Senate’s revisions, researchers from Yale’s School of Public Health and UPenn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (Penn LDI, 6/3/25) projected that such massive cuts to healthcare would result in 51,000 deaths annually. That number is expected to be even higher now, as the calculation was based on an earlier CBO estimate of 7.7 million people losing coverage over the next decade (CBO, 5/11/25).

‘Harms to healthcare’—not to people

CNN (7/4/25) euphemized life-threatening withdrawal of care as “harm to the healthcare system.”

CNN (7/4/25), in a piece on “Who Stands to Gain From the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’ And Who May Struggle,” similarly failed to spell out the dire consequences of the Medicaid cuts. It wrote that low-income Americans would be “worse off” thanks to those cuts, yet it extensively described only the fiscal impacts, as opposed to the costs in life and health, on lower- and middle-class families.

Hospitals would also be “worse off” due to the bill, as it would “leave them with more uncompensated care costs for treating uninsured patients.” This rhetorically rendered the patient, made uninsured by legislation, a burden.

The article quoted American Hospital Association CEO Rick Pollack, who said that

the real-life consequences…will result in irreparable harm to our healthcare system, reducing access to care for all Americans and severely undermining the ability of hospitals and health systems to care for our most vulnerable patients.

But CNN refused to spell out to readers what that “harm to the healthcare system” would mean: beyond “reducing access,” it would cause people to die preventable deaths.

Outlets often seemed more concerned with the impact of the bill on lawmakers’ political survival than its impact on their low-income constituents’ actual survival. The Washington Post (7/4/25), though acknowledging that their poll revealed that “two-thirds [of Americans] said they had heard either little or nothing about [the bill],” made little or no effort to contribute to an informed public. Instead, it focused on analyzing the “Six Ways Trump’s Tax Bill Could Shape the Battle for Control of Congress.”

The New York Times (7/1/25) similarly observed that the Senate Republicans’ “hard-fought legislative win came at considerable risk to their party’s political futures and fiscal legacy.” In another article (7/1/25), they noticed that it was the “more moderate and politically vulnerable Republicans” who “repeated their opposition to [the bill’s] cuts to Medicaid.”

‘Winners and losers’

“Opponents of the bill say the proposed cuts will leave millions of adults and children hungry”; the New York Times (7/1/25) apparently doesn’t know whether that’s true or not.

The Medicaid cuts aren’t the only part of the bill that will result in unnecessary deaths. The bill will cut $186 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a program that helps low-income individuals and families buy food. CBO (5/22/25) estimated that 3.2 million people under the age of 65 will lose food assistance. This contraction is expected to be even more deadly than the healthcare cutbacks: The same researchers from UPenn (7/2/25), along with NYU Langone Health, projected that losing SNAP benefits will result in 93,000 premature deaths between now and 2039.

SNAP cuts were mostly only mentioned alongside Medicaid, if at all (Washington Post, 7/3/25; New York Times, 7/3/25; CNN, 7/4/25). And when they did decide to dedicate a whole article to the singular provision, they rarely ventured beyond the fiscal impacts of such cuts into real, tangible consequences, such as food insecurity, hunger and death. The New York Times (7/1/25) asked “how many people will be affected,” but didn’t bother to ask “how will people be affected?”

What’s more, according to the Center for American Progress (7/7/25), the bill’s repeal of incentives for energy efficiency and improved air quality “will likely lead to 430 avoidable deaths every year by 2030 and 930 by 2035.”

The New York Times (7/3/25), however, analyzed this outcome as a changing landscape with “energy winners and losers.” It described how the bill will eliminate tax credits that have encouraged the electrification of homes and alleviated energy costs for millions of families. Somehow, the “loser” here (and all throughout the article) is the abstract concept of “energy efficiency” and private companies, not actual US families.

Another little-discussed provision in the bill is the funding for the Golden Dome, an anti-missile system named for and modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome. The bill set aside $25 billion for its development, along with another $128 billion for military initiatives like expanding the naval fleet and nuclear arsenal.

Media, though, did little more than report these numbers, when they weren’t ignored entirely (CBS, 7/4/25; CNN, 7/4/25). The New York Times (7/1/25) characterized these measures to strengthen the military/industrial complex as “the least controversial in the legislative package”; they were “meant to entice Republicans to vote for it.” In utterly failing to challenge $153 billion in spending on a military that is currently being deployed to bomb other countries in wars of aggression and to suppress protests against authoritarianism at home, the media manufacture consent for militarism as a necessity and an inevitability.

Ignorance a journalistic fail

The Washington Post’s headline and article (7/3/25) perfectly exemplified the paradox with today’s media—calling out how “The Big Problem With Trump’s Bill [Is That] Many Voters Don’t Know What’s in It.” Yet it tosses in an unsubstantial explanation about how “it deals with tax policy, border security, restocking the military/industrial complex, slashing spending on health and food programs for the poor—as well as many, many other programs.”

By reducing sweeping legislative consequences to vague generalities and by positioning ignorance as a voter issue rather than journalistic failure, media outlets maintain a veneer of critique while sidestepping accountability.

Featured image: PBS  depiction (7/30/25) of President Donald Trump signing the reconciliation bill. (photo: Alex Brandon/Pool via Reuters.)

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Shirlynn Chan.

New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani handily won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June, despite corporate media’s best attempts to discredit and suppress his campaign. But his opponents are not giving up, and Mamdani faces three noteworthy challengers in the general election.

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s humiliating defeat, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams’ overwhelming unpopularity and Republican Curtis Sliwa’s eccentricities have not stopped the Wall Street Journal from trying to discourage New Yorkers from voting for Mamdani in the general election. Once primary results became official on July 1, the Journal published ten op-eds in a single week (7/1–7/25) that cast Mamdani in a negative light.

Red scare

Mary Anastasia O’Grady (Wall Street Journal, 7/6/25) denounced Zohran Mamdani’s “plan to turn New York into an Orwellian ‘Animal Farm’ of equality.”

Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which to the Wall Street Journal is equivalent to Stalinism. There are currently six mayors in America who are DSA members, and none of them have implemented purges or rounded up billionaires into gulags. That does not stop the Journal’s opinion writers from fearmongering about a dystopian future under Mamdani.

Under the headline “The Lure of Comrade Mamdani,” former Merrill Lynch strategist and current Heritage Foundation affiliate Mary Anastasia O’Grady (7/6/25) asked, “Have you made something of yourself? If so, [Mamdani is] coming for you.” O’Grady attacked Mamdani’s progressive platform through references to Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela, blaming their economic struggles on socialist leaders. She made no mention, of course, of the US interventionist policies—including not just coups and coup attempts, but also strangling economic blockades and punishments—that were key drivers of those struggles.

Columnist Jason L. Riley (7/1/25) offered readers a “Blueprint for Defeating Zohran Mamdani”: the 2021 Buffalo mayoral election. His op-ed gleefully recounted that when Black democratic socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary there, business elites collaborated with Republicans and establishment Democrats to flood the general election with money and crush her campaign in favor of “corrupt, incompetent” (Jacobin, 11/3/21) incumbent Byron Brown.

Sadanand Dhume (Wall Street Journal, 7/2/25) accused Mamdani of importing “Third World” ideas like rent control (which New York City has had since 1943). 

Sadanand Dhume (7/2/25) of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute contributed the outrageously headlined op-ed, “Mamdani Brings Third World Prejudices to New York.” “Why would someone who emigrated to the US from a poor country champion ideas that keep poor countries poor?” he asked.

More than one writer compared Mamdani to Trump in terms of their extremism. In his piece, Gerard Baker (7/7/25) lambasted the “siren song of socialism,” suggesting that Mamdani and Trump similarly adhere to a “reality-challenging radicalism.” Mamdani shows that Democrats “refuse to reconcile with the new order,” and would rather “take their chances on the easy appeal of radical ideas.”

Meanwhile, Long Island Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi (7/2/25) repeatedly drew parallels between Mamdani and Trump, and argued that New York would be destroyed by Mamdani’s “lofty, utopian promises: free public transit, free college tuition, more public housing, sweeping debt cancellation and massive overhauls of systems”—because they will be paid for by modestly increasing taxes on corporations and people making millions. Allysia Finley (7/6/25) took issue with Mamdani’s proposed tax increases for the wealthy, irrespective of the social benefits that money could provide.

Former hedge fund manager Jay Newman (7/7/25) published a satirical op-ed titled “Some Modest Proposals for Mamdani,” modeled on Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” While Swift’s essay was meant to bring attention to the plight of the Irish poor and the callousness of the English response, Newman used the format to mock Mamdani for wanting to respond to the homeless crisis. Newman suggested that Mamdani might convert the Metropolitan Museum of Art into public housing—ignoring the city’s tens of thousands of empty apartment units.

Israel: NYC’s sixth borough?

If polling is to be believed, the Jewish way is more to vote for Mamdani’s New York (Wall Street Journal, 7/3/25).

Much has been written about the Islamophobia and baseless accusations of antisemitism the Zionist establishment has hurled against Mamdani. The Wall Street Journal is a key player in that narrative. Five of the ten anti-Mamdani op-eds (7/2/25,  7/3/25, 7/3/25, 7/7/25, 7/7/25) included reference to Mamdani’s anti-Israel stance (or that of his supporters) as a means to paint him as unfit for office; all of these mentioned “Hamas,” “globalize the intifada” or both.

Dhume (7/2/25), who dedicated three entire paragraphs to Mamdani’s position on Israel, expressed outrage over Mamdani’s compliance with international law. He wrote that Mamdani “accuses the Jewish state of ‘genocide’ in Gaza. If elected, he said he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli prime minister visits New York City.” This is presented as if Mamdani himself is making these accusations, rather than echoing the conclusions of several human rights organizations, and joining various world leaders in complying with the ICC’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu. (A Data for Progress poll—7/11-17/25—found that 78% of Democratic primary voters believe that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and 63% think that New York’s mayor should enforce the warrant against Netanyahu.)

Multiple writers warned of a mass exodus of Jews from New York in the face of a Mamdani mayoralty. In an opinion interview with political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, Tunku Varadarajan (7/3/25) wrote that Sheinkopf

expects Jews will start to leave New York in substantial numbers. “Never mind the general election. Jews will think, ‘If Mamdani’s got this far, who knows what’s next?’ ” There are now three-quarters of a million Muslims in New York—nearly 9% of the population. Mr. Mamdani campaigned extensively in their neighborhoods.

It’s an Islamophobic version of the Great Replacement Theory, using a dubious outlier number for the Muslim population, which most sources report to be around 3% of the city’s population (compared to a Jewish population of 7%).

Sheinkopf also suggested that Mamdani’s New York would be “the capital of class war and hatred and antisemitism, where it’s OK for a mayor to say the intifada’s just fine.”

Meanwhile, Dovid Margolin (7/3/25) wrote that Jews in New York “are nervous” because they “know what it means to have to flee. They know what it looks like in America, too, when their homes are no longer safe and there is no one to call for help.”  He painted such a dire depiction of the predicament of Jews under a Mamdani administration that he felt he had to quote Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, “One must stand firm and not run away.”

Despite the Journal’s allegations that Jewish New Yorkers are terrified of a Mamdani victory, his opponent Cuomo believes that “50% of the Jewish people voted for Mamdani” (Forward, 7/20/25). A recent poll by Zenith and Public Progress (7/16–24/25) found Mamdani getting a 43% plurality of the Jewish vote in a five-way race—vs. 26% for Cuomo. Mamdani was the choice of an overwhelming 67% of Jews between 18–44, with Cuomo having only 7% support from this group.

‘Useful idiot generation’

Mark Penn and Andrew Stein (Wall Street Journal, 7/7/25): “Call [Gen X] the Useful Idiot generation, mouthing slogans and causes they don’t understand and from which they would recoil if they did.”

Sheinkopf (7/3/25), for instance, argued that, because of their politics, “the kids are going to be the death of New York.” He called Gen Z “the most pampered generation in the history of the world…. I’m sorry they can’t buy an apartment. But they can buy a $9 latte, and a $100 dinner.”

Given that the average price of a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan is $1.5 million, young people would have to forgo their imaginary daily latte and dinner for almost eight years before they could afford a down payment.

Varadarajan also criticized Mamdani for his privileged upbringing, contrasting it with Sheinkopf’s “hardscrabble background” in which he “‘cut corned beef at the Carnegie Deli’ as he put himself through college.” Neither Sheinkopf nor Varadarajan noted that around the time that Sheinkopf was attending college, the average yearly tuition for a US public college was $394. After adjusting for inflation, that’s a quarter of the cost in the 2020s.

The crown jewel of this argument, though, was an op-ed headlined “Gen Z: the Useful Idiot Generation” (7/7/25) by Democratic strategist/corporate lobbyist Mark Penn and disgraced former New York City politician Andrew Stein. They fret about the generation’s “radicalism,” which they argue stems from being “indoctrinated” at college (where, among other things, they supposedly “learn that socialism means free stuff”), delaying marriage and turning away from religion, all of which leaves them “unmoored.” They warned:

Socialism and antisemitism will continue to fester and grow if we don’t stand up and reform our universities, reinforce our basic values and balance our social media.

Though the primary results are finalized, the Wall Street Journal has joined with others in New York’s corporate media in trying to ensure that Mamdani’s success, and his supporters’ enthusiasm, ends there.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Emma Llano.

Even as media report more regularly on starvation in Gaza, coverage still tends to obscure responsibility—as with this CNN headline (7/26/25) blaming the baby’s death on the “starvation crisis” rather than on the US-backed Israeli government.

The headlines are increasingly dire.

• “Child Dies of Malnutrition as Starvation in Gaza Grows” (CNN, 7/21/25)
• “More Than 100 Aid Groups Warn of Starvation in Gaza as Israeli Strikes Kill 29, Officials Say” (AP, 7/23/25)
• “No Formula, No Food: Mothers and Babies Starve Together in Gaza” (NBC, 7/25/25)
• “Five-Month-Old Baby Dies in Mother’s Arms in Gaza, a New Victim of Escalating Starvation Crisis” (CNN, 7/26/25)
• “Gaza’s Children Are Looking Through Trash to Avoid Starving” (New York, 7/28/25)

This media coverage is urgent and necessary—and criminally late.

Devastatingly late to care

An informative Wall Street Journal chart (7/27/25) shows the complete cutoff of food into Gaza at the beginning of 2025—a genocidal policy decision by Israel that was not accompanied by increased coverage in US media of famine in the Strip.

Since the October 7 attacks, Israel has severely restricted humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, using starvation of civilians as a tool of war, a war crime for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Yoav Gallant have been charged by the International Criminal Court. Gallant proclaimed a “complete siege” of Gaza on October 9, 2023: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”

Aid groups warned of famine conditions in parts of Gaza as early as December 2023. By April 2024, USAID administrator Samantha Power (CNN, 4/11/24) found it “likely that parts of Gaza, and particularly northern Gaza, are already experiencing famine.”

A modest increase in food aid was allowed into the Strip during a ceasefire in early 2025. But on March 2, 2025, Netanyahu announced a complete blockade on the occupied territory. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared that there was “no reason for a gram of food or aid to enter Gaza.”

After more than two months of a total blockade, Israel on May 19 began allowing in a trickle of aid through US/Israeli “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF) centers (FAIR.org, 6/6/25)—while targeting with snipers those who came for it—but it is not anywhere near enough, and the population in Gaza is now on the brink of mass death, experts warn. According to UNICEF (7/27/25):

The entire population of over 2 million people in Gaza is severely food insecure. One out of every three people has not eaten for days, and 80% of all reported deaths by starvation are children.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 147 Gazans have died from malnutrition since the start of Israel’s post–October 7 assault. Most have been in the past few weeks.

Mainstream politicians are finally starting to speak out—even Donald Trump has acknowledged “real starvation” in Gaza—but as critical observers have pointed out, it is devastatingly late to begin to profess concern. Jack Mirkinson’s Discourse Blog (7/28/25) quoted Refugees International president Jeremy Konyndyk:

I fear that starvation in Gaza has now passed the tipping point and we are going to see mass-scale starvation mortality…. Once a famine gathers momentum, the effort required to contain it increases exponentially. It would now take an overwhelmingly large aid operation to reverse the coming wave of mortality, and it would take months.

And there are long-term, permanent health consequences to famine, even when lives are saved (NPR, 7/29/25). Mirkinson lambasted leaders like Cory Booker and Hillary Clinton for failing to speak up before now: “It is too late for them to wash the blood from their hands.”

Barely newsworthy

Major US media, likewise, bear a share of responsibility for the hunger-related deaths in Gaza. The conditions of famine have been out in the open for well over a year, and yet it was considered barely newsworthy in US news media.

A MediaCloud search of online US news reports mentioning “Gaza” and either “famine” or “starvation” shows that since Netanyahu’s March 2 announcement of a total blockade—which could only mean rapidly increasing famine conditions—there was a brief blip of media attention, and then even less news coverage than usual for the rest of March and April. Media attention rose modestly in May, at a time when the world body that classifies famines announced in May that one in five people in Gaza were “likely to face starvation between May 11 and September 30″—in other words, that flooding Gaza with aid was of the highest urgency.

But as aid continued to be held up, and Gazans were shot by Israeli snipers when attempting to retrieve the little offered them, that coverage eventually dwindled, until the current spike that began on July 21.

FAIR (e.g., 3/22/24, 4/25/25, 5/16/25, 5/16/25) has repeatedly criticized US media for  coverage that largely absolves Israel of responsibility for its policy of forced starvation—what Human Rights Watch (5/15/25) called “a tool of extermination”—implemented with the backing of the US government.

The current headlines reveal that the coverage still largely diverts attention from Israeli (let alone US) responsibility, but it’s a positive development that major US news media are beginning to devote serious coverage to the issue. Imagine how different this all could have looked had they given it the attention it has warranted, and the accountability it has demanded, when alarms were first raised.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

Of the critical pieces, only three (one in the Times and two in USA Today) opposed the idea on legal or moral grounds, challenging the idea that the United States has a right to attack a country that had not attacked it.

This opposition rate of less than a fifth is in stark contrast to US public opinion on the matter, which showed that 56% of Americans opposed Trump’s bombing. Why wasn’t this reflected in the range of opinions presented by America’s top press outlets? These numbers highlight just how poorly represented the views of the public are in elite media.

‘Trump’s courageous and correct decision’

Bret Stephens (New York Times, 6/22/25) argued that bombing Iran without any evidence the country intended to build a nuclear weapon was “the essence of statesmanship.”

FAIR looked at all opinion pieces in the four papers that addressed Trump’s strikes on Iran, from June 21 through June 24. Forty-seven percent (17) explicitly praised Trump’s unauthorized act of war.

Many of these cheered the aggressive assertion of US power. The New York Times’ Bret Stephens (6/22/25) lauded “Trump’s Courageous and Correct Decision,” which “deserves respect, no matter how one feels about this president and the rest of his policies.” At the Washington Post, David Ignatius (6/22/25) offered similar praise under the headline, “Trump’s Iran Strike Was Clear and Bold,” and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (6/22/25) declared, “Trump Meets the Moment on Iran.”

USA Today (6/22/25) published columnist Nicole Russell’s “Trump Warned Iran. Then He Acted Boldly to Protect America.” The headline was later changed to an even more laudatory: “Trump Was Right to Bomb Iran. Even Democrats Will Be Safer Because of It.”  In a Wall Street Journal guest column (6/24/25), Karen Elliott House celebrated the “restor[ation] of US deterrence and credibility.”

Some directly attempted to defend the strikes’ legality. In a Post guest column (6/23/25), Geoffrey Corn, Claire Finkelstein and Orde Kittrie claimed to explain “Why Trump Didn’t Have to Ask Congress Before Striking Iran.” The piece relied extensively on the playground rhetorical tool of if they did it, why can’t I?, confidently listing earlier US presidents’ attacks that defied constitutional law, as if past violations justify the current one.

They asserted that “the operation also derives support from international law as an exercise of collective self-defense in defense of Israel,” ignoring the fact that international law does not allow you to “defend” yourself against a country that hasn’t attacked you—let alone the illogical formulation of the US engaging in “self-defense” on behalf of another country.

For the Wall Street Journal‘s art department (6/24/25), war is peace.

USA Today columnist Dace Potas (6/22/25), who called the attacks “strategically the right move and a just action,” also defended the constitutionality of Trump’s strikes, attacking Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s call to impeach Trump over the strikes:

If the president is not able to respond to a hostile regime building weapons that could destroy entire American cities, then I’m not sure what else, short of an actual invasion of the homeland, would allow for him to act.

That’s the thing about self-defense, though—it’s supposed to involve an attack.

Journal columnist Gerard Baker (6/23/25), who called the attack “judicious and pragmatic,” likewise pointed to Iran’s nuclear program, claiming that “no one seriously doubts the Iran nuclear threat”—despite both US intelligence and the International Agency for Atomic Energy concluding otherwise.

Yet another angle came from Times columnist Thomas Friedman (6/22/25), who argued that the “Attacks on Iran Are Part of a Much Bigger Global Struggle”—between the forces of “inclusion,” who believe in “more decent, if not democratic, governance,” and the forces of “resistance,” who “thrive on resisting those trends because conflict enables them to keep their people down.” Friedman called Trump’s strikes “necessary” for the right side to “triumph” in this good-vs-evil struggle.

Questions without criticism

The New York Times (6/22/25) figures you can’t go wrong by asserting total ignorance.

Of the remaining opinion pieces, ten accepted the strikes as a fait accompli and offered analysis that mostly speculated about the future and offered no anti-bombing pushback.

For instance, the Wall Street Journal published a commentary (6/23/25) asking “Can Iran Strike Back Effectively?” A New York Times op-ed (6/22/25) by security consultant Colin P. Clarke speculated about “How Iran Might Strike Back.”

The Times also published columnist W.J. Hennigan’s piece (6/22/25) that warned that “We Have No Idea Where This War Will Go.” Hennigan speculated: “It’s almost certain we haven’t seen the end of US military action in this war,” but he did not indicate whether this might be a good or bad thing.

Others were slightly more wary, such as a Times op-ed (6/23/25) headlined “What Bombs Can’t Do In Iran.” The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Karim Sadjadpour asked, “Will this extraordinary act of war strengthen Tehran’s authoritarians or hasten their demise?” Sadjadpour tells readers that “while military strikes may expose an authoritarian regime’s weaknesses, they rarely create the conditions necessary for lasting democratic change”—yet he offers support for both possible outcomes.

Similarly, the Washington Post (6/22/25) published a triple-bylined opinion piece debating the question: “Will the US/Iran Conflict Spin Out of Control?” Participant Jason Rezaian did not criticize the bombing itself, only the lack of strategy around it, judging that Trump’s idea of “decimating Iran’s defenses and then letting them stay in power to terrorize their citizens, dissidents and opponents around the world would be a massive failure” and concluding, “my concern is that there is no plan to speak of.”

Attacking Trump, supporting war

Criticizing Donald Trump’s decision-making process, USA Today‘s Rex Huppke (6/22/25) assures readers that “of course” he hopes the bombing of Iran is “successful.”

Of the seven articles that criticized Trump’s actions, more were critical of Trump and his personality or disregard of procedure than were opposed to the illegal and aggressive actions of an empire. Three of these came from USA Today’s Rex Huppke. His first column (6/21/25) argued that “Trump may have just hurled America into war because he was mad nobody liked his recent military parade.”

His second piece (6/22/25) accused Trump of starting the war based on “vibes,” and rightly attacked the credibility of the administration, citing the numerous contradictory or false statements from US and Israeli officials. However, that column made it clear that Huppke hoped for a successful strike on Iran, even as he acknowledged it could end in “disaster”:

If Trump’s bombing of Iran proves successful—and I, of course, hope it does—it’ll be dumb luck. But if it leads to disaster, it’ll be exactly what anyone paying attention to these reckless hucksters predicted.

At the New York Times, former Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote a guest column (6/24/25) under the headline: “Trump’s Iran Strike Was a Mistake. I Hope It Succeeds.” Blinken’s primary issue with Trump’s attack was that Blinken deemed it ineffective; his secondary concern was that his own State Department achievements were being overlooked: “Mr. Trump’s actions were possible only because of the work of the Obama and Biden administrations.”

‘International authoritarianism’

It’s telling that a piece (New York Times, 6/23/25) arguing that Trump’s airstrikes were illegal has to go on to explain why that’s bad.

Of the 36 editorials and opinion pieces published by the top papers on the Iran bombing, only three (8%) explicitly opposed the bombing on legal or moral grounds. The New York Times and USA Today ran opinions grounded in legal arguments. USA Today also published human rights attorney Yasmin Z. Vafa on the human toll of this war on the citizens of Iran.

In her Times op-ed (6/23/25), Yale Law School professor Oona A. Hathaway points out that the attacks were not only unconstitutional, but in violation of international law, as Trump did not seek approval from either Congress or the UN Security Council. Hathaway was the sole opinion writer to describe Trump’s illegal actions with the same diction usually reserved for America’s enemies:

The seeming rise of authoritarianism at home is precipitating a kind of international authoritarianism, in which the American president can unleash the most powerful military the world has ever known on a whim.

USA Today‘s Chris Brennan (6/24/25) also emphasized Trump’s lack of congressional approval under the headline: “There’s a Legal Way to Go to War. Trump Flouting the Constitution Isn’t It.”

The same day in USA Today (6/24/25), Vafa—an Iranian refugee herself—brought a human angle to this conflict that is unfortunately hard to come by in the top papers’ pages. She wrote: “This kind of violence doesn’t happen in theory. It happens in living rooms. In kitchens. In schoolyards and in hospitals.”

Vafa not only raised the US’s history of destabilization in the Middle East, she also contextualized these kinds of attacks’ role in creating the refugee crises that right-wingers then use to create moral panics. “We are here because you were there,” she wrote.

The people speak 

The New York Times letters page (6/22/25) once again demonstrated that the paper is well to the right of its readership.

The New York Times (6/22/25) did publish a series of letters to the editor from their readers on “The Consequences of US Strikes in Iran.” Unlike the professional columnists, many of these readers were explicitly against the bombing. One letter began: “Once again our government has launched a war against a nation that has not attacked the United States.”

Another writer wrote:

Whether President Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities has postponed one danger or not, it has surely destroyed the effort to limit nuclear proliferation. The damage is incalculable.

Another wrote: “By crossing the line and attacking Iran, the United States should not be under the misconception that it has made a step toward peace.”

In fact, the only pro-bombing letter the Times published in the package was not written by an average citizen, but by Aviva Klompas, identified by the Times as “a former speechwriter for Israel.”

The Big Lie this time

Every big US aggression is sold by a Big Lie, told over and over again by policy makers and repeated ad nauseam in the press. US interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Ukraine have all been sold to the public based on Big Lies.

This time for US newspaper columnists, the Big Lie is twofold: firstly, that Iran was rejecting negotiations in favor of building a bomb; secondly, that Iran wants to build a bomb to destroy Israel. These lies rely not only on ignorance, but also on a media apparatus that repeats them until they’re accepted as an uncontested premise for all discussion.

As FAIR (10/17/17, 6/23/25) has described in the past, these claims have no basis in fact. Iran, which has long been in favor of a nuclear weapons–free Middle East, has  attempted to negotiate a stable deal with the West for over a decade. Hindering this are Israel’s insistence on its undeclared nuclear arsenal, as well as both Trump and Biden’s rejection of the deal negotiated under Obama. Even if that weren’t the case, there’s no indication whatsoever that Iran, should it produce a nuclear bomb, would commit national suicide by attacking Israel with it.

These misrepresentations are made all the more egregious by the fact that there is a Mideastern country that has rejected the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which occupies neighboring lands under military dictatorship, regularly attacks and violates treaties with its neighbors, has proven repeatedly to be a bad-faith negotiator, is currently committing an internationally recognized genocide, and does all this in the name of rights given to them by God. That country is Israel. If the columnists at leading US newspapers had any consistency, they would be calling for Trump to launch a surprise attack on Israel’s nuclear facilities and stockpiles.

But they don’t do this, because they either don’t know or don’t care about the relevant history. They’re all willing to uncritically manufacture consent for the US empire.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Bryce Greene.

FCC chair Brendan Carr (Bloomberg, 7/24/25) enthused about Skydance‘s promises: “They’ve committed to addressing bias issues. They’ve committed to embracing fact-based journalism.”

The media production company Skydance is acquiring Paramount Global. The deal may be thought largely to be an entertainment merger, as Paramount owns Comedy Central, MTV, BET, Nickelodeon, Showtime and the Paramount film studio. But Paramount owns broadcast network CBS and its news programming, which means that the deal has enormous implications for journalism—particularly given that it requires federal approval.

The coast certainly seems clear for the merger at this point: Paramount has settled what is widely regarded as a frivolous lawsuit from President Donald Trump for $16 million over a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris; it has also canceled its highly successful and long-running Late Show With Stephen Colbert, whose host was critical of the settlement. Meanwhile, Paramount‘s soon-to-be-owner has met with “anti-woke” crusader Bari Weiss about a potential partnership with CBS.

Trump has used his institutional power to attack media he dislikes such as ABC and CBS, as well as to defund liberal-leaning public broadcasters NPR and PBS (FAIR.org, 4/25/25; Variety, 7/18/25; USA Today, 7/18/25). Late last year, Disney settled a similarly ludicrous Trump lawsuit over ABC‘s election coverage (FAIR.org, 12/16/24).

Trump has also used his power to take control of government broadcaster Voice of America, once a Cold War propaganda tool for US power projection abroad, and fill it with content from One America News Network (AP, 5/7/25), a pro-Trump outlet FAIR founder Jeff Cohen once said “makes Fox News sound like Democracy Now!” (FAIR.org, 10/15/21).

The latest moves from CBS‘s owners mark the latest seismic shift to the right in the US media landscape.

Paramount kisses the ring

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said “Paramount should be ashamed of putting its profits over independent journalism” (Vanity Fair, 7/2/25).

The lawsuit that Paramount settled to pave the way for the deal preposterously claimed that an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the CBS show 60 Minutes was deceptively edited to favor her over Trump (BBC, 7/2/25). Anyone who cares about journalism or media freedom would have rooted for Paramount and CBS to fight the lawsuit, but Paramount‘s leading stockholder, Shari Redstone, apparently saw the settlement as a small price to keep Trump’s Federal Communications Commission from standing in the way of the lucrative sale. (Trump claims that the combined company has also agreed to air $16 million more in PSAs, described as messages that will “support conservative causes supported by President Trump,” as part of the settlement, though Paramount denies such a side agreement exists—Variety, 7/4/25).

The settlement has been “broadly criticized as capitulation” by CBS staffers (Vanity Fair, 7/2/25). Reuters (7/2/25) reported that one 60 Minutes source said

newsroom staff expressed ‘widespread distress’ about the settlement and concerns about the future of the CBS News prime time news magazine and its hard-hitting brand of journalism.

A filing with the FCC (Deadline, 7/18/25) suggested that an upcoming shift in CBS’s news coverage was part of the deal to get the acquisition approved. It said that Skydance and FCC officials had “discussed Skydance’s commitment to unbiased journalism and its embrace of diverse viewpoints, principles that will ensure CBS’s editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers.”

Presumably those “varied ideological perspectives” will not include those offensive to Trump, since airing those resulted in Paramount paying a multi-million-dollar settlement. As I previously wrote (FAIR.org, 2/26/25), FCC chair Brendan Carr is a lieutenant in the MAGA movement, and wrote the FCC section for Project 2025, the right-wing policy roadmap for the second Trump administration. While vowing to reduce regulation, he has shown no qualms about using state power to impose ideological limits on broadcast news.

Paramount also promised to install an ombud who would investigate “any complaints of bias or other concerns” at CBS News, and to eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs (Wrap, 7/23/25).

‘Sacrificing free speech to curry favor’

Mother Jones‘ Inae Oh (7/18/25) wrote that “the end of Colbert signals a dark new chapter in Trump’s authoritarian slide.”

As the deal approached, it became clear that CBS’s ability to operate as a fair news provider was slipping, as Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, “announced his resignation, saying he can no longer make independent journalism decisions for the program” (NPR, 4/23/25). With Colbert’s termination, it’s unclear whether any part of the new Skydance empire will escape ideological purification.

CBS‘s announcement that it would cancel the Late Show With Stephen Colbert has been read as a muzzling of a prominent critic, not just of Trump, but of the Paramount settlement. The Writers Guild of America East (7/18/25) spelled out the authoritarian moment plainly:

On July 15, during a regular show of the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Colbert went on-air and called the settlement a “big fat bribe” in exchange for a favorable decision on the proposed merger between Paramount and Skydance, a charge currently under investigation in California.

Less than 48 hours later, on July 17, Paramount canceled the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, a show currently performing first in its timeslot, giving vague references to the program’s “financial performance” as the only explanation. For ten years, the show has been one of the most successful, beloved and profitable programs on CBS, entertaining an audience of millions on late night television, on streaming services and across social media.

Given Paramount’s recent capitulation to President Trump in the CBS News lawsuit, the Writers Guild of America has significant concerns that the Late Show’s cancellation is a bribe, sacrificing free speech to curry favor with the Trump administration as the company looks for merger approval.

In its first new episode in over a year, the Comedy Central flagship animated comedy South Park (7/23/25), often embraced by conservatives for its eagerness to offend liberals, attacked both Trump and the channel’s owner Paramount. In its raunchy style,  USA Today (7/24/25) reported, it “referenced everything from the company’s controversial settlement with the president to its shock decision to cancel the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” Show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had previously commented on X (7/2/25), “This merger is a shitshow and it’s fucking up South Park.” It remains to be seen whether the thin-skinned Trump White House will hold up the acquisition in retaliation for the satire.

Trump’s ‘favorite tech company’

Skydance‘s David Ellison “is said to be interested in infusing [Bari] Weiss’s editorial perspective into CBS News” (CNN, 7/11/25). 

For those who are unfamiliar with Weiss, she is a former New York Times editor and writer who gained fame for attacking “wokeness” (Commentary, 11/21)—which for the right is any politics that seeks to address racial and gender inequalities—and her advocacy for Israel and against critics of its government (Intercept, 3/8/18).

While David Ellison donated to former President Joe Biden’s reelection efforts (CNBC, 4/16/24) and other Democratic campaigns, the political commitments of his father Larry Ellison may be more relevant. Larry is the co-founder of the software giant Oracle and, according to the Forbes 400 list, the fourth-richest person in the United States, behind Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos and X‘s Elon Musk. As the New York Times (4/2/25) noted, Larry “is putting up most of the $8 billion bid by his son, David, to buy Paramount.”

The elder Ellison is well-known for his contributions to conservative causes (Vox, 2/12/20; Washington Post, 5/20/22). He gave $4 million to a super PAC supporting Marco Rubio’s presidential bid (Politico, 2/20/16), and $15 million to one backing Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.) (Politico, 2/19/22).

Slate (9/14/20) called Oracle the “Trump Administration’s Favorite Tech Company,” as evidenced by the fact that Trump picked Oracle to potentially “partner” with TikTok, giving the Chinese-owned social media company a reliable ideological watchdog in order to avoid a congressionally mandated ban (FAIR.org, 12/6/24).

Shared ‘Zionist values’

A Jerusalem Post article (7/31/24) “written in cooperation with SkyDance”—that is, an advertorial—touted the young executives at Skydance and Paramount as “connected to Israel and holding Zionist values.”

One thing the Ellisons agree on is wholehearted support for Zionism. In 2017, Larry Ellison gave $16.6 million to the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 11/5/17). Two years ago, the Hollywood Reporter (10/13/23) reported that “Skydance Media, led by David Ellison, has committed $1 million to humanitarian relief efforts in Israel” in response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.  It quoted the company:

Skydance stands with Israel, strongly condemns the attacks against its citizens, is donating support to the victims of this tragic act of terrorism, and prays for the safe release of innocents hostages.

Last year, the Jerusalem Post (7/31/24) ran a story “written in cooperation with SkyDance” that highlighted support for Israel by David Ellison and Redstone’s son, “Brandon Korff, heir to the Paramount empire.” The article quoted a “source familiar with the details” who described Ellison and Korff sharing “Zionist values” and noted that “both quietly donate quite a bit to the state of Israel and the IDF.”

Redstone herself has been an outspoken Zionist during her time at the head of Paramount; when CBS admonished host Tony Dokoupil for his hostile interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which Dokoupil suggested that Coates was an “extremist” on Palestine, Redstone publicly criticized network management (LA Times, 10/9/24).

Given the talks with Weiss and the Free Press, one might expect CBS coverage to skew even further to the right on the Middle East, as well as on the Trump’s administration effort to clamp down on critical speech against Israel’s genocide and its support from the US. While Weiss’s brand is all about free speech, she got her start in politics agitating for the censorship of professors with pro-Palestinian views (Jewish Currents, 7/23/20).

Featured image: The 60 Minutes interview (10/7/25) that CBS is paying Donald Trump $16 million for airing.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Sam Feder is the director of Heightened Scrutiny, a documentary that follows transgender ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio as he argues before the Supreme Court against Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. The film explores the crucial role centrist media played in driving legislation like Tennessee’s, and the broader cultural backlash against trans rights. FAIR senior analyst Julie Hollar, who appears in the film, interviewed Feder for FAIR.

Civil rights Lawyer Chase Strangio in Heightened Scrutiny: “It’s a playbook that will effectively take a misunderstood, maligned, small minority of people and place a larger population’s anxiety of a changing world onto them.”

Julie Hollar: You previously made a documentary, Disclosure (2020), about trans representation in film and television. You’ve said Heightened Scrutiny is something like a sequel to Disclosure. What drove you to make this film?

Sam Feder: Disclosure ends with a warning about the risks of increased visibility. I first met Chase when I interviewed him for Disclosure. He explained that while representation was important, it was crucial for trans people to be pushing for actual material redistribution, and to disrupt the systems that exclude most trans people, impacting their ability to survive. Without the deep, structural change Chase suggested, I worried that we were about to face a significant backlash to the media visibility we were witnessing at the time.

The backlash was even more drastic than I could have imagined. A year after Disclosure came out, hundreds of anti trans bills were being introduced. In just three years, from 2021–2024, we went from zero states banning gender-affirming care to 24 states. Now it’s up to 27 states.

I realized very quickly that anti-trans talking points that had once been confined to right-wing news outlets were now front-page stories in the mainstream media. My colleagues, who had always been strong allies, were parroting the mainstream media, questioning the legitimacy of trans healthcare. And they felt empowered by the coverage they were reading to speak with authority when debating trans rights, because the Paper of Record was saying it, and the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic, and on and on and on.

So I wanted to understand this shift, and I wanted to understand why reporters did not uphold the standards of journalism in coverage of trans people. Heightened Scrutiny examines the relationship between the media’s coverage of trans rights and the anti-trans legislation we have seen balloon in the backlash since 2021.

JH: Tell me more about the role of the media that you uncovered, and your focus on the New York Times.

Atlantic (7-8/18): “”Your Child Says She’s Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13.” (He’s 22, actually.)

SF: In the film we show that there was a clear shift starting in 2018, with the cover story in the Atlantic by Jesse Singal headlined “Your Child Says She’s Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13.”

We interviewed the cover model—he was 22 years old at the time of that article! Likewise, the rest of the story is full of misinformation and fearmongering. Fast forward to 2021, and misinformation about trans people is all over the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the Washington Post.

And people started to speak up and tell these outlets that they were publishing a lot of misinformation that was dangerous and harmful. And most outlets were willing to hear that criticism, and at least tried to do somewhat better—except the New York Times. They kind of dug in their heels and took it up a notch.

In a matter of six months or so, there were seven front-page stories questioning trans people’s right to healthcare in the New York Times. In early 2023, a group of Times contributors published an open letter about the anti-trans bias that had been steadily increasing. But the Times refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing, calling it legitimate and important journalism, and still to this day they promote the voices and ideas of well-known anti-trans thinkers, and perpetuate this anti-trans narrative.

And as Chase explains in the film, in the legal realm, this unprecedented thing was happening, which is that legal briefs were citing these articles. And that is incredibly uncommon with legal briefs about medical care; you usually see citations from scientists and medical experts, you don’t see them quoting articles from newspapers. And they were doing it because that was the only place they could draw on to support their anti-trans legislation.

And it was working; they were able to pass these bills because of the anti-trans media bias that was popping up everywhere. And the New York Times was central in that. There is a scene in the film where Fox News says look, even the New York Times is questioning this medical care, so it must be really bad for adolescents.

Julie Hollar in Heightened Scrutiny: “The news media really set the political agenda in many ways…. They establish what the national discourse is.”

JH: In the film, I talk briefly about FAIR’s 2023 study of New York Times trans coverage, which showed that over the course of a year, the paper devoted more front-page articles to framing trans people as some sort of threat to others’ rights—such as cisgender women and parents—than to the coordinated assault on trans people’s rights. FAIR just published an update to that study, which shows that the Times has gotten even worse in some ways than they were before, including fewer trans sources in front-page stories about trans issues, for instance, and including just as many sources peddling unchallenged anti-trans misinformation as trans sources. How are you as a filmmaker trying to hold the Times accountable? What do you hope audiences might do in response?

SF: When people watch the film, so many are surprised to learn about the trajectory from coverage to law, and how culpable the Times has been in spreading misinformation. This link between the articles and anti-trans bills is devastating; the film shows the direct connection from article to harm.

Just like Disclosure was a field study in representation that could be applied to any marginalized community, Heightened Scrutiny is a field study that can be applied to the ways in which the media has skewed the public’s perception of all marginalized people. At the end of the day, when anyone’s right to bodily autonomy is chipped away at, everyone’s rights are.

I think this is a way to show people an example of the harm. I also hope this film is a tool for supporting those who are on the ground fighting back against the harm—medical providers, lawyers, legislators, etc.

JH: The Times is getting worse, the Supreme Court isn’t saving us. In making the film, did you come across anything that gave you hope or inspiration?

SF: I learned from people I spoke with, in particular Lewis Wallace, who talks about how hope is a practice. Hope is something we have to work for relentlessly and rigorously.

I’m inspired by Mila, the 13-year-old trans girl in the film. She’s this brilliant person, empowered and unflappable in the face of immense struggle. Watching her fight gives me hope. And watching her family showing up to support her every step of the way teaches all of us what love can look like.

There’s still so much to protect. The Skrmetti decision is devastating, but queer and trans people know that we cannot rely on the law. Our ability to survive and thrive does not begin or end with the law. We know how to take care of each other. That also gives me hope.

You know, when Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral primary, I also felt real hope, witnessing New Yorkers come together and do something that seemed so impossible. I hope people will rally around trans civil rights the same way.

JH: And media did their best to push misinformation in that case, too.

SF: Yes, the Times included. And seeing people be skeptical of the media, ignore the misinformation, take action together, and do what the media try to tell us is impossible or scary or “too woke”—we need to keep doing that, and giving each other hope.

Filmmaker Sam Feder: “So many people were misled into thinking there is a legitimate debate about…whether trans people’s basic rights should be upheld, and it’s because of what they read or see in mainstream media.”

JH: What do you want people to walk away from your film with?

SF: I want people to see that the SCOTUS case is grounded in popular culture, in mainstream media and social media discourse. So many people were misled into thinking there is a legitimate debate about whether the risks of gender-affirming care outweighed the need for it, and whether trans people’s basic rights should be upheld, and it’s because of what they read or see in mainstream media. The legislation directly responds to the media climate.

Our existence is not a debate. As Jude [Ellison S. Doyle] says in the film: “Trans people are presented as one side of a debate on our lives. I hold the opinion that I exist, and you hold the opinion that I don’t.”

The outcome of this case is going to impact the constitutional rights of all people living in America. That’s lost on many people, but this is going to affect everyone’s access to privacy with their doctors.

JH: And that’s something that just wasn’t highlighted in most of the media coverage of the case, so that most people are not aware of it, based on the news reports.

SF: I absolutely think you’re right about that. There is still a lot we can protect. The fight is not over.

Heightened Scrutiny is screening in New York City at DCTV, July 18–24; in Los Angeles at Laemmle Theatres, July 26–27 and 29; and in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater, July 31 and August 2.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

ABC (7/15/25) reports on the death toll of Texas’ fossil fuel–fueled floods.

In Texas, at least 134 people are dead, including 36 children, and a hundred are missing after a devastating flash flood swept through the central part of the state on July 4. A late June/early July heatwave in Europe claimed 2,300 lives across the continent. These events, of the kind made more extreme and frequent by climate change (ABC, 7/7/25; New York Times, 7/9/25), occur as EU leaders roll back climate policy and the Trump administration guts climate protections, staying true to the slogan of “Drill, baby, drill!”

Despite this dire backsliding on climate policy, with consequences that are clear as day, it’s business as usual in the realm of business news. Recent pieces in the widely read business publications Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and the business section of Reuters misleadingly suggested the fossil fuel industry’s profits and losses happen in a vacuum.

A clear consensus

Global leaders ignoring the climate crisis clearly aren’t making its tragic effects go away. The scientific consensus has been unmistakable for years: Fossil fuels are the main driver of climate change. In order to avoid surpassing the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit, beyond which the most devastating impacts from global heating will be felt, we need to phase out fossil fuels—and fast (Union of Concerned Scientists, 1/21/21).

Many journalists have expressed this urgency while covering extreme weather and other impacts, making the connection to human-caused climate change and fossil fuel emissions (FAIR.org, 5/17/24). While these in-depth stories serve as clear explainers in outlets’ science and environment sections, the connection is still being ignored when business is discussed.

If not for the grotesque profits of fossil fuel companies—which knew about their industry’s environmental impact since the 1970s—resistance to a clean energy transition would not exist.

Industry coverage

Reuters (7/8/25) reported that “the US will produce less oil in 2025 than previously expected as declining oil prices have prompted producers to slow activity this year”—with no acknowledgment of the climate impact of this slowdown.

In early July, Exxon and Shell announced lower second-quarter profits from weaker oil and gas trading. Coverage in Bloomberg (7/7/25), the Wall Street Journal (7/7/25) and Reuters (7/7/25) discussed these announcements as indicative of how the rest of the fossil fuel industry will fare in Q2. Stories attributed these dips to Trump’s tariffs, Middle East tensions, excess supply and uncertain demand. Oil prices creeping up over the past two weeks were due to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, projected lower US oil production and Trump tariffs, Reuters (7/8/25) reported.

Meanwhile, reports on renewable energy stocks dipping after the passing of Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” also failed to mention the consequences of this backslide (Reuters, 7/7/25; Bloomberg, 7/8/25): If we keep our carbon emissions at current rates, we are poised to hit the 1.5°C threshold before 2030, leading to more deadly extreme weather events worldwide (Health Policy Watch, 5/6/24).

Discussing Chevron’s efforts to cut costs, Bloomberg (7/9/25) mentioned low oil prices and an “uncertain outlook for fossil fuels.” A passing mention of an “uncertain outlook” was the closest any of these pieces gets to hinting at the relevant need to phase out fossil fuels and invest in renewables, regardless of geopolitical events and market trends.

Increased demand

The Wall Street Journal (7/10/25) euphemized Trump’s wholesale attack on renewable energy as “a rising tide of pushback and scrutiny over climate-transition plans.”

The Wall Street Journal (7/10/25) reported “Oil Age Is Far From Over, OPEC Says,” citing increased energy needs globally as a reason fossil fuels will continue to be extracted. Oil correspondent Giulia Petroni wrote:

Meanwhile, OPEC also said energy policies across major economies are shifting as countries grapple with a growing array of challenges. While ambitious policy goals remain in place, a rising tide of pushback and scrutiny over climate-transition plans is emerging, particularly in the US and other advanced economies, according to the cartel.

Petroni did not cite any scientists or climate activists to push back against OPEC’s claims, let alone any of the litany of studies, data and reports that warn that if we want life on earth as we know it to continue, we simply cannot keep drilling for more oil. The International Institute for Sustainable Development (9/25/24) explained:

Peer-reviewed science shows there is no room for new coal, oil and gas development under the 1.5°C global warming limit agreed in Paris. In 1.5°C-aligned scenarios, coal production declines by 95% by 2050, and oil and gas production by at least 65%.

Another Journal piece (7/9/25) discussed a decrease in diesel supply, which could increase transport and heating costs next winter. “Lack of refining capacity growth is also a problem in the US, where the green energy movement has turned some refiners away from making diesel, said Flynn of the Price Futures Group,”  Anthony Harrup reported—as if it’s a “problem” that green activists have succeeded in steering producers away from a climate-wrecking fuel. (No experts on renewable alternatives were cited.)

The argument that renewable energy sources can’t power the world is also not supported. According to the UN, renewables have the potential to meet 65% of the world’s energy demands by 2030 and 90% by 2050. And contrary to fossil fuel propaganda parroted by corporate media, renewable energy sources are already the cheapest power option in the majority of the world.

The AI boom

Bloomberg‘s report (7/4/25) worried that ending tax credits for renewable energy would fail to “quench the thirst of data centers that power artificial intelligence”—not that it would accelerate the climate catastrophe. 

Reports about AI’s profligate energy usage from Reuters and Bloomberg also largely left out discussions about its climate impact. Reuters (7/9/25) did a story on the crisis facing the largest power grid in the country due to AI demand, as chatbots “consume power faster than new plants can be built.” The piece reported Trump ordering two oil and natural gas power plants in Pennsylvania to continue operating through the summer, despite their scheduled retirement in May, without mentioning the effect on climate.

Bloomberg (7/4/25) reported on Trump’s tax package curbing renewables even as AI’s need for power increases. The piece discussed the economic implications of the policy, but left out the dire environmental consequences.

Another Bloomberg piece (7/7/25) about AI’s utility needs did briefly make the climate connection. Reporter Josh Saul alluded at the end of the article to the arguments of “critics,” who warn these data centers can “hurt climate efforts by extending the lives of carbon-emitting coal and gas plants.” But he did not quote or cite specific groups, scientists or activists.

Ironic omissions

“Europe’s fleet of coal and gas plants could come to the rescue,” Bloomberg (7/7/25) reported. “The likely comeback for the region’s legacy fossil-fuel plants shows just how important they are.”

More puzzling reporting discussed European countries needing to fill energy gaps with fossil fuels during June and July’s deadly heatwaves.

“Fossil Fuels Set to Fill Europe’s Power Gap as Wind Plunges” (Bloomberg, 7/7/25) quoted an energy strategist from Rabobank: “The longer the wind lull continues amid the scorching heat, the longer fossil fuels will have to fill the evening demand gap in power markets.”

“Europe is steadily refilling storage sites that ended last winter severely depleted after a colder-than-usual heating season triggered hefty withdrawals,” another Bloomberg piece (7/7/25) stated. “Still, the region remains vulnerable to sudden shifts in supply or demand—especially as hot weather drives up energy use for cooling.”

“Risks remain as most of July is expected to be hotter than usual across Europe, possibly boosting gas consumption to meet demand for cooling,” said another (Bloomberg, 7/10/25).

This “hotter than usual” weather in Europe has claimed thousands of lives, with research suggesting 1,500 of the 2,300 estimated heat deaths could be connected to climate change, which, as we know, is caused by the burning of fossil fuels (New York Times, 7/9/25). But this clear connection and ironic chicken-and-egg scenario is not explained in any of these articles.

The Wall Street Journal (7/5/25) refers to the rolling back of “Biden’s climate law”—but never explains what energy and climate have to do with each other.

The Wall Street Journal (7/5/25) covered Trump’s rollback of President Joe Biden’s climate law, which offered subsidies for wind and solar power, electric vehicles and other green projects, in a piece headlined “The Moment the Clean-Energy Boom Ran Into ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’”

The piece quoted Tracy Stone-Manning, president of the Wilderness Society and director of the Bureau of Land Management under Biden; Reagan Farr, chief executive of solar developer Silicon Ranch; and Cierra Pearl, a young Maine resident who recently lost her job building solar arrays. These sources decried Trump’s sabotage of the green energy transition, but none of them were cited discussing broader climate impacts.

“The clashing visions have left many developers and workers around the country in a lurch,” Journal oil reporter David Uberti wrote. Uberti made sure to quote a statement by Tom Pyle, president of the pro-fossil fuel American Energy Alliance: “If repealing these subsidies will ‘kill’ their industry, then maybe it shouldn’t exist in the first place.” (The $20 billion the fossil fuel industry receives annually in direct US government subsidies was not discussed.)

The impacts Trump’s anti–green energy policies will have on fossil fuel workers are certainly relevant, and it makes sense that business news articles would center broadly defined economic implications. But it is a glaring omission to discuss EVs, renewable energy and the possibility of oil drilling on public lands without any mention of environmental impacts and our all-but-guaranteed surpassing of the Paris Agreement threshold if we continue along this path.

Siloing the connection

Bloomberg (7/10/15) puts a story about how climate change is killing Europeans in its special “Green” section.

These outlets have no shortage of resources to report on climate change—and the culpability of the fossil fuel industry for its ramifications. Some are already doing it in other sections of the paper.

“We need to start acting against climate change and this means, first, trying to reduce the heat in cities,” a Bloomberg piece (7/10/15) about Europe’s heatwave said, quoting environmental epidemiologist Pierre Masselot. “But at the end of the day, all these measures won’t probably be as efficient as just reducing climate change altogether, and so reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.” This article appeared in the site’s “Green” section.

In another  piece (7/7/25) regarding AI’s energy demands in the “Green” section, the outlet also makes the connection to climate change. Bloomberg quoted a statement from environmental law organization Earthjustice:

Coal, gas and oil fired power plants spew millions of pounds of health-harming and climate-warming pollution into the air each year, and cost consumers millions of dollars more than cleaner energy sources.

While thorough climate reporting and mentions of the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility for global heating are difficult to find in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, its “Sustainable Business” section (6/30/25) recently covered how companies are reporting fewer details about how climate change and extreme weather are impacting their business.

In its “Sustainability” section, Reuters (7/1/25) discussed the EU heatwave’s links to climate change and fossil fuel emissions. “Scientists say greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are a cause of climate change, with deforestation and industrial practices being other contributing factors,” Clotaire Achi, Emma Pinedo and Alvise Armellini wrote. “Last year was the planet’s hottest on record.”

The ‘silent majority’

Recent studies have revealed that between 80–89% of people worldwide are concerned about climate change and want their governments to do more to address it. But this vast majority of global citizens is ignored by reporting that treats the relentless extraction of fossil fuels as a source of profit rather than an existential threat. The climate journalism resource group Covering Climate Now, of which FAIR is a partner, refers to these people as the “silent majority.” Public support is widespread, but public discourse is lagging behind.

Major publications should not relegate the causes of climate change to their science and environmental sections. They need to be front and center in pieces that focus on the industry responsible for driving it, profiting from it and lying to the public about it for decades.

This story is part of the 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Olivia Riggio.

The bill will have a remarkably regressive distributional impact. While top incomes will balloon by thousands of dollars, lower-income Americans will actually see their incomes decline. One analysis from before the bill’s final passage found that its major provisions would reduce incomes for the bottom 20% by about 2%.

Tax cuts, after all, are only one part of the bill. More relevant to lower-income Americans is that this bill will deliver the largest cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in US history.

Such a historic weakening of the safety net—the programs that support the finances of lower-income Americans—should warrant not only major attention, but significant scrutiny from national media outlets. And yet, at the New York Times, the approach has been to distract and obscure above all else.

‘Defined by staggering debt’

As Trump slashed $1 trillion from healthcare, the New York Times (6/27/25) stressed the importance of reducing the deficit. 

One manifestation of this approach has been the Times’ insistence on elevating the bill’s effect on the debt as a foremost concern. In the week or so leading up to the bill’s passage, in fact, both an editorial (6/27/25) and an episode of the Times’ flagship podcast the Daily (7/2/25) were dedicated entirely to a discussion of the national debt.

The Daily episode went as far as claiming, “The legislation is defined by the staggering amount of debt that it’s creating.” It then warned of the potential for a debt “doom loop,” whereby rising debt raises borrowing costs and forces the government to issue more debt in order to pay for its existing debt load.

Meanwhile, the Times editorial board opted to focus more heavily on the costs already being imposed by high federal debt. In a piece titled “The National Debt Is Already Causing Bigger Problems Than People Realize,” the board highlighted the “staggering amount of money” the government puts towards interest payments each year. The board’s solution:

The government needs to raise taxes, especially on the wealthy, and it needs to make long-term changes in Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of spending growth.

In other words, at a time when the Republican Party is gutting the safety net in epic fashion, the New York Times is coyly hinting that Social Security and Medicare will need to be cut.

‘Enough to repair every bridge’

The New York Times‘ own chart (6/27/25) indicates that Trump’s budget bill will have only a modest impact on US interest payments. What did cause interest costs to soar was the political decision to fight inflation through higher interest rates, a decision the Times applauded  (FAIR.org, 1/25/23, 6/27/23).

Across both the editorial and the podcast episode, the primary reason put forward by the Times for concern over the national debt was the borrowing costs associated with it. But is the bill’s effect on borrowing costs—the amount of money the federal government will have to spend to pay off the interest on its debts—genuinely that significant of a concern?

The Times editorial board seems to think so. Warning of the ill effects of increasing borrowing costs, the board observed:

The House version of Mr. Trump’s bill, already approved by that chamber, would increase interest payments on the debt by an average of $55 billion a year over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The increase alone is enough money to fully repair every bridge in the United States.

This comparison is useful to a degree. It exposes the priorities of the Trump administration, which seems to value tax cuts for the wealthy above delivering basic public goods.

But the comparison ultimately obscures more than it illuminates. The reality is that $55 billion is a relatively small sum for the US government. It represents only about 0.8% of the 2024 federal budget, and 0.2% of US GDP.

High cost of high interest rates

The interest rate on 10-year US Treasury bills has risen from 0.6% in 2020 to 4.5% today (chart: CNBC).

The total amount the federal government pays in interest—the amount it pays in excess of what it borrowed when it pays back loans—is of course much larger: The Times relays that interest payments are on pace to surpass $1 trillion this year, representing around 15% of last year’s federal budget. As the editorial board notes, this level of spending on interest payments crowds out other, more useful spending by the government. In other words, it does impose a not-insignificant cost.

What the board de-emphasizes or ignores, however, is that high interest payments are really just a symptom of other more fundamental policy choices.

On the one hand, they reflect the political decision to rely on the blunt instrument of interest rates to combat the pandemic-era spike in inflation. The result has been a rise in interest rates on ten-year government bonds, from under 1% in 2020 to above 4% today.

This was not an inevitable development. Other methods exist for combating inflation. But these methods were sidelined in favor of a regressive, debt-inflating approach. Would you know this by reading the Times editorial? Absolutely not.

The incredibly low tax rate

The United States has one of the lowest effective tax rates among wealthy countries (chart: Tax Policy Center).

On the other hand, high interest payments also reflect the political decision to run up the US debt load through tax cuts for the wealthy. This history of tax cuts is discussed by the editorial board, but it is framed as more of a secondary issue. Little would readers know that the crowding-out effect imposed by high interest payments, which the Times depicts climbing above the cost of Social Security in coming years, is dwarfed by the crowding-out effect of low tax revenue.

For such a rich country, the US collects incredibly little in taxes. Its tax revenue registers a meager 29% of GDP, compared to 42% in Canada, 52% in France and 62% in Norway.

Meanwhile, interest payments as a percentage of GDP are set to double over the next 30 years, reaching about 6% of GDP in the 2050s. That’s not even half the revenue deficit the US faces versus Canada—and Canada’s a low-tax country compared to France and Norway!

The Times nonetheless has run no editorial in recent months decrying the US for being such a low-tax country. Even in its editorial about interest payments, a breakdown of the pitiful state of US tax collection by international standards is nowhere to be found. Instead, we get a muddled denunciation of the bill’s irresponsible contribution to burdensome borrowing costs.

But, again, the bill’s contribution is tiny. Yes, interest payments are projected to reach 6% of GDP by the 2050s, but they will hit 5% even in the absence of this bill. With this single percentage of GDP boost in borrowing costs, the bill imposes a cost in 30 years that is a fraction of the cost of our tax deficit versus Canada today.

‘People benefit from working’

In its one editorial (5/23/25) on the reconciliation bill’s cuts to the safety net, the New York Times endorsed the idea “that some government benefits should be tied to employment.”

This is not to say that the Big Beautiful Bill will not impose Major Gratuitous Pain. But it is to say that such pain will not be found in an analysis of its impact on borrowing costs.

Rather, where we should look to see clear evidence of negative effects is the savings side of the bill, where Republicans have enacted brutal cuts to the social safety net, cuts that the economist James Galbraith calls “the direct result of bipartisan scaremongering over deficits and debt.”

The Times editorial board has run one editorial (5/23/25) on the bill’s cuts to the safety net. Published over a month before the bill’s passage, the piece was headlined “Republicans Can’t Hide Medicaid Cuts in a ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill.” As it pointed out, the Republican bill would reverse the progress that has been made over the past decade or so in expanding health insurance access to more Americans.

Oddly, however, the editorial extended an olive branch to the GOP, conceding:

We are sympathetic to the idea that some government benefits should be tied to employment. People benefit from working, and society benefits when more people are working.

Explaining the decision to insert this concession into the piece, editorial director David Leonhardt (New York Times, 7/1/25) has since elaborated:

I actually understand why, at a top-line way, people would want to put work requirements on a federal program, and actually I do think there are federal programs that should have work requirements. I’m a pretty big skeptic of universal basic income, of the idea that we’re just going to have the federal government give people lots of money outright. I don’t think it’s worked very well. I think it’s hugely expensive.

This is a baffling explanation. As worded in the editorial, it appears that the board is expressing sympathy for work requirements for some existing government benefits, and justifying them with reference to the value of work, despite work requirements’ long history of doing nothing to increase employment. Yet Leonhardt gives no example of a current government program that should be saddled with a work requirement. Instead, he merely expresses his opposition to universal basic income, using conservative arguments against the policy in doing so. This level of clarity, however, may be all we can expect from the Times.

Unnoted cutbacks

At least as notable as the contents of the editorials published by the Times on the Big Beautiful Bill is what the Times has failed to highlight about the legislation. After all, the paper has run just two editorials on what is probably the most regressive major piece of legislation in at least a generation. What have these missed? A lot.

For one, the largest cuts to food stamps in history are entirely absent from the Times editorial board’s critiques of the bill. That millions would lose access to food stamps and tens of millions would see their benefits cut is apparently an afterthought for the board. It evidently does not warrant the denunciation that somewhat higher borrowing costs require.

Decimation of clean energy provisions and heavy new restrictions on student loans likewise appear a grand total of zero times in the Times’ editorials on the bill. This is the sort of resistance that the most prominent establishment newspaper in the country has to offer.

‘Big ugly battle’

The situation at the Daily has been better, though it had only a rather low bar to clear. Through the day the bill was signed into law, the show published three episodes on the legislation. The first (6/5/25), titled “The Big Ugly Battle Over the Big Beautiful Bill,” touched on the bill’s attacks on climate provisions in its first half, and devoted its second half to a conversation about cuts to Medicaid.

Food stamps, by contrast, were mentioned in just two sentences. And student loans didn’t make a single appearance.

The following episode (7/2/25), discussed above, centered on the debt, but the third episode (7/4/25) dedicated additional airtime to cuts to the safety net, again including a discussion of Medicaid cuts in the second half of the episode. Its first half also centered the serious negative impacts of the legislation, mostly focusing on the array of tax cuts in the bill, but framing the overall impact as wildly regressive:

The most important thing to know about this package is that it delivers its greatest benefits to the wealthy, and it extracts its greatest cuts on the poor.

The largest cuts to food stamps in American history, however, garnered no airtime. Same goes for the massive pullback in student loans.

A ripple in a tsunami

We found only two New York Times headlines like this one (6/5/25)—out of nearly 800 in its US politics section—that straightforwardly conveyed the impact of the budget bill’s cuts.

Unfortunately, this poor coverage is not limited to Times editorials and the Daily. As it turns out, the news section of the Times has been similarly lacking in serious coverage.

The paper’s US Politics section is case in point. From the start of June through July 4, when Trump signed his bill into law, this section of the Times featured a total of seven articles that mentioned “food stamp(s),” “SNAP” or “food aid” in either their headline or subhead. For “Medicaid,” “health cuts” and “Obamacare,” the number was ten.

But few of these articles bore headlines straightforwardly reporting the facts of what’s projected to happen to millions of Americans as a result of cuts to food stamps and healthcare spending. In total, only two headlines, both about healthcare, really fit this description:

• “GOP Bill Has $1.1 Trillion in Health Cuts and 11.8 Million Losing Care, CBO Says” (6/29/25)
• “Millions Would Lose Their Obamacare Coverage Under Trump’s Bill” (6/5/25)

Other headlines mentioned cuts, but some didn’t even reference that information. For instance, one headline (6/3/25) read, “Trump Administration Backs Off Effort to Collect Data on Food Stamp Recipients.”

Amazingly, at least in the US Politics section of the paper, zero headlines included the phrase “student loans,” despite substantial retrenchment in student loan policy. The term “safety net” appeared in the headline or subhead of only six articles.

With around 800 articles appearing in the Times’ US Politics section during this timeframe, coverage of historic cuts to crucial safety net programs resembled a ripple in a tsunami.

‘Fair to criticize Democrats’

The type sizes conveys the relative importance the New York Times (7/1/25) places on prices paid by politicians vs. those paid by the public.

Nonetheless, when Times editorial director David Leonhardt was asked whether he thinks “Americans who will be impacted by these cuts understand what’s happening,” given the lack of public outcry so far, he gave credit to Republicans for succeeding in minimizing public opposition, and blamed Democrats for failing to make a bigger deal out of the bill:

I also think it’s fair to criticize the Democratic Party and activists who are aligned with the Democratic Party for not figuring out ways to make a bigger deal out of these cuts. To some extent, they’ve allowed the Republican cynical strategy of staying away from town halls to work better than it might have.

The role of corporate media, and more particularly of the New York Times, may never have even crossed Leonhardt’s mind. But, of course, the Times is a critical player in US politics. With around 12 million subscribers and millions of daily listeners to the Daily, the outlet has incredible reach. If it wanted to, the Times could play a significant role in raising public awareness of this bill. The problem is that it seems completely uninterested in adopting this role.

I would argue, therefore, that the paltry public outcry is fundamentally a result of editorial decisions, not least those made at the Times. By refusing to cover cuts to the social safety net with more than minimal urgency, the Times has done a good deal to deprive the Democratic Party and other opponents of the legislation of the sort of informational environment in which public opposition to harmful policies can be effectively mobilized.

Through inaction, through poor coverage, the Times is making a political choice to undermine opposition to some of the Trump administration’s most damaging policies.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Conor Smyth.

In recent years, transgender Americans have seen an exponentially growing assault on their rights.

In the first half of 2025 alone, 942 anti-trans bills have been introduced throughout the country—more than were introduced in all of 2024—and since taking office, President Donald Trump has signed no fewer than 12 anti-trans executive orders.

It’s an attack that the New York Times editorial board called “Trump’s Shameful Campaign Against Transgender Americans” (2/9/25). The editorial explained that the attacks seek

to exclude transgender people from nearly every aspect of American public life: denying them accurate identification documents such as passports, imposing a nationwide restriction on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, investigating schools with gender-neutral bathrooms, criminalizing teacher support for transgender students and commanding the Federal Bureau of Prisons to force the estimated 1,500 transgender women in custody to be housed with men.

But the irony of the Times‘ condemnation of transphobia was not lost on those familiar with the paper’s history of biased, sensationalistic coverage of trans issues. As transgender journalist and media critic Erin Reed (Erin in the Morning, 2/9/25) put it, “The New York Times does not get to erase its role in how we got here.”

Follow-up study

For years, media journalists and critics, including here at FAIR, have called out the Times’ pattern of platforming transphobes before trans people, spreading dangerous misinformation and framing trans rights as up for debate (FAIR.org, 5/19/23, 8/30/23, 5/28/24).

A 2023 FAIR study (5/11/23) found that in a year of front-page coverage of trans issues, rather than centering the growing assault on the trans community and its impact on that community, the Times largely focused on whether “trans people are receiving too many rights, and accessing too much medical care, too quickly.”

FAIR conducted a follow-up study looking at the Times’ front-page stories between February 2024 and January 2025. This time we found slightly more coverage, but even fewer trans voices. Even while feigning concern, the paper of record remains largely uninterested in centering trans people and perspectives in coverage of trans issues, while failing to challenge misleading and transphobic right-wing narratives.

Growing frequency, changing subject matter

FAIR found that the New York Times‘ front page featured stories about trans issues 13 times, with an additional 49 pieces that mentioned the word “transgender.” It’s a small increase from the 2023 study, which found nine trans-centered stories and 30 pieces that mentioned but did not center trans issues.

It’s still far less coverage than the paper’s national competitor, the Washington Post, gave trans issues in the 2023 study: 22 front-page stories and 54 front-page story mentions.

FAIR also found a sharp drop in the Times’ use of trans sources, from 19% in the previous period to 11% (14 sources). Where in the last study, each of the nine front-page articles quoted at least one trans source, our new study found three of the Times‘ 13 pieces, or 23%, lacking any trans or nonbinary person’s perspective.

Once again, most of the Times‘ front-page stories about trans issues were not centered on trans people and the issues they face, but on trans people as a problem for cisgender people—whether athletes (“Volleyball Team in Grip of Fierce Debate on Transgender Rights”—11/29/24) or politicians (“Debating Role of Trans Rights in Harris’s Loss”— 11/21/24).

In the last study, six of the nine front-page articles questioned gender-affirming care or pitted trans rights against the rights of others (such as parents or cis women).  A year later, those themes are still prominent (four articles), while the paper’s attention to trans issues in the political arena increased, from one article to eight. Yet despite the increased attention—which followed the escalating right-wing anti-trans campaign that took trans rights to the Supreme Court and the center of the 2024 presidential campaign—the paper’s framing still repeatedly adopts or fails to challenge right-wing narratives.

This year, FAIR counted sources that advanced misinformation about trans issues that went unchallenged in the story, such as those that claimed that gender-affirming care is ineffective, experimental or risky, or that used anti-trans talking points that the Times failed to present without critical context. Such sources generalized gender-affirming care as irreversible, exaggerated detransition rates, or claimed that trans women hold a wholesale advantage in women’s sports. Fourteen sources (11%) were in this category—equal to the number of trans people who appeared as sources.

FAIR also found that nine sources (7%) had undisclosed anti-trans backgrounds—lending credence to these sources’ authority on trans issues by concealing their prior anti-trans advocacy or rhetoric. Of these sources, two were allowed to spread misinformation without challenge.

The front-page articles all fell into one of three broad themes: gender-affirming medical care and related court battles (five articles), non-court politics (five articles) and sports and culture (three articles).

Questioning ‘gender drugs’

The New York Times put five pieces covering gender-affirming care for minors on its front page: three covering related court battles in the US and two questioning its efficacy. These five pieces accounted for more than half of the cases of unchallenged misinformation (9)—painting gender-affirming care as risky, experimental and ineffective—and of obscured anti-trans backgrounds (5). Combined, these five pieces had only four trans sources.

The three pieces covering court battles focused largely on the legal technicalities of whether bans on care constitute sex discrimination, rather than how these bans would impact trans minors, adults and their families. They overwhelmingly quoted judges and lawyers, marginalizing the voices of trans people and their families, and leaving unchallenged the premises that care is “experimental” (12/4/24, 12/5/24) and poses “significant risks with unproven benefits” (12/4/24).

Two of the court-related articles followed the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a ban on care for minors in Tennessee (12/4/24, 12/5/24); both quoted Chase B. Strangio, the trans ACLU lawyer representing the families in the case, in his oral arguments, but quoted no other trans people or advocates speaking to how these bans could impact trans people and their families. (The first also quoted a line from the families’ legal argument about parental rights.)

We counted more pieces of misinformation in this New York Times story (4/10/24) than in any other piece in our study.

Both of the pieces questioning care for minors were written by Azeen Ghorayshi, a Times science reporter who has previously been criticized for misreporting the experiences of trans minors and their families, misrepresenting study findings, and promoting unsubstantiated claims that contributed in part to the closure of a St. Louis youth gender clinic. Ghorayshi’s two front-page pieces reveal continued misrepresentation and lack of trans perspectives.

The first was “Britain Limits Gender Drugs for Children” (4/10/24), which recapped the NHS-commissioned Cass Review, while also promoting misinformation pertaining to the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care. (This article contained four pieces of unchallenged misinformation, the most of any in our study period, and only included one trans source.)

The article eagerly accepted the authority of “independent pediatrician” Dr. Hilary Cass in her finding that “for most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” Not only did the piece fail to mention that this claim is disputed by the leading world health authorities and every major medical association in the US, it also omitted that Cass had no prior experience or expertise in working with trans patients, nor did most of her named contributors.

The only challenge Ghorayshi presented to the review, which is littered with serious methodological flaws, was unrelated to the quality of Cass’s research or her lack of credentials. Instead, she mentioned that transgender advocacy groups in Europe have condemned legislative changes informed by Cass’s findings, before quickly describing these changes as “notably different from the outright bans for adolescents passed in 22 US states.” (Ghorayshi didn’t note that Cass contributed to a similarly politically motivated report in Florida, which was used to justify the state’s ban on care.)

‘Unpublished because of politics’

Since Joanna Olson-Kennedy’s study does not have a control group, she was concerned that her data would be misused to suggest that puberty blockers are ineffective—which is exactly what this New York Times article (10/23/24) does.

The second piece, “Doctor, Fearing Outrage, Slows a Gender Study” (10/24/24), and its web version, “US Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says” (10/23/24), insinuate that researcher Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy might have withheld study data because it undermined her pro-gender-affirming care agenda.

Though the print version reached nearly 1500 words, it only quoted three sources, none of which are trans: Olson-Kennedy, who has specialized in the treatment of trans children and adolescents for close to two decades, another researcher critical of her decision to delay publication, and Hilary Cass.

The piece’s central implication is that, because “puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements” in the unpublished study data, this undermines the case for gender-affirming care.

But puberty blockers are not prescribed to “improve” mental health—as described by an Erin in the Morning (10/23/24) factcheck, they’re intended to “prevent deleterious effects of puberty.” Puberty blockers give trans kids and their families time to weigh their options and avoid poor mental health outcomes—so the way to know whether puberty blockers are effective is to compare those with dysphoria who receive them with those that do not. Olson-Kennedy’s study does not have a control group; therefore, she is concerned that her longitudinal data, which show neither increase nor decrease on average in mental health, would be misused to suggest that puberty blockers are ineffective—which is exactly what Ghorayshi’s article does.

“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” Olson-Kennedy is quoted in the article. And indeed, thanks to the New York Times, it has been: Senate Republicans soon launched an inquiry (12/5/24) into the study, heavily citing the Times article, and linking the release of study data to Britain’s restriction on gender-affirming care.

‘Tapping into fears’

Five articles were related to right-wing political attacks on trans rights, a noticeable increase from the previous study period (which ran one such article). But the increase does not reflect an improvement in coverage. Rather than looking at the impacts on trans people, the Times framed the issue primarily as a political football.

The New York Times (10/9/24) framed anti-trans “fears” as natural, pre-existing phenomena, rather than a political phenomenon that the GOP worked tirelessly to promote.

For instance, the paper published two front-page pieces on the role of trans rights in the presidential election: “Anti-Trans Ads Become Focus for the GOP” (10/9/24) and “Debating Role of Trans Rights in Harris’s Loss” (11/21/24). Each included just one trans source, and also included two guests who had their anti-trans perspectives obscured, along with two pieces of unchallenged misinformation about the biological advantages of trans girls in sports.

These pieces were much more interested in evaluating the political effectiveness of scapegoating as a campaign strategy than they were with the bigotry of the approach or the dangerous implications for the scapegoated minority in question.

National political correspondent Shane Goldmacher led with an explanation that Republican candidates are “tapping into fears about transgender women and girls in sports and about taxpayer-funded gender transitions in prisons.” That frames such “fears” as natural, pre-existing phenomena, rather than a political phenomenon that the GOP worked tirelessly to promote—and that the Times, with such coverage, is abetting.

Goldmacher continued:

Most of the Republican ads do not criticize the transgender community in general. Instead, they zero in on specific wedge cases, such as transgender women and girls in sports, transgender women’s sharing of locker rooms, the use of taxpayer funds for gender-affirming surgery for people in prison and access to transition services for minors, such as puberty blockers.

Yes, trans kids, adolescents and incarcerated people receiving gender-affirming healthcare make up a tiny proportion of the population, and transgender girls in athletics make up a negligible sum at the K-12 and collegiate levels; but how do attacks on trans people receiving healthcare and trans children participating in extracurricular activities not constitute an attack on the “transgender community in general”?

‘Trans rights in Harris’s loss’

The New York Times‘ focus (11/21/24) was on Democrats facing the “challenge” of trans rights; the much more consequential challenge—that of the existential attack by Republicans on trans people—is presented as an afterthought.

In the post-election piece by reporters Adam Nagourney and Nicholas Nehamas—whose web headline was “​​Harris Loss Has Democrats Fighting Over How to Talk About Transgender Rights”—the central question was again around political strategy: “Republicans clearly see a political opportunity,” they wrote, while for Democrats, “the question of how the party deals with transgender rights has emerged as a challenge for the years ahead.”

In this narrative, the protagonists are Democrats facing the “challenge” of trans rights; the much more consequential challenge—that of the existential attack by Republicans on trans people—is presented as an afterthought, wedged into two paragraphs at the very end of their lengthy piece: “Activists and others who work with transgender people, particularly transgender youths, say the political debate has resulted in a spike in reports of cyberbullying, online harassment and family tensions.” Nagourney and Nehamas followed this with a quote from Jaymes Black, CEO of the Trevor Project, about the “surge of calls to [the Trevor Project] crisis line.”

The paper also published two separate front-page articles covering transphobia at a Manhattan school board: “Spraying Vitriol, Parents in New York Clash Over What’s Taught” (4/5/24) and “A Culture-War Battle Roils a School Panel in Liberal Manhattan” (12/3/24).

Both pieces largely focused on arguments among parents, teachers and school officials, entirely omitting trans kids’ perspectives and including only one trans adult perspective (in the April 2024 piece). Both articles briefly quoted students expressing their concerns that enabling adult school board bullies to harass trans kids puts the “safety of the ‘most vulnerable students…at stake,’” but these students were afforded much less room to express their opinions than school board bullies themselves.

Scrutinizing trans advocates, not transphobes

This New York Times piece (11/27/24) was much more concerned with the fundamental unfairness of making people “put pronouns in their email signature” than of limiting the rights of gender and sexual minorities.

The one politics piece that centered trans people, “Trans Activists Question Tack Amid Backlash” (11/27/24), incredibly made the case that trans activists are the ones who ought to be under scrutiny at this political moment. It quoted more trans people (3) and advocates (3) combined than any other front-page article, but managed to present them in a way that raised outcry among the trans community (Erin in the Morning, 11/26/24).

“To get on the wrong side of transgender activists is often to endure their unsparing criticism,” the piece by Jeremy Peters began, and went on to describe criticisms and protests of public figures, including author J.K. Rowling, a notorious anti-trans activist, and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), the most prominent Democrat to suggest retreating from trans rights after Democrats’ election losses. “Now, some activists say it is time to rethink and recalibrate their confrontational ways,” Peters wrote, “and are pushing back against the more all-or-nothing voices in their coalition.”

Peters characterized Rowling—the billionaire author–turned–transphobic activist, who recently founded a “women’s fund” entirely dedicated to funding anti-trans court battles—as simply saying “that denying any relationship between sex and biology was ‘deeply misogynistic and regressive.’” He was less generous with transgender activists, whom he criticized as sounding “too judgmental,” “dogmatic and intolerant” and “unreasonable.” For what, exactly? Peters pointed to social media activists who “police language,” insist “that everyone declare whether they prefer to be referred to as he, she or other pronouns,” and “put pressure on liberal candidates for office to take positions that align with theirs.”

Peters’ headline thesis (published on the web as “Transgender Activists Question the Movement’s Confrontational Approach”) hinged on exactly two trans sources. One of them, Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, then–executive director of Advocates for Transgender Equality, released a statement disputing the Times‘ account:

Yesterday, [the] New York Times ran an article in which I was quoted as saying, “We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds,” and “We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team.” Because my quotes were taken out of context, I’d like to clarify what I meant. Those statements were regarding how to persuade every day, undecided people in the public, not people who have already taken actions to oppose our equality.

In advising trans people to concede to bad faith arguments about how advocates are too aggressive in demanding respect, the Times prioritizes those harmed in fictitious hypotheticals over trans people harmed by transphobic narratives in real life. The piece at least includes one source who seems to understand this: Gillian Branstetter of the ACLU, who explained that such arguments attempting to “scapegoat” trans people are built upon a “fundamental unfairness.” They come, she said, from people who are not “interested in compromise and open debate.”

For the most part, however, the piece was much more concerned with the fundamental unfairness of making people “put pronouns in their email signature” than of limiting the rights of gender and sexual minorities.

Trans women (who aren’t) in women’s sports 

In coverage of transphobic harassment campaigns, the New York Times (11/29/24) has outrage to spare for the act of bullying itself: just not a critical analysis of the transphobia underpinning it.

The two sports-focused articles continued the Times‘ pattern from last year of questioning the “fairness” of trans girls competing in girls’ sports; a third culture piece focused on religion.

“Olympic Officials Try to Quell Fury Over Fairness” (8/3/24) included no transgender sources or anti-trans misinformation—or, for that matter, a single trans subject. Instead, the piece focused on the transvestigation of Olympic boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, describing it as a “swirling controversy” that sparked a “fierce debate about biology, gender and fairness in women’s sports”—without connecting the overtly “political” speculation to a broader trend of rising transphobia.

It even obscured far-right, anti-LGBTQ Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s role in promoting claims that the boxers might be intersex or trans—she’d said of Khelif, “Athletes who have male genetic characteristics should not be admitted to women’s competitions” (Fox News, 8/1/24). Her opinion was reduced to her statement that the boxing match “did not seem on equal footing.”

“Volleyball Team in Grip of Fierce Debate on Transgender Rights” (11/29/24) described the “complicated mess” confronting the women’s team at San Jose State University, where, after a right-wing website outed a trans player, a co-captain and assistant coach sued the team for allowing her to play. The article didn’t attempt to combat the co-captain’s smears that the player is a “man” or her lawyer’s claim that college administrators “‘have willfully neglected their duty’ to keep sports safe and fair” by allowing trans women to play on women’s teams—though it did mention multiple times that she is not “‘the best or most dominant hitter’” on her team,  nor does she “lead any statistical category in her conference.”

(While research is limited on trans athletes’ biological advantages, analysis of existing literature comparing the physical capabilities of cis and trans women non-athletes finds that physical performance begins approaching that of cisgender women at at least two years of hormone-replacement treatments, and that there is a lack of evidence for a wholesale advantage for trans women athletes. Meanwhile, there are numerous benefits of allowing trans adolescents to play with their friends.)

Instead, while reporting the assistant coach’s claim that “she hits and blocks like a dude,” the piece sought its middle ground in the recognition that the player was also being dehumanized. The impression that readers were left with was that her participation may be unfair (though, again, she doesn’t have any advantage over her teammates), but that nonetheless, “she’s being targeted” by a “mob mentality.”

This point of analysis is not unwelcome—but doesn’t address the false premise that including a trans player somehow undermines the fairness of the whole game.

It also reinforced the false notion that the inclusion of trans athletes is a pressing issue in women’s sports, calling it “one of the most explosive issues in American life,” when in fact transgender college athletes are a negligible statistic: In December 2024, President Charlie Baker of the National Collegiate Athletic Association testified to a senate panel that of over 500,000 total college athletes, he believes that fewer than 10 are trans.

It’s clear that in coverage of transphobic harassment campaigns, the Times has outrage to spare for the act of bullying itself: just not a critical analysis of the transphobia underpinning it.

Meanwhile, “Some Christians Seek Truce in the Gender Wars” (5/18/24), by religion reporter Ruth Graham, focused on how some conservative Christian families are working to accept their trans children and offered perhaps the paper’s most nuanced front-page reporting on trans issues. It included three trans sources, one trans-allied advocate source and one allied family-member; it also quoted three transphobes and did not obfuscate their anti-trans positions.

The article included one piece of unchallenged misinformation, paraphrasing otherwise trans-sympathetic Colorado psychologist Julia Sadusky in her fears about “irreversible medical interventions” being administered to trans patients.

Such interventions are, in fact, exceedingly rare, and often deliberately mischaracterized—a small number of young teens are treated with hormone blockers, which are entirely reversible. Some older teens might undergo hormone treatments, which can cause more permanent changes, with the strict guidance of a medical team and parental consent. Vanishingly few trans minors receive surgical interventions.

Lacking analysis of transphobia

None of this is to say that the Times’ coverage hasn’t improved in some ways since 2023. This time around, FAIR found an absence of detransitioners, who in the previous study received disproportionate coverage that created a misleading picture of detransition rates.

FAIR also found that perspectives of family members of trans people were included for very different reasons from the 2023 study. While family members in the 2023 study largely served to cast doubt on the efficacy of gender-affirming care and the reality of gender-diverse experience, this time around, family members acted as advocates for their trans relatives’ interests.

However, for the most part, both quantitative and qualitative analysis finds that while the Times is aware of the outsized scrutiny that trans people received leading up to the 2024 election, the paper of record remains largely uninterested in critical coverage of transphobic scapegoating. Instead of affording trans people space to discuss how scapegoating is detrimental, especially to those most vulnerable (like trans children and their families), the Times seems much more concerned with civility and bothsidesism.

Note: The study looked at articles from the New York Times‘ print edition, as archived on the Nexis news database. The dates cited are the print dates, though the links naturally go to the online edition, typically dated a day earlier and given a different headline.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Wilson Korik.

A FAIR study found that CNN’s primetime coverage of the Los Angeles anti-ICE protests in early June rarely included the voices of the protesters themselves. Instead, the network’s sources were overwhelmingly current and former government and law enforcement officials. The resulting coverage rarely took issue with Trump’s desire to silence the people who were defending their undocumented neighbors—but mainly debated his decision to deploy the California National Guard to do so.

FAIR recorded the sources that appeared in the 5–10 pm timeslot during two key days, June 9 and 10, of CNN’s television coverage of the Los Angeles protests; the shows included were the Lead with Jake Tapper, Erin Burnett OutFront, Anderson Cooper 360 and the Source With Kaitlan Collins.

The sources were categorized by current or former occupation, and on whether they were a featured guest—who typically field multiple interview-style questions from an anchor—or simply a soundbite. Sources that made multiple appearances were counted once for each segment they appeared in. (CNN’s in-house “analysts” or “commentators” were counted as featured guests to reflect their significant impact on the perspectives shared on the shows.)

Out of 85 total sources across the eight broadcasts, only five were protesters, appearing on just three shows. None of the 47 featured guests were protesters or community or immigrant advocates.

By far the most frequent sources were current or former US government officials, with 55 appearances—a whopping 65% of total sources. Thirteen additional sources were law enforcement, and five were current or former military. Together, these official sources accounted for 86% of all appearances. (There were also three journalists, two lawyers and two partisan strategists.)

Of featured guest and analyst interviews, current or former government officials dominated at 49% (23 out of 47). These sources were given the most time to present their perspectives, shaping the narrative around the protests and the government responses. Another 11 featured guests were law enforcement and two were military, so official sources accounted for 77% of all such interviews. The three journalists, two lawyers and two partisan strategists made up the remaining featured guests.

‘Verbally at least hostile’

CNN‘s Kyung Lah (6/9/25) covers protests at LA’s Federal Building—while giving no sign of talking to any protesters.

CNN’s made-for-TV, on-the-ground style of protest coverage in the days following the Ambiance Apparel and Home Depot ICE raids felt little different from when Anderson Cooper stands around in a raincoat during a hurricane. Only this time, CNN reporters were braving an uncontrollable storm of Angelenos.

Much like Cooper’s coat, CNN senior investigative correspondent Kyung Lah (Erin Burnett OutFront, 6/9/25) donned protective goggles—useful should she have encountered tear gas, but also undoubtedly a dramatic flourish perfect for one of CNN’s 30-second TV spots.

That CNN was primarily interested in drama rather than helping viewers understand the protests became abundantly clear as—even with her protective goggles—Lah made no apparent effort to interview any protesters as she and CNN anchor Erin Burnett stood in front of LA’s federal detention center, where federal agents, LAPD and the California National Guard were in a standoff with demonstrators. Instead, they kept a close eye on every thrown water bottle, expressing concern about the crowd’s increasingly “young” demographic as the day went on. “This is a much younger crowd, certainly, verbally at least, Erin, hostile,” Lah reported.

The only protest voices that CNN’s audience heard from throughout both days of primetime coverage came in the form of two brief soundbites captured by correspondent Jason Carroll (Lead, 6/9/25) at a protest for the release of arrested SEIU leader David Huerta the morning of June 9.

Araceli Martinez, the only named protester in the study period with a soundbite on CNN ( 6/9/25).

Araceli Martinez, the only protester identified by name, offered a call to action for all Americans, arguing that the Trump administration’s immigration raids are a threat to “the rights of all people, not just the immigrants, but all of us.” That soundbite reaired on Erin Burnett Outfront and Anderson Cooper 360, both on June 9.

Another protester at the demonstration demanding Huerta’s release had this to say, with the soundbite reairing on Anderson Cooper 360, also on June 9:

We are part of that immigrant community that has made L.A. great, that has made the state of California the fourth largest economy in the world today. So, we have a message for President Donald Trump. Get the National Guardsmen out of here.

Multiple times during the first day studied, Lah held up that union-led protest as a standard of message discipline and nonviolent tactics that those outside the federal building, later in the day, weren’t measuring up to. The folks at the earlier protest were “a very different slice of Los Angeles than what I am seeing” at the federal building, Lah said. The key word there is “seeing,” as she did not interview a single protester on camera.

‘We do very good here with unrest’

CNN‘s Jake Tapper (6/10/25) interviews Rep. Adam Smith, who agrees that “you should meet any sort of violent protest with law enforcement.”

Meanwhile, CNN brought on multiple featured guests who framed protesters as violent and law enforcement as the ones pushing for accountability—despite the fact that reported injuries of civilians by law enforcement far outnumbered those of law enforcement by protesters (FAIR.org, 6/13/25). LA District Attorney Nathan Hochman (OutFront, 6/10/25), for example, stated that he would work to “punish” all protesters who engage in “illegal conduct.”

Similarly, California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis (Source, 6/10/25) warned “anyone who goes out and is protesting in a way that is not peaceful…state and local and regional law enforcement will hold people accountable.”

Rep. Adam Smith told Jake Tapper (Lead, 6/10/25): “I don’t disagree that you should meet any sort of violent protest with law enforcement, but there’s no evidence in this case that the LAPD wasn’t doing that.” Once you parse the double negatives, it’s clear that Smith, like the rest of CNN‘s official sources, accepted the characterization of protesters as violent and argued that the response of California law enforcement was perfectly appropriate.

Most of these state and local government sources were responding to questions about Trump calling in the National Guard and Marines; they were defending the local law enforcement response and challenging Trump’s decision.

CNN‘s Erin Burnett (6/9/25) interviews LA County Sheriff Robert Luna, who assures her his forces were “very good here with unrest.”

One of Burnett’s featured guests, for instance, was LA County Sheriff Robert Luna (OutFront, 6/9/25)—the leader of a police force that community activists say routinely collaborates with federal immigration raids (Democracy Now!, 6/9/25), and had just sparred with demonstrators in the Home Depot parking lot in Compton following the failed ICE raid there (New York Times, 6/14/25).

The primary focus of Burnett’s line of questioning was geared at exposing the political nature of Trump’s calling in the national guard:

Just a very simple question. Do you need the Marines? Do you need the National Guard right now? Or if you were looking at this situation and assessing it as sheriff of LA County, would you say you do not need them?

That’s certainly a critical line of questioning to get at the issue of federal overreach. But Burnett failed to similarly question (or even acknowledge) the violence by local law enforcement—which, by the time of Burnett’s broadcast, included 24 attacks on journalists with weapons like pepper balls, rubber bullets and tear gas canisters, according to Reporters Without Borders (FAIR.org, 6/13/25).

Instead, she left unchallenged Luna’s claims that “if they’re peacefully protesting, they’ll be allowed to do that,” that his utmost priority was “keeping our community safe,” and that his police force does “very good here with unrest.”

In doing so, Burnett framed the story as a question of whether putting down protests against sweeping raids of undocumented workers was the responsibility of federal troops or local law enforcement—rather than questioning why such protests were being met with force, and why local officials weren’t doing more to protect their immigrant communities.

Redefining safety

Democracy Now! (6/9/25) broadened the conversation by allowing protesters like Ron Gochez to take part in it.

Meanwhile, the protesters that received such little consideration from Burnett and CNN could have contributed to a very different definition of safety for CNN’s viewers. Ron Gochez, a community organizer and social studies teacher, who was one of the protesters at the ICE raid on Ambiance Apparel, described on Democracy Now! (6/9/25) how the protests have managed to protect people despite the efforts of local and federal officials:

When we have these protests, they have been peaceful. But when the repression comes from the state, whether it’s the sheriffs, the LAPD or, on Saturday, for example, in Paramount, California, it was the Border Patrol, it was brutal violence….

But what they didn’t think was going to happen was that the people would resist and would fight back. And that’s exactly what happened in Paramount and in Compton, California, where for eight-and-a-half hours, the people combatted in the streets against the Border Patrol…. They had to retreat because of the fierce resistance of the community. And the hundreds of workers that were in the factories around them were able to escape. They were able to go to their cars and go home. That was only thanks to the resistance that allowed them to go home that night.

The Trump administration is intent on testing just how far it can go to crush political dissent, and it’s clear most Democratic politicians and local law enforcement are not going to bat for the most vulnerable communities in its crosshairs. Angelenos know they are fighting for the rights of all of us who reside in the US. But CNN’s refusal to have them on air to discuss their struggle and explain their tactics makes it all the more difficult to raise public awareness. Pretending to challenge the deployment of federal troops, CNN normalizes police violence and silences those truly protecting their communities.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Luca GoldMansour.

Salon (7/3/25): “The funds going towards deportation would…be enough to fully fund the program to end world hunger for four years.”

And so it has come to pass: US President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has set the stage for tax cuts for the rich, slashed services for the poor, and a host of other things that qualify as “beautiful” in the present dystopia. Some cuts, like those to Medicaid, have been heavily covered by the corporate media. But one key piece of the bill has gotten much less media scrutiny: The preposterous sum of $175 billion has been allocated to fund Trump’s signature mass deportation campaign, which, as a Salon article (7/3/25) points out, exceeds the military budget for every single country in the world aside from the US and China.

Approximately $30 billion of that is destined directly for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the goons who have recently made a name for themselves by going around in masks and kidnapping people. This constitutes a threefold increase over ICE’s previous budget, and propels the outfit to the position of the largest US federal law enforcement agency in history. $45 billion will go toward building new ICE detention centers, including family detention centers.

Prior to the signing into law of the sweeping bill on July 4, US Vice President JD Vance took to X to highlight what really mattered in the legislation:

Everything else—the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.

Scant attention to ICE expansion

“What happens if we spend more than the military budget of Russia on deportation?” was not a question the New York Times (7/3/25) thought needed answering.

And yet many US corporate media outlets have paid scant attention to this aspect of the bill and refrained from delving too deeply into the matter of what exactly this massive ramping up of ICE portends for American society. According to a search of the Nexis news database, while half (50%) of newspaper articles and news transcripts mentioning the reconciliation bill from its first passage in the House (May 20) to its signing into law (July 4) also mentioned Medicaid, less than 6% named Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE.

Even many of those that did mention ICE barely gave it any attention. On July 3, for example, the New York Times presented readers with “Nine Questions About the Republican Megabill, Answered,” which in response to the first question—“Why is it being called a megabill?”—did manage to mention “a 150% boost to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget over the next five years.” However, there was no further discussion in the article’s remaining 1,500-plus words of potential ramifications of this boost—although there was a section devoted to the “tax break for Native Alaskan subsistence whaling captains.”

That was more than CNN’s intervention managed, also published on July 3, and headlined “Here’s Who Stands to Gain From the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’ And Who May Struggle.” The article aced a couple of no-brainers, including that “corporate America” would be “better off” thanks to the bill, while “low-income Americans” would be “worse off.” But there was not a single reference to the ICE budget—or who might “struggle” because of it.

‘Detention blitz’

Washington Post (7/4/25): “Immigrant rights advocates are imploring the government not to award more contracts to…companies they say have failed to provide safe accommodations and adequate medical care to detainees.”

This is not to imply, of course, that there are no articles detailing what ICE has been up to in terms of persecuting refuge seekers, visa holders, legal US residents and even US citizens—who supposedly have greater protections under the law—and how all of this stands to get worse, in accordance with the impending deluge of anti-immigration funds.

In its report on ICE’s looming “detention blitz,” the Washington Post (7/4/25) noted that “at least 10 immigrants died while in ICE’s custody during the first half of this year,” and cited the finding that ICE is “now arresting people with no criminal charges at a higher rate than people charged with crimes.”

The Post article also contained sufficiently thought-provoking details to enable the conscientious reader to draw their own conclusions regarding the ultimate purpose of manic detention schemes. (Hint: it’s not to keep America “safe.”) For instance, we learn that the share prices of GEO Group and CoreCivic—the two largest detention companies contracted by ICE, which have notorious reputations for detainee mistreatment—“each rose about 3%… as investors cheered the passage of congressional funding likely to result in a flurry of new contracts.”

Lest there remain any doubt as to the centrality of profit flows to the immigration crackdown, the article specifies that GEO Group and CoreCivic “each gave $500,000 to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to Federal Election Commission data.”

This article, however, came after the legislation was passed.

A Post opinion piece (6/30/25), meanwhile, put a human face on some of ICE’s victims, such as Jermaine Thomas, born to a US soldier on a military base in Germany. Following an incident of “suspected trespassing” in Texas, Thomas was deported by ICE to Jamaica, a country he had never set foot in. Other victims spotlighted by the Post include 64-year-old Iranian immigrant Madonna Kashanian, nabbed while gardening at her house in New Orleans, and a six-year-old Honduran boy with leukemia who was arrested at an immigration court in California while pursuing his asylum case with his family.

It was also possible, if one sought it out, to find reporting on what the cash infusion entails from a logistical perspective: more agents, more arrests, more racial profiling, increased detention capacity, and a deportation system that runs “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours,” as ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons charmingly put it.

‘Police state first’

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (Jacobin, 7/3/25): “Mass deportation wouldn’t only reshape American society and cause the economy to go into a tailspin. It would also lead to a very different relationship between the US populace and law enforcement.”

Gutting Medicaid is certainly an angle on the reconciliation bill that deserved the media attention it got, and will devastate millions in this country. But the massive infusion of money and power to ICE will likewise devastate millions with a ballooning police state that unleashes terror, rips apart families and creates a network of concentration camps across the country. Given ICE’s contemporary track record and de facto exemption from the constraints of due process, the public desperately needs a media that will connect the dots in order to convey a bigger-picture look of what America is up against.

In an interview with Jacobin magazine (7/3/25) on how “ICE Is About to Get More Money Than It Can Spend,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick—a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council—made the crucial observation: “You don’t build the mass deportation machine without building the police state first.”

This is precisely the analysis that is missing from corporate media coverage of the bill. Beyond making life hell for the undocumented workers on whose very labor the US economy depends, ICE has become a tool for political repression as well—as evidenced by a slew of recent episodes involving the abduction and disappearance of international scholars whose political opinions did not coincide with those of the commander in chief of our, um, democracy.

Take the case of 30-year-old Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student and Fulbright scholar studying childhood development at Tufts University in Massachusetts. While walking to an iftar dinner in March, Öztürk was accosted by six plainclothes officers, some of them masked, and forced into an unmarked van, after which she was flown halfway across the country to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. Her crime, apparently, was to have co-written an opinion piece last year for the Tufts Daily (3/26/24), in which she and her co-authors encouraged the university to accede to demands by the Tufts Community Union Senate by recognizing the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip and divesting from companies with ties to Israel.

Öztürk’s case is hardly an isolated one. There’s Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral researcher at Georgetown University who was seized by masked agents outside his Virginia home and swept off to an ICE facility in Texas. There’s Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian former PhD student at Cornell who sued the Trump administration over the crackdown on Palestine solidarity and then self-deported, explaining that he had “lost faith [he] could walk the streets without being abducted.” And the list goes on (Al Jazeera, 5/15/25).

‘Homegrowns are next’

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (NPR, 4/15/25): The Trump administration believes it “could deport and incarcerate any person, including US citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”

In the twisted view of the US government, of course, opposing the US-backed genocide of Palestinians equals support for “terrorism”—and in Trump’s view, basically anything that goes against his own thinking and policies potentially constitutes a criminal offense. It follows that Öztürk-style politically motivated kidnappings by the state are presumably merely the top of a very slippery slope that US citizens, too, will soon find themselves careening down—especially as Trump has already exhibited enthusiasm at the prospect of outsourcing the incarceration of US citizens to El Salvador: “The homegrowns are next,” he told Salvadoran autocrat Nayib Bukele.

The line between citizens and residents has been intentionally blurred, with the Trump Justice Department announcing it was “Prioritizing Denaturalization”—that is, stripping citizenship from foreign-born citizens. This draconian punishment has been proposed for Trump’s political enemies, from New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani to former BFF Elon Musk. Trump has also taken aim at the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, potentially turning millions of other Americans into ICE targets.

Somehow, the elite media have not deemed it necessary to dwell even superficially on the implications of super-funding a rogue agency that has essentially been given carte blanche to indiscriminately round people up—be they undocumented workers, political dissidents, or just somebody who “looks like somebody we are looking for.” As for CNN’s write-up on “who stands to gain from the ‘big, beautiful bill,’” it’s definitely not all the folks currently living in a permanent state of fear, deprived of basic freedoms like movement, speech and thought.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Belén Fernández.

This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/5/23) was called antisemitic because in calling attention to the Israeli army’s ongoing and very real killing of more than 17,000 children, it might evoke associations with the false trope used across centuries that Jews killed children in religious rituals.

Cartoonist Mr. Fish (real name Dwayne Booth) posted an update to his Patreon on March 20 headed “Fish: Laid Off!” Fish’s work has accompanied columns by Chris Hedges, appeared in Harper’s Magazine and currently can be found on ScheerPost. He collaborated with Ralph Nader to create The Day the Rats Vetoed Congress, a fable of a citizen uprising against Washington corruption. Fish announced he had been laid off from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania after teaching there for 11 years. Fish states that, officially, “the reason for the termination was budgetary.”

Unofficially, Fish has been subject to an assault stoked by right-wing media since last February. The Washington Free Beacon (2/1/24) fired the starting gun with its piece, “Penn Lecturer Is Behind Grotesque Antisemitic Cartoons.” Writer Jessica Costescu freely conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism in her piece. She includes as antisemitic a cartoon of accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu as a “butcher holding a long knife and a crumpled Palestinian flag,” and another showing “an Israeli holding a gun to a hospitalized baby’s head.”

Even more serious is the charge Costescu makes that Fish evokes the “blood libel,” the myth that Jews murdered Christian children to use in religious rituals, via a cartoon of American and Israeli leaders drinking cups of blood labeled “Gaza.” Fish maintains he was “playing off of the New Yorker style” in drawing “upper-crust power brokers,” and that he was unaware of the blood libel myth (Real News Network, 5/6/25).

Costescu claims that other Fish cartoons are antisemitic because they compare Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany. She cites one showing soldiers marching under a combination Nazi and Israeli flag, and another showing prisoners in a concentration camp holding signs reading “Gaza, the World’s Biggest Concentration Camp” and “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza.”

‘A Holocaust in Gaza’

Another cartoon by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post, 11/11/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted an IDF soldier holding a gun to the head of a baby. Medical personnel in Gaza report frequently treating children who have been shot in the head by Israeli snipers (Guardian, 4/2/24).

It’s hard to maintain that comparing Israeli policies to Nazism is antisemitic when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir belonged to Lehi, a Zionist militant group so sympathetic to fascism that it offered to ally with Germany during World War II. In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and others wrote a letter to the New York Times (12/4/48) criticizing the right-wing Freedom Party (Herut), home of future Prime Minister Menachem Begin, for similarity “in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” The Freedom Party was one of the major parties that allied to form Likud in 1973, the faction that has governed Israel for most of the last 50 years.

Pre–October 7, an editorial in Haaretz (10/3/23) warned that “neo-fascism in Israel seriously threatens Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Israeli politicians and public figures have not shied away from using genocidal rhetoric that compares with Nazi propaganda during the Final Solution. Yitzhak Kroizer of the Jewish Power party (Guardian, 1/3/24) proclaimed: “The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death.”

Israeli parliamentarian Moshe Feiglin (Middle East Eye, 5/21/25) said in May: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there. There is no other victory.”

Israeli TV presenter Elad Barashi (New Arab, 5/5/25) made the parallels explicit when he called for “a Holocaust in Gaza.” He maintained he couldn’t “understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas showers…or train cars.”

‘Antisemitism forever!’

Cartoonist Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) responded to the Trump administration’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil for protesting genocide by suggesting that Khalil was akin to Hitler.

If Israeli military and political actions are off-limits to comparisons to the Nazis in the field of cartoons, the same is not true for Palestinians. This creates a situation where the Israeli government perpetrating a genocide, per Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, cannot be compared to the Nazis, but the Palestinians—the victims of the same genocide—can.

Since our last survey of anti-Palestinian cartooning (FAIR.org, 3/27/25), some of those profiled have continued to paint pro-Palestine protests as Nazi-like or inherently antisemitic.

Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) made reference to the Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against student protester Mahmoud Khalil. He drew a despondent Adolf Hitler poring over a military map, lamenting battlefield reverses. He takes consolation in that “Columbia U. has offered [him] a student visa.”

Kirk Walters (King Features Syndicate, 5/29/25) drew a college president side-by-side with George Wallace. As the segregationist yells out, “Segregation now…Segregation tomorrow… Segregation forever!!” the college president yells out, “Antisemitism now… Antisemitism tomorrow… Antisemitism forever!!” The cartoon is a reference to colleges who have been accused by the Trump administration of not doing enough to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests (Politico, 4/6/25).

‘Generated threats of personal violence’

A Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/1/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has overseen the killing of more than 57,000 people in Gaza—as a butcher covered in blood and holding a knife.

Within two weeks of the Free Beacon article, the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors felt compelled to release a statement on the targeted harassment of Fish. The AAUP stated that the article “generated threats of personal violence against him and calls for the university to discipline him,” and that by publishing the date and time of his next class, the Free Beacon “endangered the physical safety of both [Fish] and his students.” The AAUP also criticized the interim president of the university for publicly calling Fish’s cartoons “reprehensible” and saying that Fish should not have published them.

Fish himself has long opposed censorship, writing in the Comics Journal (Summer–Fall/20), “I don’t believe there are images that are so problematic and so hurtful they should be censored, for the same reasons why I don’t believe in censoring the written word.”

After Fish announced his firing, the Free Beacon (3/22/25) could barely contain its glee. It included a quote from the AAUP crediting the publication with launching a campaign of “targeted harassment” against Fish.

It’s clear that right-wing media and pro-Israel pressure groups still have the capacity to threaten the employment of cartoonists who do not toe the pro-Israel line. There is no such organized push-back against anti-Palestinian cartoonists, even though they are targeting the victims of an ongoing genocide.

Featured image: This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/31/23) was called antisemitic because it imagined that victims of Nazi genocide were opposed to Israeli genocide.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Hank Kennedy.

This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/5/23) was called antisemitic because in calling attention to the Israeli army’s ongoing and very real killing of more than 17,000 children, it might evoke associations with the false trope used across centuries that Jews killed children in religious rituals.

Cartoonist Mr. Fish (real name Dwayne Booth) posted an update to his Patreon on March 20 headed “Fish: Laid Off!” Fish’s work has accompanied columns by Chris Hedges, appeared in Harper’s Magazine and currently can be found on ScheerPost. He collaborated with Ralph Nader to create The Day the Rats Vetoed Congress, a fable of a citizen uprising against Washington corruption. Fish announced he had been laid off from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania after teaching there for 11 years. Fish states that, officially, “the reason for the termination was budgetary.”

Unofficially, Fish has been subject to an assault stoked by right-wing media since last February. The Washington Free Beacon (2/1/24) fired the starting gun with its piece, “Penn Lecturer Is Behind Grotesque Antisemitic Cartoons.” Writer Jessica Costescu freely conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism in her piece. She includes as antisemitic a cartoon of accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu as a “butcher holding a long knife and a crumpled Palestinian flag,” and another showing “an Israeli holding a gun to a hospitalized baby’s head.”

Even more serious is the charge Costescu makes that Fish evokes the “blood libel,” the myth that Jews murdered Christian children to use in religious rituals, via a cartoon of American and Israeli leaders drinking cups of blood labeled “Gaza.” Fish maintains he was “playing off of the New Yorker style” in drawing “upper-crust power brokers,” and that he was unaware of the blood libel myth (Real News Network, 5/6/25).

Costescu claims that other Fish cartoons are antisemitic because they compare Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany. She cites one showing soldiers marching under a combination Nazi and Israeli flag, and another showing prisoners in a concentration camp holding signs reading “Gaza, the World’s Biggest Concentration Camp” and “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza.”

‘A Holocaust in Gaza’

Another cartoon by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post, 11/11/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted an IDF soldier holding a gun to the head of a baby. Medical personnel in Gaza report frequently treating children who have been shot in the head by Israeli snipers (Guardian, 4/2/24).

It’s hard to maintain that comparing Israeli policies to Nazism is antisemitic when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir belonged to Lehi, a Zionist militant group so sympathetic to fascism that it offered to ally with Germany during World War II. In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and others wrote a letter to the New York Times (12/4/48) criticizing the right-wing Freedom Party (Herut), home of future Prime Minister Menachem Begin, for similarity “in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” The Freedom Party was one of the major parties that allied to form Likud in 1973, the faction that has governed Israel for most of the last 50 years.

Pre–October 7, an editorial in Haaretz (10/3/23) warned that “neo-fascism in Israel seriously threatens Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Israeli politicians and public figures have not shied away from using genocidal rhetoric that compares with Nazi propaganda during the Final Solution. Yitzhak Kroizer of the Jewish Power party (Guardian, 1/3/24) proclaimed: “The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death.”

Israeli parliamentarian Moshe Feiglin (Middle East Eye, 5/21/25) said in May: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there. There is no other victory.”

Israeli TV presenter Elad Barashi (New Arab, 5/5/25) made the parallels explicit when he called for “a Holocaust in Gaza.” He maintained he couldn’t “understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas showers…or train cars.”

‘Antisemitism forever!’

Cartoonist Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) responded to the Trump administration’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil for protesting genocide by suggesting that Khalil was akin to Hitler.

If Israeli military and political actions are off-limits to comparisons to the Nazis in the field of cartoons, the same is not true for Palestinians. This creates a situation where the Israeli government perpetrating a genocide, per Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, cannot be compared to the Nazis, but the Palestinians—the victims of the same genocide—can.

Since our last survey of anti-Palestinian cartooning (FAIR.org, 3/27/25), some of those profiled have continued to paint pro-Palestine protests as Nazi-like or inherently antisemitic.

Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) made reference to the Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against student protester Mahmoud Khalil. He drew a despondent Adolf Hitler poring over a military map, lamenting battlefield reverses. He takes consolation in that “Columbia U. has offered [him] a student visa.”

Kirk Walters (King Features Syndicate, 5/29/25) drew a college president side-by-side with George Wallace. As the segregationist yells out, “Segregation now…Segregation tomorrow… Segregation forever!!” the college president yells out, “Antisemitism now… Antisemitism tomorrow… Antisemitism forever!!” The cartoon is a reference to colleges who have been accused by the Trump administration of not doing enough to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests (Politico, 4/6/25).

‘Generated threats of personal violence’

A Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/1/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has overseen the killing of more than 57,000 people in Gaza—as a butcher covered in blood and holding a knife.

Within two weeks of the Free Beacon article, the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors felt compelled to release a statement on the targeted harassment of Fish. The AAUP stated that the article “generated threats of personal violence against him and calls for the university to discipline him,” and that by publishing the date and time of his next class, the Free Beacon “endangered the physical safety of both [Fish] and his students.” The AAUP also criticized the interim president of the university for publicly calling Fish’s cartoons “reprehensible” and saying that Fish should not have published them.

Fish himself has long opposed censorship, writing in the Comics Journal (Summer–Fall/20), “I don’t believe there are images that are so problematic and so hurtful they should be censored, for the same reasons why I don’t believe in censoring the written word.”

After Fish announced his firing, the Free Beacon (3/22/25) could barely contain its glee. It included a quote from the AAUP crediting the publication with launching a campaign of “targeted harassment” against Fish.

It’s clear that right-wing media and pro-Israel pressure groups still have the capacity to threaten the employment of cartoonists who do not toe the pro-Israel line. There is no such organized push-back against anti-Palestinian cartoonists, even though they are targeting the victims of an ongoing genocide.

Featured image: This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/31/23) was called antisemitic because it imagined that victims of Nazi genocide were opposed to Israeli genocide.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Hank Kennedy.

Zohran Mamdani to Kristen Welker (Meet the Press, 6/29/25): “Freedom and justice and safety are things that, to have meaning, have to be applied to all people, and that includes Israelis and Palestinians as well.”

Meet the Press host Kristen Welker (6/29/25) showed courage by interviewing Zohran Mamdani, the winner of the Democratic mayoral primary for New York, after he’d been widely attacked by corporate media. But unfortunately, she fell into a trap that has been set repeatedly in recent months to smear Mamdani. She asked him to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” claiming—without offering evidence—that the term “intifada” refers to “violence against Jews.”

I doubt Welker is an Arabic linguist. But as a Palestinian journalist who covered the Intifada and helped introduce the term to Western media, I am appalled by this misrepresentation. Not only is the translation wrong, it’s an insult to the thousands of New York Jews who voted for Mamdani.

For the record, intifada translates to “shake off.” Palestinians used the term to describe their popular resistance against an Israeli occupation of their land that had no end in sight. It emerged amid a steady expansion of illegal settlements, which were systematically turning the occupied territories into a Swiss cheese–like landscape, precisely designed to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

As someone who reported on the Intifada and explained its meaning to international audiences, I can say unequivocally: Intifada was used by Palestinian activists to describe a civil resistance movement rooted in dignity and national self-determination.

Metaphor for liberation

The Arabic-language version of the website of the US Holocaust Museum translated the Warsaw Ghetto “Uprising” as “Intifada”—until blogger Juan Cole (5/1/24) pointed this out. (Creative Commons photo: Phil Kalina.)

Let’s begin with the word’s literal meaning. As noted, in Arabic, intifada simply means “shaking off.” Since many—including Jewish leaders, Christian Zionists and GOP officials—have distorted the peaceful intentions behind the word, I turned to a source that might resonate more clearly with people of faith: the Bible.

In the Arabic version of the Old Testament, the word intifada appears three times, both as a noun and a verb. Looking at its English equivalents in the New International Version (though other translations are similar) offers enlightening context:

• Judges 16:20: “Samson awoke from his sleep and thought, ‘I’ll go out as before and shake myself free.’”
• Isaiah 52:2: “Shake off your dust; rise up, sit enthroned, Jerusalem. Free yourself from the chains on your neck, Daughter Zion, now a captive.”
• Psalm 109:23: “I fade away like an evening shadow; I am shaken off like a locust.”

Each of these examples uses the term intifada—shaking off oppression, captivity or anguish—as a metaphor for liberation, not violence.

While Google Translate and other modern tools often render intifada as “popular uprising,” its literal meaning—“to shake off”—captures the spirit with which Palestinians adopted the term. When they launched the first Intifada in 1987—after 20 years under a foreign military occupation—it was an expression of a desire to wake up, rise and throw off the chains of subjugation. It is not inherently antisemitic, nor does it refer by default to terrorism or violence.

While accompanying international journalists covering the protests, I often discussed this with them. In Jerusalem, I explained to LA Times bureau chief Dan Fisher, the  Washington Post’s Glenn Frankel and the New York Times’ John Kifner what Palestinians meant by the word. I told them that throughout Palestinian patriotic literature and slogans, two distinctions were always made: The Intifada was a protest against the Israeli occupation, not against Jews or the existence of Israel, and that the ultimate goal was to achieve an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Fisher, Frankel and Kifner included these clarifications in their reports, helping the Arabic term intifada enter the global lexicon with its intended meaning.

‘Bringing terror to the streets of America’

To define “intifada,” Fox News (5/23/25) brought on Douglas Murray, who calls Islam an “infection” and declares that “all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop.”

But today, as protests against Israel’s devastating war on Gaza mount, the word is being twisted. When Rep. Elise Stefanik grilled the presidents of UPenn, Harvard, and MIT in December 2023 about pro-Palestinian chants invoking “intifada,” she equated the term with “genocide of Jews.”

The university presidents faltered. They should have said clearly: Genocide against Jews—or any people—is abhorrent. But intifada is not synonymous with genocide. To equate a call to end the Israeli military occupation with a call for genocide or violence against Jews is a gross distortion—a bizarre reversal that paints the victims as aggressors.

And yet this distortion persists. [Gillibrand] Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo labeled Mamdani antisemitic. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt—who likely doesn’t speak Arabic—claimed on X that intifada is “explicit incitement to violence.” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) added that the word is “well understood to refer to the violent terror attacks.” Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) told WNYC public radio (6/26/25), “The global intifada is a statement that means destroy Israel and kill all the Jews.”

Media echoed the politicians’ misrepresentations of intifada. “Many Jews see it as a call to violence against Israeli civilians,” ABC (6/29/25) reported. “Many Jews consider it a call to violence, a nod to deadly attacks on civilians in Israel by Palestinians in uprisings in the 1980s and 2000s,” wrote the New York Times (6/25/25). Of course, “many Jews” do not hear the word that way—but the more important question is, what is the accurate understanding of the word as used by Palestinians?

Fox News (5/23/25) didn’t mince words: “‘Intifada’ Means Bringing Terror to the Streets of America,” it said in a headline, citing notorious Islamophobe Douglas Murray. To the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (7/1/25), “What Intifada Really Means” is “giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.”

Even liberal podcast host Donny Deutsch repeated the same claim while speaking on MSNBC (Morning Joe, 6/30/25):

I’m outraged that we have a candidate for mayor of New York, Mr. Mamdani, that cannot walk back or cannot condemn the words “globalize the intifada” and his nuance of, “Well, it means different things for different people.” Well, let me tell you what it means to a Jew—it means violence.

Brutal suppression of protest

The First Intifada in the Gaza Strip, December 21, 1987 (photo: Efi Sharir).

The first Intifada embraced principles of nonviolent resistance championed by Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. My cousin, Mubarak Awad, who established the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, encouraged boycotts of Israeli products, labor strikes and grassroots economic development in preparation for statehood. He translated, printed and distributed Arabic translations of Gene Sharp’s writings on nonviolence throughout the occupied territories. Mubarak was deported on the eve of the Intifada by then–Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

After Shamir came Yitzhak Rabin, who called publicly to “break the bones” of Palestinian stone throwers. During the first Intifada, Israeli soldiers and settlers responded to the nonfatal protests with extreme violence. In the first phase of the uprising—a little more than a year—332 Palestinians were killed, along with 12 Israelis (Middle East Monitor, 12/8/16).

This brutality did not suppress the protests, but merely escalated the violence: At the end of six years, more than 1,500 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, and 400 Israelis—18 of whom were children—were dead, according to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem.

The same pattern recurred in the second Intifada: Only after the initial protests were met with massively disproportionate force did Palestinians, led by Hamas, turn to suicide bombing as a desperation tactic (Al Jazeera, 9/28/20). To treat the response to the brutal suppression of protest as though it represented the essential nature of intifada is intellectually lazy and politically cynical.

Zohran Mamdani never used the words “global intifada.” But he refused to denounce calls for the world to wake up and speak out against atrocities in Gaza. His victory in the Democratic primary—supported in part by Jewish New Yorkers—shows he is neither antisemitic nor willing to renounce an Arabic word that has been hijacked and misused by people who would rather Palestinians remain silent and submissive under occupation.

Research assistance: Shirlynn Chan

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Daoud Kuttab.

Aggression is widely understood as the most serious form of the illegal use of force under international law. At the post–World War II Nuremberg Trials, British Judge Norman Birkett said:

To initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 lists seven acts that constitute aggression, including:

• The invasion or attack by the armed forces of a state of the territory of another State….
• Bombardment by the armed forces of a state against the territory of another state, or the use of any weapons by a state against the territory of another state.

In a clear instance of such aggression, 125 US military aircraft (along with a submarine) unleashed 75 weapons against Iran on June 21, including 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs), each of which weighs 30,000 pounds (BBC, 6/23/25). The MOPs are the most powerful non-nuclear weapons in the US arsenal (Democracy Now!, 6/23/25).

‘Brilliant military operation’

The New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (6/22/25) acknowledged that US intelligence maintained that “Iran’s leaders had not yet decided to build a bomb”—but he argued that to act “amid uncertainty…is the essence of statesmanship.”

Rather than condemning this blatant violation of international law, US corporate media commentators gushed over what the Boston Globe (6/24/25) called a “brilliant military operation.” The Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) gave President Donald Trump “credit…for meeting the moment.”

To the New York Times’ Bret Stephens (6/22/25), Trump made “a courageous and correct decision that deserves respect.” “The president acted before it was too late,” he wrote. “It is the essence of statesmanship.”

For the Washington Post’s Max Boot (6/25/25), it’s “good news…that both Israel and the United States showed they can bombard Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets at will.”

Rather than toasting aggression, these observers could have used their platforms to try to help foster a political climate that prioritizes peace and the international legal principles that could help create a less violent world.

Meanwhile, some opinion mongers thought the US was at risk of insufficiently violating international law. The Post’s editorial board (6/22/25) said Trump

should ensure that Iran’s nuclear program is demolished, as he appeared to claim it was on Saturday. This would mean the destruction of the targeted sites plus any residual weapons-building capacity.

In other words, the authors are glad that the US bombed Iran in violation of international law, and think it might be best to do more of the same.

A Journal editorial (6/23/25) put forth a similar view, warning that Trump will “squander” any “gains” that the US and Israel may have made against Iran if he “lets Iran take a breather, retain any enriched uranium it has secretly stored, and then rearm. But the last fortnight creates a rare opportunity for a more peaceful Middle East.” I’m not a big Orwell fan, but there’s something to his vision of the propaganda slogan “war is peace.”

Upside-down world

Iran “now knows Mr. Trump isn’t bluffing,” the Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) wrote. Does the paper imagine that Iran thought Trump was “bluffing” when he assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the nation’s top military leader, in 2020?

These celebrations of bomb-dropping occur in an upside-down world, where Iran is an aggressor against the United States. One form of this lie is accusing Iran of wantonly killing Americans or seeking to do so. The Journal (6/22/25) cited “1,000 Americans killed by Iran-supplied roadside bombs and other means”—referring to the dubious claim that Iran is responsible for US soldiers killed during the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq (Progressive, 1/7/20). Thus, to the editors, “Mr. Trump had to act to stop the threat in front of him to protect America.”

For Boot (6/22/25), Iran is a “predator” that the United States and Israel “will still have to deal with…for years to come.”

It would be nice to be able to assess the evidence for these allegations, but the authors don’t so much as hint at any. What is well documented, though, is that the US has been the aggressor in its longrunning war with Iran.

The US ruling class initiated the conflict by overthrowing Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 (NPR, 2/7/19), propping up the Shah’s torture regime for 26 years (BBC, 6/3/16; AP, 2/6/19), sponsoring the Iraqi invasion of Iran and helping Iraq use chemical weapons against Iran (Foreign Policy, 8/26/13), supporting Israel’s years-long campaign of murdering Iranian scientists (Responsible Statecraft, 12/21/20), and asphyxiating Iran’s civilian population through economic sanctions (Human Rights Watch, 10/29/19).

In other words, the US has been prosecuting a war against the Iranian people for more than 70 years, and Iran hasn’t done anything remotely comparable to the US, but the corporate media pretends that the inverse is true.

The consent manufacturers went even further, characterizing Iran as a threat to the world more generally. The Journal (6/22/25) said “Iran has been waging regional and terrorist war for decades,” and that “the world is safer” because the US bombed the country. Stephens proclaimed the Iranian government “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism,” a claim Boot (6/25/25) echoed, writing that the nation has a “decades-long track record as the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism.” Sickeningly, Antony Blinken (New York Times, 6/24/25), a leading architect of the genocide of Gaza’s civilian population, called Iran “a leading state sponsor of terrorism; a destructive and destabilizing force via its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and Iraq.”

As usual, none of these writers bothered to say which acts of “terrorism” Iran has backed, never mind provide proof. Of course, if one wanted to make a serious argument that Iran has won the planet’s “state sponsor of terrorism” gold medal, then it would be necessary to show how they trumped, say, US support for Al Qaeda in Syria. For such a case to be convincing, it would furthermore be necessary to assess where bankrolling a genocide ranks in the terror-sponsoring Olympics.

‘A grave nuclear threat’

Max Boot (Washington Post, 6/25/25): “The good news is that both Israel and the United States showed they can bombard Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets at will.”

In the fantasy world where Iran is a grave danger to the US and indeed the world, then wrongly implying that it has or is about to have nuclear weapons packs a heavier punch. The Journal (6/22/25) said, “President Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s three most significant nuclear sites on Saturday helped rid the world of a grave nuclear threat.” The editorial would later add, “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wanted a bomb more than peace.”

Boot (6/25/25) wrote that “preliminary Israeli intelligence assessments [of the US bombing of Iran] conclude that the damage to the Iranian nuclear weapons program was more extensive—enough to set back the program by several years.” Stephens began his piece:

For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it was President Trump who, by bombing three of Iran’s key nuclear sites on Sunday morning, was willing to demonstrate that those pledges were not hollow and that Tehran could not simply tunnel its way to a bomb because no country other than Israel dared confront it.

As FAIR contributor Bryce Greene (6/23/25) recently demonstrated, there is no proof that Iran has nuclear weapons or is close to having any. Yet the op-ed pages are peppered with insinuations that Iran’s imaginary nukes legitimize the US’s aggression against the country.

A Boston Globe editorial (6/24/25) read:

After years of insisting it would not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, Israel followed through by launching a wide-ranging attack earlier this month, assassinating nuclear scientists and military leaders and destroying many sites associated with Iran’s decades-long nuclear program. Trump initially stayed on the sidelines, until Saturday when US bombers delivered the coup de grâce, destroying—or at least heavily damaging—a key underground site that only American bunker-buster bombs could reach….

Stopping Iran, whose unofficial national motto is “Death to America,’’ from gaining a nuclear weapon has rightly been a US priority for decades.

Iran’s nuclear program is now damaged but not destroyed.

What’s missing from this chatter is that, even if we lived in an alternate reality where Iran had nuclear weapons or was hours away from having them, attacking them on these grounds would not be legitimate. After all, international law does not grant states a right to attack each other on a preventive (Conversation, 6/18/25) or pre-emptive basis (Conversation, 6/23/25). This crucial point was entirely absent in the coverage I’ve discussed.

Also overlooked are the 90 nuclear warheads that Israel is believed to have, as well as the more than 5,200 that the US reportedly possesses, none of which apparently constitute “a grave nuclear threat,” even as it’s not Iran but the US and Israel that routinely carry out full-scale invasions and occupations of nations in West Asia.

Whether it’s Iran’s supposed support for terrorism or Iran’s nonexistent and non-imminent nuclear weapons, the propaganda follows the same formula: make an unsubstantiated claim about Iranian malfeasance, and use that as a premise on which to defend Washington openly carrying out acts of aggression, perhaps the gravest violation of international law.

If you want the US and Israel to stop killing and immiserating people in Iran, remember this pattern and get used to debunking it. Because, last week’s ceasefire notwithstanding, the US/Israeli war on Iran isn’t over.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Gregory Shupak.

White House press secretary Bill Moyers in 1965.

Bill Moyers died last week at the age of 91. His career began as a close aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, serving as LBJ’s de facto chief of staff and then his press secretary, but Moyers spent most of his life in journalism. After the Johnson administration, he was briefly publisher of Long Island’s Newsday, which won two Pulitzers under his tenure before he was forced out for being too left (Extra!, 1–2/96).

Most of Moyers’ journalism, however, appeared on public television, an institution he helped launch as a member of the 1967 Carnegie Commission, which called for public TV to be “a forum for controversy and debate” that would  “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard” and “help us see America whole, in all its diversity.”

While public TV as a whole has often failed to live up to those ideas, Moyers exemplified them.

Consistently critical

Bill Moyers (The Secret Government, 1987): “Can we have the permanent warfare state and democracy too?”

Moyers was a consistently critical voice on PBS. In 1987, his PBS special The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis offered a searing examination of the Iran/Contra scandal; he followed that up with an even deeper dive into the story three years later for Frontline with High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Moyers’ 2007 documentary Buying the War, aired four years into the Iraq War, offered a critique of media failures in the run-up to war that was rarely heard in corporate media.

His independence made him a thorn in PBS‘s side. Robert Parry (FAIR.org, 9/13/11) explained:

When I was working at PBS Frontline in the early 1990s, senior producers would sometimes order up pre-ordained right-wing programs—such as a show denouncing Cuba’s Fidel Castro—to counter Republican attacks on the documentary series for programs the right didn’t like, such as Bill Moyers’ analysis of the Iran/Contra scandal.

In essence, the idea was to inject right-wing bias into some programming as “balance” to other serious journalism, which presented facts that Republicans found objectionable. That way, the producers could point to the right-wing show to prove their “objectivity” and, with luck, deter GOP assaults on PBS funding.

When Moyers hosted the news program Now (2002-04), the right complained—and PBS addressed the complaints by cutting the hour-long show to 30 minutes, while adding three right-wing programs: Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered, a show by conservative commentator Michael Medved and the Journal Editorial Report, featuring writers and editors from the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page (FAIR.org, 9/17/04).

Moyers was already heading out the door at Now, passing the torch to co-host David Brancaccio, who largely continued its hard-hitting tradition. Moyers returned to PBS in 2007 with a revival of his 1970s public affairs show, Bill Moyers Journal. When he retired that show in 2010, PBS also canceled Now. Moyers’ brand of independent journalism has been in short supply on PBS ever since.

Moyers diagnosed the problem in an appearance on Democracy Now! (6/8/11):

Sometimes self-censorship occurs because you’re looking over your shoulder, and you think, well, if I do this story or that story, it will hurt public broadcasting. Public broadcasting has suffered often for my sins, reporting stories the officials don’t want reported. And today, only…a very small percentage of funding for NPR and PBS comes from the government. But that accounts for a concentration of pressure and self-censorship. And only when we get a trust fund, only when the public figures out how to support us independently of a federal treasury, will we flourish as an independent medium.

‘Real change comes from outside the consensus’

Bill Moyers on Tavis Smiley (5/12/11): “Voices that challenge the ruling ideology…get constantly pushed back to the areas of the stage you can’t see or hear.”

Moyers shared FAIR’s critique of corporate media. On Tavis Smiley (5/13/11), he spoke about the elite bias in the media:

Television, including public television, rarely gives a venue to people who have refused to buy into the ruling ideology of Washington. The ruling ideology of Washington is we have two parties, they do their job, they do their job pretty well. The differences between them limit the terms of the debate. But we know that real change comes from outside the consensus. Real change comes from people making history, challenging history, dissenting, protesting, agitating, organizing.

Those voices that challenge the ruling ideology—two parties, the best of all worlds, do a pretty good job—those voices get constantly pushed back to the areas of the stage you can’t see or hear.

Jeff Cohen, FAIR’s founder, remembered Moyers’ impact on FAIR:

He was very supportive of FAIR from day one, and always offered encouragement to our staff. He was especially supportive of our studies of who gets to speak on PBS and NPR, and who doesn’t. He helped FAIR find funding for quarter-page advertorials on the New York Times op-ed page, which was then crucial and well-read media real estate, on various issues of corporate media bias or censorship. And he helped us find funding as well for a full-page ad in USA Today, exposing the distortions and lies of Rush Limbaugh.

Already some in corporate media are trying to push Moyers’ dissenting voice to the shadows. The New York Times (6/26/25), in a lengthy obituary devoted mostly to Moyers’ time working with LBJ, found no room to mention Moyers’ Iran/Contra work, or his repeated clashes with and criticisms of PBS. It did, however, find space to quote far-right website FrontPageMag.com, which in 2004 called Moyers a “sweater-wearing pundit who delivered socialist and neo-Marxist propaganda with a soft Texas accent.”

Featured Image: Bill Moyers at Arizona State University, 2017 (Creative Commons photo: Gage Skidmore)

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

In the new weekly political podcast, The Bradbury Group, last night presenter Martyn Bradbury talked with visiting Palestinian journalist Dr Yousef Aljamal.

They assess the current situation in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and what New Zealand should be doing.

As Bradbury, publisher of The Daily Blog, notes, “Fourth Estate public broadcasting is dying — The Bradbury Group will fight back.”

Gaza crisis and Iran tensions.     Video: The Bradbury Group/Radio Waatea

Also in last night’s programme was featured a View From A Far Podcast Special Middle East Report with former intelligence analyst Dr Paul Buchanan and international affairs commentator Selwyn Manning on what will happen next in Iran.

Political Panel:
Māori Party president John Tamihere,
NZ Herald columnist Simon Wilson
NZCTU economist Craig Renney

Topics:
– The Legacy of Tarsh Kemp
– New coward punch and first responder assault laws — virtue signalling or meaningful policy?
– Cost of living crisis and the failing economy

• The Bradbury Group is sponsored by Waatea News live at 8pm Tuesdays on ROVA, Youtube, SkyTV and Waatea’s main Facebook page.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The Sunday morning talkshows have for decades played an important part in shaping political narratives in the United States. They typically bring on high-profile Washington guests for one-on-one interviews, aiming to set the political agenda for the week ahead. But these shows also have consistently marginalized the voices of women and BIPOC people, and those who might represent the public interest, rather than the interests of a narrow, wealthy elite (Extra!, 9–10/01, 4/12).

After Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 and 2024 elections, the Sunday shows had an opportunity to hold up both his campaign promises and his cabinet picks to scrutiny. With his campaigns’ racist attacks on immigrants and diversity initiatives, as well as his movement’s assaults on the rights of women and trans people, inviting guests who more accurately reflect the diversity of the country would seem to be a journalistic imperative. Yet a new FAIR study finds that the Sunday shows’ coverage of the Trump transitions were even more heavily white and male than usual.

We also found that in 2024, when Trump’s rhetoric and cabinet picks became even more extreme, fewer guests voiced criticism of Trump and his cabinet than in 2016. By downplaying critiques of Trump, these shows used their inside-the-Beltway influence to tell insiders that the MAGA presidency should get a more deferential reception the second time around.

Methodology

FAIR documented all guests on ABC‘s This Week, CBS‘s Face the Nation, CNN‘s State of the Union, Fox News Sunday and NBC‘s Meet the Press from November 13, 2016, through January 22, 2017, and from November 10, 2024, through January 19, 2025. We used the Nexis news database, Archive.org and news outlet websites to obtain complete transcripts. We included all guests invited to speak on the show with the host, whether individually or in groups. (Most panel discussions—which were typically journalist roundtables—were excluded; the exceptions were those conducted in an interview format.)

We documented the guests’ occupation, gender and race or ethnicity, as well as whether they voiced critical or supportive opinions of Trump, his campaign and his cabinet picks. For politicians and other political professionals, we recorded partisan affiliation.

We counted 162 guests in the first Trump transition period, and 186 in the second. (Much of the difference can be accounted for by the fact that Christmas fell on a Sunday in 2016, resulting in only three guests across all shows, rather than the usual 15 to 17.)

From the first to the second transition period, there were some notable shifts in the shows’ guest demographics and views on the president-elect, particularly from nonpartisan guests and guests from the defeated Democratic Party.

Focus on Beltway insiders

The vast majority of guests in both time periods were current and former government officials, in line with the Sunday shows’ focus on Washington insiders. This habit has the effect of marginalizing other kinds of people with deep knowledge about various policy areas, such as academics, NGO leaders, labor leaders, activists or other public interest voices.

In 2016, current and former US officials and politicians made up 86% of all guest appearances. In 2024–25, that number stayed nearly the same, at 84%. In 2016, journalists came in a distant second, at 7%. In 2024, that distinction went to former military officials, with 6%.

Of the partisan sources, Republicans outnumbered Democrats (and independents who caucused with the Democrats) 56% to 40% in 2016–17. Interestingly, Democrats slightly outnumbered Republicans in 2024–25, 49% to 47%. (The remainder were primarily people who had served as appointees under both Republican and Democratic administrations, and one Green Party guest in 2016.)

Historically, Republicans have been overrepresented on the Sunday shows. It’s noteworthy that that wasn’t the case in the transition to the second Trump administration. But at the same time, the number of invited guests who voiced criticism of Trump or his cabinet picks decreased from 2016 to 2024, from 28% to 22%. This can be largely attributed to the fact that far fewer of the Sunday shows’ Democratic guests and nonpartisan guests took a critical position on Trump in 2024—a phenomenon that will be discussed in more detail below.

Skewing (more) male

The Sunday show guests were highly skewed toward men (81% of guests) in 2016; they were even more skewed (84%) in 2024. This was driven primarily by the shift in GOP guests, whose 3.5:1 male-to-female ratio in 2016 skyrocketed to an astounding 24:1 ratio in 2024. (Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway accounted for 15 of the 17 female GOP appearances in the first time period.)

Not every Sunday show guest talked about Trump; other interview topics ranged from political issues, like Middle East policy or the opioid epidemic, to largely apolitical interviews about things like sports or books. In 2024–25, there were 19 of these guests, and they were nearly evenly split along gender lines—meaning the gender split among those talking about Trump was even more skewed towards men.

Fox News was consistently the worst in this category, inviting 89% male guests in 2016 and 90% in 2024, but most of the others weren’t far behind. The high mark in female representation for any show in the study was CNN in 2016, when just 27% of its guests were women. In 2024, CBS bucked the trend as the only show that increased its female representation, moving from 20% to 25%, and also was the only show to invite a trans guest (Rep. Sarah McBride, 11/24/24) during either study period.

In other words, as Trump retook office under the shadow of Project 2025, with its promises to reverse decades of gains on gender equity and reproductive rights, nearly every show moved toward a greater silencing of women’s voices.

Marginalizing women’s voices is consequential. For instance, State of the Union host Jake Tapper (1/5/25) directed questions about Trump nominee Pete Hegseth to two white male guests, Republican Sen. Jim Banks and Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. Asked directly by Tapper about the sexual assault claim against Hegseth, Banks waved it off; the only “concerns” Kelly expressed were about Hegseth’s lack of experience.

When CBS Face the Nation (11/24/24) asked similar questions of Democrat Sen. Tammy Duckworth, she responded directly: “It’s frankly an insult and really troubling that Mr. Trump would nominate someone who has admitted that he’s paid off a victim who has claimed rape allegations against him.” Female guests won’t always raise issues of women’s rights, gender equity or misogyny, nor should they be expected to shoulder that responsibility alone—but they are certainly more likely to.

Overwhelmingly white

The shows also invited overwhelmingly white guests to interview, though that number decreased from 2016 to 2024, from 85% to 78%. While not quite as extreme an overrepresentation as gender, the percentage of white guests still far exceeded their proportion among the general public: In 2024, 58% of the US population identified as non-Hispanic white, down from 62% in 2016.

From 2016 to 2024, Black representation on the Sunday shows decreased from 10% to 5%, while Asian-American guests increased, from less than 1% to 8%. This increase was in part due to repeat appearances by Democrats Duckworth and Rep. Ro Khanna. GOP guests also increased in diversity, due largely to four appearances by Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a member of the Cherokee Nation.

During the 2024–25 time period, neither CBS nor CNN invited any Black guests, and Fox invited no Latine guests, as the Trump team geared up for Day One attacks on anti-racism initiatives and on immigrant communities.

In 2016, then–Rep. Keith Ellison (D–Minn.) said of Trump on ABC (11/13/16):

We oppose his misogyny. We oppose his picking on people of different ethnic and religious groups. And we want to be making clear that if he tries to deliver on his word, that we will be there to say no.

Ellison appeared the next week on CBS (11/20/16), similarly decrying Trump’s “racism, misogyny,” and declaring, “It’s hard to normalize that, and we can never do it.” But eight years later, that racism and misogyny were repeatedly normalized by Sunday show guests—mostly of the white male variety.

Guestlists are not entirely determined by the shows themselves, as administrations choose who to make available as guests, and not every invited guest will agree to appear. Because shows lean so heavily on congressmembers for guest interviews, they also draw from a pool that is demographically skewed (76% non-Hispanic white, 72% male). But the Sunday shows clearly aren’t making any effort to offer voices more representative of the US population, tilting even further white and male than Congress does.

Democrats’ shift on Trump

When a guest spoke about Trump, his campaign or his cabinet picks, FAIR coded those comments as positive, neutral or critical. We defined those who praised Trump, his cabinet picks or his policy positions (as opposed to general Republican positions) as positive; those who do not take an explicit stance on these as neutral; and those who disparaged these as critical. Statements about Trump’s opponents, like Vice President Kamala Harris or Sen. Hillary Clinton, were not considered unless they also included specific references to Trump. The balance of these comments changed markedly between the first and second Trump transitions—particularly among Democratic and nonpartisan guests.

Overall, guest interviews became more neutral in the second transition. In 2016–17, 94% of guests made comments about Trump, and in 2024–25, 90% did so. But in the first transition, 30% of those guests spoke critically, while in the second, only 24% were critical. Neutral takes rose from 19% of sources to 28%. Nearly half the guests who commented on Trump had positive things to say in both transitions: 51% in the first, 48% in the second. It’s notable that there was a marked shift toward neutrality among guests, even as Trump’s rhetoric and cabinet picks became more extreme.

This was particularly noteworthy among those Democratic guests (and independents who caucused with Democrats) who made comments about Trump. In 2016–17, the combined Democratic and independent guests’ comments about Trump were critical 62% of the time, and only 4% of such comments were positive. In contrast, in 2024–25, when far more such guests were invited to appear, only 49% spoke critically, while 11% spoke positively. Trump-related commentary from Democrats shifted from 35% to 40% neutral.

Senators, who make up a large portion of partisan guests, didn’t shift their perspectives much between the years, from 63% to 62% critical. Representatives tilted a little more neutral, but the biggest shift can be seen in which Democrats the Sunday shows invited: more former White House officials in 2016–17 (10, vs. 4 in the second transition), and more officials of the current/outgoing White House in 2024–25 (13, vs. five in the first).

All the guests representing the outgoing administration were either neutral or voiced support for Trump. Meanwhile, in the first time period, seven of the critical Democratic interviews about Trump (and three of the neutrals) were from former presidential appointees. Only three former appointees were asked about Trump in the second transition—all of whom were critical.

It’s predictable that former officials, who are not representing the current White House team that is seeking a smooth transition, feel more free to speak critically. For instance, Norm Eisen, a former special counsel on ethics to Barack Obama, spoke to This Week (12/11/16) about Trump’s conflicts of interest, predicting, “He’s going to be tainted by scandal.”

In contrast, Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan offered a more flattering perspective (NBC Meet the Press, 12/1/24):

First I would just say that we’ve had good consultations with the incoming team. We’ve been transparent with them. We are committed to ensuring a smooth transition. Second, I’m glad to see the incoming team is welcoming the ceasefire.

Interestingly, Republican guests also trended slightly more toward neutral comments in the second transition period. Five Republicans (6%) spoke about Trump critically in the first time period, while only three (4%) did so in the second. At the same time, the percentage of Republicans making pro-Trump comments dipped from 87% to 84%. GOP guests making neutral comments increased from 6% to 12%.

A different kind of nonpartisan

Nonpartisan guests, who accounted for 15% of guests in both time periods, shifted even more markedly: Half of those who made comments about Trump expressed criticism in 2016–17, and none did so in 2024–25. Meanwhile, positive comments increased from 21% to 50%.

The types of guests dominating this category also changed: In 2016, the largest group consisted of journalists invited for one-on-one interviews (8); these often made critical remarks about Trump, as when the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius told Face the Nation (12/18/16), “I was struck…by his reluctance to do what typically happens in national security matters, which is seek some kind of bipartisan unified consensus.” Or when the New York Times‘ Dean Baquet said to Meet the Press (1/1/17), “I think that there are a lot of question marks about Donald Trump.”

In 2024, there was only one journalist (radio host Charlamagne tha God—This Week, 11/12/24), while business elites (4) and foreign diplomats (3) dominated.

As one might expect, diplomats tended to express more enthusiasm for the incoming president. “I know they share our goal of wanting to have security and stability,” British Ambassador Karen Pierce said of the incoming Trump administration (Face the Nation, 11/10/24). Ukrainian Ambassador Oksana Markarova told Face the Nation (12/15/24): “Let me thank President Trump. He is the one who made a historic decision…to provide us with lethal aid in the first place.”

Business leaders likewise tended to praise Trump. “The American consumer today, as well as corporate America, is quite excited about what the Trump administration is talking about,” IBM vice chair Gary Cohn—a Trump advisor—told Face the Nation (12/15/24). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said to Fox News Sunday (12/1/24): “We need to be able to have the best AI infrastructure in the world….. I believe President-elect Trump will be very good at that.”

With Trump’s threats of retribution a major factor in the second transition, it’s not necessarily surprising that partisan guests might be more wary of voicing criticism—which is all the more reason for the Sunday shows to look outside their usual suspects. Instead, the few nonpartisan guests they invited came from occupations much more likely to say flattering things of the incoming president in order to curry favor.

Research assistance: Wilson Korik, Emma Llano

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Keiwana Grant-Floyd.

They tried. Oh, did the media try.

The declared victory for Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor highlights many things. The power of his campaign, the popularity of his ideas, the importance of grassroots get-out-the-vote mobilization, and the tepid reception for Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as the state’s governor due to a myriad of sexual harassment allegations, all contributed to the surprising—to corporate media, anyway—result.

Earlier this month, FAIR’s Raina Lipsitz (6/13/25) responded to a New York profile (5/20/25) that attempted to undermine Mamdani’s record. In the home stretch of the primary race in the latter half of June, the pressure against Mamdani increased, featuring thoughtless dismissals of his ideas, selective memory and factual inaccuracy in the service of lowering Mamdani’s electoral chances.

That Mamdani emerged from this mess victorious exposes the out-of-touchness of establishment media outlets that twisted like pretzels to scare voters away from the 33-year-old phenomenon. (Readers should know that I ranked Mamdani first in the primary and contributed to his campaign. I’m not unbiased when it comes to who I want to see as mayor, but the analysis of the media that follows, I believe, will withstand scrutiny.)

‘Uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges’

The New York Times‘ attack (6/16/25) on Zohran Mamdani was accompanied by an image centered on the World Trade Center.

The New York Times editorial board (6/16/25) argued that “Mr. Mamdani is running on an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.” They explained:

He is a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance. He favors rent freezes that could restrict housing supply and make it harder for younger New Yorkers and new arrivals to afford housing. He wants the government to operate grocery stores, as if customer service and retail sales were strengths of the public sector. He minimizes the importance of policing.

At least one poll shows that a rent freeze is overwhelmingly popular (City and State, 4/15/25), and they’re far from unheard of: Rent freezes were a key policy victory under Mayor Bill de Blasio (City Limits, 6/28/16; Politico, 3/15/17; WNBC, 6/17/20), a mayor whose candidacy the board (9/5/17, 11/2/17) had enthusiastically supported.

The landlord class, which has organized against Mamdani’s campaign (Jacobin, 6/23/25), no doubt agrees with the Times‘ argument that if we don’t let rents go up, housing will be unaffordable—though 12 years of steady increases on regulated rentals under the tenure of Mayor Michael Bloomberg didn’t seem to make it easier to get an apartment here.

And is the grocery store pitch such a crazy idea? The rising cost of food, despite the Times’ framing, is a very real problem for New Yorkers (Daily News, 5/1/25). The city operates public housing, homeless shelters and  hospitals—and a public education system that delivers daily meals to more than 900,000 students.

The Times (12/12/24) positively explored the idea of city-owned stores in its news pages, citing how cities like Chicago and Atlanta were exploring similar missions. But when Mamdani proposes it, the editors present it as a sign of kookiness.

‘The disorder of the past decade’

The New York Times (6/16/25) accused Mamdani of showing “little concern about the disorder of the past decade”—a time period when there were fewer killings in New York City than at any time since the 1950s (chart: Wikipedia).

The paper continued:

Most worrisome, he shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade, even though its costs have fallen hardest on the city’s working-class and poor residents. Mr. Mamdani, who has called Mr. de Blasio the best New York mayor of his lifetime, offers an agenda that remains alluring among elite progressives but has proved damaging to city life.

What disorder is the board talking about? We can guess they mean crime, but the homicide rate in New York City for the past ten years is the lowest it’s been since the 1950s. It’s true that Mamdani believes in police reform. The Times editorial board used to champion this cause (7/13/20, 9/13/20), even endorsing a reform-minded democratic socialist defense attorney for Queens district attorney five years ago (6/18/25).

Alex Vitale, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project, suggested that—”given that crime rates are at or near historic low”—the Times‘ “disorder” is likely “the presence of homeless mentally ill people on the subway and other public spaces.” But, he argues:

Ironically, Mamdani and to some extent [Comptroller Brad] Lander are the candidates who have actual plans to address the kind of disorder that pearl-clutching Times readers are worried about. They understand that the solution to this decades old problem is not endlessly using police to cycle people through jails and hospitals, but instead to develop actual supportive housing and other essential social services.

The Times has capitulated to neoliberal austerity, which accepts that cities have no choice but to cut services and turn the real estate market over to billionaires, and then use policing to manage the chaos that ensues.

As for the idea that Mamdani is somehow just a candidate for “elite progressives” but not the “working-class and poor,” the Times’ own interactive map shows a more nuanced story. While it’s true that Cuomo did well in, for example, the impoverished South Bronx, in Manhattan he won the monied districts like Tribeca and the Upper East and West Side, while Mamdani carried lower-income neighborhoods like Harlem, Washington Heights and the Lower East Side. Mamdani’s funding came mostly from small contributions—he had seven times as many donors as Cuomo (New York Times, 5/6/25)—whereas Cuomo was heavily funded by billionaires and the real-estate industry (City, 6/26/25).

‘A quality of magical realism’

The Atlantic‘s Michael Powell (6/18/25) said Mamdani’s campaign was “exuberantly disconnected from actual government budgets and organizational charts.”

The Atlantic published two anti-Mamdani articles, with two of them warning that Mamdani is too inexperienced to earn the people’s vote and that his ambitious proposals can’t be achieved. (A third went after his support for the phrase “globalize the intifada—6/24/25.) Former Times writer Michael Powell (6/18/25), like the Times editorial board, scoffed at the grocery store idea, saying, “How would he pay for his most ambitious plans? Tax the rich and major corporations.” His colleague Annie Lowery (6/12/25) joined in:

He is a leftist in the Bernie Sanders mold, with a raft of great-sounding policies. Free buses! Free childcare! Cheap groceries! Frozen rents! But a lot of these are impractical at best. Free buses would deprive the MTA of needed revenue. Free childcare would require a mammoth tax hike that Albany would need to approve, which it has shown no interest in doing.

Similarly, Powell pompously asserts that “Mamdani’s candidacy also has a quality of magic realism, a campaign exuberantly disconnected from actual government budgets and organizational charts.”

Progressives are often annoyed by the retort “how are you going to pay for it?” because this question only gets deployed against the expansion of healthcare, education and social services, and not jails, policing and subsidies for business. But it also exposes the superficialities of reporters’ knowledge of city affairs.

Many years ago, when I was a reporter at the Chief-Leader, a fellow reporter asked then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg why his budget proposal rested so much on the outcome of the city’s negotiations with its unions. His answer was simple: That’s what government is—it’s services for people, staffed by people. Any administration, in short, has to grapple with how to pay for its priorities, whether those priorities are left-wing or right-wing, and that often involves cutting bloat, consolidating functions and increasing revenue.

Mamdani’s spending plan offends the Atlantic, not because it costs money—the magazine (8/8/21, 3/8/23) has argued against efforts to cut police budgets—but because Atlantic writers and editors don’t like his budget priorities, which validate the New Deal concept of government services for the 99 Percent.

‘Undeniably young’

What Zohran Mamdani got right, according to the New Yorker (6/23/25), is understanding that “social media is where many voters decide if a politician…can be counted on.”

New Yorker coverage has been fairer to Mamdani than the Atlantic was, but Eric Lach’s interview (6/23/25) with the candidate honed in on a swipe favored by the assembly member’s critics, including the New York article FAIR already responded to: his youth. Lach said:

Mamdani has been stymied for several reasons that were apparent before primary day. For one thing, he is undeniably young, and he never found a way to reassure voters that he was truly up for the job of managing the city’s agencies, its $100 billion budget, and its 300,000-person workforce.

Democratic socialist upstarts have often been tagged as unruly whippersnappers who need to stop bothering party elders with competitive primaries. But in a moment where one of the biggest problems of the Democratic Party is its gerontocracy (Newsweek, 12/19/24; The Nation, 5/23/25; Atlantic, 6/19/25), perhaps Mamdani’s ineligibility for AARP membership is a strength.

Lach continued:

The new program of public spending he has proposed is predicated on increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations, taxes that would have to be approved in Albany. If the big shots in Albany—never a good bet for anything, politically—refuse him, what would become of Mayor Mamdani? No one can say.

Warning that Mamdani’s agenda might cause friction with Albany suggests it might be Lach, not Mamdani, who is too new to the subject matter. The tension between state and city government is age-old, and consistent with every administration.

Once again, Mamdani gets extra scrutiny because of the substance of his agenda. Would Cuomo deal better with the state government he was forced to resign from, with a governor who is the deputy who replaced him? That’s a rhetorical question.

Right-wing rage

Marvel Comics‘ Daily Bugle used to run headlines like “Spider-Man: Threat or Menace?” The New York Post (6/23/25) is less ambivalent about Mamdani.

It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch’s editorial boards savaged Mamdani. The New York Post (6/23/25) called him a  “cheap influencer” and “a babyfaced socialist antisemite who’s never accomplished anything except this so-buzzy campaign.” Likewise, Murdoch’s pro-business Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) claimed that “Manhattanites are warning that Mr. Mamdani’s ruinous utopianism could prompt a flight of talent and capital.”

But the onslaught from the more centrist outlets is telling: Like the business establishment, they fear progressive economic policies when it comes to housing, education, transit and public safety, despite all overtures to the contrary.

The good news is that this press assault failed. Perhaps that is because the political advice of the New York Times and Atlantic only still sways opinion in a few enclaves of the upper crust. The rage from the Post, Daily News and Journal probably only reached conservative audiences, who wouldn’t have ranked Mamdani anyway. And perhaps it also is testament to the degree that a grassroots messaging campaign can overcome an onslaught from the corporate media.

The bad news is that this was only the primary: incumbent Mayor Eric Adams will be running in the general election as an independent, and Andrew Cuomo has left that option open. Monied interests will likely double down, hoping to spread enough fear of a Mamdani-run New York City to help sink his meteoric rise—and elite media are rarely far behind them.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

But for much of this election cycle, it has been easy for a casual consumer of news to believe that only one person was in the running to replace Adams: disgraced former New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

A FAIR analysis of media coverage of the top six Democratic candidates (based on polling through the end of May) found that Cuomo’s name appeared in headlines seven times more often than Zohran Mamdani, who for months had been in second place in opinion polls, and nine times more often than Brad Lander, who typically came in No. 3 in the polls (as he did in first-round voting). The omissions were sometimes egregious; for example, one May 2025 New York Times article (5/17/25) was headlined “Can Cool Kids Get This Mayoral Candidate Elected?” Mamdani was the candidate in question, but his name was relegated to the subhead.

By far the most references

FAIR searched the Nexis Uni news database for US news stories that included each  candidate’s name and the words “mayor” and “election.” (We looked on May 28, 2025, going from September 1, 2024, until the date of search.) We then manually filtered out duplicates and false positives. Cuomo received by far the most references, with 411. Lander had the second-most, with 266; Mamdani had only 203.

Cuomo’s mentions increased markedly after he announced his candidacy on March 1, but rumors of his candidacy made him the most-mentioned candidate in most of the preceding months.

FAIR searched Media Cloud‘s New York state and local news database as well, with similar results: Cuomo became the clear leader in mentions in February, with far greater coverage than his competitors in the three months before the election. Cuomo had 141 mentions in New York media in the month of May, versus 84 for Mamdani and 78 for Lander.

Media Cloud analysis of New York Democratic mayoral primary coverage.

Familiarity creates affinity

Maisie Williams as Arya Stark from Game of Thrones.

To understand why this matters, consider a different name—Arya.

The first time the name Arya appears on the Social Security Administration’s list of most popular baby names is in 2010, where it crawled onto the list as the 942nd-most popular name for girls. That’s the same year that Game of Thrones debuted with a bang, introducing the country to Arya Stark—a main character and a fan favorite.  By 2019, when the show fizzled its way off the air, the name Arya had become the 92nd-most popular baby name for girls in the country.

Despite the truism that familiarity breeds contempt, familiarity can in fact create affinity, according to Kentaro Fukumoto, a professor of political science at the University of Tokyo.

“In psychology, there’s a theory called the mere exposure effect,” Fukumoto told FAIR. “The theory argues that when you’re exposed to something [enough] you start to like it.”

Mere exposure effect is how one goes from not even knowing the name Arya to deciding to name your child Arya. It’s also how we sometimes go from hating a song on the radio to loving it. And it’s why companies—and politicians—run ads. The hope is that if we hear a name often enough, it will unconsciously motivate us to buy the product or vote for the candidate. And there’s some evidence, at least when it comes to politicians, that they’re right.

Name-recognition effect

In 2018, Fukumoto published a study that looked at what happened in Japanese elections when a Japanese national candidate shared a last name with a candidate in a down-ballot race—and thus voters were exposed to that name a lot.  Fukumoto found that in districts where candidates shared a name, the national candidate received a 69% boost, compared to how they performed in districts where they didn’t share a name.  So, for example, if a national candidate had 10% of the vote share, in districts where they shared a name with a down-ballot candidate, their vote share would become 17% —a sizable jump.

Campaigns use lawn signs in part to increase the familiarity of their candidates’ names (Creative Commons photo: Eric Behrens).

Fukumoto cautions that for major candidates, the effect is likely not as large, but the effect is very important for minor candidates—say, a lesser-known candidate challenging an incumbent. In the New York City mayoral race, Mamdani and the other less-covered candidates certainly were much less well-known than Cuomo, who not only served as governor, but whose father also served as governor from 1983–94.

A 2013 study by researchers at Vanderbilt University also found that name recognition can give candidates a boost. That study took advantage of the fact that a local school had strict routes for parents to drive down, to avoid creating the dreaded overburdened school pick-up line. The researchers placed four lawn signs for a local election with a fictional candidate—Ben Griffin—along one of the routes, and then surveyed all of the parents afterwards. They found that parents who drove along the route with the sign were 10 percentage points more likely than those who didn’t drive along the route to say that they would put Griffin—who, remember, did not exist—in their top three choices for a council seat.  And that’s a handful of lawn signs placed along one road.

In aggregate, news outlets prioritizing one candidate over others could shift the outcome of the election. When one considers that the 2021 mayoral primary election was decided by just 7,000 votes, it matters that Lander received roughly 35% less attention, Mamdani 50% less attention, and Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the New York City Council (and no relationship to Eric Adams), received 62% less coverage than Cuomo.

Bad publicity still publicity

Some of Cuomo’s coverage may have related to his history of scandals (New Republic, 1/26/24)—but a FAIR analysis (4/9/25) found media downplayed that record.

Some of Cuomo’s mentions were likely tied to the continued fallout of his governorship, including his concealment of nursing home deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic, and lawsuits tied to the New York attorney general’s report on complaints that he had sexually harassed employees. That report affirmed that Cuomo had sexually harassed members of his own staff as well as other state employees, creating a culture “filled with fear and intimidation.”

But at the same time, many of the candidates in the race were current government officials, who might be expected to generate news coverage in the course of their work. Adrienne Adams has been the speaker of the New York City Council since 2022. Lander is the city’s current comptroller, widely considered the second most powerful citywide office, serving as the chief financial officer and auditor of the city agencies. Mamdani is a New York State Assembly member, and Zellnor Myrie is a New York State senator.

And negative news coverage doesn’t mean negative election impact for candidates receiving outsize media attention—Donald Trump famously received billions of dollars worth of free media in his 2016 campaign, much of it negative.

Thumbs on the scale

The Atlantic‘s Annie Lowrey (6/12/25) noted that “the political scion with a multimillion-dollar war chest and blanket name recognition could lose to the young Millennial whom few New Yorkers had heard of as of last year”—before going on to argue that “if this is democracy, it’s a funny form of it.”

Further, while the analysis focused on the frequency of occurrences, not the tone, in recent weeks some news outlets have made their support for Cuomo more explicit. The New York Times editorial board said in 2024 that it would no longer endorse candidates for local races, but still this week published a confusingly written piece (6/16/25) that amounted to an endorsement for the former governor. (In April, a FAIR analysis—4/9/25—found the Times’ coverage of the former governor’s record notably forgiving.)

Similarly, Annie Lowrey in the Atlantic  (6/12/25) wrote a piece, rife with inaccuracies about voting methods, criticizing the city’s system for primaries as anti-democratic. New York City uses a ranked-choice system, which allows voters to rank mayoral candidates in their order of preference. While mathematicians don’t all agree on which voting systems are the best at accurately capturing voter preferences, there is broad consensus that plurality voting—where the candidate who gets the most votes in a single round wins—is the worst. Like the New York Times editorial, Lowrey’s article ends up as a de facto endorsement for the former governor, but by criticizing the system, it also acts to undermine the election itself. In other words, if Cuomo loses under this system—according to Lowrey—no he didn’t.

It’s unsettling that news outlets that proclaim to be for democracy are putting their thumbs on the scale, providing Cuomo with extensive coverage even as he mostly avoided actually meeting the people he has said he wants to govern.

However, while name recognition is important, news coverage is not the only way to get it. In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated Joe Crowley, a Democrat who had served as the US representative for New York’s 14th District for almost two decades, and received almost no media attention before she did so. She did it, in part, by knocking on doors.

Mamdani, who entered the race in the low single digits as a relatively unknown assemblymember, and headed into Primary Day neck and neck with Cuomo in polling, pledged to knock on at least 1 million doors before NYC’s June 24 Democratic primary. Two weeks ago, on TikTok, Mamdani said they were on track to reach that goal 10 days early.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Kendra Pierre-Louis.

The New York Times (6/18/25) made clear that it wouldn’t mind an unprovoked attack on Iran—so long as it wasn’t done hastily.

In the wake of the US-supported Israeli attack on Iran, and days before the direct US bombing that followed, the New York Times editorial board (6/18/25) argued that “America Must Not Rush Into a War Against Iran.”

This language was as shifty as it was deliberate. Rather than oppose a policy of unprovoked aggression and mass murder, the Times editorialists suggested such a campaign was happening too hastily, and it should be preceded by more debate.

The opinion writers at the most important paper in the world were fully in favor of attacking Iran; they only worried that Trump would go about it the wrong way. In fact, the Times’ justification for war was identical to that of the Trump administration’s explanation after the fact.  It laid it out in the first paragraph:

A nuclear-armed Iran would make the world less safe. It would destabilize the already volatile Middle East. It could imperil Israel’s existence. It would encourage other nations to acquire their own nuclear weapons, with far-reaching geopolitical consequences.

The New York Times‘ echo of the standard Israeli and US propaganda line offers an opportunity to critically examine this most recent justification for aggressive war.

‘Iran is not building a nuclear weapon’

The Trump administration’s top intelligence official saying that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” (Responsible Statecraft, 6/8/25) did not prevent the New York Times from asserting that Iran “has made substantial progress toward acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

The premise here was that Iran is working to build a nuclear weapon, something that forms the backbone of the Israeli propaganda campaign justifying their actions. The only problem is that there is no evidence whatsoever for this position. Not only is there no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, there is no reason to think that if they did, they would be anything other than defensive weapons.

Nowhere in the Times analysis was there any reference to the fact that neither US intelligence agencies nor international monitoring organizations have found evidence of any Iranian intention to build a nuclear weapon. As recently as March 25, 2025, Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump administration’s director of national intelligence, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the US intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”

While the International Atomic Energy Agency has been critical of steps Iran has taken to make its nuclear power program less transparent in the context of continual threats from Israel and the US to bomb that program, IAEA director Rafael Grossi emphasized in an interview with CNN (6/17/25; cited in Al Jazeera, 6/18/25), after those threats had become reality, “We did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon.”

Unilaterally scrapped

“The Trump administration might well be able to achieve a stricter deal” than the one Obama negotiated in 2015, the Times advised—without mentioning that Trump’s unilateral repudiated the Obama deal (New York Times, 5/8/18).

While the Times editorial did make brief mention of the US’s Obama-era anti-nuclear treaty with Iran, it offered no analysis as to why the Trump administration unilaterally scrapped the deal, despite no violation on Iran’s part. Nor did the paper mention the Biden administration refusal to negotiate a return to the deal. There was no mention of the fact that as Israel launched its first strike against Iran, the Iranians had made it clear that they wished to make a deal with the Trump administration on its nuclear energy program, and were actively negotiating toward that end.

But the fact is that every country in the Middle East, including Iran, has been in favor of a nuclear weapons–free Middle East. Every country, that is, with the exception of Israel, whose illegal, undeclared and often unacknowledged stockpile of nuclear weapons are currently in the hands of a genocidal and messianic regime, hell-bent on attacking its neighbors and thwarting any opportunities for peace.

Despite all of the fearmongering about Iran’s alleged aggressive intent and destabilizing potential, the Times ignored ample analysis and evidence to the contrary. As eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer (PBS, 7/9/12) has argued, a nuclear armed Iran could make the region more stable, because of the deterrent power of nuclear weapons.

A 2009 US military–funded study from the RAND corporation (4/14/09) examined Iranian ”press statements, writings in military journals, and other glimpses into Iranian thinking,” and found that it was extremely unlikely that Iran would use nuclear weapons offensively against Israel. Contrary to the Times’ image of Iran as fanatical theocrats bent on Israel’s destruction at all costs, military planners in Iran are well aware of the danger of being wiped off the map by retaliatory US strikes, and plan accordingly. If the Islamic Republic was to get nuclear weapons, predicts RAND, they would be used to deter exactly the kind of unprovoked attack that the US and Israel have launched over the past several days. They would be defensive, not offensive, weapons.

‘A malevolent force in the world’ 

The IAEA statement cited by the New York Times was the product of intense lobbying by the US (Common Dreams, 6/23/25).

The editorial board explicitly avoided the question of what Congress should do on the question of war with Iran: “The separate question of whether the United States should join the conflict is not one that we are addressing here.” But they had no problem presenting their pros list:

We know the arguments in favor of doing so—namely, that Iran’s government is a malevolent force in the world, and that it has made substantial progress toward acquiring a nuclear weapon. Last week the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is part of the United Nations, declared that Iran was violating its nonproliferation obligations and apparently hiding evidence of its efforts.

And their cons list:

Given how much weaker Iran is today than it was then, thanks partly to Israel’s humbling of Iranian proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, the Trump administration might well be able to achieve a stricter [Iran nuclear deal] today.

While the Times correctly pointed out that the IAEA found Iran to be in “noncompliance” with the nonproliferation treaty (NPT), the Times failed to point out that this came after an intense lobbying effort from Western officials just hours before Israeli strikes. They also ignore Iran’s detailed criticism of the IAEA finding, including its allegations that the findings were based in part on forged documents—a credible allegation, given Israel’s history of fabricating and forging evidence to justify aggression. Iran also noted that some of the “nonproliferation obligations” it had allegedly violated were not codified in the NPT, but instead were part of the agreement that the US unilaterally withdrew from. Nor did the Times make reference to the IAEA chief’s explicit insistence that the agency did not have proof Iran was trying to build a nuclear weapon.

‘Let this vital debate begin’ 

Shortly after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the bombing of Iran “was not and has not been about regime change” (BBC, 6/23/25), Trump posted, “Why wouldn’t there be a regime change???”

Instead of explaining this, the Times went straight to name-calling. One does not have to scrape the annals of the New York Times to predict that the phrase “malevolent force” has never been used to describe any of Washington’s ultra-violent allies, even the ones who have actually built and maintained an illegal stockpile of nuclear weapons. Certainly not Israel, the nation that has put an entire population under military apartheid for decades, and has slaughtered tens of thousands as part of what international rights organizations have labeled a genocide.

The US and Israel have made Iran the target of propaganda campaigns, terrorism, cyber attacks, assassinations, regime change operations and unprovoked attacks on its personnel and home soil. If the Times had included these facts, it would have inhibited the ultimate goal of the editorial: to promote the idea that war with Iran could potentially be desirable—and certainly justifiable. The Times seemed keen to act as a loyal opposition to Trump, while distancing themselves from the manner in which he might enact such a war.

Including the facts of America’s aggressive and provocative behavior against Iran would force them to conclude that the primary force destabilizing the region is not Iran, but the US and Israel. It isn’t Iran whose top papers are weighing the benefits of whether or not to launch a war of aggression against yet another nation. That honor goes to the New York Times, which said of this national discussion of mass murder policy: “Let this vital debate begin.”

After the strikes on Iran, the Trump administration and Israel have not announced full scale regime change war just yet, though there is every indication that such plans are in the works. As with Iraq in 2003, we have seen how easily false claims of weapons of mass destruction, and propaganda about a need to act, can morph into a years-long quagmire of senseless killing in the name of rebuilding a nation according to Washington’s designs. If such a war should be launched against Iran, the Times will have been one of its key supporters.

Research assistance: Emma Llano

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

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Bryce Greene.

After citing Trump administration charges that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, Al Jazeera (6/6/25) included a response from his advocates: “His lawyers have denied that he was a gang member and said he had not been convicted of any crime.”

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was returned to the United States on June 6, after being wrongly deported to El Salvador almost three months earlier. Abrego Garcia had been detained in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center since March 15, along with more than 250 other immigrants accused of belonging to the Latin American gangs Tren de Aragua and MS-13.

Abrego Garcia’s case drew particular media attention, due to the admission by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that his deportation and subsequent imprisonment were a result of an “administrative error.” For weeks, however, both the Trump administration and the Salvadoran government insisted they were powerless to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.

After months of protests from Abrego Garcia’s Maryland community and legal challenges from his lawyers, the father of three was finally returned to the US. But there was a caveat: He would face criminal charges related to an immigrant-smuggling operation that the Department of Justice alleges Abrego Garcia took part in as a member of MS-13.

Though there are plenty of reasons to cast doubt on the charges made against Abrego Garcia, in the seven articles published in the wake of his return, the New York Times (6/6/25, 6/6/25, 6/6/25, 6/8/25) and Wall Street Journal (6/6/25, 6/7/25, 6/8/25) present them mostly at face value. Given that the publications are the top two largest newspapers in America, their deficient coverage of one of the most important immigration cases of the second Trump administration is noteworthy.

Unreliable sources

The main New York Times story (6/6/25) on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador consists largely of Trump administration officials accusing him of crimes—with no quotes from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers contesting those charges. 

Only two of the articles (New York Times, 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/7/25) mentioned that the charges against Abrego Garcia stem from recent information supplied by jailhouse informants.  The articles failed to note that such testimony is notoriously unreliable, as documented by research, and frequently results in wrongful convictions.

Though there are six unnamed co-conspirators listed in the indictment, it appears as though the majority of the charges rely on the testimony of one or two of these individuals. Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, told CNN’s Erin Burnett (6/6/25), “The very first question I’m going to be asking is, what were those two people offered to make up these really fantastic, hyperbolic allegations against Mr. Abrego Garcia?”

The DoJ’s stonewalling of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers in his civil case should raise further suspicion about why these jailhouse informants decided to come forward now, despite the DoJ’s allegation that Abrego Garcia has been involved with immigrant smuggling since 2016. None of the articles mention that Abrego Garcia had been attending yearly check-ins with ICE since 2019, and that these allegations had not come up during the six years that ICE had been monitoring him, nor were they mentioned during the trial that resulted in a judge granting him withholding of removal.

In their New York Times piece (6/6/25), reporters Devlin Barrett, Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush dedicated two paragraphs to a 2022 traffic stop involving Abrego Garcia that the indictment cites as evidence of a smuggling operation, while curiously omitting the fact that he was not charged with a crime at the time of the incident.

None of the articles mentioned that Abrego Garcia had been in ICE detention for seven months in 2019, at the same time that the DoJ alleges he was leading an immigrant smuggling operation. Also missing in the Times and Journal’s coverage was the fact that the police officer who authored the 2019 report was later terminated for sharing “sensitive and confidential information about an ongoing police investigation with a commercial sex worker” (USA Today, 4/17/25).

 Sidelining advocates

The Wall Street Journal (6/6/25) published several paragraphs alleging crimes by Abrego Garcia with no rebuttal.

Two articles omitted comments from Abrego Garcia’s legal team altogether (New York Times 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/7/25). While the other articles do quote Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, they cited them only about his initial deportation and his return, but not about the criminal charges. Three articles (New York Times, 6/6/25, 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/6/25) include the same sole quote from Andrew Rossman, another one of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers:

Today’s action proves what we’ve known all along—that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so…. It’s now up to our judicial system to see that Mr. Abrego Garcia receives the due process that the Constitution guarantees to all persons.

When given the chance to comment on the criminal allegations, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have been clear that these charges are “preposterous.” Sandoval-Moshenberg told CBS affiliate WUSA9 (6/6/25), “What happened today is the exact opposite of due process, because due process means the opportunity to defend yourself before you’re punished, not afterwards.”

Another one of his lawyers, Chris Newman, who is also the legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told WUSA9 (6/6/25) in the same conference:

This administration has shown amazing disregard for the Constitution, for due process and for basic decency. It is engaged in an unprecedented campaign of disinformation, defamation and cruelty directed at Kilmar’s family.

Another member of Abrego Garcia’s legal team, Brian Murray, told MSNBC’s Alex Witt (6/7/25), “Anyone who’s been looking at this case and has been watching this play out would agree this is a political and vindictive prosecution.”

In the days since Abrego Garcia’s release, his legal team has frequently made themselves available to media to speak about the criminal charges and ongoing constitutional issues surrounding his case. At a time when immigrants’ rights to free speech are under attack, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal chose to sideline the voices of their advocates.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Emma Llano.

After citing Trump administration charges that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, Al Jazeera (6/6/25) included a response from his advocates: “His lawyers have denied that he was a gang member and said he had not been convicted of any crime.”

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was returned to the United States on June 6, after being wrongly deported to El Salvador almost three months earlier. Abrego Garcia had been detained in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center since March 15, along with more than 250 other immigrants accused of belonging to the Latin American gangs Tren de Aragua and MS-13.

Abrego Garcia’s case drew particular media attention, due to the admission by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that his deportation and subsequent imprisonment were a result of an “administrative error.” For weeks, however, both the Trump administration and the Salvadoran government insisted they were powerless to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.

After months of protests from Abrego Garcia’s Maryland community and legal challenges from his lawyers, the father of three was finally returned to the US. But there was a caveat: He would face criminal charges related to an immigrant-smuggling operation that the Department of Justice alleges Abrego Garcia took part in as a member of MS-13.

Though there are plenty of reasons to cast doubt on the charges made against Abrego Garcia, in the seven articles published in the wake of his return, the New York Times (6/6/25, 6/6/25, 6/6/25, 6/8/25) and Wall Street Journal (6/6/25, 6/7/25, 6/8/25) present them mostly at face value. Given that the publications are the top two largest newspapers in America, their deficient coverage of one of the most important immigration cases of the second Trump administration is noteworthy.

Unreliable sources

The main New York Times story (6/6/25) on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador consists largely of Trump administration officials accusing him of crimes—with no quotes from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers contesting those charges. 

Only two of the articles (New York Times, 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/7/25) mentioned that the charges against Abrego Garcia stem from recent information supplied by jailhouse informants.  The articles failed to note that such testimony is notoriously unreliable, as documented by research, and frequently results in wrongful convictions.

Though there are six unnamed co-conspirators listed in the indictment, it appears as though the majority of the charges rely on the testimony of one or two of these individuals. Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, told CNN’s Erin Burnett (6/6/25), “The very first question I’m going to be asking is, what were those two people offered to make up these really fantastic, hyperbolic allegations against Mr. Abrego Garcia?”

The DoJ’s stonewalling of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers in his civil case should raise further suspicion about why these jailhouse informants decided to come forward now, despite the DoJ’s allegation that Abrego Garcia has been involved with immigrant smuggling since 2016. None of the articles mention that Abrego Garcia had been attending yearly check-ins with ICE since 2019, and that these allegations had not come up during the six years that ICE had been monitoring him, nor were they mentioned during the trial that resulted in a judge granting him withholding of removal.

In their New York Times piece (6/6/25), reporters Devlin Barrett, Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush dedicated two paragraphs to a 2022 traffic stop involving Abrego Garcia that the indictment cites as evidence of a smuggling operation, while curiously omitting the fact that he was not charged with a crime at the time of the incident.

None of the articles mentioned that Abrego Garcia had been in ICE detention for seven months in 2019, at the same time that the DoJ alleges he was leading an immigrant smuggling operation. Also missing in the Times and Journal’s coverage was the fact that the police officer who authored the 2019 report was later terminated for sharing “sensitive and confidential information about an ongoing police investigation with a commercial sex worker” (USA Today, 4/17/25).

 Sidelining advocates

The Wall Street Journal (6/6/25) published several paragraphs alleging crimes by Abrego Garcia with no rebuttal.

Two articles omitted comments from Abrego Garcia’s legal team altogether (New York Times 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/7/25). While the other articles do quote Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, they cited them only about his initial deportation and his return, but not about the criminal charges. Three articles (New York Times, 6/6/25, 6/6/25; Wall Street Journal, 6/6/25) include the same sole quote from Andrew Rossman, another one of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers:

Today’s action proves what we’ve known all along—that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so…. It’s now up to our judicial system to see that Mr. Abrego Garcia receives the due process that the Constitution guarantees to all persons.

When given the chance to comment on the criminal allegations, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have been clear that these charges are “preposterous.” Sandoval-Moshenberg told CBS affiliate WUSA9 (6/6/25), “What happened today is the exact opposite of due process, because due process means the opportunity to defend yourself before you’re punished, not afterwards.”

Another one of his lawyers, Chris Newman, who is also the legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told WUSA9 (6/6/25) in the same conference:

This administration has shown amazing disregard for the Constitution, for due process and for basic decency. It is engaged in an unprecedented campaign of disinformation, defamation and cruelty directed at Kilmar’s family.

Another member of Abrego Garcia’s legal team, Brian Murray, told MSNBC’s Alex Witt (6/7/25), “Anyone who’s been looking at this case and has been watching this play out would agree this is a political and vindictive prosecution.”

In the days since Abrego Garcia’s release, his legal team has frequently made themselves available to media to speak about the criminal charges and ongoing constitutional issues surrounding his case. At a time when immigrants’ rights to free speech are under attack, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal chose to sideline the voices of their advocates.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Emma Llano.

New York comptroller Brad Lander being arrested by DHS secret police for asking to see their warrant (AP, 6/17/25).

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, as he and other activists escorted immigrants in the halls of Manhattan’s federal immigration court house (AP, 6/17/25; New York Times, 6/17/25; Democracy Now!, 6/18/25).

Lander is a progressive Democrat running for mayor, although he is trailing in the polls. He is only the latest of many Democrats who have been detained by federal agents in a widespread campaign of intimidation of President Donald Trump’s critics, such as California Sen. Alex Padilla and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver was also indicted  on “charges alleging she assaulted and interfered with immigration officers outside a New Jersey detention center” (AP, 6/10/25), the same case Baraka was involved in.

Feds also briefly detained an aide to New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler. The arrest and hospitalization of California Service Employees International Union leader David Huerta helped kick off the uprising against ICE in Los Angeles (Guardian, 6/9/25). Two House committees are investigating Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell to “determine if the mayor obstructed immigration operations” (WZTV, 6/18/25).

The witch hunt has focused on judges, too. Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan faces a possible prison sentence on allegations she helped an immigrant evade authorities in her courtroom. Attorney General Pam Bondi took to Fox News (4/25/25) to warn other judges who run afoul with the executive branch: “We are prosecuting you.”

During an emergency rally outside the federal building, elected officials and activists charged that Lander’s high-profile arrest was meant as the Trump administration’s warning against any citizen who advocates for immigrant families. The outrage was palpable. Said Justin Brannan, a city council member running for Lander’s job this year: “I’m from Brooklyn. You know what we call this? Complete and total bullshit.”

‘It isn’t his job’

The New York Post (6/17/25) calls lawmakers standing up for immigrants as “pretty pathetic, and pointless,” because “even many Democrats support Trump’s deportations of criminal illegal immigrants.” (“Many” here means 9%, according to Pew—6/17/25.)

The Murdoch press, however, is celebrating the latest use weaponization of government power.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/17/25):

“Do you have a judicial warrant?” Mr. Lander asks, as he’s pulled along in a scrum toward an elevator. “Do you have a judicial warrant? Can I see the judicial warrant? Can I see the warrant? I will let go when you show me the judicial warrant. Where is it? Where is the warrant?” It isn’t his job to demand a warrant or for agents to produce one to him.

First of all, Lander is the comptroller, the city’s second-highest elected officer and its chief fiduciary. Comptrollers commonly advocate for clean government, transparency and criminal justice reform. Further, he was acting mostly in his capacity as an activist doing “court watch” to protect families against deportations and family separations. Is it his job as comptroller to ensure cops aren’t abusing their power? Arguably. Is it his duty as a citizen in a democratic society? Absolutely.

The New York Post editorial board (6/17/25):

Lander repeatedly demanded to see a warrant for a guy ICE was detaining outside federal immigration court, holding his hand on the arrestee’s shoulder in an obvious bid to obstruct the agents enough to provoke an arrest.

Unsurprisingly, the charges got dropped after a few hours; Homeland Security has far more important things to do than play the heavy in Dems’ various morality plays.

Clearly, the editorial was written so hastily the writers didn’t notice a glaring contradiction: Given how many federal agents came after Lander and how long they detained him, the feds clearly did prioritize his detention. Some activists outside the courthouse even speculated that the rally calling for his release only encouraged federal agents to keep holding him.

‘Playbook for lefty politicians’

Fox News (6/17/25) suggested that Lander’s arrest was “staged” because he was released “after being held for only a few hours.”  (The Fox video blurred out the faces of the DHS officers who weren’t masked.)

Joe Concha of the Washington Examiner told Fox & Friends First (6/18/25) Lander’s arrest was “cheesy performance art.” His paper (Washington Examiner, 6/18/25) recalled that Concha “predicted these efforts will only increase.” And Fox News (6/17/25) interviewed Joe Borelli, a Republican city council member:

“Election day is a week from today, and early voting has begun. Make no mistake, the purpose was to get the headlines that he’s getting,” said Borelli. “It’s instant name recognition and establishing even stronger liberal bona fides.”

Speaking with Fox News Digital, Borelli likened Lander’s arrest to the recent arrest of Newark Democrat Mayor Ras Baraka and the detaining of Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who were both detained for allegedly disrupting different federal events.

“This is the playbook for lefty politicians who want to make a get-a-headline. They try to get arrested, they get arrested and then fake outrage over getting arrested,” he said.

This is a common smear that right-wing media use against progressive activists: that they are engaging in publicity stunts (New York Post, 7/20/22; Jerusalem Post, 6/8/25). Put aside the fact DHS is led by Kristi Noem, famous for her cosplay photo ops: None of these people asked, or tried, to be arrested. Lander and other activists have been doing this type of work in order to publicize the injustice of these mass immigrant round-ups and the eradication of due process.

If anything, the federal agents making these arrests are the ones giving these actions more play in the news, and creating more outrage in general. In other words, right-wing media are mad that these arrests are helping to unify the outrage against mass deportations.

In fact, a headline at the right-wing Washington Times (6/17/25) warned: “Democrats’ Defiance of ICE Grows After New York Mayoral Candidate Arrested.”

It isn’t terribly unusual that these right-wing outlets are pooh-poohing Democrats and immigrants. The issue here isn’t their devotion to right-wing policies, but to a Mafia-like government that is using an unaccountable police force to arrest politicians of a rival political party. The Murdoch press isn’t just running propaganda for the White House, these outlets are fanning the flames of authoritarianism.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

“Have the canines acquired strange mutations living near the power plant?” Popular Mechanics (6/8/25) asks. Spoiler alert: No.

I like to read science stories, even (maybe especially) when they’re not politically earthshaking. But sometimes what’s on the label is not what’s in the tin.

Take a Popular Mechanics story, “The Dogs of Chernobyl Are Experiencing Rapid Evolution, Study Suggests” (6/8/25). The subhead asks the question, “Have the canines acquired strange mutations living near the power plant?”

To answer that, PM reports on a paper from 2023: “The study uncovered that the feral dogs living near the Chernobyl Power Plant showed distinct genetic differences from dogs living only some 10 miles away in nearby Chernobyl City.” That is literally all we learn about the findings of the study that the headline is based on.

It does go on to say that a newer study finds that the answer to the subhead’s question is “no”:

A study published nearly two years later confidently asserts that we can cross radiation off the list of explanations for the current state of the Chernobyl canine population…. This new genetic analysis looked at the chromosomal level, the genome level and even the nucleotides of the Chernobyl dogs, and found no abnormalities indicative of radiation-induced mutation.

Oh. Never mind!

I guess an accurate headline—”Study Finds No Sign Chernobyl’s Dogs Are Radioactive Mutants”—wouldn’t have gotten as many clicks.

“Dinosaurs didn’t rule the Earth,” Big Think (6/10/26) argues, because someone found a fossil of “a badger-like mammal…biting a small horned dinosaur.”

Another piece appeared in Big Think (6/10/26) under the headline “A Mesozoic Myth: Dinosaurs Didn’t Rule the Earth Like We Think.” Intriguing! Tell us more?

It turns that the argument is basically that even though none of them were “larger than the size of a house cat,” during the age of dinosaurs “there were ancient mammal equivalents of squirrels, shrews, otters, aardvarks, flying squirrels and more.” I put it to you, though, that none of these are the kind of creatures that we think of today as “ruling the Earth.”

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Jim Naureckas.

Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”

Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

‘Preemptive strike’

AP‘s headline (6/18/25) highlights that Israel struck “Iran’s nuclear sites and kills top generals”; the article doesn’t note that Iran says the “overwhelming majority” of the 78 people killed at that point by Israel were civilians (Times of Israel, 6/14/25).

From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC, 6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP, 6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)

On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Press reported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead.

Back in paragraph 8, meanwhile, came the typical implicit validation of Israeli actions:

Israel says its sweeping assault on Iran’s top military leaders, uranium enrichment sites and nuclear scientists, is necessary to prevent its longtime adversary from getting any closer to building an atomic weapon.

That Israel’s “preventive” efforts happened to occur smack in the middle of a US push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue has not proved to be a detail that is overly of interest to the US media; nor have corporate outlets found it necessary to dwell too deeply on the matter of the personal convenience of war on Iran for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—both as a distraction from the genocide in Gaza, and from his domestic embroilment in assorted corruption charges.

In its own coverage, NBC News (6/14/25) highlighted that Netanyahu had “said the operation targeted Iran’s nuclear program and ‘will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.’” Somehow, it is never deemed worth mentioning in such reports that it is not in fact up to Israel—the only state in the region with an (undeclared) nuclear arsenal, and a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—to be policing any perceived nuclear “threat.” Instead, Israeli officials are given ample space, time and again, to present their supposed cause as entirely legitimate, while getting away with murder—not to mention genocide.

‘Potential salvation’

A Washington Post article (6/16/25) manages to blame the Iranian officials for not keeping their people safe from Israeli missiles.

Its profile of the young poet Abbasi notwithstanding, the Washington Post has been particularly aggressive in toeing the Israeli line. Following Netanyahu’s English-language appeal to Iranians to “stand up” against the “common enemy: the murderous regime that both oppresses you and impoverishes you”—a pretty rich accusation, coming from the man currently presiding over mass murder and all manner of other oppression—Post reporter Yeganeh Torbati (6/14/25) undertook to detail how some Iranians “see potential salvation in Israel’s attack despite risk of a wider war.”

In her dispatch, Torbati explained that in spite of reports of civilian deaths, “ordinary Iranians” had “expressed satisfaction” at Israel’s attacks on Iran’s “oppressive government.” As usual, there was no room for any potentially relevant historical details regarding “oppressive” governance in Iran—like, say, the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup d’état against the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh, which paved the way for the extended rule-by-terror of the torture-happy Iranian shah, whose oppression was aided by manic acquisition of US weaponry.

On Monday, Torbati was back with another report on how, amid Israel’s attacks on Iran, the Iranian population had “lamented the lack of adequate safety instructions and evacuation orders” from its government, “turning to social media for answers.” The article quotes a Tehran resident named Alireza as complaining that “we have nothing, not even a government that would bother giving safety suggestions to people”—although it’s anyone’s guess as to what sort of suggestions the government is supposed to offer given the circumstances. Try not to be sleeping in your apartment when Israel decides to bomb it?

We thus end up with an entire article in a top US newspaper suggesting that the issue at hand is not that Israel is conducting illegal and unprovoked attacks on Iran, but rather that the Iranian government has not publicized proper safety recommendations for dealing with said attacks. At one point, Torbati concedes that “the government did provide some broad safety instructions,” and that “a government spokeswoman, Fatemeh Mohajerani, recommended that Iranians take shelter in metros, mosques and schools.”

Refusing to leave it at that, Torbati goes on to object that “it was unclear why mosques and schools would be safer than other buildings, given that Israel had already targeted residential and other civilian structures”—which again magically transforms the issue into a critique of the Iranian government for lack of clarity, as opposed to a critique of Israel for, you know, committing war crimes.

‘It’s all targeted’

To the New York Times (6/15/25), mass assassination of Iranian leaders is a “playbook” and “following the script.”

Which brings us to the New York Times, never one to miss a chance to cheerlead on behalf of Israeli atrocities—like that time in 2009 that the paper’s resident foreign affairs columnist literally advocated for targeting civilians in Gaza (FAIR.org, 1/30/25), invoking Israel’s targeting of civilians in Lebanon in 2006 as a positive precedent. Now, a Times article (6/15/25) headlined “Israel’s Attack in Iran Echoes Its Strategy Against Hezbollah” wonders if another Lebanese precedent might prove successful: “Israel decimated the group’s leadership last fall and degraded its military capabilities. Can the same strategy work against a far more powerful foe?”

After reminiscing about “repeated Israeli attacks on apartment buildings, bunkers and speeding vehicles” in Lebanon in 2024—which produced “more than 15 senior Hezbollah military commanders eliminated in total”—the piece speculates that Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iran and assassinations of top Iranian officers seem “to be following the script from last fall” in Lebanon. Swift confirmation comes from Randa Slim at the Middle East Institute in Washington: “It’s all targeted, the assassination of their senior officials in their homes.”

Never mind that Israel’s activity in Lebanon last fall amounted to straight-up terrorism—or that somehow these “targeted assassinations” managed to kill some 4,000 people in Lebanon between October 2023 and November 2024 alone. In unceasingly providing a platform to justify Israeli aggression and mass civilian slaughter throughout the region, the US corporate media at least appears to be following its own script to a T.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Belén Fernández.

Pro-Israel zealots commonly attempt to discredit criticism of the Israeli government by equating such criticism with antisemitism, because Israel is the world’s only state with a Jewish majority.

One way of lifting up this accusation is to say that pro-Palestine leftists hold Israel to a different standard by focusing on Israel and ignoring human rights concerns in other countries. The World Jewish Congress (5/4/22) gives supposed examples of this, such as “accusing Israel of human right violations while refusing to criticize regimes with far worse human right abuses, such as Iran, North Korea, Iraq and Pakistan,” or “rebuking Israel for allegedly violating women’s rights, while ignoring significantly worse abuses carried out by governments and terrorist organizations.”

‘Demonization and double standards’

To the New York Times (6/14/25), saying that people are opposed to Israel and not to Jews is “making excuses.”

The New York Times (6/14/25) recently invoked this in an editorial headlined “Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses.” To the board’s credit, the editorial talks about how antisemitism plays a big role in the Trump administration’s racist and demagogic rule—although it could have gone further into analyzing how antisemitism is at the center of fascism’s other conspiratorial bigotries: that Jewish masterminds are behind mass immigration (FAIR.org, 10/30/18) and Black Lives Matter (Fox Business, 12/15/17).

But the editorialists aim at least as much criticism at the left for its vocal opposition against the ongoing genocide and starvation in Gaza. Yes, the editors admit that “criticism of the Israeli government is not the same thing as antisemitism,” and insist that they themselves “have abhorred the mass killing of civilians and the destruction of Gaza.” They also said that pro-Israel activists “hurt their own cause when they equate all such arguments with antisemitism.”

There’s a “but” coming. “But some Americans have gone too far in the other direction,” the board said, pointing to the “3D test” of “delegitimization, demonization and double standards” that it says is a key test for determining “when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism.” “Progressive rhetoric has regularly failed that test in recent years,” they write:

Consider the double standard that leads to a fixation on Israel’s human rights record and little campus activism about the records of China, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela or almost any other country. Consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist and express admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis—Iran-backed terrorist groups that brag about murdering Jews. Consider how often people use “Zionist” as a slur—an echo of Soviet propaganda from the Cold War—and call for the exclusion of Zionists from public spaces. The definition of a Zionist is somebody who supports the existence of Israel.

Let’s take these one at a time. It is depressingly telling that the first line echoes a year-old editorial in the right-wing City Journal (4/14/24) that condemned students for not aiming their protests at Syria, Russia or China. The most obvious answer to these “gotcha” scenarios is that the US and US universities are not funding human rights violations or wars initiated by any of these countries. The protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza are growing in the US precisely because of US support for Israel. Students often want to see their universities divest from Israeli entities as a way to put pressure on Israel, the same way activists mobilized against South African apartheid.

The US and its allies have imposed sanctions on Russia (Reuters, 2/27/22; Politico, 2/28/22; Al Jazeera, 4/24/24), and the US is currently in a trade war with China (CNN, 6/11/25); the State Department has declared it will “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students (Reuters, 5/29/25). The Trump administration’s new travel restrictions ban people from Sudan and highly restrict entry for Venezuelans (NPR, 6/9/25). The Council on Foreign Relations (3/11/25) estimates that the US has given Ukraine $128 billion to defend against the Russian invasion, and the House of Representatives has an entire committee devoted to investigating China’s ruling Communist Party.

The Times next asks us to “consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist.” Left-leaning groups generally oppose ethnostates, and tend not to make an exception for Israel, whose ethnic policies have been condemned as “apartheid” by the world’s leading human rights groups. As for expressing admiration for Hamas et al.: You’ll rarely hear US progressives praising Hamas, but you will hear them blaming Hamas’s violence on the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel prior to October 7, 2023.

Antisemitism as pretext

The Times goes on to complain that the word “Zionist,” which it defines as “somebody who supports the existence of Israel,” is used as a slur. But Zionism hasn’t become a thorny word because of antisemitism. Zionists are defending a political system where rights and freedom depend on one’s religion and ethnicity, a concept the small-d democrats of a liberal paper like the Times would otherwise abhor. The word “Dixiecrat” is remembered today only as a bad word, not because these people were from the American Southeast, but because they advocated for segregation.

The Times, as usual, wrongly equates Zionism with Jewishness. There are many Jewish non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, including sects that view Zionism as a sort of false messianism. There are also many Christian Zionists—who far outnumber Jewish Zionists—who see Israel as a necessary means to the biblically foretold End Times.

The editorial admits that the Trump administration “has also used [antisemitism] as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education.” The paper notes: “The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.”

The Times is absolutely right that the Trump administration’s vociferous attacks on antisemitism are ineffective, precisely because they are patently just a stick with which to beat his enemies in academia. But that is the exact same problem that the Times editorial has: If you use charges of antisemitism as a pretense to smear critics of a genocidal government, you are doing nothing to protect Jews.

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

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Trigger warning: discussion of suicide and its depictions.

The New York Times Magazine (6/1/25) ignored ethical guidelines designed to keep reporting from encouraging suicide.

The New York Times Magazine recently published a cover story (6/1/25) that gave in-depth representation to the challenges faced by a chronically sick, disabled woman named Paula Ritchie, age 52. Ritchie dealt with underdiagnosed illnesses and pain, as well as challenges in supporting herself and managing her mental health.

The Times then told the story of Ritchie ending her own life out of despair over her situation. The journalist, Katie Engelhart, observed and documented her suicide, up until the last breath left her body. “I was with Ritchie until the very end,” she posted on X (6/1/25). Engelhart gave lengthy justifications for Ritchie’s choice to end her life, and described several people who supported her in that decision.

Articles like this aren’t common in the media. Suicide prevention is typically regarded as both a social good and an ethical responsibility. In the US and Canada (where the article takes place), suicidal people are involuntarily detained to prevent their deaths. It has long been illegal in Canada (and many US states) to assist or even “counsel” a person to commit suicide.

There are also ethical standards that guide media outlets in reporting on suicide, in order to minimize the risk of glamorizing or idealizing it. These guidelines are based on research showing that the media has an outsized influence when it comes to suicide. Graphic, detailed and sensationalized coverage has been shown to increase the “risk of contagion,” according to one guide. AP News specifically tries to avoid detailing the “methods used” in stories that reference suicide, based on this research.

The Times violated almost all of the published guidelines by personalizing, detailing, dramatizing, justifying and sentimentalizing Ritchie’s suicide, as well as by making it a cover story. The story featured close-up images of the method of Ritchie’s death and what appears to be her post-mortem body.

The World Health Organization urges journalists covering suicide not to “explicitly describe the method used” or “use photographs, video footage or social media links that relate to the circumstances of the suicide,” among other guidelines.

So why wasn’t there generalized outrage or pushback from other media? The only significant outcry came from thousands of disabled people on social media.

The simplest answer is that Ritchie’s suicide was administered by a doctor, and legal in Canada. Media tend to be more accepting of the unacceptable when it is government-sanctioned. In 2021, the country expanded its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) law to permit physician-assisted suicide for disabled people who aren’t suffering terminal illnesses. The law and its implementation have been extremely controversial, as the article noted. Similar laws have been passed or introduced across Europe.

The Times article reinforced a popular belief that disability is a fate worse than death. The disabled author Imani Barbarin sums it up in the title of her forthcoming book: If I Were You, I’d Kill Myself. It’s a refrain disabled people are accustomed to hearing, the frightful implication of which is that accommodations aren’t worth the bother, and death is for their own good.

The media has a tendency to reinforce this idea in stories about disability. As I previously wrote about for FAIR (1/20/21), the New York Times (4/10/20, 12/24/20) published stories early in the Covid-19 pandemic suggesting that disability should be considered in determining who had a right to Covid ventilators, based on unproven myths of “quality of life.” The articles cited literal eugenicists as experts, and didn’t invite disabled people to the conversation.

Both sides, and propaganda

In Engelhart’s Times article, she appeared to offer a sensitive and balanced view on the debates around MAiD expansion. Yet the article was laden with ableist rhetoric, medical misinformation and subtle propaganda from the well-funded “right to die” movement. It also left out prominent critical facts about MAiD.

Engelhart omitted that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (3/11/25) issued a report in March that condemned Canada’s MAiD, and recommended that the country “repeal” the expanded law and halt plans for future expansion. The report outlined how benefits and healthcare for disabled people are inadequate in Canada, resulting in coercion around MAiD, especially for women and marginalized groups. People have been sharing stories of coercive MAiD practices since it was expanded (e.g., Independent, 6/23/23; New York Post, 11/8/22; X, 6/4/25).

It’s significant that the most powerful international body issued such a strong condemnation of MAiD; it’s something that anyone following the issue should know about, and Engelhart has published a book on MAiD and speaks about it constantly, yet she left it out of her article.

Dying With Dignity Canada’s goals include, according to the Walrus (1/12/24) “making MAiD available to people whose sole condition is a mental disorder” and “expanding MAID to ‘mature minors’ age twelve and older.”

Engelhart did discuss some of the issues exposed by the UN, but she cited “disability rights advocates,” “critics” and “opponents,” not the UN. She also didn’t name or quote these opponents, aside from a few uneasy doctors. None of the many disability rights, human rights and religious organizations that have condemned MAiD expansion were named, and only some of their arguments were discussed. Missing, for instance, was the fact that a promised expansion of disability benefits was tabled just after MAiD expansion was approved, suggesting the government saw the suicide program as another solution, of sorts, to the disability problem.

Also missing from the article was the role of a powerful lobbying group known as Dying with Dignity Canada (DwD), which has raised millions of dollars from corporate and wealthy donors (Walrus, 1/12/24). DwD has had an enormous influence on the Canadian government and media conversations on MAiD. The organization isn’t named in the Times Magazine piece, but its propaganda is subtly woven throughout.

Engelhart has been more explicit about her pro-MAiD leanings in other writings and statements (e.g., Neiman Storyboard, 3/3/21; NPR, 3/9/21), as well as in online responses to comments on her Times Magazine piece.

In search of euphemism

As evidence of her bias, look at the way Engelhart introduced the terminology in the Times article: “Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program—what critics call physician-assisted suicide.” It’s a curious attribution. Is there a more direct, factual way to describe what happened to Ritchie than suicide? It’s a subtle nod to DwD, which seeks to remove the “suicide” from assisted suicide. From the organization’s website:

We do not use the terms assisted suicide or euthanasia because they stigmatize people who are suffering intolerably and want to access their right to a peaceful death. Suicide is a desperate act of self-harm, while medical assistance in dying is a legal, federally regulated end-of-life choice, driven by hope and autonomy.

The Merriam-Webster definition of suicide is “the act or an instance of ending one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally.” DwD seems to be attempting to redefine the word to soften what happens with MAiD.

On Twitter, Engelhart has argued that “assisted death” is a less “politically loaded” term than “assisted suicide.” She has also taken issue with the AP for referring to MAiD recipients as “killed.” It’s not propaganda to state that when someone dies, they are “killed” by the cause of death. People are killed by cancer, accidents and self-inflicted wounds as much as by murder.

Engelhart’s efforts to soften the language of assisted suicide calls to mind crime reporters using “police-involved shooting” to say that police have shot someone. The common norms for speaking about suicide and shootings can apply without harm or distortion of the facts.

The Times Magazine article reflected some of the contradictions inherent to DwD ideology that appear throughout Engelhart’s work. For instance, she often compares assisted suicide rights to abortion rights, a DwD talking point. But she also compares it to the merciful “euthanizing” of “beloved pets.” Unlike people who elect abortions, animals do not get to choose their fates, or even express their wishes. Humans project our assumptions onto pets, including that their suffering must be a fate worse than death.

Despite Engelhart’s seeming alignment with the “dying with dignity” movement, to her credit, she did expose that there wasn’t absolute “dignity” in Ritchie’s death. The article ends with a gruesome description of Ritchie’s last moments, including her expression of “horrible” discomfort.

A ‘difficult case’

Dr. Matt Wonnacott, the doctor who approved euthanasia for Paula Ritchie: “If you tell me that you’re suffering, who am I to question that?” he told Engelhart.

Engelhart provided a lot of detail about Ritchie’s medical conditions, but relied on outdated, vaguely sourced and ableist ways of describing chronic illness. Here and elsewhere, her work is mostly sourced to doctors, especially MAiD providers, and patients who want to die, but not the many people who live with and manage complex chronic disease.

As a disabled journalist, I see Ritchie’s story through a different lens than Engelhart. I have many of her conditions, deal with ongoing suffering, sometimes severe, and was suicidal at one point.

Engelhart described Ritchie as if she were too difficult to diagnose sufficiently beyond a collection of symptoms, including head injury, migraine, fatigue, dizziness, long-standing depression and PTSD from childhood trauma. Yet I know that it can take ten or more years for a person to get properly diagnosed with most chronic illnesses, if they are lucky. I also know that chronic illness patients deal with doctors who gaslight, misdiagnose and psychologize symptoms.

The doctor who authorized Ritchie’s suicide, Matt Wonnacott, appears to be one of those. He was a primary source in the story. Engelhart did leave it open for readers to feel uncomfortable with Wonnacott’s approach. Although he acknowledged that Ritchie still had treatment options, he admitted to making decisions to approve assisted suicide based on “gestalt” and “patient choice” more than medicine. On the other hand, Engelhart seemed to take the doctor’s medical assessments at face value, not interrogating his knowledge or biases.

At one point, Engelhart referred to a category of MAiD patients with “functional disorders…that are poorly understood within medicine, and disputed within medicine, and that some clinicians believe have a significant psychological component.” Who are these clinicians? She did not say, but then listed a series of conditions that are not considered, by official diagnostic criteria, to be psychological: “fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, irritable-bowel syndrome, some kinds of chronic headaches.”  “Functional” has a history, like “hysteria” before it, of being used as a catch-all for misunderstood women’s illnesses.

As for “chronic fatigue,” it is more properly known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or ME. There is an epidemic of it lately, as it is commonly caused by Covid-19. As such, there are countless recent studies proving its physiological causes. At one point, Engelhart discussed how Ritchie’s muscles work one minute, then “suddenly buckle” the next, writing: “This suggested that the buckling was due to psychological causes or a lack of effort.” Yet Ritchie seemed to be demonstrating a hallmark symptom of ME known as “post-exertional malaise.”

Engelhart included a lot of detail about Ritchie’s care and medications, with the effect of seeming like every option was exhausted. Yet I am surprised by what is missing. There is no mention of dysautonomia or its treatments, even though Ritchie has difficulty bathing herself and getting out of the bath, both common in that illness. There is no mention of cutting-edge treatments for ME, like antivirals for reactivated viruses, or naltrexone. And there is no mention of the new class of CGRP migraine drugs, which have rescued millions of people from horrible constant pain.

In place of medical investigation, Engelhart uses rhetoric and sentiment to portray Ritchie as a lost cause. She supports this portrait with classist and ableist imagery, like mentioning Ritchie’s “old TV and a window that looked out on a row of garbage bins,” her “stained” floors, her trouble bathing and long history of depression. She quotes people in Ritchie’s life who liked her, but also found her difficult, “vicious,” and “loud and excessive.”

I have a different perspective on Ritchie. She comes across to me as resourceful in pursuing help, a strong person who has survived tremendous suffering, and compassionate to others. She is surrounded by friends when she dies. She has common illnesses that have been under-researched due to medical misogyny. And she has been denied cutting-edge treatments due to the profound gulf between research and practice, as well as long-established bigotry in medical care. In my perception, if she had been properly diagnosed and treated, she may or may not have felt differently about ending her life.

Fly on the wall

The Economist‘s cover story (11/21/24) seemed to encourage not just legalizing suicide, but suicide itself.

Engelhart did a skillful job of portraying her own role in Ritchie’s suicide as if she were a passive observer. In a separate interview she gave with the Times about writing the piece, she said she “was trying to be as small a presence as possible in the room.” Yet she also admitted that Ritchie reached for her hand just before she died, so she couldn’t have been that small. Engelhart didn’t reflect, in the interview, on the role she may have played in Ritchie’s fate, or the ethics of her project.

The article emphasized that Ritchie knew she was being interviewed by a writer for the New York Times Magazine. She knew that her story would be amplified worldwide, but especially if she continued to end her life. Engelhart’s body of work on MAiD is mostly about people who elect and complete the act of suicide. That validation, alone, could have been a form of encouragement, especially for someone who felt isolated and unheard.

Best practices in suicide prevention are based on studies showing that suicidal people are uniquely and extremely vulnerable to suggestion, and that suicidality is usually temporary. According to a journalism guide from the Trevor Project, which aims to prevent suicide in LGBTQ youth, “More than 50 research studies worldwide have found that certain types of news coverage can increase the likelihood of suicide in vulnerable individuals.”

With the Times’ story, the worst-case scenario almost happened. One reader, a patient with Long Covid, responded on social media that the article caused him to consider that maybe assisted suicide would be a good option for him. After reading the responses of disabled people, he had more context and changed his mind. (I am protecting his identity.)

There is growing support for the expansion of assisted suicide across the world and in the media (e.g., Economist, 11/13/21, 11/21/24). The pandemic has eased people’s discomfort with preventable death, especially of elderly and disabled people. Engelhart’s book got a lot of attention around the height of Covid-19’s Omicron wave. Meanwhile, the current US administration is suggesting that worthiness for healthcare should be tied to social value.

It’s a key time for news organizations to recall their ethical obligations around reporting on suicide. At the very least, the news shouldn’t stop calling it “suicide” just because those who die have been approved for MAiD due to disability.

Stories of chronically sick people who resist MAiD and/or survive suicide attempts are rarely given as much in-depth treatment or column inches in the media. But those stories might give readers more context in considering how to feel about these policies. The New York Times even gave a flattering interview (11/16/24) to a doctor who has elsewhere been condemned for her unethical and too-eager MAiD practices and has been restricted from practicing everywhere (London Times, 7/19/24; Globe and Mail, 3/9/16).

News outlets should also consider hiring disabled journalists and editors to work on stories like this, or at least journalists who are curious enough to investigate medicine critically. Mainstream writing about health and disability has long ignored the insights of chronic illness patients, unless to use individual cases to speak over collective concerns. We need stories about disability and illness that don’t rely mostly on the medical establishment for expertise, especially given its long history of aligning with eugenics.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Justine Barron.

The protests emerged as resistance to militarized law enforcement (Al Jazeera, 6/7/25), a dynamic that was often obscured by coverage that focused on the “clash” between protesters and government. 

In the early morning of Friday, June 6, several federal agencies carried out militarized immigration raids across Los Angeles (Al Jazeera, 6/7/25). Armed and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), FBI and DEA, tore through these neighborhoods in unmarked vehicles, carrying out a new method of targeted raids in workplaces like Home Depot, Ambiance Apparel and car washes (Washington Post, 6/8/25, 6/12/25, LA Times, 6/10/25).

Later that morning, demonstrations formed in front of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building and Metropolitan Detention Center, where detainees were believed to be held (Al Jazeera, 6/11/25). Protests grew exponentially over the weekend, spreading not only across California, but also to major cities around the country (Time, 6/9/25).

In response, without state authorization, President Donald Trump federalized and deployed 2,000 California National Guard troops to LA to “solve the problem” (CNN, 6/9/25). California Gov. Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass and other government officials have called this an unprecedented show of force and an abuse of executive power, intended to intimidate and terrorize local communities (Atlantic, 6/10/25; CNN, 6/9/25).

‘Violence’ and ‘anarchists’

While major media sources described these protests as “mostly peaceful,” they nevertheless tended to dwell on what was depicted as rioting and protester violence. In its morning newsletter, the New York Times (6/9/25) set the scene:

Hundreds of National Guard troops arrived in the city, and crowds of people demonstrated against President Trump’s immigration raids. They clashed with federal agents, leaving burned cars, broken barricades and graffiti scrawled across government buildings downtown.

Is it possible that Trump administration efforts to expel nearly a million Los Angeles residents are “driving chaos at LA immigration protests” (LA Times, 6/10/25)?

The LA Times (6/10/25), citing LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, blamed “‘anarchists’ who, he said, were bent on exploiting the state of unrest to vandalize property and attack police.” (Law enforcement agencies reported only a handful of minor injuries to officers—KCRA, 6/12/25.) These critiques were interwoven with descriptions of “scenes of lawlessness [that] disgusted” McDonnell, such as setting “Waymo taxis on fire,” “defacing city buildings with anti-police graffiti” and looting businesses. And, an ironic, laughable account of the underlying power dynamics at play:

Several young men crept through the crowd, hunched over and hiding something in their hands. They reached the front line and hurled eggs at the officers, who fired into the fleeing crowd with riot guns.

The article ran under the headline “Protesters or Agitators: Who Is Driving Chaos at LA Immigration Protests?”—never offering readers the possibility that the answer is, in fact, law enforcement. The framing came directly from McDonnell’s attempt, cited in the article, to draw a “distinction” between protesters and anarchists. Yet further down, the piece described what can only be understood as federal troops instigating chaos and violence:

A phalanx of National Guard troops charged into the crowd, yelling “push” as they rammed people with riot shields. The troops and federal officers used pepper balls, tear gas canisters as well as flash-bang and smoke grenades to break up the crowd.

No one in the crowd had been violent toward the federal deployment up to that point. The purpose of the surge appeared to be to clear space for a convoy of approaching federal vehicles.

‘Non-lethal’ weapons?

CNN (6/10/25) framed police munitions as the way cops “responded with force” after protests “devolved into violence.” 

One CNN article (6/10/25) offered “A Look at the ‘Less Lethal’ Weapons Authorities Used to Crack Down on Los Angeles Protests.” Reporter Dakin Andone wrote:

Police have used a standard variety of tools to disperse crowds and quell protests that had devolved into violence, with protesters lighting self-driving cars on fire and two motorcyclists driving into a skirmish line of officers, injuring two. A Molotov cocktail was also thrown at officers, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell alleged, condemning the “disgusting” violence.

Authorities have responded with force. So far, CNN has documented the deployment of flash-bangs, tear gas, pepper balls, rubber bullets and bean bag rounds, as well as more traditional gear such as batons.

To CNN, protesters devolve into “violence,” while heavily armed agents of the state respond with “force.”

The article noted that these weapons are not “harmless,” as they have been found to “disable, disfigure and even kill.” Projectiles are meant to cause “‘blunt-force trauma to the skin,’” chemical irritants cause “difficulty swallowing, chest tightness, coughing, shortness of breath and a feeling of choking,” and flash-bangs “obscure a target’s vision and hearing.”

Yet the article’s description of the effects of those weapons used in LA remained almost entirely theoretical. The only example it gave of a civilian targeted by one of these “less lethal” weapons was that of Australian 9News correspondent Lauren Tomasi, shot at close range by a rubber bullet while reporting on live TV. (Video footage shows that there was no one close to the line of officers, nor were any protesters closing in.) “The bullet left her sore, but she was otherwise unharmed,” CNN blithely noted.

While it’s good to see media standing up for those who were injured while exercising the freedom of the press (Guardian, 6/11/25), they might have shown similar concern for those hurt while engaging in freedom of assembly.

Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders (6/11/25) has documented an astounding 35 violent attacks on journalists, almost entirely by law enforcement, including numerous reporters hit by police projectiles. The Guardian (6/11/25) reported that British photographer Nick Stern needed surgery when police shot him in the leg with a “less-lethal projectile”; Toby Canham, a photographer working for the New York Post,  was “hit in the head by a less-lethal round” by a California highway patrol officer and “treated for whiplash and neck pain,” the Guardian said. (Protesters were injured by police munitions as well, as repeatedly attested by social media, but reporters showed less interest in those injuries.)

The headlines that reported the assault on Tomasi frequently left out the perpetrator: “Australian Reporter Covering Los Angeles Immigration Protests Hit by Rubber Bullet on Live TV,” was how CBS (6/10/25) put it; CNN (6/8/25) had “Australian Reporter Covering LA Protests Hit by Rubber Bullet.” The Sydney Morning Herald (6/9/25) described Tomasi as “caught in the crossfire as the LAPD fired rubber bullets at protesters”—which doesn’t sound like a “crossfire” at all.

Many reports denied the potential for these weapons to cause death by labeling them “non-lethal” (Guardian, 6/8/25, 6/11/25; AP, 6/9/25; LA Times, 6/10/25; USA Today, 6/10/25; Newsweek, 6/10/25) or “less-than-lethal” (New York Times, 6/6/25; NBC, 6/8/25). These descriptors are entirely inaccurate, as studies and reports have documented dozens of deaths caused by “less-lethal” projectiles, as well as hundreds of permanent injuries (BMJ Open, 12/5/17; Amnesty International, 3/14/23; Arizona Republic, 5/13/25).

Reuters (6/11/25) reported on attacks by such weapons under the headline “Journalists Among the Injured in LA as ICE Protests Grow Violent”—a framing that treated the protests as the source of the violence being inflicted on journalists by police.

As an example of leftists who “encouraged peaceful protests to turn violent,” NBC News (6/12/25) included those who condemned police violence “using expletives and slights.” (Note that the skateboard-wielding protester is the same individual the LA Times—6/10/25—used to suggest “agitators” were “driving chaos.”)

A remarkable NBC News article (6/12/25) blamed protesters for fomenting violence by pointing out police violence. “Some Far-Left Groups Have Encouraged Peaceful Protests to Turn Violent, Experts Say,” was the headline; one of the few examples, under the heading “Assassination culture,” was:

One anti-police group, the People’s City Council Los Angeles, has taken to calling out the actions of officers at the protests, using expletives and slights.

Just before 1 a.m. Tuesday, it posted on X the name and picture of a police officer it said was firing rubber bullets at protesters.

He is “fucking unhinged and unloading on protesters at point blank range,” the post read. “FUCK THIS PIG!!”

Perhaps it was the cop firing rubber bullets at protesters at point blank range who “encouraged peaceful protests to turn violent”—and not the “expletives and slights” of the witnesses?

‘Diverted public attention’

Sarah J. Jackson (Atlantic, 6/3/20): “When news stories employ sensational images of property damage, using terms such as riot and the even more sensational mayhem and chaos, researchers have noted a rise in public support for law-and-order crackdowns on protest.”

The New York Times editorial board (6/8/25), while critical of Trump’s National Guard deployment, opined that “protesters will do nothing to further their cause if they resort to violence.” The LA Times (6/10/25) expressed that “violence and widespread property damage at protests…have diverted public attention away from the focus of the demonstrations.” What has historically turned the tide against protests, however, is inflammatory reporting that blames protesters for their response to government’s aggressive efforts to suppress freedom of assembly (Penn State University, 6/1/01; Real Change, 3/18/09; Atlantic, 6/3/20).

By framing the problem as unruly demonstrators, the media lend legitimacy to the Trump administration’s attempt to set a precedent for military suppression of dissent. (“If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” Trump said of the military parade he arranged to run through DC on June 14, his 79th birthday. “This is people that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force.”) Journalists should be focusing not on the broken windows, but on Trump’s very real efforts to break our democracy.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Shirlynn Chan.

Sure, you may like the idea of a “socialist New York,” but New York magazine (5/20/25) is here with a bunch of anonymous sources to tell you it’s “more complicated.”

There’s an art to writing a profile of a political candidate that sows doubt about their fitness for office without attacking them directly. Done smoothly, it can be more damaging than an overt hit piece.

“Zohran Mamdani Crashes the Party,” a recent New York magazine profile (5/20/25) of the New York State Assembly member and New York City mayoral candidate, is a prime example. The headline and subhead (“He’s selling the dream of a socialist New York. The picture inside the Democratic party is more complicated.”) manage to convey knowing sympathy (party-crashing is cool!) and parental concern (a socialist New York is but a “dream,” and party insiders know the reality is “more complicated”).

The story’s author, E. Alex Jung, is not a Free Press columnist but a National Magazine Award–nominated features writer who comes across as sympathetic to but skeptical of Mamdani. Mamdani, he writes,

has given hope to people who are in despair about the state of the country…showing up at protests for trans rights and shouting at Tom Homan while State Police officers hold him back—and then posting it all on Instagram.

Jung added that Mamdani

became the first to max out the city’s campaign matching funds and had more individual donors than the rest of the field combined…. His campaign has built the largest field program ever for a mayoral race: Around 22,000 volunteers have knocked on 450,000 doors and made 140,000 phone calls…. The rally at Brooklyn Steel was a demonstration to the city’s progressive power brokers that the time to consolidate behind their candidate was yesterday—that he was the only one who could slay the big bad, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Though the odds of that happening are not good.

Part of subtly and effectively undermining someone is appearing to give them their due. As ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo said of his rival Mamdani during a recent NYC mayoral debate:

Mr. Mamdani is very good on Twitter and with videos, but he actually produces nothing…. He has no experience with Washington, no experience with New York City.

Like Cuomo, New York acknowledges upfront that Mamdani is an exceptionally strong communicator. It then puts forth a string of criticisms, most from unnamed colleagues and critics of Mamdani, with their own agendas and reasons to resent his rise. An “anti-Cuomo Democratic strategist” dismisses Mamdani supporters as “online kids.” Critics claim he is “drawn to attention-grabbing stunts rather than the grind of whipping votes.” Because Jung allows anonymous sources to criticize Mamdani at length—he quotes or paraphrases “those with knowledge of the conversations,” “some New York Democratic Party members,” “a Democratic political operative,” “another operative,” “critics,” “detractors” and so on—the reader has no way of independently assessing their motives.

‘Language of the internet’

The New York Editorial Board (2/2/25), “a group of veteran journalists interviewing candidates for Mayor of New York City,” got specifics on the questions New York said were “unclear.”

The profile opens with a shower of trivializing compliments. Mamdani and his “congregation of true believers” are “jubilant and young.” Supporters like Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter Ella Emhoff and semi-canceled chef Alison Roman represent “power and cool and changing winds.” Mamdani is “a Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidate” (as a DSA member, I can confirm) with a “short work history and a long history of pro-Palestinian advocacy”—qualities, Jung writes, that were “seen as nonstarters within the small electorate that ultimately decides the race.”

Yet in the last six months, he has “transformed the race with memorable policy proposals and a winning social-media presence. If you’re online, he seems to be the only candidate with Wi-Fi.” His campaign videos are “in the language of the internet.”

So far, a reader will have learned that Mamdani is young, cool and online. His campaign pitch—Freeze the rent! Make buses fast and free! Universal childcare!—is catchy, as is his plan to tax the rich and big corporations, provide free buses and municipal grocery stores, and establish a department of community safety. But how New Yorkers feel about these proposals and “how he would actually do all of this” is “unclear”—whether because Jung neglected to ask, or was unsatisfied with the answer, we’ll never know.

Profiles like this are popular because they are more about personality and style than sober, eat-your-vegetables political analysis. Thus, we learn that Mamdani is “energetic, enthusiastic, quick with a joke, and good-looking in a ‘Who’s your brother’s friend?’ kind of way.” It’s a vivid description, and it’s reminiscent of ex-Sen. Claire McCaskill’s blistering dismissal of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She was, McCaskill said, a “bright, shiny new object” whose rhetoric was “cheap” (Business Insider, 12/26/18).

‘Smothering effect on discourse’

New York scorned the “ideological purity” that made Mamdani insist that marginalized workers ought to have gotten the support they needed (New York Times, 10/19/21).

Jung contends without evidence that Mamdani supporters have had “a smothering effect on discourse, making any public criticism or dissent verboten within parts of the left.” He goes on to quote state Sen. Jabari Brisport, who was elected alongside Mamdani in 2020. Unlike most of Jung’s sources, Brisport is a Mamdani supporter and willing to speak on the record. “People were looking for drastic changes in society,” Brisport says of the period in which they were elected.

But according to Jung, the “reality of the chamber was different.” Recounting a fight between moderate and progressive Democrats over whether to tax the rich and expand a fund for undocumented workers who had been denied federal pandemic relief, he implies that Mamdani was outmaneuvered. Legislators eventually agreed to set aside $2.1 billion for the excluded-workers fund—far short of the $3.5 billion that progressives wanted and, it’s important to note, excluded workers needed.

Mamdani and some colleagues indicated to New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie that they would protest the shortfall by voting against the budget, which would have passed regardless. Heastie “warned that the fund would get watered down even more if they didn’t fall in line.” (Heastie denies this.) Mamdani, Jung writes, was “in a panic, unsure of what to do. Accept less than what you believe or risk losing even more?”

Unwilling to risk it, Mamdani ended up voting for a budget he had initially opposed as insufficient. Yet somehow the villain of this story is not Heastie, who apparently threatened to withhold even more money from people in need, but Mamdani, who is implied to have shown poor judgment and “earned a reputation for ideological purity.”

The evidence? He pushed hard for single-payer healthcare, fought side-by-side with city taxi drivers to win hundreds of millions of dollars in debt relief from the city, joined a protest encampment by cab drivers outside City Hall, and convinced Chuck Schumer to film a video calling attention to the cabbies’ plight via the story of one whose brother, a fellow driver, killed himself under enormous financial pressure. Where outlets like New York see an obsession with “ideological purity,” others see a willingness to fight.

‘A show pony, not a workhorse’

Politico (4/30/25) blamed Mamdani for the end of a free bus pilot program because he didn’t understand that “you’re either a team player or you’re not.”

Mamdani also got Senate Deputy Leader Mike Gianaris to co-sponsor an eight-bill legislative package known as Fix the MTA, which would have frozen fares, instituted six-minute service on subways, and phased in free buses over four years. He spent $22,000 of his own campaign money to promote it.

It didn’t have the unqualified backing of Gov. Hochul or the MTA, so Mamdani texted Mayor Eric Adams, who had mentioned that he found the dictator Idi Amin fascinating, and arranged a dinner with the mayor and Mamdani’s father, whom Amin had expelled from Uganda. Mamdani then convinced Adams to take a photo with a poster touting free buses, and film a quick video to support the program—all of which led to earned media, and resulted in a fare-free-bus pilot being included in the 2023 budget. “It was a success,” Jung writes.

Some might conclude that Mamdani is resourceful and effective. But Jung cautions us to curb our enthusiasm. “For Mamdani,” Jung writes, “this was an example of his ability to work with someone…whom he was critical of and yet recognized as a potential ally.” But wait: Unnamed legislators told Jung that Mamdani could have extended the bus program during the 2024 budget negotiations, but he “took issue” with a part of the budget that would make it easier for landlords to claim they were doing needed repairs while raising rents on rent-stabilized units—a major loophole in New York’s tenant protections.

According to Politico (4/30/25), when Mamdani told Heastie he planned to vote against the budget because of this, Heastie threatened to kill the expansion of the free-bus pilot. Mamdani refused to back down this time, so Heastie pulled the plug on free buses. (Heastie and Mamdani say this didn’t happen.) “That is literally a material good being delivered to the working class…. And [Mamdani] threw it away for a performance,” an unnamed legislator told Jung.

Despite the allegation that Heastie killed free buses because Mamdani wouldn’t support a budget he believed would harm his constituents, Jung again portrays Mamdani as incompetent: “He appeared to realize he’d made a mistake,” and tried and failed during this year’s budget negotiations “to get free buses back on the agenda, this time by attempting to leverage his district’s capital funds.” (The campaign, again, denies this.)

“That to me demonstrates how he operates—you can talk about doing things, but that alone is not going to achieve those things,” yet another unnamed colleague of Mamdani’s tells Jung. What “some New York Democratic Party members”—again, unnamed—see as Mamdani’s legislative missteps “have given them pause about his ability to govern…. They see him as a show pony, not a workhorse,” Jung writes.

It’s a trope often invoked to discredit social media-savvy progressives. As Caroline Fredrickson, president emerita of the American Constitution Society, said of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez in 2019 (Guardian, 12/24/19): “A lot of people expected a show pony. But it turns out she’s a workhorse.”

‘Aura of privilege’

“Mamdani’s moral clarity has the aura of privilege,” New York snarked, implicitly contrasting him with—Andrew Cuomo (NY1, 6/12/25)?

In addition to casting doubt on Mamdani’s ability to govern, Jung implies that the everyday New Yorkers who admire him are shallow and naive. “Literally this morning I posted you on my Instagram story!” one young woman tells Mamdani, adding, “I’m so emotional seeing you. Like, you’re real.” As a number of public forums and events have made clear, many Mamdani supporters know and care a great deal about policy, while also using Instagram. But you wouldn’t know that from this profile.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of profiles like these is the suggestion that it’s hypocritical to fight for poor and working-class people when you are not poor or working-class. (Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a Columbia professor, and his mother, Mira Nair, is a prominent filmmaker.)

The candidate’s “moral clarity,” which many appreciate, has “the aura of privilege,” Jung writes. He asks about “the combination of the relative privilege in [Mamdani’s] own life and the working-class people at the center of his politics.” But to admirers of, say, Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, there is nothing suspect or contradictory about rich and upper-middle-class people standing in solidarity with their poor and working-class counterparts.

Jung acknowledges that Mamdani has “given hope to people who are in despair…and looking for someone with real fight.” Yet, ultimately, he sees the “appeal of [Mamdani’s] message” as its “simplicity and memeability”—not specific policies or his willingness to battle for them. The final quote is the most telling: “The thing about being a legislator and making compromises is that poor people make compromises every single day,” an unnamed colleague of Mamdani’s tells Jung. “Poor people know what is important, and sometimes they have to choose between two important things.”

It could be that poor people are born knowing how to prioritize and negotiate. Or it could be that politicians force them to choose between, for example, reliable transit and affordable housing. This profile creates the impression that Mamdani is unwilling to compromise and unfit to govern. But it’s just as plausible that his rejection of such false dichotomies has made some colleagues eager to keep him out of the mayor’s office.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Raina Lipsitz.

Sure, you may like the idea of a “socialist New York,” but New York magazine (5/20/25) is here with a bunch of anonymous sources to tell you it’s “more complicated.”

There’s an art to writing a profile of a political candidate that sows doubt about their fitness for office without attacking them directly. Done smoothly, it can be more damaging than an overt hit piece.

“Zohran Mamdani Crashes the Party,” a recent New York magazine profile (5/20/25) of the New York State Assembly member and New York City mayoral candidate, is a prime example. The headline and subhead (“He’s selling the dream of a socialist New York. The picture inside the Democratic party is more complicated.”) manage to convey knowing sympathy (party-crashing is cool!) and parental concern (a socialist New York is but a “dream,” and party insiders know the reality is “more complicated”).

The story’s author, E. Alex Jung, is not a Free Press columnist but a National Magazine Award–nominated features writer who comes across as sympathetic to but skeptical of Mamdani. Mamdani, he writes,

has given hope to people who are in despair about the state of the country…showing up at protests for trans rights and shouting at Tom Homan while State Police officers hold him back—and then posting it all on Instagram.

Jung added that Mamdani

became the first to max out the city’s campaign matching funds and had more individual donors than the rest of the field combined…. His campaign has built the largest field program ever for a mayoral race: Around 22,000 volunteers have knocked on 450,000 doors and made 140,000 phone calls…. The rally at Brooklyn Steel was a demonstration to the city’s progressive power brokers that the time to consolidate behind their candidate was yesterday—that he was the only one who could slay the big bad, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Though the odds of that happening are not good.

Part of subtly and effectively undermining someone is appearing to give them their due. As ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo said of his rival Mamdani during a recent NYC mayoral debate:

Mr. Mamdani is very good on Twitter and with videos, but he actually produces nothing…. He has no experience with Washington, no experience with New York City.

Like Cuomo, New York acknowledges upfront that Mamdani is an exceptionally strong communicator. It then puts forth a string of criticisms, most from unnamed colleagues and critics of Mamdani, with their own agendas and reasons to resent his rise. An “anti-Cuomo Democratic strategist” dismisses Mamdani supporters as “online kids.” Critics claim he is “drawn to attention-grabbing stunts rather than the grind of whipping votes.” Because Jung allows anonymous sources to criticize Mamdani at length—he quotes or paraphrases “those with knowledge of the conversations,” “some New York Democratic Party members,” “a Democratic political operative,” “another operative,” “critics,” “detractors” and so on—the reader has no way of independently assessing their motives.

‘Language of the internet’

The New York Editorial Board (2/2/25), “a group of veteran journalists interviewing candidates for Mayor of New York City,” got specifics on the questions New York said were “unclear.”

The profile opens with a shower of trivializing compliments. Mamdani and his “congregation of true believers” are “jubilant and young.” Supporters like Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter Ella Emhoff and semi-canceled chef Alison Roman represent “power and cool and changing winds.” Mamdani is “a Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidate” (as a DSA member, I can confirm) with a “short work history and a long history of pro-Palestinian advocacy”—qualities, Jung writes, that were “seen as nonstarters within the small electorate that ultimately decides the race.”

Yet in the last six months, he has “transformed the race with memorable policy proposals and a winning social-media presence. If you’re online, he seems to be the only candidate with Wi-Fi.” His campaign videos are “in the language of the internet.”

So far, a reader will have learned that Mamdani is young, cool and online. His campaign pitch—Freeze the rent! Make buses fast and free! Universal childcare!—is catchy, as is his plan to tax the rich and big corporations, provide free buses and municipal grocery stores, and establish a department of community safety. But how New Yorkers feel about these proposals and “how he would actually do all of this” is “unclear”—whether because Jung neglected to ask, or was unsatisfied with the answer, we’ll never know.

Profiles like this are popular because they are more about personality and style than sober, eat-your-vegetables political analysis. Thus, we learn that Mamdani is “energetic, enthusiastic, quick with a joke, and good-looking in a ‘Who’s your brother’s friend?’ kind of way.” It’s a vivid description, and it’s reminiscent of ex-Sen. Claire McCaskill’s blistering dismissal of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She was, McCaskill said, a “bright, shiny new object” whose rhetoric was “cheap” (Business Insider, 12/26/18).

‘Smothering effect on discourse’

New York scorned the “ideological purity” that made Mamdani insist that marginalized workers ought to have gotten the support they needed (New York Times, 10/19/21).

Jung contends without evidence that Mamdani supporters have had “a smothering effect on discourse, making any public criticism or dissent verboten within parts of the left.” He goes on to quote state Sen. Jabari Brisport, who was elected alongside Mamdani in 2020. Unlike most of Jung’s sources, Brisport is a Mamdani supporter and willing to speak on the record. “People were looking for drastic changes in society,” Brisport says of the period in which they were elected.

But according to Jung, the “reality of the chamber was different.” Recounting a fight between moderate and progressive Democrats over whether to tax the rich and expand a fund for undocumented workers who had been denied federal pandemic relief, he implies that Mamdani was outmaneuvered. Legislators eventually agreed to set aside $2.1 billion for the excluded-workers fund—far short of the $3.5 billion that progressives wanted and, it’s important to note, excluded workers needed.

Mamdani and some colleagues indicated to New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie that they would protest the shortfall by voting against the budget, which would have passed regardless. Heastie “warned that the fund would get watered down even more if they didn’t fall in line.” (Heastie denies this.) Mamdani, Jung writes, was “in a panic, unsure of what to do. Accept less than what you believe or risk losing even more?”

Unwilling to risk it, Mamdani ended up voting for a budget he had initially opposed as insufficient. Yet somehow the villain of this story is not Heastie, who apparently threatened to withhold even more money from people in need, but Mamdani, who is implied to have shown poor judgment and “earned a reputation for ideological purity.”

The evidence? He pushed hard for single-payer healthcare, fought side-by-side with city taxi drivers to win hundreds of millions of dollars in debt relief from the city, joined a protest encampment by cab drivers outside City Hall, and convinced Chuck Schumer to film a video calling attention to the cabbies’ plight via the story of one whose brother, a fellow driver, killed himself under enormous financial pressure. Where outlets like New York see an obsession with “ideological purity,” others see a willingness to fight.

‘A show pony, not a workhorse’

Politico (4/30/25) blamed Mamdani for the end of a free bus pilot program because he didn’t understand that “you’re either a team player or you’re not.”

Mamdani also got Senate Deputy Leader Mike Gianaris to co-sponsor an eight-bill legislative package known as Fix the MTA, which would have frozen fares, instituted six-minute service on subways, and phased in free buses over four years. He spent $22,000 of his own campaign money to promote it.

It didn’t have the unqualified backing of Gov. Hochul or the MTA, so Mamdani texted Mayor Eric Adams, who had mentioned that he found the dictator Idi Amin fascinating, and arranged a dinner with the mayor and Mamdani’s father, whom Amin had expelled from Uganda. Mamdani then convinced Adams to take a photo with a poster touting free buses, and film a quick video to support the program—all of which led to earned media, and resulted in a fare-free-bus pilot being included in the 2023 budget. “It was a success,” Jung writes.

Some might conclude that Mamdani is resourceful and effective. But Jung cautions us to curb our enthusiasm. “For Mamdani,” Jung writes, “this was an example of his ability to work with someone…whom he was critical of and yet recognized as a potential ally.” But wait: Unnamed legislators told Jung that Mamdani could have extended the bus program during the 2024 budget negotiations, but he “took issue” with a part of the budget that would make it easier for landlords to claim they were doing needed repairs while raising rents on rent-stabilized units—a major loophole in New York’s tenant protections.

According to Politico (4/30/25), when Mamdani told Heastie he planned to vote against the budget because of this, Heastie threatened to kill the expansion of the free-bus pilot. Mamdani refused to back down this time, so Heastie pulled the plug on free buses. (Heastie and Mamdani say this didn’t happen.) “That is literally a material good being delivered to the working class…. And [Mamdani] threw it away for a performance,” an unnamed legislator told Jung.

Despite the allegation that Heastie killed free buses because Mamdani wouldn’t support a budget he believed would harm his constituents, Jung again portrays Mamdani as incompetent: “He appeared to realize he’d made a mistake,” and tried and failed during this year’s budget negotiations “to get free buses back on the agenda, this time by attempting to leverage his district’s capital funds.” (The campaign, again, denies this.)

“That to me demonstrates how he operates—you can talk about doing things, but that alone is not going to achieve those things,” yet another unnamed colleague of Mamdani’s tells Jung. What “some New York Democratic Party members”—again, unnamed—see as Mamdani’s legislative missteps “have given them pause about his ability to govern…. They see him as a show pony, not a workhorse,” Jung writes.

It’s a trope often invoked to discredit social media-savvy progressives. As Caroline Fredrickson, president emerita of the American Constitution Society, said of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez in 2019 (Guardian, 12/24/19): “A lot of people expected a show pony. But it turns out she’s a workhorse.”

‘Aura of privilege’

“Mamdani’s moral clarity has the aura of privilege,” New York snarked, implicitly contrasting him with—Andrew Cuomo (NY1, 6/12/25)?

In addition to casting doubt on Mamdani’s ability to govern, Jung implies that the everyday New Yorkers who admire him are shallow and naive. “Literally this morning I posted you on my Instagram story!” one young woman tells Mamdani, adding, “I’m so emotional seeing you. Like, you’re real.” As a number of public forums and events have made clear, many Mamdani supporters know and care a great deal about policy, while also using Instagram. But you wouldn’t know that from this profile.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of profiles like these is the suggestion that it’s hypocritical to fight for poor and working-class people when you are not poor or working-class. (Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a Columbia professor, and his mother, Mira Nair, is a prominent filmmaker.)

The candidate’s “moral clarity,” which many appreciate, has “the aura of privilege,” Jung writes. He asks about “the combination of the relative privilege in [Mamdani’s] own life and the working-class people at the center of his politics.” But to admirers of, say, Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, there is nothing suspect or contradictory about rich and upper-middle-class people standing in solidarity with their poor and working-class counterparts.

Jung acknowledges that Mamdani has “given hope to people who are in despair…and looking for someone with real fight.” Yet, ultimately, he sees the “appeal of [Mamdani’s] message” as its “simplicity and memeability”—not specific policies or his willingness to battle for them. The final quote is the most telling: “The thing about being a legislator and making compromises is that poor people make compromises every single day,” an unnamed colleague of Mamdani’s tells Jung. “Poor people know what is important, and sometimes they have to choose between two important things.”

It could be that poor people are born knowing how to prioritize and negotiate. Or it could be that politicians force them to choose between, for example, reliable transit and affordable housing. This profile creates the impression that Mamdani is unwilling to compromise and unfit to govern. But it’s just as plausible that his rejection of such false dichotomies has made some colleagues eager to keep him out of the mayor’s office.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Raina Lipsitz.

The madness has begun.

We should have suspected something when the cloud strike shut down occurred.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to continue war so that he is never held to account.

• READ MORE: Israel media reports of multiple assassinations in Iran strike
• What happened to the Madleen Gaza boat activists detained by Israel?
• Other Israeli attacks on Iran reports

This madness is the last straw.

NZ must immediately expel the Israeli Ambassador for this unprovoked attack on Iran.

As moral and ethical people, we must turn away from Israel’s new war crime, they have started a war, we must as righteous people condemn Israel and their enabler America.

This is the beginning of madness.

We cannot be party to it.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman, Jordan, said the Israeli army radio was reporting that in addition to the air strikes, Israel’s external intelligence service Mossad had carried out some sabotage activities and attacks inside Iran.

“There are also several reports and leaks in the Israeli media talking not only about the assassination of the top chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard but rather a very large number of senior military commanders in addition to prominent academics and nuclear scientists,” she said.

“This is a very large-scale attack, not just on military installations, but also on the people who could potentially be making decisions about what Iran can do next, how Iran can respond to this attack that continues as we speak.”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

AP (4/13/25) attributes Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa’s re-election to “voters weary of crime”—even though murders rose sharply under his administration.

Elections in Latin America are often controversial. While many countries in the Global North regularly shuffle between parties offering alternating versions of neoliberalism, voting in Central and South America often offers starker contrasts: An anti-imperialist candidate in the mold of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez might be up against a neoliberal such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. It could hardly be otherwise, in a region with the world’s biggest gap between the richest and poorest.

North American and European corporate media are conscious of this complexity, but rarely convey it to their readers, instead issuing reports that lack sufficient context or history. Washington’s influence on their messaging—as if the media had their own Monroe Doctrine—is never far below the surface, especially when it comes to reporting political turning points such as elections. Doubts about the results, or questions about outside influence, can be set aside if the outcome fits the consensus narrative, especially if it is endorsed by a White House spokesperson, or a surrogate body like the Organization of American States (OAS).

Ecuador provides an example. Its President Daniel Noboa, son of the country’s richest landowner, began his second term of office on May 25. He was declared victor by a huge margin in a run-off election on April 13, even though his opponent, leftist Luisa González, virtually tied with him in the first round in February.

According to the corporate media, Noboa’s victory was clear-cut, the reasons for it were obvious and there was little reason to question the outcome. The Washington Post (4/13/25) headlined “President Who Declared War on Ecuador’s Drug Gangs Is Reelected.” The Wall Street Journal (4/13/25) said “Ecuador Re-Elects Leader Fighting War on Gangs Smuggling Cocaine to US.” The New York Times (4/13/25) proclaimed that “Ecuador’s President Wins Re-Election in Nation Rocked by Drug Violence.” The headlines were so similar they might have been modeled on the agency story from the Associated Press (4/13/25): “Daniel Noboa Is Reelected Ecuador’s President by Voters Weary of Crime.”

Linking the election to the war on drugs added a useful North American perspective. And, of course, this could be strengthened by reminding readers that Noboa is an ally of Donald Trump, as the Post, Journal and Times duly did.

‘Increasingly authoritarian’

The New York Times (4/13/25) dismissed candidate Luisa González as someone “largely seen as the representative of the former president” Rafael Correa, who is condemned for his “authoritarian tendencies.”

Had González won instead, she would have become Ecuador’s first female president (aside from Rosalía Arteaga, who was president for two days in 1997). However, all three outlets felt it necessary to remind readers of her dangerous link to former President Rafael Correa, known for “antagonizing the United States,” as the Post put it. The Times patronizingly suggested she would be Correa’s “handpicked successor,” or even “the representative of the former president, a divisive figure in Ecuador” (emphasis added), who (the Post claimed) “grew increasingly authoritarian” before he left office in 2017.

This grossly inverts history. Arguably, Ecuador “grew increasingly authoritarian” after Correa’s presidency (FAIR.org, 8/17/20). His party, and three others, were banned in 2020. This decision was later reversed, but then both Correa and his vice president, Jorge Glas, were convicted of corruption, in what appeared to be obvious cases of “lawfare,” based on evidence from a source funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy.

Correa fled to Belgium, where he was granted asylum. Glas spent five years in prison and, seriously ill and facing new charges after Noboa first took office in late 2023, was granted asylum by Mexico. He never managed to leave Quito, because Noboa had him violently abducted from Mexico’s embassy and thrown into prison, in a clear breach of international law (London Review of Books, 4/9/24).

Five years of escalating violence

Correa had successfully reduced violence in Ecuador, making it one of Latin America’s safest countries. Progress was reversed under successive neoliberal governments, beginning with President Lenín Moreno. Victims have included several political figures, but the most egregious incident occurred only five months ago under Noboa’s presidency, when a group of soldiers captured, tortured and then murdered four children in Ecuador’s second city, Guayaquil (El Pais, 5/5/25).

Source: Primicias (5/21/25), based on Ecuadorian police data for the first four months of each year.

Violence continues to escalate, despite Noboa’s promises to tackle it. The first four months of 2025 saw a 58% increase in homicides, compared with the same period in 2024 (see chart), turning Ecuador into the most dangerous country in the Americas. Much violence is related to drug trafficking, with Ecuador now “an open funnel for cocaine exports and money laundering” under recent right-wing governments (London Review of Books, 4/30/25). Despite being part of the problem, Noboa maintained that only he could solve it, offering to adopt the hardline policies for which El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has become famous.

Ecuador’s contested ballot

After the media chorus of welcome for Noboa, it seems almost churlish to ask if he really won a clean election. Yet while Foreign Policy (4/17/25) said his win was “not surprising,” it certainly did surprise many commentators. It is instructive to review the evidence, starting with the first round of the elections and ending with the results of the final round.

February’s first round could hardly have been closer, with Noboa gaining 44.17% of the votes, barely ahead of González with 44.00% (see table), a difference of only 16,746 votes. Turnout was 82%. The result suggested that opinion polls were exaggerating Noboa’s popularity, since for the preceding month they had given him a comfortable average lead.

A third candidate, representing the largest Indigenous party, garnered 5.25%, and was obliged to drop out ahead of the final top-two round two months later. This candidate would later support González, but smaller Indigenous parties would favor Noboa.

Source: Wikipedia.

The electoral campaign period saw a series of illegal moves on Noboa’s part. He refused to step down temporarily, as required constitutionally. Instead he suspended his vice-president, Verónica Abad, ignoring a court ruling that she should temporarily replace him and shut her office (Financial Times, 1/18/25). A right-wing rival was barred from standing, and Ecuadorians in Venezuela were denied the vote while their compatriots elsewhere were not.

Noboa’s massive social media campaign was allegedly financed from public funds (La Calle, 10/22/24); troll centers were established to attack his opponent (Pandemia Digital, 2/3/25). Bonuses costing over $500 million were paid to hundreds of thousands of poor Ecuadorians from public funds (Primicias, 3/28/25); CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot dubbed this “vote buying,” at an estimated $475 each. Noboa was photographed with Trump, Ecuador’s Washington embassy having paid at least $165,000 for the opportunity (People’s Dispatch, 4/6/25).

Like El Salvador’s Bukele, Noboa enhances his powers by declaring states of emergency. Prior to the poll on April 13, he declared one that covered the capital and several urban centers which González had won in the first round, intimidating voters and allowing unannounced searches (CBS News, 4/12/25). On election day, machine gun–bearing soldiers were posted at polling stations. Even so, two exit polls showed a close result, one indicating a win by González. During the count, images were posted of voting sheets published by the Noboa-manipulated electoral council that were invalid because they were unsigned.

‘Impossible’ result

The April 13 results were extraordinary, awarding Noboa victory by a full 11.25 percentage points. They gave Noboa 1.3 million more votes than he won in the first round, while González gained only 160,000. This happened despite the first-round tie, González’s endorsement by the leading Indigenous candidate, opinion polls slightly favoring her, two close exit polls and a much smaller difference (2 percentage points) between the two candidates’ parties in the simultaneous vote for the National Assembly.

Former President Rafael Correa wrote in his X account:

Ecuadorian people: You know that, unlike our adversaries, we have always accepted the opponent’s victory when it has been clean. This time it is NOT. Statistically, the result is IMPOSSIBLE.

González’s requests for recounts were twice rejected by the judicial bodies governing the election, in a series of decisions demonstrating bias in Noboa’s favor. Several leftist presidents, such as Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, endorsed González’s protests, and the latter refused to recognize Noboa’s presidency.

Truthout (5/2/25): “President Noboa carried out one of the dirtiest and unequal campaigns in memory—relying on fake news, vote buying and threats.”

A week after the poll, Denver University Professor Francisco Rodríguez published a statistical comparison of the result in Ecuador with 31 other recent Latin American run-off elections. He concluded that Ecuador’s was “not normal,” and “deviates sharply from regional experience.” He said he was not claiming fraud, but was calling for careful scrutiny.

Ecuadorian political sociologist Franklin Ramírez Gallegos went further in Truthout (5/2/25): “These were absolutely unequal, opaque, fraudulent elections,” he said. Within a few days of the election, there were reports of Noboa’s opponents being persecuted, and of a “blacklist” naming more than 100 people to be tracked down.

None of the US corporate media suggested the election was problem-free. But where, for example, they reported that González had claimed fraud, they qualified this by saying she did so “without presenting evidence” (Washington Post, 4/13/25). They also repeated Noboa’s phony counterclaims of irregularities (AP, 4/13/25). Reassurances by electoral observers from the OAS and US State Department were duly cited (Reuters, 4/14/25).

Framing Latin American elections

The New York Times (10/23/19) shows highly selective skepticism over Latin American electoral results.

The OAS has a 70-year history of bending to Washington’s whim when judging elections. Media reliance on its verdicts, despite—or really because of—its close alignment with US interests, speaks to the wider problem of media reporting of Latin American elections. Here are just three further examples—of many.

In 2019, the unsubstantiated findings by OAS observers of faults in the presidential election in Bolivia were swallowed wholesale by corporate media (FAIR.org, 11/18/19). The New York Times, citing the OAS’s “withering assessment” (10/23/19), quickly scorned the “highly fishy vote” (11/11/19) which extended the presidency of leftist Evo Morales. It turned out not to be fishy at all, but before the truth emerged, Morales had resigned, faced likely assassination and fled to Mexico. Morales’s forced resignation by Bolivia’s rightist-aligned military was called a “coup” by Argentina and Mexico.

The year before, when Bolsonaro won the election in Brazil while his principal opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was imprisoned (later to be released, post-election), the Times published 37 relevant articles, but not one examined the falsity of the charges. Reporting from Brazil, journalist Brian Mier (FAIR.org, 3/8/21) observed that this “helped normalize” Bolsonaro’s victory and “opened the door for a neofascist/military takeover of Brazil.”

In Honduras in 2013, after the neoliberal candidate Juan Orlando Hernández had “all the ducks lined up for a fraudulent election” (London Review of Books, 11/21/13), the Washington Post (11/26/13) produced a scurrilous editorial claiming that his victory had avoided a dictatorship. Instead, it created one: Hernández won two fraudulent elections, was extradited on drug charges after leaving office, and is now in a US prison.

After the dubious victory

Since the election, Noboa has been busy in pursuing the “blacklisted” political opponents who tried to stand in his way. A few days before his May 25 investiture, dubious charges were pressed against former presidential candidate Andrés Arauz. It was Arauz who published the images of invalid voting sheets on April 13—to no avail, as they were ignored not only by the electoral authorities, but by the observers from the OAS and European Union.

Noboa’s big if highly questionable victory will strengthen his hand in creating a permanent and violent security state. Blackwater’s founder Erik Prince was hired in April to help him in the task. Two new military bases, one of them in the Galápagos Islands, have been offered to the US, in defiance of a prohibition on foreign bases in Ecuador’s constitution—a prohibition that the National Assembly rescinded this month at Noboa’s request.

On April 30, the Defense and interior ministers were pictured in El Salvador, inspecting Bukele’s notorious CECOT prison (Infobae, 4/30/25). Presumably these are the first steps in delivering the promise, made in Noboa’s short and vacuous speech at the investiture last month, to “rescue” Ecuador.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by John Perry.

Israeli tanks opened fire last Sunday on a crowd of thousands of starving Palestinians at an aid distribution center in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. The victims had gathered in hopes of finding food for themselves and their families, following a nearly three-month total Israeli blockade of the territory. At least 31 people were killed; one Palestinian was also killed by Israeli fire the same day at another distribution site in central Gaza.

On Monday, June 2, three more Palestinians lost their lives to Israeli projectiles while trying to procure food, and on Tuesday there were 27 fatalities at the aid hub in Rafah. This brought the total number of Palestinian deaths at the newly implemented hubs to more than 100 in just a week.

‘Not possible to implement’

Al Jazeera‘s Hind Khoudary (6/3/25): ““The Israeli forces just opened fire randomly, shooting Palestinians…using quadcopters and live ammunition.”

Mass killing in the guise of food distribution is occurring under the supervision of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a sketchy-as-hell organization registered in Switzerland and Delaware. It boasts the participation of former US military and intelligence officers, as well as solid Israeli endorsement and armed US security contractors escorting food deliveries.

Jake Wood—the ex-US Marine sniper who had taken up the post of GHF executive director—recently resigned after reasoning that “it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence.”

Indeed, the GHF, which has temporarily suspended operations to conduct damage control, has managed to align its activities entirely with the genocidal vision of the state of Israel, whose military has killed more than 54,600 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. In May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu determined that “minimal” aid should be let into Gaza, lest mass starvation force the US to scale back its support for genocide (which is somehow less problematic than enforced famine).

By entrusting the delivery of this “minimal” aid to the brand-new GHF, rather than the United Nations and other groups that have decades of experience doing such things, the Israelis have in fact been able to call the shots in terms of strategic placement of the aid hubs. Only four are currently in place for a starving population of 2 million, requiring many Palestinians to walk long distances—those that are able to walk, that is—across Israeli military lines.

The hubs are mainly in southern Gaza, which is conveniently where Israel has schemed to concentrate the surviving Palestinian population, in order to then expel them in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s dream of a brand-new Palestinian-free “Riviera of the Middle East” in the Gaza Strip. Even as he authorized the resumption of aid, Netanyahu reiterated his vow to “take control” of all of Gaza. As UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini has observed, “Aid distribution has become a death trap.”

Leading with denials

The Washington Post headline (6/2/25) puts Israel’s rebuttal ahead of the charge it’s responding to.

And yet despite all of this, Western corporate media have somehow found it difficult to report in straightforward fashion that the food-distribution massacres have left Palestinians with a rather bleak choice: either die of starvation or die trying to obtain food aid.

So it is that we end up with, for example, the Washington Post’s Tuesday dispatch (6/2/25) from Jerusalem, headlined “Israel Says It Fired ‘Warning Shots’ Near Aid Site; Health Officials Say 27 Dead,” which charitably gave Israel the privilege of refuting what the health officials have said before they even say it. The article quoted the Israeli army as claiming that its soldiers had fired at suspects “who advanced toward the troops in such a way that posed a threat.” It also quoted the following statement from the GHF:

While the aid distribution was conducted safely and without incident at our site today, we understand that [Israeli army] is investigating whether a number of civilians were injured after moving beyond the designated safe corridor and into a closed military zone.

Anyway, that’s what happens when you put your aid distribution site in the middle of an Israeli military zone.

Then there was the BBC report (5/31/25) on Sunday’s massacre, headlined “Israel Denies Firing at Civilians After Hamas-Run Ministry Says 31 Killed in Gaza Aid Center Attack,” which went on to underscore that the ministry in question was the “Hamas-run health ministry.” Given Hamas’s role as the governing authority in the Gaza Strip, this is sort of like specifying that the US Department of Health & Human Services is “run by the US government”—except that, in Gaza’s case, the “Hamas-run” qualifier is meant to cast doubt on the ministry’s claims. Never mind that said ministry’s death counts have over time consistently “held up to UN scrutiny, independent investigations and even Israel’s tallies,” as the Associated Press (11/6/23) has previously acknowledged.

The BBC headline (5/31/25) likewise presents Israel’s defense before revealing the charge made by the “Hamas-run ministry.”

On Tuesday, though, the AP (6/3/25) chimed in with its own headline, “Gaza Officials Say Israeli Forces Killed 27 Heading to Aid Site. Israel Says It Fired Near Suspects.” The text of the article details how Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is “led by medical professionals but reports to the Hamas-run government,” has calculated that the majority of the more than 54,000 Palestinian fatalities in Israel’s current war on Gaza are women and children, but hasn’t said “how many of the dead were civilians or combatants.”

Meanwhile, Reuters (6/1/25) reported that an Israeli attack near a GHF-run aid distribution point had “killed at least 30 people in Rafah, Palestinian news agency WAFA and Hamas-affiliated media said on Sunday.” In a separate article on Sunday’s massacre, the news wire (6/1/25) wrote that

the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry said 31 people were killed with a single gunshot wound to the head or chest from Israeli fire as they were gathered in the Al-Alam district aid distribution area in Rafah.

The latter dispatch was headlined “Gaza Ministry Says Israel Kills More Than 30 Aid Seekers, Israel Denies.”

‘No shortage’

Israel’s most absurd denials can turn into headlines (Le Monde, 4/8/25).

There is pretty much no end to the crafty sidelining by Western corporate media of truthful assertions by “Hamas-run” entities—and the simultaneous provision of ample space to the Israeli military to continue its established tradition of propagating outright lies. Recall that time not so long ago that Israeli officials insisted that there was “no shortage” of aid in the Gaza Strip, despite a full-blown blockade, and the glee directly expressed by various Israeli ministers about not letting an iota of food, or anything else necessary for survival, into the besieged enclave (FAIR.org, 4/25/25).

It is furthermore perplexing why there is even a perceived need to cast doubt on massacres of 31 or 27 or three individuals, in the context of a genocide that has killed more than 54,600 people in 20 months—a war in which Israel has exhibited no qualms in slaughtering starving people, as in the February 2024 incident when at least 112 Palestinians were massacred while queuing for flour southwest of Gaza City (FAIR.org, 3/22/24). Against a backdrop of such wanton slaughter, what are 100 more Palestinian deaths to Israel? Indiscriminate mass killing is, after all, the objective here.

Just as GHF is now engaged in micro-level damage control operations vis-à-vis their militarized distribution of food in Gaza, Israel, too, appears to be in a similar mode, since it’s a whole lot simpler—and helpfully distracting—to bicker over dozens of casualties rather than, you know, a whole genocide.

And the Western establishment media are, as ever, standing by to lend a helping hand. Perhaps we should start calling them the “Israel-affiliated media.” 

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Belén Fernández.

The New York Times (12/2/19) apparently doesn’t think Greta Thunberg is an icon Gaza desperately needs.

When Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was fighting for climate justice in her home country and the world stage, the New York Times gave her top billing. She co-authored an op-ed (8/19/21), and was the subject of a long interview (10/30/20).

Acclaimed film director Darren Aronofsky wrote a piece for the Times (12/2/19) headlined “Greta Thunberg Is the Icon the Planet Desperately Needs.” Seeing a photo of her at 15, staging her first environmental protest, he said: “Here was the image—one of hope, commitment and action—I needed to see. An image that could spark a movement.” Her work was highlighted constantly in the Paper of Record (e.g., New York Times, 2/18/19, 8/29/19, 9/18/19, 1/21/20, 4/9/21, 11/4/21, 6/30/23).

Now Thunberg is sailing to Gaza with a group of 11 other activists in what AP (6/2/25)  called an “effort to bring in some aid and raise ‘international awareness’ over the ongoing humanitarian crisis.” The Israeli blockade of Gaza and the ongoing military strikes on the devastated territory is leading to a massive starvation crisis (UN News, 6/1/25; FAIR.org, 4/25/25).

No fawning coverage of Thunberg’s activism from the Times this time. No Hollywood big shot saying that he hoped her trip would “spark a movement.”

‘Professional tantrum-thrower’

Fox News‘ Greg Gutfeld (6/3/25) decried Thunberg’s “promiscuity of activism.”

The right-wing press is upset about Thunberg’s voyage and Palestine advocacy, of course. The Israeli military “says it is ‘prepared’ to raid the ship, as it has done with previous freedom flotilla efforts,” reported the Daily Mail (6/4/25), adding IDF spokesperson Gen. Effie Defrin’s remark: “We have gained experience in recent years, and we will act accordingly.” Israeli security sources have reportedly vowed to stop the vessel before it gets to Gaza (Jerusalem Post, 6/4/25, 6/5/25).

The British Spectator‘s Julie Burchill (6/4/25) said:

When we consider child stars through the ages, the girls generally age better than the boys; Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Billie Piper all made the seamless switch from winsome cuties to gifted entertainers. The same cannot be said of Greta Thunberg, though she’s certainly remained consistently irritating. Neither a singer nor a thespian, she is a professional tantrum-thrower, more comparable to the fictional horrors Violet Elizabeth Bott and Veruca Salt than the trio of troupers listed above.

“Hope Greta and her friends can swim!” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina (X, 6/1/25), a ghoulish statement suggesting that an attack on the ship was imminent. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (6/2/25) called the message a “grotesque social media post suggesting a possible Israeli state terrorism attack on peaceful international activists aboard a humanitarian aid ship bound for Gaza.”

The pro-Israel media criticism website HonestReporting (6/4/25) called Thunberg’s participation in the aid mission an “anti-Israel publicity stunt.” “Greta Thunberg’s beliefs are as shallow as her need for attention,” said Fox News host Greg Gutfeld (6/3/25). Rita Panahi of Australia’s Sky News (6/4/25) called Thunberg a “doom goblin.”

These comments aren’t just mean-spirited but ominous, considering that the group’s previous mission was aborted when their ship suffered a drone attack (Reuters, 5/6/25), and an aid flotilla to Gaza 15 years ago ended up with Israeli special forces killing ten activists (Al Jazeera, 5/30/20).

From star to nonentity

Greta Thunberg (AP, 6/2/25): “No matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s not even near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the live-streamed genocide.”

And yet while the New York Times (5/2/25) covered the aborted mission and Thunberg’s involvement, it has not yet reported on the current mission and Thunberg’s role. As noted earlier, AP (6/2/25) covered the launch of the current mission, with Thunberg aboard, which was re-run in the Washington Post (6/2/25). She has done interviews with other media from the boat (Democracy Now!, 6/4/25).

How could she have gone from a star in the Times‘ pages to such a nonentity? Given how much attention she received in the Times for leading a movement for climate justice, one might think that her dedication to the strife in Gaza might warrant some attention, too.

For activists and journalists who have covered the press response to the crisis in Gaza, this is all part of the Palestine exception, where liberal groups and outlets might show concern for humanitarian crises around the world, but lower their outrage or stay completely silent on the subject of Palestine.

FAIR (5/22/25) recently noted another example of this phenomenon at the Times. An op-ed by its publisher, ​​A.G. Sulzberger (5/13/25), decried attacks on the freedom of the press around the world, but omitted that the biggest killer of journalists in the world today is the Israeli government.

‘Money from Hamas’

The New York Times (5/14/25) treated the idea that Hamas might be bankrolling an American children’s entertainer as a plausible allegation.

The New York Times (5/14/25) recently covered the backlash children’s entertainer Rachel Griffin Accurso, aka Ms. Rachel, has received from pro-Israel activists for using her platform to speak out for Palestinian children. The most eyebrow-raising bit from the piece:

Last month, the advocacy group StopAntisemitism labeled Accurso the “Antisemite of the Week” and, the New York Post reported, sent a letter urging Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether Accurso is receiving funding to further Hamas’s agenda.

Accurso “posted nearly 50 times about the children of Gaza, most of which is filled with misinformation from Hamas, and only five times about Israeli children,” the group, which monitors statements about Israel on social media accounts of prominent figures, said on its website. “In the case of the Israeli children, she only posted due to widespread public backlash, never condemning Hamas and the Palestinians.”

Accurso, 42, in an emailed response denied having received money from Hamas. “This accusation is not only absurd, it’s patently false,” she said.

It’s impossible to imagine that if Accurso had been speaking about Ukrainian children suffering under Russia’s invasion, the Times or any other US establishment outlet would entertain the notion that she was working on behalf of the Azov Battalion or another extremist Ukrainian faction. Alas, this is how the Palestine exception works in US media like the Times.

Accurso and Thunberg’s advocacy for Palestinian civilians is dangerous to those cheerleading the slaughter in Gaza, because their status as clear-eyed and big-hearted people give public legitimacy to the Palestinian cause. The Times invoking the Palestinian exception against them is a part of a larger effort to keep public opinion from turning against Israeli militarism.

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

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

New York Times promo for an upcoming podcast on how “medical treatment for transgender young people, and how the care got pulled into a political fight.”

As Pride month kicks off, the New York Times is releasing a new six-part podcast about medical care for trans youth—a subject on which Times coverage has been shameful.

Reporting on the issue is of critical importance at the moment, given the breathtaking assault on trans rights by the Trump administration, which has issued at least six anti-trans executive orders in its first months. Across the country, 920 bills aimed at trans people have been introduced in the first half of 2025, and the Supreme Court is poised to issue a decision in the Skrmetti case that may legitimize restrictions on gender-affirming care.

But in light of the Times‘ documented anti-trans bias—and the fact that reporter Azeen Ghorayshi, responsible for much of their previous problematic coverage (FAIR.org, 8/30/23,  7/19/24), is centrally involved in the podcast—trans activists are girding for the worst. Ghorayshi has been criticized for misreporting the experiences of trans minors and their families, misrepresenting study findings, and promoting unsubstantiated claims that contributed in part to the closure of a St. Louis youth gender clinic.

FAIR described an article by the New York Times‘ Azeen Ghorayshi  (8/23/23)  as “a greatest-hits album of all of the Times’ problematic coverage on adolescent gender-affirming care, filled with familiar tropes and tactics the paper of record has used to distort the issue.”

The podcast teaser offers a glimpse of what’s to come: back-and-forth quotes from trans people and those seeking to take away trans kids’ health care, plus some troubling quotes like this one:

If the treatment is barred, some kids will suffer because they can’t access the treatment. If the treatment is allowed, some kids will suffer who get the treatment and later wish they hadn’t. And then the question becomes, how does the court choose which group?

It’s not clear who the speaker is, but the sense the listener gets is that these are equal harms.  The reality is that regret over gender-affirming care is extremely low (Medium, 3/24/23), and such care has been shown to greatly reduce the alarmingly high suicide rates among trans youth (HCPLive, 3/8/22).

It’s worth noting that standards for gender-affirming care for youth do not even recommend surgery for children under the age of 18 except in extreme cases. Instead, treatment typically begins—after screenings from both mental health and medical professionals—with entirely reversible puberty blockers.

A voice later in the teaser remarks:

Conservative states want to just, you know, be done with trans people altogether. And when reports come out that show this, you know, two-sided thing and the skepticism and the fact there’s no evidence, this just adds fuel to their fire.

Sign at the Transexual Menace protest at the New York Times (photo: Tyler Albertario).

The claim that “there’s no evidence” to support the value of gender-affirming care is not a fact, but a myth (Psychology Today, 1/24/22)—one promoted by credulous reporting of the British government’s Cass Review by the Times‘ Ghorayshi (FAIR.org, 7/19/24).

The teaser frames the story as one in which “the medicine and the politics have become impossibly entangled.” As media critic Parker Molloy (Present Age, 6/4/25) observes:

Transgender healthcare didn’t get “pulled into” a political fight—it became the target of a coordinated campaign by anti-trans activists and Republican politicians. But the Times‘ language suggests this is some kind of natural, inevitable conflict rather than a deliberate assault on medical care.

The Transexual Menace, a group of trans rights activists, is picketing New York Times offices today. “For years now, the New York Times‘ reporting on trans healthcare has given undue credence to anecdotes offered by bigots,” spokesperson Anabel Ruggiero said in a statement. The group is demanding “an end to the Times’ deliberate anti-transgender bias.”

Research Assistance: Wilson Korik

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

In The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End Press, 1979), Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued that the American ruling class and corporate media regard bloodbaths as being constructive, nefarious or benign. A constructive bloodbath is typically carried out by the US or one of its proxies, and is endorsed in establishment media. The most obvious contemporary example is the genocidal US/Israeli campaign in Gaza, approved by media commentators in the New York Times (2/11/25), Wall Street Journal (3/20/25) and Washington Post (10/24/23).

Headlines from the Washington Post (8/27/12, 8/23/12), New York Times (6/2/11) and Wall Street Journal (6/15/12) treated massacres in Assad’s Syria as what Chomsky and Herman called a “nefarious bloodbath.”

The two other approaches that Chomsky and Herman outline illuminate the corporate media’s approach to Syria. When Bashar al-Assad was in power in Syria and the US was seeking his overthrow, corporate media treated killings that his government and its allies carried out as nefarious bloodbaths: Their violence was denounced in corporate press with unambiguous language, and prompted demands that the US intervene against them.

For David Brooks of the Times (6/2/11), the Assad government was “one of the world’s genuinely depraved regimes,” and thus it was necessary for Barack Obama to “embrace the cautious regime-change strategy that is his current doctrine.”

An editorial in the Journal (6/15/12) saw “Mr. Assad’s efficient butchery” as a reason that the US should conduct an “air campaign targeting elite Syrian military units.” This

could prompt the general staff to reconsider its contempt for international opinion, and perhaps its allegiance to the Assad family. Short of that, carving out some kind of safe haven inside Syria would at least save lives.

The Post published an editorial (8/27/12) saying that “according to opposition sources, at least 300 people were slaughtered in the town of Daraya late last week.” The piece added that this

newest war crime, like those before it, reflects a deliberate strategy. As the Post’s Liz Sly has reported [8/23/12], the Assad regime is seeking to regain control over opposition-held areas by teaching their residents that harboring the rebels will be punished with mass murder.

The paper called the Obama administration “morally bankrupt” for not taking more aggressive military action in Syria.

Embracing Damascus

France 24 (5/1/25): “The latest round of violence follows a series of massacres in Syria’s coast in March, where the Observatory said security forces and allied groups killed more than 1,700 civilians, mostly Alawites.”

In the months since Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa came to power, with substantial assistance from the US and its partners (New York Times, 8/2/17), his government has opened Syria’s economy to international capital, arrested Palestinian resistance fighters, indicated that it’s open to the prospect of normalizing relations with Israel, and opted not to defend Syria against Israel’s frequent bombings and ever-expanding occupation of Syrian land. In that context, Washington has embraced Damascus, with Trump praising al-Sharaa personally, and finally lifting the brutal sanctions regime on Syria.

As these developments have unfolded, US media have switched from treating bloodbaths in Syria as nefarious to treating them as benign. A benign bloodbath is one to which corporate media are largely indifferent. They may not openly cheer such killings, but the atrocities get minimal attention, and don’t elicit high-volume denunciations. There are few if any calls for perpetrators to be brought to justice or ousted from government.

Those unaware of the shifts in Syria and US policy toward it might expect the horrors of Syria’s recent massacres to generate a cavalcade of media denunciation. In March, the new Syrian government’s security forces and groups allied to it reportedly killed 1,700 civilians, most of them from the Alawite minority (France 24, 5/1/25), following attacks that Assad loyalists carried out on security and military sites.

Amnesty International (4/3/25) reported:

Our evidence indicates that government-affiliated militias deliberately targeted civilians from the Alawite minority in gruesome . . . attacks—shooting individuals at close range in cold blood. For two days, authorities failed to intervene to stop the killings.

Amnesty called the killings “reprisals,” a reference to the sectarian view that the Alawites, followers of an offshoot of Shia Islam, deserve to be collectively punished for the Assad government’s crimes. The group observed that families of Alawite “victims were forced by the authorities to bury their loved one[s] in mass burial sites without religious rites.”

The Druze, a religious minority with Islamic roots that accounts for approximately 3–4% of Syria’s population, have also been massacred. At the end of April, “auxiliary forces to the Syrian ministries of defense and interior” killed 42 Druze in an ambush on the Damascus/Al-Suwaidaa highway, and another ten civilians from Druze community “were executed by forces affiliated with the Syrian ministries of defense and interior” (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/2/25). Some of the victims’ bodies were incinerated (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/1/25).

‘Lack of control’

A New York Times op-ed (4/2/25) treated the killing of “hundreds of Alawite civilians” as a sign of ” the government’s lack of control over its own forces.”

Yet commentary on the grisly mass murders of people from these minority groups has been decidedly muted. The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times together have published just one op-ed that focused on the killings. The lone piece (Washington Post, 3/10/25) pointed out that Syrian government forces have evidently “embark[ed] on the sort of sectarian slaughter of civilians that many had feared when rebel forces gained power three months ago.” Author Jim Geraghty, however, stopped short of issuing the call for US military intervention that characterizes media responses to nefarious bloodbaths.

Other op-eds treated the al-Sharaa government’s violence as little more than a footnote. A Journal editorial (5/9/25) offering a rundown of recent developments in Syria waited until the last line of the sixth paragraph to mention that “government-aligned forces have slaughtered Alawites and attacked Druze,” as if doing so were a minor detail. A Times essay (4/2/25) took nearly 800 words before referencing the massacres:

And in March, when insurgents loyal to the Assad regime clashed with security groups affiliated with the new government and bands of fighters—including some nominally under the control of the government, according to rights groups—responded by killing hundreds of Alawite civilians as well as suspected insurgents, it displayed the government’s lack of control over its own forces and ignited fears that the country was descending into sectarian violence.

Painting massacres of hundreds of civilians from minority groups as a “respon[se]” is far from the full-throated denunciations deployed for nefarious bloodbaths: “killing hundreds of Alawite civilians” evidently does not show that the government is “depraved,” but rather demonstrates its “lack of control over its own forces.”

‘Recent surge in sectarian violence’

A New York Times news report (5/14/25) on a meeting between the US and Syrian presidents referred vaguely  to “a recent surge in sectarian violence.”

For the New York Times (5/14/25), the massacres of Alawites and Druze weren’t important enough to warrant mentioning in their rundown of Trump’s meeting with al-Sharaa. The paper referred instead to “the unstable situation” in the country and “a recent surge in sectarian violence.” That vague language provided no sense of the severity of the violence, or of the al-Sharaa government’s share in the responsibility for it, highly relevant information in an article about the Washington/Damascus embrace.

The phrase “recent surge in sectarian violence” is particularly obfuscatory, as it wrongly suggests that it’s impossible to assign responsibility for that violence, even though it’s well-established that the government and its allies have done most of the killing (Amnesty International, 4/3/25; Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/2/25). The wording also inaccurately suggests that this phenomenon is new, an implication debunked by the Carnegie Endowment (5/14/25):

In 2015, fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, a predecessor of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham [HTS], which is led by Syria’s president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, killed at least 20 Druze villagers in Qalb Lozeh in Idlib governorate. Others were coerced into converting to Sunni Islam, while Druze shrines were desecrated and graves defaced.

Similarly, in August 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra was part of a coalition of armed groups that attacked predominantly Alawite villages, killing 190 civilians, including 18 children and 14 elderly men (BBC, 10/11/13). That track record might have been the basis for expressions of moral outrage against the al-Sharaa government’s “butchery,” but, fortunately for HTS and its partners, their massacres are benign.

The relative indifference with which the corporate media has treated sectarian killings carried out by HTS and allies, both before and since they came to power, could also have something to do with the US’s role in helping foment sectarianism in Syria in the run up to the war in the country (Truthout, 10/9/15).

A New York Times (5/16/25) report on Saudi Arabia and Qatar paying off Syria’s World Bank debt called that move “the latest victory for Syria’s new government as it attempts to stabilize the nation after a long civil war and decades of dictatorship.” Reporter Euan Ward went on to say that “there are still significant challenges ahead for the fractured nation, which has been rocked by repeated waves of sectarian violence in recent months.” At no point did Ward note that the government he said was trying to “stabilize” the nation has been carrying out that “sectarian violence.”

Nor did the Times‘ May 14 or May 16 articles mention, as the Conversation (5/12/25) did, that civil society groups have called for the al-Sharaa government “to issue protective religious rulings for minority communities”—the sort of step a government would take if it were seeking to “stabilize the nation.” “Their appeals have gone unanswered,” the Conversation noted.

The difference in the tenor of coverage of killings by the Assad government and that of the al-Sharaa government’s killings demonstrates the cynicism of corporate media’s humanitarian rhetoric whenever a state in America’s crosshairs is accused of serious crimes. Such preening is not merely hypocritical. It has nothing to do with protecting any population, and everything to do with how the US ruling class generates consent for its blood-drenched empire.

FEATURED IMAGE: Amnesty International’s depiction (4/3/25) of Syrians protesting sectarian killings (photo: Delil Souleiman/AFP).

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Gregory Shupak.

In The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End Press, 1979), Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued that the American ruling class and corporate media regard bloodbaths as being constructive, nefarious or benign. A constructive bloodbath is typically carried out by the US or one of its proxies, and is endorsed in establishment media. The most obvious contemporary example is the genocidal US/Israeli campaign in Gaza, approved by media commentators in the New York Times (2/11/25), Wall Street Journal (3/20/25) and Washington Post (10/24/23).

Headlines from the Washington Post (8/27/12, 8/23/12), New York Times (6/2/11) and Wall Street Journal (6/15/12) treated massacres in Assad’s Syria as what Chomsky and Herman called a “nefarious bloodbath.”

The two other approaches that Chomsky and Herman outline illuminate the corporate media’s approach to Syria. When Bashar al-Assad was in power in Syria and the US was seeking his overthrow, corporate media treated killings that his government and its allies carried out as nefarious bloodbaths: Their violence was denounced in corporate press with unambiguous language, and prompted demands that the US intervene against them.

For David Brooks of the Times (6/2/11), the Assad government was “one of the world’s genuinely depraved regimes,” and thus it was necessary for Barack Obama to “embrace the cautious regime-change strategy that is his current doctrine.”

An editorial in the Journal (6/15/12) saw “Mr. Assad’s efficient butchery” as a reason that the US should conduct an “air campaign targeting elite Syrian military units.” This

could prompt the general staff to reconsider its contempt for international opinion, and perhaps its allegiance to the Assad family. Short of that, carving out some kind of safe haven inside Syria would at least save lives.

The Post published an editorial (8/27/12) saying that “according to opposition sources, at least 300 people were slaughtered in the town of Daraya late last week.” The piece added that this

newest war crime, like those before it, reflects a deliberate strategy. As the Post’s Liz Sly has reported [8/23/12], the Assad regime is seeking to regain control over opposition-held areas by teaching their residents that harboring the rebels will be punished with mass murder.

The paper called the Obama administration “morally bankrupt” for not taking more aggressive military action in Syria.

Embracing Damascus

France 24 (5/1/25): “The latest round of violence follows a series of massacres in Syria’s coast in March, where the Observatory said security forces and allied groups killed more than 1,700 civilians, mostly Alawites.”

In the months since Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa came to power, with substantial assistance from the US and its partners (New York Times, 8/2/17), his government has opened Syria’s economy to international capital, arrested Palestinian resistance fighters, indicated that it’s open to the prospect of normalizing relations with Israel, and opted not to defend Syria against Israel’s frequent bombings and ever-expanding occupation of Syrian land. In that context, Washington has embraced Damascus, with Trump praising al-Sharaa personally, and finally lifting the brutal sanctions regime on Syria.

As these developments have unfolded, US media have switched from treating bloodbaths in Syria as nefarious to treating them as benign. A benign bloodbath is one to which corporate media are largely indifferent. They may not openly cheer such killings, but the atrocities get minimal attention, and don’t elicit high-volume denunciations. There are few if any calls for perpetrators to be brought to justice or ousted from government.

Those unaware of the shifts in Syria and US policy toward it might expect the horrors of Syria’s recent massacres to generate a cavalcade of media denunciation. In March, the new Syrian government’s security forces and groups allied to it reportedly killed 1,700 civilians, most of them from the Alawite minority (France 24, 5/1/25), following attacks that Assad loyalists carried out on security and military sites.

Amnesty International (4/3/25) reported:

Our evidence indicates that government-affiliated militias deliberately targeted civilians from the Alawite minority in gruesome . . . attacks—shooting individuals at close range in cold blood. For two days, authorities failed to intervene to stop the killings.

Amnesty called the killings “reprisals,” a reference to the sectarian view that the Alawites, followers of an offshoot of Shia Islam, deserve to be collectively punished for the Assad government’s crimes. The group observed that families of Alawite “victims were forced by the authorities to bury their loved one[s] in mass burial sites without religious rites.”

The Druze, a religious minority with Islamic roots that accounts for approximately 3–4% of Syria’s population, have also been massacred. At the end of April, “auxiliary forces to the Syrian ministries of defense and interior” killed 42 Druze in an ambush on the Damascus/Al-Suwaidaa highway, and another ten civilians from Druze community “were executed by forces affiliated with the Syrian ministries of defense and interior” (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/2/25). Some of the victims’ bodies were incinerated (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/1/25).

‘Lack of control’

A New York Times op-ed (4/2/25) treated the killing of “hundreds of Alawite civilians” as a sign of ” the government’s lack of control over its own forces.”

Yet commentary on the grisly mass murders of people from these minority groups has been decidedly muted. The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times together have published just one op-ed that focused on the killings. The lone piece (Washington Post, 3/10/25) pointed out that Syrian government forces have evidently “embark[ed] on the sort of sectarian slaughter of civilians that many had feared when rebel forces gained power three months ago.” Author Jim Geraghty, however, stopped short of issuing the call for US military intervention that characterizes media responses to nefarious bloodbaths.

Other op-eds treated the al-Sharaa government’s violence as little more than a footnote. A Journal editorial (5/9/25) offering a rundown of recent developments in Syria waited until the last line of the sixth paragraph to mention that “government-aligned forces have slaughtered Alawites and attacked Druze,” as if doing so were a minor detail. A Times essay (4/2/25) took nearly 800 words before referencing the massacres:

And in March, when insurgents loyal to the Assad regime clashed with security groups affiliated with the new government and bands of fighters—including some nominally under the control of the government, according to rights groups—responded by killing hundreds of Alawite civilians as well as suspected insurgents, it displayed the government’s lack of control over its own forces and ignited fears that the country was descending into sectarian violence.

Painting massacres of hundreds of civilians from minority groups as a “respon[se]” is far from the full-throated denunciations deployed for nefarious bloodbaths: “killing hundreds of Alawite civilians” evidently does not show that the government is “depraved,” but rather demonstrates its “lack of control over its own forces.”

‘Recent surge in sectarian violence’

A New York Times news report (5/14/25) on a meeting between the US and Syrian presidents referred vaguely  to “a recent surge in sectarian violence.”

For the New York Times (5/14/25), the massacres of Alawites and Druze weren’t important enough to warrant mentioning in their rundown of Trump’s meeting with al-Sharaa. The paper referred instead to “the unstable situation” in the country and “a recent surge in sectarian violence.” That vague language provided no sense of the severity of the violence, or of the al-Sharaa government’s share in the responsibility for it, highly relevant information in an article about the Washington/Damascus embrace.

The phrase “recent surge in sectarian violence” is particularly obfuscatory, as it wrongly suggests that it’s impossible to assign responsibility for that violence, even though it’s well-established that the government and its allies have done most of the killing (Amnesty International, 4/3/25; Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 5/2/25). The wording also inaccurately suggests that this phenomenon is new, an implication debunked by the Carnegie Endowment (5/14/25):

In 2015, fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, a predecessor of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham [HTS], which is led by Syria’s president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, killed at least 20 Druze villagers in Qalb Lozeh in Idlib governorate. Others were coerced into converting to Sunni Islam, while Druze shrines were desecrated and graves defaced.

Similarly, in August 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra was part of a coalition of armed groups that attacked predominantly Alawite villages, killing 190 civilians, including 18 children and 14 elderly men (BBC, 10/11/13). That track record might have been the basis for expressions of moral outrage against the al-Sharaa government’s “butchery,” but, fortunately for HTS and its partners, their massacres are benign.

The relative indifference with which the corporate media has treated sectarian killings carried out by HTS and allies, both before and since they came to power, could also have something to do with the US’s role in helping foment sectarianism in Syria in the run up to the war in the country (Truthout, 10/9/15).

A New York Times (5/16/25) report on Saudi Arabia and Qatar paying off Syria’s World Bank debt called that move “the latest victory for Syria’s new government as it attempts to stabilize the nation after a long civil war and decades of dictatorship.” Reporter Euan Ward went on to say that “there are still significant challenges ahead for the fractured nation, which has been rocked by repeated waves of sectarian violence in recent months.” At no point did Ward note that the government he said was trying to “stabilize” the nation has been carrying out that “sectarian violence.”

Nor did the Times‘ May 14 or May 16 articles mention, as the Conversation (5/12/25) did, that civil society groups have called for the al-Sharaa government “to issue protective religious rulings for minority communities”—the sort of step a government would take if it were seeking to “stabilize the nation.” “Their appeals have gone unanswered,” the Conversation noted.

The difference in the tenor of coverage of killings by the Assad government and that of the al-Sharaa government’s killings demonstrates the cynicism of corporate media’s humanitarian rhetoric whenever a state in America’s crosshairs is accused of serious crimes. Such preening is not merely hypocritical. It has nothing to do with protecting any population, and everything to do with how the US ruling class generates consent for its blood-drenched empire.

FEATURED IMAGE: Amnesty International’s depiction (4/3/25) of Syrians protesting sectarian killings (photo: Delil Souleiman/AFP).

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Gregory Shupak.

The New York Times (5/28/25) gave the last word to a Trump official who framed trans participation in high school sports as “violating women’s civil rights.”

California public schools are the latest target of Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, which is ramping up an investigation into high school sports after a transgender girl qualified for three track and field events at the upcoming state championships.

The DoJ is alleging that the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) allowing transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports could violate Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex.

The New York Times (5/28/25) covered this latest right-wing attack on trans youth in a fashion all too common for the paper (FAIR.org, 5/11/23): devoid of any perspectives from trans individuals.

The article, by Soumya Karlamangla, quoted four government officials who are against the participation of trans girls in girls sports. After quoting Trump demanding that “local authorities” bar the trans athlete’s participation, the paper turned to Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, who said in a statement, “It is perverse to allow males to compete against girls, invade their private spaces, and take their trophies.” The Times left this claim unchallenged, despite its inflammatory and misgendering language.

It quoted Gov. Gavin Newsom, speaking on his podcast (3/6/25) to far-right influencer Charlie Kirk, calling trans athletes’ participation in female sports “deeply unfair.” And it quoted Bill Essayli, US attorney for the Central District of California, asserting in a statement that “discrimination on the basis of sex is illegal and immoral”—by which he means that including trans female athletes discriminates against other women, and seeks to deny that discrimination against trans athletes is sex discrimination.

The Times made no effort to evaluate Essayli’s claim—for instance, by noting that courts have interpreted Title IX preventing discrimination “on the basis of sex” to also protect trans students.

Against these four anti–trans rights sources, the piece cited only one statement from a coalition of LGBTQ advocates, which pointed out that sports organizations were following “inclusive, evidence-based policies that ensure fairness for all athletes, regardless of their gender identity.” The coalition argued: “Undermining that now for political gain is a transparent attempt to scapegoat a child and distract from real national challenges Americans are facing.”

Physical and mental health benefits

“I’m still a child, you’re an adult, and for you to act like a child shows how you are as a person,” said AB Hernandez, the 16-year-old transgender athlete, referring to the people who “spent hours heckling and harassing Hernandez as she competed” (Defector, 5/28/25).

Including the voices of trans athletes and their families, or of more rights advocates, might have introduced readers to some of the many arguments and evidence that exist in support of allowing trans athletes to compete in alignment with their identities.

Gender nonconforming people are already at heightened risk for suicide, according to a 2020 study. Eighty-six percent of trans youth have considered killing themselves. School belonging, emotional neglect by family, and internalized self-stigma made statistically significant contributions to recent suicidality in this population. Furthermore, a study in the journal Nature (9/26/24) found that state-level anti-transgender laws increased suicide attempts by transgender and nonbinary youth.

Meanwhile, playing school sports confers physical and mental health benefits that should not be denied to trans children. The Human Rights Campaign’s analysis of the 2023 LGBTQ+ Youth survey, by HRC and the University of Connecticut, found that

high school-aged transgender and non-binary student athletes reported higher grades, lower levels of depression, and were less likely to feel unsafe at school than those who did not play sports.

Not biological men 

Ohio Capital Journal (6/3/22) noted that a proposed state ban on trans athletes was accompanied by intrusive verification requirements: “If someone is suspected to be transgender, she must go through evaluations of her external and internal genitalia, testosterone levels and genetic makeup.”

The idea that cisgender boys will “pretend” to be trans in order to participate in girls’ sports is preposterous. Not to mention, natural variations, both physical and otherwise, are common in all sports—especially in schools where children are growing rapidly at different paces (HRC). It’s a combination of factors—not just one—that determine athleticism.

In 2024, the Times (4/23/24) reported on a study by the International Olympic Committee that found that while trans women displayed an advantage in handgrip strength over their cisgender counterparts, they are actually weaker in other areas, like jumping ability, cardiovascular fitness and lung function. The main point of the study was that, when it comes to athletics, trans women are not biological men. 

Bans on transgender athletes participating in girls’ sports also put cisgender girls at risk. For example, in 2022, House Republicans in Ohio passed a bill banning trans girls from girls’ sports. It includes genital inspection for any girl who is “accused” of being trans (Ohio Capital Journal, 6/3/22). Cisgender athletes are frequently accused of being trans by transphobes claiming to “protect” women (FAIR.org, 8/21/09; Extra!, 10/12).

During the 2024 summer Olympics, Algerian boxing champion Imane Khelif, who is a cisgender woman, was accused of being male. Now World Boxing has announced all athletes must undergo mandatory genetic testing to determine their sex (CNN, 5/30/25).

The Times’ framing, which allowed adult politicians and attorneys to smear already vulnerable trans children as predatory, “perverse” and invasive, without any perspectives from actual transgender people, let alone any proper legal arguments in their favor, fell short of even “both-sidesing” the issue.

As journalist and activist Erin Reed said recently on CounterSpin (5/23/25):

“Both sides” coverage and “the truth is in the middle” coverage and “giving both sides a chance to make their point”—that would be an improvement over what we have right now…. This is not even “both sides” reporting. It’s not even “the truth is in the middle” reporting. These papers have taken a position on this, and it’s a position that’s not supported by the science.

FEATURED IMAGE: AB Hernandez, the 16-year-old Californian at the center of a debate about trans youth participation in sports (Capital & Main, 5/15/25).

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

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Olivia Riggio.

Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 5/22/25) published a statement, ostensibly from embassy shooting suspect Elias Rodriguez, “citing the war in Gaza as its central grievance and framing the killings as an act of political protest.”

Elias Rodriguez is the suspect in the murder of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington, DC, outside a diplomatic reception at the Capital Jewish Museum. Journalist Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 5/22/25) has posted what he believes to be an authentic manifesto of the alleged shooter, a story that was subsequently reported on in the Jewish and Israeli press (Forward, 5/22/25; Israel Hayom, 5/22/25; Jewish Chronicle, 5/22/25). If the document is authentic, it appears the alleged gunman was violently opposed to the bloodbath in Gaza and the actions of the Israeli government.

Invoking the Palestinian death toll, the statement said, “The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion.” It referenced the 1964 attempt on the life of Robert McNamara, Defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, saying McNamara’s attacker was “incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam.”

Rodriguez (AP, 5/22/25) reportedly told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”

‘Part of global surge’

Details are still emerging about how and why the shooter chose these two people at this particular event. The Washington Post (5/25/25) noted that the victims were both employees of the Israeli Embassy who had attended the Young Diplomats Reception, an annual event hosted by the American Jewish Committee, a Zionist organization. There is nothing in the public record that suggests Rodriguez harbored antisemitic sentiments or targeted his victims for being Jews. Rodriguez’ reported statements suggest that the assassinations were motivated by opposition to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. The words “Jew” or “Jewish” do not appear in his purported manifesto.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (5/22/25) reported that Rodriguez’ Chicago apartment had many political signs, including one that said “‘Tikkun Olam means FREE PALESTINE.’” The wire explained, “Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase meaning ‘repair the world’ that has come to reflect a shorthand for social justice.” It’s a phrase commonly used by progressive Jews, and dubious decor for an antisemite. (FAIR readers might remember the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun, which recently closed—Forward, 4/15/24).

The New York Times (5/22/25) framed the embassy murders as “an extreme example of what law enforcement officials and others call a global surge in antisemitic incidents that emerged after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages on October 7, 2023.”

But a New York Times report (5/22/25) asserted definitively that Rodriguez’ violent action was antisemitic and must be understood in the context of global anti-Jewish hate. “Slaying Outside DC Jewish Museum Is Part of Global Surge in Antisemitism,” announced the headline over the piece by White House correspondent Michael Shear. Its first paragraph implicitly attributed rising antisemitism to the Hamas attack of October 7, describing “a global surge in antisemitic incidents that emerged after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages on October 7, 2023.”

The Times quoted a number of politicians and activists who labeled the shooting antisemitic. Shear wrote, for instance:

The shooting prompted fresh outcries from political leaders around the world, including President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, both of whom expressed outrage at what they called evidence of antisemitic hatred. Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform that “these horrible DC killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW!”

Another key passage pinned rising antisemitism in the United States on the pro-Palestinian movement:

In the United States, the war and the pro-Palestinian movement have amped up tensions and fears about antisemitism. The shooting at the museum is the type of development that many Jews, as well as some Jewish scholars and activists, have been worried about and warning about. They argue that the explosion of antisemitic language has already led to violent personal attacks.

“You can’t draw a direct line from the campus to the gun,” said David Wolpe, who’s the emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and who was a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School as campus protests broke out there last year.

“But the campuses normalized hate and anathematized Jews,” Rabbi Wolpe said. “Against that backdrop, violence is as unsurprising as it is appalling. After all, ‘globalize the intifada’ looks a lot like this.”

‘Corrosive to America’

The New York Post (5/22/25) said the embassy shooting was “antisemitic terrorism, as is nearly all ‘anti-Zionist’ action.”

None of these statements were ever countered or questioned in the piece, which more or less presented their viewpoint as unchallenged fact. While the Times prolifically cited those quick to conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism, it failed to acknowledge that a great many American Jews have been protesting against the Israeli government’s attacks on civilians in Gaza, or to cite scholarship like that of Yael Feinberg, who has found that “there is no more important factor in explaining variation in antisemitic hate crimes in this country than Israel being engaged in a particularly violent military operation.”

This Times news story fits neatly into the message of the right’s editorials on the shooting. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (5/22/25) said that, in light of the shooting,

anti-Zionism, including enthusiasm for the total destruction of Israel and efforts to ostracize its domestic supporters, is corrosive to America and is stirring up old dangers for Jews.

Calling the killings “antisemitic terrorism,” the New York Post editorial board (5/22/25) said, “Rodriguez did just what all those college protesters have been demanding: ‘Globalize the intifada.’”

The Times jumped in on this Murdoch media rhetoric in a news article by Sharon Otterman (5/23/25), saying the killings

cast a harsh spotlight on the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States and the impact even peaceful protests might be having on attitudes against people connected to Israel.

It included this nugget:

Oren Segal, senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence at the Anti-Defamation League, said that while attending a rally or being a member of pro-Palestinian groups does not predict violence, the broader ecosystem being created, particularly online, by groups strongly opposed to Israel, “created an environment that made the tragedy last night more likely.”

Guilt by association

The New York Times (5/18/25) described the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther as an effort  at “branding a broad range of critics of Israel as ‘effectively a terrorist support network,’ so that they could be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered ‘open society.’” (It dubiously calls this “an ambitious plan to fight antisemitism.”) 

The Times‘ Shear joined the right-wing Post and Journal in framing the attack as an act of antisemitism, as well as building a “guilt by association” narrative, implicating peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters rather than acknowledging any responsibility on the part of Israel’s war and its US backers. They suggest that, to stem antisemitism and acts of political violence against Israel, the logical solution is not to end the genocide, but to suppress and punish pro-Palestinian protest—something that the Trump administration will almost certainly use the embassy worker killings to do even more harshly (Jewish Currents, 5/23/25).

His reporting might have been better informed if he had read the piece by his Times colleague Katie J.M. Baker (New York Times, 5/18/25) about the Heritage Foundation’s agenda to destroy pro-Palestine activism. Baker wrote of Heritage’s “Project Esther“:

It singled out anti-Zionist groups that had organized pro-Palestinian protests, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, but the intended targets stretched much further. In pitch materials for potential donors, Heritage presented an illustration of a pyramid topped by “progressive ‘elites’ leading the way,” which included Jewish billionaires such as the philanthropist George Soros and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois.

Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (5/19/25) followed up to note that Project Esther targets “the majority of Jewish House Democrats who declined to censure their colleague Rashida Tlaib for anti-Israel language.” It “describes the Jewish congresswoman Jan Schakowsky as part of a ‘Hamas caucus’ in Congress, one that’s also supported by the Jewish senator Bernie Sanders.” Goldberg observed that “there’s something off about Project Esther’s definition of antisemitism,” because it so often “tags Jews as perpetrators.”

Antisemitic Zionists

Jewish Council for Public Affairs CEO Amy Spitalnick told NPR (5/14/25): “If the administration were serious about countering antisemitism, first and foremost they wouldn’t be appointing people with antisemitic and other extremist ties to senior roles within the administration.”

These passages in the Times allude to a point pro-Palestine advocates have made for a long time, which is that anti-Zionism not only isn’t antisemitism (many Jews are not Zionists, just as many Zionists are not Jews), but that a large part of the right-wing Zionist movement is inherently antisemitic. It’s often rooted in Christian apocalyptic fantasies in which Israel’s creation brings about the End Times.

The book One Palestine, Complete, by Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev makes the case that under British rule in Palestine, between World War I and the founding of the Jewish state in 1948, the imperialists sided with Zionist forces against the Arabs not despite their Christian antisemitism, but because of it. In a fiery assessment of the recently deceased Jerry Falwell, journalist Christopher Hitchens told CNN’s Anderson Cooper (Anderson Cooper 360°, 5/15/07) that the minister spent his life “fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping antisemitic innuendos into American politics,” along with other right-wing evangelists like Pat Robertson and Billy Graham. The white nationalist Richard Spencer admitted that he looked to Israel as a model of the white, gentile Xanadu he desired (Haaretz, 10/19/17).

Here at FAIR (5/1/05, 6/6/18, 11/6/23, 8/9/24, 2/19/25), we grow tired of having to point out that media, in the allegiance to the Israeli government narrative over Palestinian voices, use the insult of “antisemitism” to discredit criticism of Israel. Rodriguez’ alleged actions, of course, are not criticism but violence—murder is murder. But the Times’ evidence-free assertion that this attack was antisemitic adds to the false narrative that support for Palestine is inherently tied to bigotry against Jews.

In fact, news coverage of Jew-hatred should focus on the growing power of the racist right. The worst recent antisemitic incident in the United States was the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh (Axios, 6/16/23), carried out by a shooter obsessed with right-wing media tropes about Jews and immigration (FAIR.org, 10/30/18).

That case was often linked to Dylann Roof, the Charleston church killer. While Roof targeted Black Christians, his manifesto “railed against Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans, gays and Muslims”; Roof said that Adolf Hitler would someday “be inducted as a saint” (New York Times, 1/5/17). In short, anti-Jewish vigilantes put antisemitic ideas in their manifestos, which it appears Rodriguez didn’t do.

By contrast, these chilling ideas are widespread on the right. The QAnon movement, a proximate cohort to MAGA Trumpism, is enmeshed with antisemitic conspiracism (Guardian, 8/25/20; Just Security, 9/9/20; Newsweek, 6/28/21). NPR (5/14/25) reported that its investigation “identified three Trump officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists, including a man described by federal prosecutors as a ‘Nazi sympathizer,’ and a prominent Holocaust denier.” Though the Jewish Democratic Council of America (5/21/25) lists the numerous antisemitic offenses of the Trump administration, that doesn’t seem to steer the coverage of the politics of antisemitism in the Times the way ADL’s spurious equation of pro-Palestinian with anti-Jewish does.

‘A much wider smear campaign’

Guardian (10/3/24): “Among the most violent incidents of the last year were the fatal Chicago stabbing of six-year-old Wadea al-Fayoume and a Vermont shooting of three Palestinian college students that left one of them, 21-year-old Hisham Awartani, paralyzed.”

It’s worth mentioning that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment has also increased since the October 7 attacks of 2023 (NBC News, 4/13/24; Guardian, 10/3/24; Al Jazeera, 3/11/25). An Illinois man was convicted earlier this year of “fatally stabbing a Palestinian-American child in 2023 and severely wounding his mother,” who reported him saying, “You, as a Muslim, must die” (BBC, 2/28/25). ABC affiliate WLS (5/24/25) reported that in the window of Rodriguez’ home in Chicago, law enforcement found a photo of Wadee Alfayoumi, the 6-year-old victim in this crime.

In New York City, a pro-Israel mob terrorized a random woman mistaken for a pro-ceasefire activist; in addition to hurling rape threats, the crowd was heard chanting “death to Arabs” (PBS, 4/28/25; Battleground, 5/2/25). No arrests have been made at this time (Hell Gate, 5/23/25).

Benjamin Balthaser, an associate professor of English at Indiana University/South Bend who writes widely on Jewish subjects, told FAIR:

Over the past year and a half, we have seen an intensification of claims that all criticism and protest against Israel’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza are just masked antisemitism, culminating with the deportation of students, the defunding of major universities, and the banning of lawful student organizations. The Heritage Foundation, as part of its “Project 2025,” has gone further, to claim that Palestine solidarity organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace are directly connected to armed militant organizations such as Hamas, despite JVP’s commitment to nonviolence and a peaceful solution to the now nearly century-long conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Equating a lone gunman with campus protest not only lacks evidence, it is part of a much wider smear campaign with the sole intent to criminalize legitimate, legal protest for peace and human rights. It not only runs afoul of cherished American principles of the First Amendment, it also cheapens and hollows out any attempt to hold antisemites, such as in Trump’s cabinet, accountable.

What happened in DC was alarming news that needed to be reported. But Shear’s piece, along with propaganda in the Murdoch press, added to the false Israeli line that all the people condemning genocide in Palestine are violent Jew-haters—or, in the case of Jewish activists for Palestine, self-hating Jews.

Featured image: Embassy shooting suspect Elias Rodriguez, interviewed by Scripps News (1/23/18) at an anti-Amazon protest in 2018.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Natasha Lennard (Intercept (5/20/25): “News organizations should…have long ago stopped affording the Trump administration such credulous coverage.”

A FAIR post (5/22/25) on New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s selective defense of press freedom (New York Times, 5/13/25) referred to him as someone who “clings to the false god of journalistic neutrality at all costs.” Natasha Lennard’s piece in the Intercept (5/20/25) on media coverage of the Trump administration’s arrest of Rep. LaMonica McIver (D–N.J.) illustrates what we mean by this.

McIver, Lennard wrote, was charged with “assaulting” an ICE officer when she “attempted to conduct an oversight visit earlier this month at a massive, new ICE detention facility in her hometown of Newark, New Jersey.” Such oversight is part of representatives’ constitutional duty, and is specifically authorized by law in the case of ICE facilities. Lennard noted that if this had happened in a different country—one not favored by Washington—this would have been reported, accurately enough, as something like, “Regime targets opposition politician with fabricated charges for carrying out oversight.”

But as it happened in the United States, that’s not how leading US news outlets—including the New York Times (5/19/25)—reported it. “Rep. McIver Charged With Assault Over Clash Outside Newark ICE Center” was the Times headline over an article that followed the Times‘ he said/she said stylebook. “Both sides have pointed to videos from the chaotic scuffle…to accuse each other of instigating the altercation.”

As the Intercept‘s subhead remarked, “You’d never know reading the New York Times that charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver are nothing but an authoritarian attack.” The Times article did not provide the context that ICE has been seizing immigrants without due process and shipping them to foreign prisons in violation of court orders—background that is critical to judging whether the prosecution of a lawmaker that attempted to investigate the agency is in good faith.

“Clash” is a useful word if you want to make an unarmed legislator sound like an evenly matched adversary for Homeland Security commandos (New York Times, 5/19/25).

In his essay, Sulzberger warned that without press freedom, people might not know when their rights are being taken away, or democratic structures undermined:

Without a free press, how will people know if their government is acting legally and in their interest? How will people know if their leaders are telling the truth? How will people know if their institutions are acting to the benefit of society? How will people know if their freedoms are being sustained, defended and championed—or eroded by forces that seek to replace truth and reality with propaganda and misinformation?

But if you follow the Times‘ approach to journalism, in which you must never say that something is happening if someone in power claims it is not happening, then your audience won’t know when their government is acting illegally, or denying truth and reality. (“You can’t just say the president is lying,” Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller told a DC panel—Extra!, 1–2/05—expressing an actual rule that was enforced even on the paper’s opinion columnists.)

Journalists inevitably, inescapably, have values, and those values necessarily affect what they communicate to their audiences. If they value democracy, then they communicate to their audience that arrests of opposition lawmakers are dangerous. If, on the other hand, they value the appearance of neutrality above all else, then the message readers will get is: Who’s to say?

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

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Jim Naureckas.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger (5/13/25) says the press should ask itself, “Were we open-minded enough to unexpected facts?” It’s a good question.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger delivered an impassioned defense of  press freedom to the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, which later ran in the Times (5/13/25). At first glance, Sulzberger is repeating what many free press advocates, including myself (FAIR.org, 11/14/24, 2/26/25, 4/25/25), have said, which is that press freedom is under attack, and it is incumbent upon free society to fight back.

Of course, this is A.G. Sulzberger, who clings to the false god of journalistic neutrality at all costs, so his otherwise hard-hitting critique of Trump’s all-out assault on the press and his emphasis on “upsetting powerful interests of every type” is directly undermined by his insistence that “our job is to cover political debates, not to join them,” and that “we are nobody’s opposition” and “nobody’s cheerleader.” (FAIR dissected Sulzberger’s virtually identical arguments about the role of journalism under Trump back in September—see FAIR.org, 9/6/24.)

But the notion that journalists don’t play favorites is belied by another passage in Sulzberger’s updated manifesto. He wrote:

A record number of journalists have been killed or jailed in recent years. Many more are subjected to campaigns of harassment, intimidation, surveillance and censorship. Those efforts have been perhaps most obvious and intense in authoritarian states like China and Russia. But a more insidious playbook for undermining the press has emerged in places like Hungary and India. Places where democracy persists but in a more conditional way, under leaders who were elected legitimately and then set about undermining checks on their power.

What’s most striking about this description is what it leaves out. The link is to a press release by the Committee to Protect Journalists (1/16/25), titled “The Number of Journalists Jailed Worldwide Reached a Near All-Time High in 2024.” “China, Israel and Myanmar were the leading jailers of reporters, followed by Belarus and Russia,” the release stated.

Deadliest country for journalists

Committee to Protect Journalists (2/12/25): “The toll of conflict on the press is most glaring in the unprecedented number of journalists and media workers killed in the Israel/Gaza war, 85 in 2024, and 78 in 2023.”

The fact that Israel found itself in a grouping with authoritarian regimes (most of which dwarf it in population, no less) seems like it would be worth a mention, but Sulzberger didn’t agree. He noted the authoritarian turn in India and Hungary—countries that imprisoned three and zero journalists, respectively, according to CPJ—while ignoring Israel, which jailed 43.

Israel is often pitched to Americans as a Western democratic regime in a neighborhood full of backward autocracies. CPJ noted: “A total of 108 journalists were imprisoned in the Middle East and North Africa, almost half of those detained by Israel.” That means Israel’s jailing of journalists significantly overshadows the press repression in places like Egypt (Amnesty International, 7/25/24) and Iran (Reporters Without Borders, 9/11/23), both of which have far bigger populations than Israel.

But Israel’s imprisoning journalists turns out to be the more benign part of its program of suppressing the press. CPJ also released a report (2/12/25) titled “2024 Is Deadliest Year for Journalists in CPJ History; Almost 70% Killed by Israel.” The report said, “At least 124 journalists and media workers were killed last year, nearly two-thirds of them Palestinians killed by Israel.” The group also investigated Israel’s killing of journalists in Lebanon (CPJ, 10/10/24). Altogether, there were 82 journalists killed by Israel in 2024, 13 times as many as were killed in the next-deadliest countries for journalists, Sudan and Pakistan (with six each).

And the world has known about how dire the situation is for the press in this operation from its earliest stages. Less than two months after hostilities began, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (11/28/23) reported, in a piece called “Israel’s War on Journalists”:

Israel’s assault on Gaza has quickly become the deadliest for journalists covering conflict zones since 1992. No other war in the 21st century has been so lethal for journalists, with 34 killed just within its first two weeks.

I covered this issue for FAIR.org (10/19/23) in the Gaza assault’s early days. But downplaying Israel’s often lethal repression of journalism has been a pattern for the Times generally (FAIR.org, 5/1/24), not just for its publisher.

‘Would-be strongmen’

Sulzberger (Washington Post, 9/5/24) wrote that “my colleagues and I have spent months studying how press freedom has been attacked in Hungary—as well as in other democracies such as India and Brazil.” But not, apparently, in Israel.

As mentioned earlier, this is not the first time Sulzberger has made such an omission. Last year, he wrote a lengthy article in the Washington Post (9/5/24) about the decline of press freedom in Hungary, Brazil and India. He wrote that these countries are run by “would-be strongmen” who “have developed a style” of repression against the media that is “more subtle than their counterparts in totalitarian states such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, who systematically censor, jail or kill journalists.”

It was an interesting piece, but again, Israel’s war on the press went unmentioned, even though it is a key example of press freedom decline in a Western state where the government has become more illiberal and authoritarian (NPR, 1/12/23; New Statesman, 1/17/23; Foreign Affairs, 2/8/23).

Press freedom in Israel has been on the decline since the invasion of Gaza began in October 2023. In that time, the government has pushed a boycott of the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz (Guardian, 11/24/24), moved to privatize public broadcasting (Jerusalem Post, 11/24/24) and increased censorship (+972, 5/20/24). The country has banned the broadcaster Al Jazeera (5/6/24). After Sulzberger delivered his address, the Israeli government moved to take even more control over broadcasting (Times of Israel, 5/18/25).

Israel’s killing and jailing of journalists, as well as its domestic clampdown and censorship of the press, is arguably at the center of the global crisis in press freedom. The fact that Sulzberger omitted this undercuts his point, because it reinforces the perception that the Times goes out of its way to bury or sanitize unsavory details about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians (FAIR.org, 5/16/25) and advance Israel’s narrative (Literary Hub, 4/30/24)—calling into question his claim that a free press is essential to “arm everyone else with the information and context they need to understand and meet the moment.”

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

FEATURED IMAGE: The Committee to Project Journalists’ image of a van from the Al-Quds Al-Youm TV channel that was hit by an Israeli air strike in Gaza in December 2024, killing four journalists and a media worker. (Photo: Reuters/Khamis Said)

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

The World Health Organization (5/12/25) “calls for the protection of health care and for an immediate end to the aid blockade, which is starving people, obstructing their right to health, and robbing them of dignity and hope.”

More than two months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a complete blockade of aid—including food, water and medical supplies—from entering the besieged Gaza strip. It’s a severe escalation of Israel’s now 19-month genocide against Palestinians in Gaza—and what the World Health Organization (5/12/25) has described as “one of the world’s worst hunger crises, unfolding in real time.”

With no replenishing stock, aid groups have begun running out of supplies to distribute to families in need.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (5/16/25) reports that their “flour and food parcels have run out,” and that “one third of essential medical supplies are already out of stock.” More than a week ago, World Central Kitchen reported that they no longer have supplies to cook hot meals and bake bread for starving families—they’ve since repurposed their pots to distribute filtered water.

With Gaza’s entire population experiencing crisis-level food insecurity, and with three-quarters facing “emergency” or “catastrophic” levels of deprivation, the famine has been recognized by Human Rights Watch interim executive director Federico Borello as “a tool of extermination.”

‘To pressure Hamas’

The New York Times‘ online headline (4/28/25) reduces the prospect of mass starvation to the innocuous phrase “Gaza aid.”

At first glance, the April 29 New York Times offered what many would call an objective account with the headline: “UN Faults Israel Over Blockade of Aid for Gaza” (web version here: 4/28/25).

A closer look at the piece however, reveals the Times’ usual spinelessness in its Gaza coverage, unquestioningly accepting Israeli framing in its supposed right to carry out its ongoing genocide.

Reporter Aaron Boxerman writes up top:

For more than a month and a half, Israel has blocked food, medicine and other relief from entering the devastated Gaza Strip in an attempt to pressure Hamas to free the dozens of remaining Israeli hostages there. It argues that its blockade is lawful and that Gaza has enough provisions despite the restrictions.

That frame looks like a simple sentence, but note that it tacitly requires you to accept that Israel determines whether people in the Gaza Strip can receive the basics for human life—asking why Israel is in charge of Palestinians’ food and medicine is beyond this conversation’s walls.

Then, without even a comma, we are told that the denial of life to all Gazans is “an attempt to pressure Hamas”—Boxerman makes a silent skip over the acceptability of collective punishment there, and a frictionless transmission of Israel’s rationale for its actions. That Israel has itself deprioritized the release of the hostages vis-à-vis the reoccupation of Gaza is off the page. But that Israel “argues” the blockade is lawful and that Gaza has what we’re told to accept as “enough provisions”? Those are statements that the Times suggests can stand alone.

Who you choose to believe

The New York Times (4/28/25) describes the relationship between Israel, which has announced a policy of starving millions of people, and the UN, which is trying to force Israel to allow food aid into Gaza, as “fraught with mutual recrimination.”

But aha, you say, here comes another view—though it’s already set up by being in the responsive, “others differ” position:

The United Nations and aid groups say the blockade has further harmed Palestinians already reeling from more than a year and a half of war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced well over a million and leveled large swaths of the enclave’s cities.

While true, and ostensibly sympathetic, what with the reeling and the leveling, notice how this is not a direct response to the claims in the lead: that the blockade is lawful, and that Gaza has all it needs. It’s just a statement that the people of Gaza have suffered tremendously. And that even that is just a thing the UN and aid groups “say.”

You could tighten this all to the NBC News headline (4/17/25) Belén Fernández clocked in her piece on coverage of Israel’s starvation of Gaza (FAIR.org, 4/25/25): “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.”

All of this depends on who you choose to believe, seems to be elite media’s message—with a few winky-wink tips on who to believe.

Boxerman goes on to report:

Ordinary Gazans have lamented the rising price of basic commodities under the pressure of the blockade. In some cases, the restrictions have turned the quest for getting enough nutritious food into a daily struggle.

It’s like an unfunny game of “find the qualifier”: What’s an “ordinary” Gazan, and who are the extraordinary ones who deserve to starve? What defines the “some cases”?  Is un-nutritious food freely available? When does a “quest” become a “struggle”?

It’s a perverse way to describe a situation where widespread starvation is not looming or imminent, but well underway. But it’s an excellent way to tell people they don’t necessarily, if you look at it a certain way, need to give a damn.

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

Research assistance: Wilson Korik

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

It seems like an odd moment for the US media to do a hit job on Brazil’s coffee industry.

Protective tariffs have been used since the 1800s in the US to protect domestic industry and increase employment. As Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado and other economists influential on Latin America’s “Pink Tide” argued, tariffs are also fundamental for Global South nations to escape from the prison of agricultural commodity export dependence, by enabling them to industrialize through import substitution.

Regardless of heterodox economists’ arguments in favor of import tariffs, however, there seems to be little sense in the US government imposing tariffs on products that can never be produced nationally, like bananas or coffee. This is what it did on April 2—the day after April Fool’s day—when President Trump announced new, blanket tariffs on all imports from 57 countries around the world.

Compared to other countries (like Cambodia or Madagascar) in the Global South, Brazil, which had a trade deficit with the United States in 2024, got off relatively easy, with 10%. One sector that will hurt, however, is coffee.

Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world, and its largest export market is the United States. Brazil exported $1.8 billion, or 15% of its total coffee production, to the United States in 2024. In 2025, US consumers will have to foot the bill for a 10% tariff on a product whose price has already increased by 6.9% this year, due to the effects of climate change weather events on last year’s harvest cycle.

‘Harvested by trafficked slaves’

AP (4/24/25): “Eight Brazilian coffee workers…allege… they were put in filthy housing and the cost of their transportation, food and equipment was deducted from their pay.”

The US’s new tariffs on Brazil came into effect on April 5. Nineteen days later, a Delaware-based NGO named Coffee Watch, which provides no funding transparency on its website, conducted a media blitz against Brazil’s coffee industry. It issued a letter to the US Customs and Border Protection, demanding a halt on all Brazilian coffee imports to the United States. On April 24, the New York Times, Guardian and AP, which sells content to hundreds of sites and newspapers, ran simultaneous articles on Coffee Watch’s campaign.

Coffee Watch built on the stories of eight workers rescued by Brazilian federal labor inspectors from what the Brazil’s government called “slave-like conditions.” These workers came from five of Brazil’s 330,000 coffee farms. Coffee Watch and other quoted experts extrapolated from their cases to advocate for a complete halt of Brazilian coffee exports to the United States—itself a country where hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants work on farms under conditions that could be categorized as “slave-like” within Brazil’s legal framework.

The New York Times article (4/24/25), headlined “Forced Labor Taints Brazilian Coffee, Say Complaints to US Authorities,” detailed a lawsuit filed against Northern companies, including Starbucks, Nestlé and Dunkin’, on behalf of eight workers from five of the 19,000 farms affiliated with the Cooxupé cooperative. The article, by the Times‘ Ephrat Livni, went on to describe Coffee Watch’s efforts to force the US Customs and Border Protection to block all coffee entering from Brazil.

“This isn’t about a few bad actors,” the Times quoted Etelle Higonnet, the founder and director of Coffee Watch. “We’re exposing an entrenched system that traps millions in extreme poverty and thousands in outright slavery.”

The subheading of the Guardian article (4/24/25) read, “Brazil has been the world’s leading coffee producer due to the forced labor of enslaved Africans and Afro-Brazilians.”

AP (4/24/25) quoted International Rights Advocates founder Terry Collingsworth, who is representing the plaintiffs, saying, “Consumers are paying obscene amounts for a cup of Starbucks coffee that was harvested by trafficked slaves.”

More labor rights than US

New York Times (4/24/25): “The laborers end up…harvesting coffee under conditions not so different from those of their enslaved forebears.”

From reporting like this, the casual reader might think that Brazil’s coffee industry is based on slave labor, and that many or most of the people who work picking coffee are enslaved. This is a greatly misleading depiction of the very real labor issues in Brazil.

Although landless agricultural workers in Brazil, like nearly everywhere else in the world, suffer from low wages, lack of job stability and oppressive labor conditions, Brazil’s coffee farm workers have significantly better labor rights than farm workers in the United States. Nearly half of the US farm workforce are undocumented immigrants with no labor rights whatsoever, in fear of being arrested, imprisoned and/or deported by ICE.

The arguments advanced to justify banning coffee imports from Brazil to the US rely on outliers representing a tiny portion of the workforce, not the norm, as these sensational articles present.

Brazil’s coffee industry provides 580,000 full time jobs and millions of harvest-season temp jobs. According to Coffee Watch’s own letter, the highest number of workers rescued from “slave-like conditions” in any year since 2003 was 333, in 2023.

When Higonnet tells the Times that “thousands” of coffee workers in Brazil work in “outright slavery” (a more than semantic leap from the Brazilian legal category of “slave-like” working conditions), she is misleadingly referring to Coffee Watch’s composite figure of 4,128, cited in Coffee Watch’s letter to Customs as the total number of coffee workers rescued from “slave-like” conditions between 2003 and 2024.

Whereas the number of 221 workers rescued from slave-like conditions in 2024 certainly doesn’t represent the total number of workers subjected to those conditions that year, no methodology is presented to estimate what that undercount might be. The number of Brazil’s federal labor inspectors is 2,800, including 900 new hires this year, and the number estimated by IPEA needed to bring Brazil up to international standards is 3,700, so an undercount is a clear possibility, but it’s certainly a far cry from Collingsworth’s insinuation that most Starbucks coffee purchased from Brazil was produced by “trafficked slaves.”

On the back of slave labor

Guardian (4/24/25): “Starbucks charges like $6 for a cup of coffee, where most of that has been harvested by forced laborers and child laborers.”

Like the United States and most other countries in the Americas, Brazil was built on the back of slave labor, and was the last country to eradicate it, in 1888. The legacy of this today is that it has the highest Afro-descendent population outside of Africa, and huge problems of structural racism, including large but shrinking levels of inequality, and lack of opportunities for the poorest segments of society, which are disproportionately constituted of the 56% of the nation’s population that is Afro-Brazilian.

There is a large population of landless rural workers, who with support from the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST in Portuguese) and the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) have been successfully fighting for land rights since the end of the US-backed military dictatorship in 1985. Today, although millions of landless rural workers toil away in degrading conditions for low wages on farms producing export commodity crops like coffee, sugar and soy—some of which cross the line into violating Brazil’s slave-labor legislation—there is also a growing population of millions of family farmers who don’t employ anyone.

Today, 78% of Brazil’s 330,000 coffee farms, producing around 48% of the total amount of coffee, are small-holder family farms. If Coffee Watch succeeds in lobbying the US government to halt imports from Brazil, the hardest-hit sector will be the same group that fair trade advocates work to empower. Without millions ferreted away in investment funds and offshore holdings, it’s the family farms that run the risk of financial ruin, not the agribusiness plantations, or companies like Starbucks and Nestlé that work with them. When small farmers lose their livelihood, they often become rural workers themselves, which, as Coffee Watch’s own letter to Border Patrol demonstrates, are among the lowest-paid and most vulnerable labor sectors in Brazil.

Based on the actions of five farms that belong to a cooperative of 19,000 of them, Coffee Watch and the media organizations supporting its campaign are targeting an industry largely composed of family farmers. It’s reminiscent of Operation Car Wash, an “anti-corruption” campaign backed by the US DoJ that bankrupted Brazil’s five largest construction and engineering companies, and caused 4.4 million direct and indirect job losses, under the guise of punishing a handful of corrupt business executives.

Just as was the case with corruption in the construction industry, the directors of the farms, the cooperative and the US corporations they sell to deserve to be held liable for their labor crimes. But punishing the industry as a whole will cause disproportionate suffering for the working class and poor, and raise Brazil’s level of extreme poverty.

Different definitions

Coffee Watch’s letter to acting Customs Commissioner Pete R. Flores cited US and International Labor Organization (ILO) legislation on slave labor used to justify the demand to block coffee imports from Brazil, but uses the Brazilian federal government’s much wider definition of “slave-like” labor conditions for the facts and figures used to back its argument.

Brazil, a nation with a long history of slavery and oppressive labor conditions in rural areas, first recognized modern slavery as a problem in 1995, and widened its definition of “slave-like” labor in 2003 under President Lula da Silva. It created a series of enforcement mechanisms to hold companies accountable for violating labor laws, including a “dirty list” of companies convicted of using slave labor. These employers are required to pay a minimum of 20 months salary at minimum wage to each rescued worker, as well as court fines, and can face up to eight years in prison.

Companies stay on the dirty list for two years and, during this time, are blocked from receiving government contracts or credit. Among the best-known companies that have appeared on the list is FEMSA, the world’s largest bottler of Coca-Cola. FEMSA was put on the list in 2018 after labor inspectors discovered truckers and warehouse workers at one of its Brazilian plants were being forced to work between 80 and 140 hours of overtime per month.

This was one of many cases in which “slave-like” working conditions, although oppressive and illegal, did not mean they were being held captive or forced to work for no remuneration. Brazil’s definition of slave-like working conditions has some overlap with US and ILO law, for example, holding workers in captivity and forcing them to work for very low or no wages. But it also includes things that are legal in the US, even for those US agricultural workers who are not undocumented, let alone the US’s 800,000 prison slave laborers.

As Brazil’s National Justice Council explains, the 2003 change in Brazil’s definition of slave labor represents

significant progress in the fight against this social problem, because it goes beyond lack of freedom, expanding the criminal definition of slavery to include cases of subjection to degrading working conditions, exhaustive work hours or debt bondage.

Coffee Watch’s own letter to Flores states:

The Brazilian approach to forced labor is somewhat more expansive than the ILO’s, as it may allow for prosecution of employers who subject workers to extremely degrading conditions, regardless of whether coercion was present in the employment relationship.

Any single violation of Brazil’s different criteria for slave-like working conditions makes the employer liable. This can include things like excessively long work days, not having an adequate number of bathrooms for the number of workers, making workers rent gloves and other safety equipment from the employer, not compensating workers for transportation to and from the work site, and not providing an adequate amount of drinking water. It would be easy enough for an organization such as Coffee Watch to verify this, but it’s a fair assumption to make that at least some of the coffee workers rescued from slave-like conditions since 2003 were victims of oppressive labor conditions that would not constitute slave labor by ILO or US legal criteria.

Landless rural laborers

This is in no way meant to minimize the oppression of those rural workers in Brazil’s coffee trade who are working in what Brazil’s government calls slave-like conditions. With over 1 million people employed in the sector, however, their situation is an outlier. Much more troublesome are the low wages and lousy working conditions that represent the norm in the industry—especially the fact that most temporary harvest laborers work off the books, outside of many of the safeguards in place to protect worker rights.

Another problem is the low number of labor inspectors—the result of six years of gutting of the Labor Ministry by neoliberal presidents Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, who, thanks to a constitutional amendment passed in 2017, left the government with neoliberal spending caps. These were only partially dismantled by a compromise amendment called the New Fiscal Framework, enacted as Lula returned to power in 2023.

Capping social spending increases at 2.5% per year above inflation may have led to the compromise of only hiring 900 of the 1,800 inspectors needed to bring Brazil up to international labor standards, but the fact remains that Brazil has not reached the goal of one inspector for 10,000–15,000 workers recommended by the International Labor Organization.

Around the world, landless rural laborers are among the most oppressed, poorest members of the labor force. Nevertheless, Brazilian coffee farms are not regularly raided by masked government police and their workers thrown into prison camps. In this political juncture, US institutions have little moral standing to criticize labor rights for agricultural workers in other countries—especially in countries like Brazil, whose labor rights issues stem in part from the US-backed military dictatorship’s systematic campaign of arrest, torture and murder of labor union leaders.

Fundraising boost

The idea that Trump’s US Customs and Border Protection would act to increase the price of coffee right now, in the name of “human rights,” based on abuses in five coffee farms, is very unlikely. This exposes the move as a publicity stunt, clearly designed to boost fundraising and legitimacy for a new NGO.

If Coffee Watch were focused more on improving the lives of coffee workers than on institutional promotion, it could show solidarity by supporting the MST and CONTAG in their fight to help landless agricultural workers start their own farms.

Taking big corporations like Starbucks and Nestlé to task for failing to obey local labor laws is commendable. But given the long history of US NGOs acting as regime change cheerleaders for the US State Department in Latin America, the priority that many of these organizations place on self-advancement over benefiting their target populations, and the long, cushy relationship between sleazy corporations like ExxonMobil and NGOs like Transparency International USA, can human rights guidelines for the Global South established by a US organization with no funding transparency really be trusted?

You would think a publication like the New York Times would exercise enough due diligence to include the voice of, say, someone from Brazil’s DA office, or an official from an agency that works to monitor, punish and prevent occurrences of slave-like working conditions. Instead, it published a slightly modified press release from Coffee Watch, and the journalists involved probably thought they were doing their good deed for the month.

Featured image: Cachoeirinha farm in Nova Resende, Brazil, on the government’s “dirty list” for labor abuses (photo: Ministry of Labor and Employment).

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Brian Mier.

Since the earliest days of the post–October 7 US/Israeli genocide in Gaza, corporate media outlets have claimed that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields. Protocol 1 of the Geneva Convention characterizes the practice thusly:

The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.

In other words, when civilians are used to shield military targets, attacking those targets can be legal under international law, but the attacker, as Al Jazeera (11/13/23) noted, still has to adhere to

the principles of distinction and proportionality: An army has the duty to target only the enemy, even if this means facing greater risks to minimize civilian casualties; and to weigh the military value of each attack against the civilian casualties that are likely to result from it.

Stunning assertion

Jewish Currents (7/17/24): “By casting all the protected sites and people it has bombed as “shields,” Israel thus seeks to shift the responsibility for its mass killings of civilians and sweeping destruction of civilian infrastructure onto Hamas—absolving itself of blame and legal accountability.”

Israel and its backers, however, have completely distorted this concept, in an apparent attempt to give their massacres in Gaza a veneer of legality. The scholars Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon (Jewish Currents, 7/17/24) explained how human shielding discourse has been misapplied to Gaza:

Parties alleging the use of human shields have typically restricted the charge to limited territorial areas; in contrast, Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield. This apparently endless multiplication of the human shielding accusation has functioned to erase the possibility of Palestinian civilianness altogether.

This corruption of the meaning of “human shields” has distorted much of the corporate media coverage of the Gaza genocide. At the outset of the October 2023 escalation in Palestine, a Boston Globe article (10/8/23) asserted that Hamas “uses its own civilians as human shields against attacks. Israel warns civilians before it launches attacks and urges that they leave conflict zones.” This was a stunning assertion, given Israel’s prolific record of deliberately killing Palestinian noncombatants, which long predates October 7, 2023 (FAIR.org, 10/13/23).

The New York Times’ editorial board (10/16/23) flatly stated that “Hamas is using the people of Gaza as human shields against Israel’s bombing campaign,” without pointing to any source documenting a single instance of this practice.

The same was true of a piece that appeared a day later in the Wall Street Journal (10/17/23), which said that “Hamas uses the inhabitants of Gaza as human shields.” It described the group as employing a “human-shield strategy.”

Evidence on one side

Such claims have two major problems. One is the lack of evidence for them, and the other is the extensive evidence of Israel using Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Consider, for example, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) report on Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s US-backed 2008–09 assault on Gaza. The UN’s fact-finding mission

found no evidence to suggest that Palestinian armed groups either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks.

The mission did, however, find credible allegations that “Israeli troops used Palestinian men as human shields whilst conducting house searches.”

The UNHRC’s report on Israel’s 2014 offensive in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, fell short of saying that Hamas used Palestinians as human shields. The commission said it was “disturbed by” a “report” that a Hamas spokesperson said people in Gaza should go on their roofs as a way of  “shielding their homes from attack.”

The document said that “although the call is directed to residents of Gaza, it can be seen and understood as an encouragement to Palestinian armed groups to use human shields.” That’s quite different from saying that Palestinian fighters actually did compel Palestinian civilians to act as human shields.

But the report said that that’s what Israel did:

The manner in which the Israeli soldiers forced Palestinian civilians to stand in windows, enter houses/underground areas and/or perform dangerous tasks of a military nature, constitutes a violation of the prohibition against the use of human shields.

An Amnesty International report (3/26/15) on Operation Protective Edge noted that

Israeli authorities have claimed that in a few incidents, the Hamas authorities or Palestinian fighters directed or physically coerced individual civilians in specific locations to shield combatants or military objectives. Amnesty International has not been able to corroborate the facts in any of these cases.

Another important context for the human shields issue comes from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (11/11/17). The organization says that, since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967,

Israeli security forces Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.

This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities.

‘Hamas command bunker’

By describing a raid on a hospital as an effort to “root out Hamas,” the Wall Street Journal (11/10/23) gave credence to unsubstantiated Israeli claims.

Over the course of the genocide in Gaza, corporate media have frequently ignored this body of evidence. The human shields propaganda arguably reached its apotheosis in the run-up to Israel’s November 2023 attack on Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex at the time, and during and after the assault.

A Wall Street Journal article (11/10/23)  on the matter carried the headline “Israeli Forces Race to Root Out Hamas,” with the subhead “Israeli forces face one of their toughest challenges as they converge on strip’s largest hospital.” Taken together, these phrases imply that Al-Shifa has a Hamas presence that ought to be “rooted out.” The piece said that Israeli

troops have converged in the past day on the sprawling facility, which Israel contends holds a major Hamas command bunker underneath the complex, a claim Hamas has denied.

At no point did the authors mention that Israel had presented no credible evidence in support of these allegations (FAIR.org, 12/1/23).

A New York Times report (11/15/23) said that

Israel maintains that Hamas built a military command center at the hospital, using its patients and staff as human shields.

The seizure of Al-Shifa, along with whatever evidence the Israelis produce of Hamas’s military presence there, could affect international sentiment about the invasion, as well as the continuing negotiations to free the hostages captured by Hamas last month.

This passage suggests that the question is what type of evidence Israel will provide of Hamas’s supposed operations at Al-Shifa, rather than whether it has any convincing evidence at all. The piece opted to present the supposed command center as a “he said, she said” narrative, but Hamas reportedly said that they were “prepared for an international delegation to conduct a search of the hospitals and their grounds for evidence of such alleged underground tunnels and command centers” (Mondoweiss, 11/13/23).

‘A deadly lie’

Human Rights Watch (11/14/23) found that “no evidence put forward would justify depriving hospitals and ambulances of their protected status under international humanitarian law.”

Meanwhile, medical staff at the hospital denied that there was a Hamas command center under the facility (Guardian, 11/14/23). Human Rights Watch (11/14/23), for its part, said:

The Israeli military on October 27 claimed that “Hamas uses hospitals as terror infrastructures,” publishing footage alleging that Hamas was operating from Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa. Israel also alleged that Hamas was using the Indonesian Hospital to hide an underground command and control center and that they had deployed a rocket launchpad 75 meters from the hospital.

These claims are contested. Human Rights Watch has not been able to corroborate them, nor seen any information that would justify attacks on Gaza hospitals.

Nevertheless, a subsequent CNN (11/17/23) report took the “shrug and say, ‘gee, golly, we just don’t know’” approach:

Israel points to the hospital as an example of Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields.

Since launching an operation at Al-Shifa this week, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed it found a tunnel shaft and military equipment, but it has not yet shown proof of a large-scale command and control center. Hamas denies the allegations. CNN has not verified the claims of either Israel or Hamas.

CNN may not have been unable to verify either party’s claims, but they do their audience no favors by leaving out Human Right Watch’s remarks, or the following from Katrina Penney (Otago Daily Times, 11/16/23), a representative of MSF, which had personnel working at Al-Shifa:

We have seen no evidence that the hospital buildings or the compounds are being used by Hamas as a military base. In fact to the contrary; the hospital facilities have been trying to treat patients and trying to shelter civilians and their families at levels far beyond their capacity.

Excluding such testimonials gave Israel’s “command center” and “human shields” arguments unwarranted credibility. In contrast to CNN, Maureen Clare Murphy (Electronic Intifada, 11/15/23) offered a much sharper assessment of the available evidence, writing that

Israel’s own propaganda published in the aftermath of the raid shows that Netanyahu and the military’s longstanding accusation that Hamas uses Al-Shifa to shield its command center is a deadly lie.

But such honesty and precision is generally too much to ask of corporate media.

‘A sub-army of slaves’

To establish the “truth” that Hamas uses human shields, Washington Post columnist James Willick (11/14/23) quotes a Post editorial (11/5/23) criticizing Hamas for “provoking Israel militarily—while protecting its own leaders and fighters in tunnels.” By this logic, any non-suicidal military operation against Israel would involve “human shields.”

This dismal coverage of the human shields question was not limited to the reporting on Al-Shifa. Throughout the genocide, corporate media have often treated the idea that Hamas routinely uses Palestinian civilians as human shields as an established fact, while pretending that Israel doesn’t do exactly that.

Nor have media offered any proof of Hamas engaging in this practice in the post–October 7 US/Israeli rampage, as in an in-house Washington Post column (11/14/23) by Jason Willick, headlined “We Can’t Ignore the Truth That Hamas Uses Human Shields.” Hamas, he said, was “trying to increase” the number of dead Palestinian civilians.

A Newsweek op-ed (5/23/24) from Fordham University philosophy professor John Davenport referred to what he called “the stark fact” that Hamas uses “ordinary Palestinians as ‘human shields.’” While voluminous evidence of US/Israeli crimes throughout the genocide was readily available (Middle East Eye, 10/20/23, 5/16/24), Willick and Davenport failed to marshal a single report from the UN or an NGO that substantiated their claim that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields.

Meanwhile, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (7/1/24) said that, in the months since October 7, “the Israeli army’s use of Palestinian civilians as human shields has been documented on a large scale.” Haaretz (8/13/24) reported that “random Palestinians have been used by Israeli army units in the Gaza Strip for one purpose: to serve as human shields for soldiers during operations.”

Still, US media commentators like Bret Stephens (New York Times, 9/3/24) and the Journal’s editorial board (10/7/24) were more interested in making uncorroborated claims that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields than in discussing Israel’s widespread, confirmed use of the practice.

More recently, Haaretz (3/30/25) ran an article by an anonymous senior officer in the Israeli military detailing how “in Gaza, human shields are used by Israeli soldiers at least six times a day.” The officer explains how no infantry force in the Israeli military goes into a house in Gaza before a human shield clears it, which means “there are four [human shields] in a company, 12 in a battalion and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.”

Blaming Palestinians for their own deaths

Reuters (4/6/25) allowed a National Security Council spokesperson to claim without contradiction that aid workers killed by Israel were “human shields for terrorism.”

Even after Haaretz published this account, the New York Times ran an op-ed (4/6/25) asserting that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as “human shields,” as if it were Hamas that kept a slave army of Palestinians for this purpose.

Similarly, a Reuters report (4/6/25) on Israel’s March 23 massacre of 15 paramedics quoted US National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes, “Hamas uses ambulances and more broadly human shields for terrorism.” The piece didn’t bother pointing to the lack of proof for Hughes’ claim, nor did it inform readers that Israel uses Palestinians as human shields on a daily basis.

In the same vein, an NBC News piece (4/7/25) on the paramedics atrocity included the sentence, “The White House on Sunday said Trump held Hamas responsible for the incident because Hamas uses ambulances and ‘human shields.’” Nothing in the article cast doubt on this unsubstantiated assertion, or noted that a senior Israeli military officer had just acknowledged (Haaretz, 3/30/25) that

the highest-ranking personnel on the ground have known about the [Israeli military’s] use of [Palestinians as] human shields for more than a year, and no one has tried to stop it.

To suggest that a meaningful portion of the Palestinians killed in Gaza can be attributed to Hamas using them as human shields—lack of evidence be damned—is to blame Palestinians for their own deaths, while reducing US/Israeli responsibility for the slaughter.

The canard also demonizes Hamas, painting its leaders as brutal savages with no regard for any human life. That in turn rationalizes the US/Israeli assault on Gaza; the narrative suggests that Hamas are so brutal toward their own people that one should cheer for Israel to eradicate them, not only for Israel’s benefit, but ultimately for the Palestinians’—even at the cost of leveling Gaza and exterminating its people.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Gregory Shupak.

The world doesn’t know yet what caused the dramatic power outage on the Iberian Peninsula (BBC, 4/28/25). Nevertheless, the right-wing press both in the US and Britain quickly exploited it to dubiously suggest that the blame rested with Spain’s push for more renewable energy sources. The insinuation that clean energy is at fault has even infected outlets like the New York Times and AP.

New York Post (4/30/25): “Experts have previously warned that Europe’s increasing reliance on renewable energy…could lead to blackouts and other supply issues.”

The right-wing New York Post (4/30/25), while admitting that a final determination on the cause of the outage in Spain hadn’t surfaced, ran with the headline “Devastating Blackout in Spain Raises Questions About Reliance on Solar Power, Wind Power.” As the Rupert Murdoch–owned tabloid criticized the Spanish government’s response, it reminded its readers that that government is “socialist.” It cited “experts” four times to pin blame on “renewables,” while naming only one. That expert noted that solar plants’ lack of inertia—which, the Post explained, is something produced by “gas and nuclear power plants,” means that “imbalances must be corrected more quickly.” (Inertia is not a characteristic unique to non-renewable energy, as the Post suggests; hydroelectric energy, another popular renewable, uses turbines and produces inertia.)

An op-ed by anti-environmentalists Gabriel Calzada and Fernández Ordóñez in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (4/30/25) said that “Spain’s system was engineered politically, not rationally.” They blamed “energy-transitionist ideologues” on the continent for the blackout, because they “forced in” renewables.

Again, while admitting that the cause of the outrage had yet to be determined, they echoed the Post’s suggestion that renewable sources are by their nature “unreliable,” focusing on their lack of “inertia”:

The greater the share of renewables vis-à-vis conventional power plants with synchronous turbines, the less inertia there is to cushion instantaneous load fluctuations in the grid.

This causes the whole system to become “increasingly fragile, with higher risk of failure.”

The far-right journal Compact (4/29/25) said renewable “sources, especially photovoltaic solar, can’t supply the requisite inertia the grid needs.” Admitting that the cause of the outrage was still unknown, it hoped the affair would repopularize climate-ravaging forms of power generation against woke wind farms and soyboy solar plants:

Whatever the cause, this blackout could have a salutary impact on European energy policy if it dissuades countries from pursuing aggressive renewable energy policies that make power less reliable.

The importance of inertia

Energy Central (8/14/24): “While transitioning to a renewable-based power grid presents challenges, the benefits significantly surpass the risks.”

The loss of power for Spain and Portugal, a major crisis reminiscent of the great northeast American blackout of the summer of 2003 (WABC, 8/14/23), has taught the world an important lesson about centrality of inertia in the electricity systems built around traditional energy sources. Gas, nuclear and hydroelectric plants use giant spinning turbines that “store kinetic energy, which helps stabilize the grid by balancing supply and demand fluctuations,” explained Energy Central (8/14/24). “High inertia means the system can better withstand sudden disturbances, such as a generator tripping or a sudden surge in demand.”

Solar and wind energy, which are in growing use in Iberia and seen as a clean alternative in an age of climate crisis, lack this feature, which means integrating them into energy grids requires alternative ways of addressing energy fluctuation problems. It’s something engineers have long understood, and have been addressing with a variety of technical solutions (Green Tech Media, 8/7/20; IET Renewable Power Generation, 11/10/20).

In general, questions of inertia are an important concern of energy planners when it comes to balancing clean energy and the need to stabilize the grid. But they’re not the only way the grid is stabilized.

A Spanish professor of electrical engineering explained in Wired (5/1/25) that both local “meshes,” which help distribute electrical flows, and interconnections with neighboring grids are crucial for preventing the kind of imbalance that apparently led to the Iberian blackout. But the latter has always been Spain’s “weak point,” because of the “geographical barrier of the Pyrenees” mountains. Rather than suggest a pullback from solar or wind, as right-wing media seem to pine for, experts told Wired the needed response was greater interconnection, and more storage mechanisms or stabilizers to account for the reduction in inertia.

‘Uniquely vulnerable to outages’

New York Times (4/29/25): “The blackout could bolster the argument for retaining conventional generation sources.”

But the anti-renewable drum beat from the right inspired similar reporting in more centrist corners. The New York Times (4/29/25) took a similar tone, under the headline, “How Spain’s Success in Renewable Energy May Have Left It Vulnerable.” The article itself seemed to have an identity crisis, trying to paint the peninsula’s success in ramping up renewables as a false victory while at the same time acknowledging that it wasn’t just the renewable energy itself that caused the vulnerability:

The incident exposed how Spain and Portugal, promoted as success stories in Europe’s renewable energy transition, are also uniquely vulnerable to outages, given their relative isolation from the rest of the continent’s energy supply.

The article did also explain Spain’s relative lack of investment in necessary grid infrastructure and storage. But those who didn’t get past the headline would have come away with the same false impression about renewables as readers of the New York Post.

The Times (4/30/25) doubled down in a follow-up piece the next day, saying, “The incident has raised questions about whether Spain and Portugal’s rapid shift to renewable energy left them more vulnerable to outages.”

An AP (4/30/25) explainer, which was also picked up by the Washington Post (4/30/25), used phrases like “renewed attention” and “questions remain” to cast a vague haze over the role of the peninsula’s renewable energy:

On Tuesday, there was renewed attention on Spain’s renewable energy generation. The southern European nation is a leader in solar and wind power generation, with more than half of its energy last year having come from renewable sources. Portugal also generates a majority of its energy from renewable sources.

Questions remain about whether Spain’s heavy renewable energy supply may have made its grid system more susceptible to the type of outage that took place Monday. The thinking goes that nonrenewable energy sources, such as coal and natural gas, can better weather the type of fluctuations observed Monday on Spain’s grid.

After sowing doubt about renewables, the AP wrote that Eamonn Lannoye, managing director at the Electric Power Research Institute, said “it was too early to draw a straight line between Monday’s event and Spain’s solar power generation.”

‘You’ve got to get the engineering right’

Euro News (4/29/25): “Far from being the cause of the peninsula’s woes…the large percentage of renewable energy in Spain and the flexibility of hydropower systems enabled the nation to react and recover more quickly.”

Though none of the outlets above seemed able to find them, some experts suggested neither solar power nor inertia were likely at fault. Euronews (4/29/25) said:

Some experts have previously voiced concern that Spain’s grid needs to be upgraded to cope with the rapid integration of solar and wind. But others stress the unlikelihood of the mass blackout being down to the intermittent renewables, which the Spanish and Portuguese operators are by now adept at handling.

Spanish energy think tank Fundacion Renovables explains that renewable power plants with 2MW of power generation or more were disconnected because of a disturbance in the frequency of the power grid—as per national safety protocols.

Essentially, the disturbance was “a consequence and not a cause,” it said in a statement. SolarPower Europe, UNEF and Global Solar Council also emphasise that photovoltaic power plants did not voluntarily disconnect; they were disconnected from the grid.

The English edition of the Spanish daily El País (5/1/25) concurred, quoting Pedro Fresco, general director of the Valencia Energy Sector Association:

The failure of a photovoltaic plant, however large, doesn’t seem likely to be the cause of the collapse of the entire electricity system…. Nor is it true that there weren’t enough synchronous sources at that time: There was nuclear, a lot of hydropower, some solar thermal and combined cycle power, and even cogeneration, coal and renewable waste… In fact, there was more synchronous power than at other times.

Others pointed more to the grid itself. Reuters’ energy columnist Ron Bousso (4/30/25) said the “issue appears to be the management [emphasis added] of renewables in the modern grid.” The outage, he said,  “should be a stark warning to governments: Investments in power storage and grid upgrades must go hand in hand with the expansion of renewables generation.”

The Guardian (4/29/25) also intervened, quoting a European energy analyst: “The nature and scale of the outage makes it unlikely that the volume of renewables was the cause.” Further, the paper quoted University of Strathclyde electrical engineer Keith Bell:

Events of this scale have happened in many places around the world over the years, in power systems using fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro or variable renewables. It doesn’t matter where you are getting the energy from: You’ve got to get the engineering right in order to ensure resilient supplies of electricity.

Experts say it could take months to determine the exact cause(s) of the outage (New York Times, 4/29/25).

Exploiting the crisis

Spanish power company chief Beatriz Corredor (Al Jazeera, 4/30/25): ““These technologies are already stable, and they have systems that allow them to operate as a conventional generation system without any safety issues.”

The quickness of not only right-wing but also centrist outlets to blame solar and wind power for the debacle is in part rooted in Spain’s right-wing political opposition’s exploitation of the crisis, using it to bash the left-leaning governing parties and Red Eléctrica de España (REE), the nation’s energy company. Al Jazeera (4/30/25) quoted a spokesperson for the right-wing People’s Party:

Since REE has ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack, we can only point to the malfunctioning of REE, which has state investment and therefore its leaders are appointed by the government.

It’s easy to see why the People’s Party would politicize this. Just last year, the party fell under heavy criticism in Valencia, where the party is in local power, for its failure to act in the face of dire weather reports that led to massive flooding, killing more than 200 people (AP, 11/9/24). The national blackout has allowed the right to attempt to shift the anger toward the ruling Socialist Workers Party.

But it’s also par for the course for the right-wing media to defend the conservative alliance with the fossil fuel industry, which is threatened by any move to address the climate crisis. The media’s jump to blame Spain’s renewables for a massive blackout looks a whole lot like their eagerness to (falsely) blame wind power for Texas’s 2021 blackouts (Media Matters, 2/19/21; FAIR.org, 2/26/21).

While we may eventually know exactly what happened—likely to be a complicated mechanical explanation that should inform us how to better guard against future problems—propagandists know that one should never let a good crisis go to waste.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Ari Paul (FAIR.org, 4/25/25): “Going after public broadcasters is…part of the neo-fascist playbook authoritarian leaders around the world are using to clamp down on dissent and keep the public in the dark.”

The death of former 1960s radical turned right-wing provocateur David Horowitz brought to mind the time he called me “stupid” (Michigan Daily, 9/8/03) because he disliked a column (Michigan Daily, 9/2/03) I wrote about neoconservatism.

I was reminded of that again just days later when Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25), a journalist who left Occupy Wall Street populism for ruling class sycophancy, attacked my recent article, “Cuts to PBS, NPR Part of Authoritarian Playbook” (FAIR.org, 4/25/25). In his response, titled, “No, State Media and Democracy Don’t Go ‘Hand in Hand.’ Just the Opposite,” Taibbi asked, “How nuts do you have to be to think ‘strong state media’ doesn’t have a dark side?”

It’s a straw man argument, with a heavy dose of McCarthyism thrown in to boot. I’d encourage everyone to read both pieces in full, but here I’ll break down the main problems with Taibbi’s piece.

Public vs. state media

Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25): “The above is either satire or written by someone consciously ignoring the history of state media.”

Taibbi’s main trick is to pretend that “state media” and “public media” are interchangeable. They’re not. State media consists of government propaganda outlets that answer directly to executive authority, rather than independent editors. Public media are independent outlets that receive taxpayer subsidies. As I wrote in my piece, NPR “only gets 1% of its funding directly from the CPB,” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Obviously, if NPR and PBS were “state media,” Trump wouldn’t need to try to shut them down; he would already control them editorially. That’s not to say that they’re perfectly independent. FAIR writers, including myself (11/26/20), have for decades been critical of NPR and PBS political coverage. FAIR (e.g., 6/1/99, 9/17/04, 5/11/24, 10/24/24) has pointed out again and again that right-wing complaints about supposed left-wing bias in public broadcasting have repeatedly resulted in compromised coverage. (I noted in the very piece Taibbi purports to critique that Republican critics of public broadcasting “use their leverage over CPB funding to push NPR and PBS political programming to the right.”)

FAIR’s Julie Hollar (FAIR.org, 5/2/25) wrote just days before Taibbi’s post that NPR had downplayed the Trump administration’s attack on free speech, taking a false “both sides” approach to the issue. So, yes, FAIR is outspoken about the “dark side” of NPR and PBS, and Taibbi surely knows it. But he doesn’t seem interested in an honest argument.

His words, not mine

White House Wire (4/30/25) is already the kind of state media Taibbi warns PBS could turn into.

Taibbi used quotation marks around “strong state media” twice, when those aren’t the words I used—they’re his. He claimed that I was “consciously ignoring the history of state media,” though much of my piece concerned state efforts to force conformity on public outlets. While failing to engage with the rest of my article, he took the reader to Russia in the 1990s, when independent journalists (like himself) were working:

That period, like the lives of many of those folks, didn’t last long. Vladimir Putin sent masked police into the last independent TV station on May 11, 2000, capping less than ten years of quasi-free speech. “Strong state media” remained, but actual journalism vanished.

I’m very open about my opposition to the tyranny of autocrats shutting down and raiding journalistic institutions (FAIR.org, 5/19/21, 6/8/23, 8/14/23, 10/22/24). And my article noted that other wannabe autocrats are attacking public broadcasters, notably in Italy, Israel and Argentina, a fact that does not undermine but rather supports the idea that there’s a correlation between public broadcasting and democracy.

If Taibbi were truly worried about “state media,” he wouldn’t be mad at a meager government subsidy to NPR or PBS, but instead would show more concern for something like the Trump administration’s White House Wire, “a news-style website that publishes exclusively positive coverage of the president on official White House servers” (Guardian, 5/1/25). And mentioning Putin’s attacks on “independent TV” is certainly a better argument against Trump’s FCC investigations into private US outlets like ABC and CBS than it is against the existence of NPR or PBS.

Taibbi’s invocation of “Putin” and “Russia” as a reason why we should not be concerned about Trump’s attacks on public broadcasting is such an illogical non sequitur, it makes more sense to interpret it as standard-issue McCarthyism. This is bolstered by Taibbi’s invocation of more paranoia about any state subsidy for media:

Yes, Car Talk and the MacNeil/Lehrer Report were cool, but outlets like Neues Deutschland, Télé Zaïre and Tung Padewat more often went “hand in hand” with fingernail factories or firing squads than democracy.

He seemed to be trying to scare the reader into thinking that we are just one episode of Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! away from the Cambodian genocide.

The neo–Cold War trick is to just say “Putin” enough times in hopes that the reader will eventually realize that the US government funding anything is a sign of impending tyranny. It’s an old joke to accuse greying reactionaries of hating publicly funded snowplows because “that’s socialism,” but that appears to be where Taibbi is these days.

A sloppy attack

Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard (International Journal of Press/Politics, 7/24): “High levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.”

Taibbi pretended to refute my claim that “strong public media systems and open democracy go hand in hand,” but in his article’s large block quotation, he omitted two embedded citations to scholarly studies that support this assertion. One of those was from Political Quarterly (3/28/24), the other was an Annenberg School study (3/16/22) whose co-author, Annenberg’s Victor Pickard, has also written about the importance of public media for The Nation (4/15/25).

Taibbi could have challenged those studies if he wanted, and good-faith disagreement is welcome. Omitting them from the quotation, though, leaves out the critical part of my statement.

Taibbi continued:

People who grew up reading the BBC or AFP may imagine a correlation between a state media and democracy, but a more dependable indicator of a free society is whether or not obnoxious private journalism (like the Russian Top Secret, whose editor Artyom Borovik died in a mysterious plane crash) is allowed to proliferate.

I’ve written at length about that dangers that the Trump administration poses when it comes to censorship, intimidating journalists, lawfare against media and using the power of the state to chill speech (FAIR.org, 12/16/24, 1/23/25, 2/18/25, 2/26/25, 3/28/25, 4/29/25). Taibbi ignored this part of my record, which is referenced in part in the very article to which he’s responding. This is crucial, because my defense of PBS and NPR in this instance is part of a general belief that the government should not attack media organizations, public or private.

As someone who read Taibbi enthusiastically when he was a Rolling Stone and New York Press writer, it’s sad to see someone I once admired so sloppily attack FAIR’s defense of press freedom against anti-democratic state power. But on the bright side, his outburst acts as an inspiration for a place like FAIR to continue defending free speech and a free press, while mercilessly calling out state propagandists who disguise themselves as journalists.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Green Card–holding students are being abducted from the streets by agents of the state for attending protests and writing op-eds. News outlets are being investigated by the FCC for reporting that displeases the president. Federal web pages are being scrubbed of a lengthy list of words, including “race,” “transgender,” “women” and “climate.”

“Is President Trump a protector of the First Amendment, or is he the biggest threat to it since the McCarthy Era?” NPR (Morning Edition, 4/7/25) asked—with the argument for the former position being that “conservatives are just, in general, much more willing to speak their mind.”

NPR responded to this shocking government attack on free speech with a Morning Edition series on “The State of the First Amendment,” whose introductory episode’s headline (4/7/25) declared freedom of speech to be “shifting under the Trump administration”; it promised that the show would be “exploring how.”

The wishy-washy language wasn’t a promising start, and the segment only went downhill from there, taking an “on the one hand/on the other hand” framing to an assault on core democratic rights.

Host Leila Fadel explained: “All this week, we are going to look at the state of free speech in the United States. Who feels more free to speak? Who feels silenced?” After offering soundbites from people on “both sides” of this debate, she asked:

Is President Trump a protector of the First Amendment, or is he the biggest threat to it since the McCarthy era in the 1940s and ’50s, when fearmongering around Soviet and Communist influence led to the political persecution of academics and leftists?

It’s a vital question with a very clear and obvious answer—one that NPR, facing an investigation from the FCC into its corporate funding and a drive by Trump to end its federal funding, and laboring under ideological overseers installed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (FAIR.org, 10/24/24), refused to offer its listeners. (Trump signed a new executive order last night to attempt to defund NPR and PBS, accusing them of “radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.'”)

‘Too early to tell’

NPR‘s Leila Fadel (4/7/25): “Are free speech protections broadening right now under President Trump, or is censorship shifting?” (Photo: Mike Morgan/NPR)

After airing Trump’s claims to have “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” Fadel offered brief descriptions of “attacks on the press” and actions that have “broken other norms as well, often in legally questionable ways.” (The first example: “Universities face uncertain futures as they become targets of the Trump administration.”)

The episode then took its balanced framing to an interview segment featuring two legal scholars, Lee Bollinger, former Columbia University president, and Jonathan Turley, a Fox News regular. Fadel introduced the two by noting that “they see the threats to [the First Amendment] in this moment differently. Bollinger sees danger under Trump,” while “Turley says he thinks this president could be an unexpected advocate.”

In her questioning of Turley, Fadel did rebut his claim that the Biden administration and social media companies colluded to censor conservative speech. She then brought up “actions by this administration that seem to be chilling speech,” citing “college professors warning students not to discuss or post opinions about Israel’s war in Gaza or Russia’s war in Ukraine for fear of deportation or arrest.” She noted as well that “government websites have taken down thousands of pages featuring information on vaccines, hate crimes, diversity.” She asked: “Are free speech protections broadening right now under President Trump, or is censorship shifting?”

It’s perhaps meant to be a tough question to make him admit that calling Trump a protector of free speech would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. (Turley responds, “Well, it’s too early to tell whether the Trump administration will make free speech truly part of its legacy in the second term.”) But Fadel’s language—”is censorship shifting?”—turns around and concedes the right’s false claims of censorship under the Biden administration (which she’d just rebutted!). Fadel and NPR offer only two ways of looking at the situation: Trump is increasing free speech, or censorship is just a swinging pendulum whose victims change as administrations change.

The segment wraps up with Bollinger and Turley finding at least one point of agreement: that the arrest and attempted deportation of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil violates, in Turley’s words, “part of the core protections that define us as a people.”

‘They feel more free’

NPR (4/7/25) framed the First Amendment question  as “who felt censored before President Trump returned to office and who feels stifled now.”

The online version of the show (4/7/25), in which the audio transcript is condensed  into an article format, bent even further backwards to find balance. It explained that the series “will explore who felt censored before President Trump returned to office and who feels stifled now.”

That exploration started by naming real censorship that has already taken place: “scrubbing reports and federal grant applications of words the Trump administration has banned,” fears that “participating in protests could lead to deportation,” an online portal where people can “file complaints about diversity, equity and inclusion lessons in class with the US Department of Education.”

If this were a report on a foreign country, it’s hard to imagine NPR offering an “on the other hand” to that list of clearly authoritarian crackdowns on speech. But here comes the next paragraph, trotting out the obligatory balance:

Yet plenty of others—including anti-abortion activists, the far-right activist group Moms for Liberty and members of university Republican clubs—say they feel more free today to express views without fear of a backlash now that President Trump is back in office.

The article eliminates references to Turley and Bollinger, but includes two quotes. One is from a history teacher who feels afraid to answer student questions related to the Trump administration. That’s “balanced” by one from the president of the College Republicans at the University of California, Berkeley, who says they have more members willing to “be outwardly and openly conservative than we did before the election.”

Orwellian redefinition

When you define the threat to free speech, as the New York Times (3/18/22) does, as “being shamed or shunned”—that is, criticized by others’ speech—it opens the door to suppressing speech in the name of free speech.

This absurd and harmful false balance NPR creates is predicated on the idea that “free speech” can mean simply how unconstrained a person feels to speak what might be unpopular opinions, including the various forms of bigotry and disinformation that have been unleashed by the Trump administration. But free speech is not, in fact, about feelings; it’s about consequences. It’s one thing to feel less afraid that your peers will criticize or even yell at you for speaking your opinions on campus. It’s another to fear that expressing your opinions will bring down official sanction, up to and including banishment from the country.

Free speech is not the freedom from “backlash” from those who disagree with your views, despite the MAGA movement’s best efforts to convince people of that—aided and abetted by many “liberal” elites and pundits who feel they have been “canceled” by left-wing criticism of their own (often bigoted) views. If college Republicans, anti-abortion activists or the Moms for Liberty feel constrained by peers harshly criticizing them or not inviting them to speak at public events, that’s not censorship; that’s ideas being contested in the public arena. Their right-wing perspectives still have many, many places to be heard, including the huge right-wing media ecosystem.

NPR concluded its article, “[Trump’s] critics say his concern for free speech is only for speech his administration finds acceptable.” That is, in fact, the only way you can make sense of the claim that Trump stands for “free speech”—by defining it as the ability of the approved people to speak, while those who would criticize (and thereby “cancel”) them are silenced (FAIR.org, 3/4/25).

The Trump administration is bringing the power of the state down on people who express opinions and ideas it finds objectionable. The consequences of that power, for both individuals and democracy, are quite dire. When NPR talks about “who feels more free to speak” and “who feels silenced,” it’s defining free speech the way MAGA wants it to be defined—as a vibe, not as a right. Ultimately, though, NPR‘s complicity in this Orwellian redefinition will not protect them from Trump’s vendetta.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR public editor Kelly McBride here, or via Bluesky: @kellymcb.bsky.social. 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.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

The Summit (Colo.) Daily (5/2/24) amplified the anxiety health consumers felt in the face of providers’ and insurers’ threats.

This time last year, tens of thousands of people in Colorado anxiously wondered if they’d have to find a new doctor or start using a different hospital. Contracts setting payment levels for Catholic Church–affiliated hospital chain CommonSpirit Health to be a member of preferred provider networks run by insurer Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Colorado were set to expire on May 1, 2024, and negotiations were a train wreck.

CommonSpirit accused Anthem of trying to pay rates so low that its hospitals couldn’t afford to take care of patients, while Anthem shot back that CommonSpirit wanted rate increases at more than twice the rate of inflation (CBS KKTV 11, 4/30/24).

Media coverage reached a fever pitch as the deadline approached. Without a new agreement, Coloradans covered by Anthem insurance plans would have to pay far more out of pocket to use CommonSpirit hospitals and the system’s affiliated doctors (Denver Post, 4/26/24). The potential consequences would be extreme in communities where CommonSpirit is a dominant provider, especially in the state’s rural and resort areas, where the company’s facilities are the only available option for miles around (KOAA, 5/1/24). “What Do We Do?” a plaintive Summit Daily headline (5/2/24) asked.

The high-stakes negotiations dragged on for more than two weeks past the contract’s expiration, with the two corporate giants contending that the other side wanted dangerously low or unaffordably high rates.

The eventual settlement was greeted with a mixture of relief and anger from patients whose care had been disrupted. La Plata County resident Christie Hunter, whose son Ollie suffers from myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disorder that weakens voluntary muscles, told the Durango Herald (5/17/24, 5/1/24) she was glad the two healthcare titans had settled, but angry that the dispute disrupted her family’s healthcare. The time spent looking for new providers “would have been much better spent trying to help my son, and get him feeling well enough to go to school.” Ollie’s first day at school after months of treatment and preparation was the day the Hunters received initial notice that they could lose access to his specialists.

Although the high-stakes conflict was about money, the terms of the new five-year price deal remain secret.

Performative hostage-taking

This kind of performative patient hostage-taking has become standard practice in hospital rate negotiations across the US. At least four major network contracts in Ohio/Virginia, Connecticut, Texas and Missouri expired at the beginning of April alone.

Media coverage usually captures the anxiety that patients like the Hunters experience at the disruption of critical medical relationships. Otherwise, the quality and depth of coverage varies widely. Some reporting fuels public hysteria to the benefit of the parties, while the best coverage provides critical national context and alerts audiences what to expect.

To help FAIR readers understand what’s happening when these conflicts hit their communities, we’ve assembled a few lessons from the past few years, and principles that should frame local and regional media coverage.

Think mob war

These stories are best understood as economic warfare between gangsters dividing money already looted from the public. Insurers, who offer employers and patients nothing the government can’t do better and cheaper, fight with hospital corporations who wield monopoly power to negotiate the world’s highest prices for inpatient care, leaving millions of Americans saddled with unmanageable medical debt.

Communicating with the public and political leaders through the media is a key negotiating strategy for both hospitals and insurance companies. Each side accuses the other of threatening patients’ access to doctors and hospitals. The corporations issue a deluge of press releases, statements and FAQ webpages to inform patients of pending changes to coverage, and the consequences for their financial, physical and mental health—all seasoned with a heavy dose of spin. The goal is to ratchet up public anxiety as the deadline approaches, and attach blame to the other side to win concessions.

Negotiations receive intense local and regional media coverage, following the same script. Both sides publicize the looming deadline, and warn that patients may lose access to local hospitals and valued doctors. Insurers accuse hospitals of price-gouging, while hospitals insist that insurers want to pay them less than it costs to take care of patients.

You’ll probably keep your doctor

KFF Health News (2/1/19) accurately characterized the antagonists in the rate disputes as “behemoths.”

Outlets frequently catch on to the fact that they’re witnessing “a battle of Goliath and Goliath,” as Dallas-based D Magazine (4/1/25) framed a recent clash in Texas. But reporters and editors should also alert their audiences to the fact that the conflicts usually resolve themselves after a few weeks or months of widespread terror.

Large local and regional insurers can’t run provider networks without major hospital systems, and hospital systems can’t afford to lose access to patients covered by major health insurers. As Georgetown University professor Sabrina Corlette told KFF Health News (2/1/19) during a 2019 dispute in California:

When you have a big behemoth healthcare system and a big behemoth payer with tens of thousands of enrolled lives, the incentives to work something out privately become much stronger.

This is what the market looks like 

The US healthcare financing system relies on the mechanism of having private health insurance companies build networks that use financial and bureaucratic coercion to force patients to use hospitals and doctors within the network, instead of other providers. Insurers offer hospitals privileged access to the thousands of “lives” they cover in exchange for discounted rates. This is supposed to lower costs and improve the quality of healthcare.

You can’t have networks with discounted rates without rate negotiations, which is why these high-stakes gang wars are so common and will continue. The degree to which these rate negotiations are central to the functioning of “market-based” healthcare is a critical piece of context for reporters, too often missing from coverage.

In Colorado, for example, Pueblo Chieftain reporter Tracy Harmon largely followed the companies’ scripts in two stories (5/14/24, 5/20/24) on the Anthem/CommonSpirit fight, focusing on patients’ need for access and sourced almost exclusively to the two combatants.

Summit Daily News reporter Ryan Spencer (4/14/24) offered some additional context, using public data to show that the CommonSpirit hospital in Summit charged rates at twice the statewide average, and “reported profit margins of 35% or more in 2020 and 2021,” according to a report by the state Division of Insurance. Neither Spencer nor Harmon made the critical policy point that the network rate negotiations are supposed to be the country’s primary cost control mechanism.