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Sen. Dick Durbin (Verge, 3/21/25): “I hope that for the sake of our nation’s kids, Congress finally acts.”

In a move that threatens to constrain online communication, congressional Democrats are partnering with their Republican counterparts to repeal a niche but crucial internet law.

According to tech trade publication the Information (3/21/25), Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) has allied with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) to reintroduce a bill that would repeal Section 230, a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 dictates that when unlawful speech occurs online, the only party responsible is the speaker, not the hosting website or app or any party that shared the content in question.

Section 230 grants platforms the ability to moderate without shouldering legal liability, a power that has historically had the effect of encouraging judicious content management (Techdirt, 6/23/20). Additionally, it indemnifies ordinary internet users against most civil suits for actions like forwarding email, sharing photos or videos, or hosting online reviews.

Dissolving the provision would reassign legal responsibility to websites and third parties, empowering a Trump-helmed federal government to force online platforms to stifle, or promote, certain speech. While the ostensible purpose of the repeal, according to Durbin, is to “protect kids online,” it’s far more likely to give the Trump White House carte blanche to advance its ultra-reactionary political agenda.

More power for MAGA

Mike Masnick (Techdirt, 3/21/25): “These senators don’t understand what Section 230 actually does—or how its repeal would make their stated goals harder to achieve.”

The effort to repeal Section 230 isn’t the first of its kind. Lawmakers, namely Republicans Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and former Florida senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have been making attempts to restrict or remove 230 for years, sometimes with explicitly censorial aims. But with a White House so hostile to dissent as to target and abduct anti-genocide activists (FAIR.org, 3/28/25; Zeteo, 3/29/25), abusing immigration law and violating constitutional rights in the process, the timing of the latest bill—complete with Democratic backing—is particularly alarming.

To imagine what could become of a Section 230 repeal under the Trump administration, consider an example from July 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic remained severe enough to be classified as a public-health emergency. Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.)—now a co-sponsor of Durbin and Graham’s 2025 bill—introduced an amendment to 230 that would authorize the Health & Human Services Secretary to designate certain online content as “health misinformation.” The label would require websites to remove the content in question.

News sources heralded the bill as a way to stem the “proliferation of falsehoods about vaccines, fake cures and other harmful health-related claims on their sites” (NPR, 7/22/21) and to “fight bogus medical claims online” (Politico, 7/22/21). While potentially true at the time, Klobuchar’s bill would now, by most indications, have the opposite effect. As Mike Masnick of Techdirt (3/21/25) explained:

Today’s Health & Human Services secretary is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who believes the solution to measles is to have more children die of measles. Under Klobuchar’s proposal, he would literally have the power to declare pro-vaccine information as “misinformation” and force it off the internet.

‘Save the Children’

ACLU (6/27/22): The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) “hasn’t meaningfully addressed sex trafficking. Instead, it has chilled speech, shut down online spaces, and made sex work more dangerous.”

Since Klobuchar’s bill, Congress has drafted multiple pieces of bipartisan child “safety” legislation resembling Durbin and Graham’s bill, offering another glimpse into the perils of a Trump-era repeal.

Consider 2023’s Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which the New York Times (2/17/22) welcomed as “sweeping legislation” that would “require online platforms to refrain from promoting harmful behavior.” KOSA enjoys robust bipartisan support, with three dozen Republican co-sponsors and nearly as many Democrats, as well as an endorsement from Joe Biden.

Though KOSA doesn’t expressly call for the removal of 230, it would effectively create a carve-out that could easily be weaponized. MAGA-boosting Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tenn.), a lead sponsor, insinuated in 2023 that KOSA could be used to “protect” children “from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence” on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram (Techdirt, 9/6/23). In other words, lawmakers could invoke KOSA to throttle or eliminate content related to trans advocacy, should they deem it “harmful” to children.

KOSA has drawn criticism from more than 90 organizations, including the ACLU and numerous LGBTQ groups, who fear that the bill masquerades as a child-safeguarding initiative while facilitating far-right censorship (CounterSpin, 6/9/23). This comes as little surprise, considering the decades-long history of “Save the Children” rhetoric as an anti-LGBTQ bludgeon, as well as the fact that these campaigns have been shown to harm children rather than protect them.

Some outlets have rightfully included the bill’s opponents in their reportage (AP, 7/31/24), even if only to characterize it as “divisive” and “controversial” (NBC News, 7/31/24). Others, however, have expressed more confidence in the legislation. The New York Times (2/1/24), for instance, described KOSA as a means to “safeguard the internet’s youngest users.” Neither Blackburn’s publicly-broadcast intentions nor the protests against the bill seemed to capture the paper’s attention.

Instead, the Times went on to cite the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), a 2018 law that amended Section 230, in part to allow victims of sex trafficking to sue websites and online platforms, as a regulatory success. What the Times didn’t note is that, according to the ACLU, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which is included in SESTA, “hasn’t meaningfully addressed sex trafficking,” and could be interpreted by courts as justification to “censor more online speech—especially materials about sex, youth health, LGBTQ identity and other important concerns.”

False anti-corporate appeals

A bipartisan pair of lawmakers argue in the Wall Street Journal (5/12/24) that repealing Section 230 would mean tech companies couldn’t “manipulate and profit from Americans’ free-speech protections”—which is true only  in the sense that platforms would be forced to assume that their users do not have free-speech protections.

Protecting kids isn’t the only promise made by 230 repeal proponents. In a statement made earlier this year, Durbin vowed to “make the tech industry legally accountable for the damage they cause.” It’s a popular refrain for government officials. The Senate Judiciary Democrats pledged to “remove Big Tech’s legal immunity,” and Trump himself has called 230 a “liability shielding gift from the US to ‘Big Tech’”—a point echoed by one of his many acolytes, Josh Hawley.

And in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (5/12/24) headlined “Sunset of Section 230 Would Force Big Tech’s Hand,” former Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican, and New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr., a Democrat, argued:

We must act because Big Tech is profiting from children, developing algorithms that push harmful content on to our kids’ feeds and refusing to strengthen their platforms’ protections against predators, drug dealers, sex traffickers, extortioners and cyberbullies.

These soft anti-corporate appeals might resonate with an audience who believes Big Tech wields too much power and influence. But there’s no guarantee that dismantling Section 230 would rein in Big Tech.

In fact, Section 230 actually confers an advantage upon the largest tech companies—which at least one of them has recognized. In 2021, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg proposed reforms to 230 that would increase and intensify legal requirements for content moderation (NBC News, 3/24/21). The apparent logic: monopolistic giants like Facebook and Google can more easily fund expensive content-moderation systems and legal battles than can smaller platforms, lending the major players far more long-term viability.

But regardless of Meta’s machinations, the fundamental problem would remain: Democrats have embraced the MAGA vision for online governance, creating the conditions not for a safer internet, but a more dangerous one.

 

Surveillance footage of Tufts grad student Rumeysa Ozturk being taken away by Homeland Security agents (Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/27/25).

The journalism world has been reeling from news that a BBC correspondent was deported from Turkey, after he was “covering the antigovernment protests in the country” and was “detained and labeled ‘a threat to public order’” (New York Times, 3/27/25). Turkey has an abysmal reputation for press freedom (CPJ, 2/13/24; European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, 10/5/23), placing 158th out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders index, so as distressing as this news is, it’s in character for a country many think of as illiberal and authoritarian (Guardian, 6/9/13; HRW, 1/29/15). Journalists have been arrested in the latest unrest in Turkey (AP, 3/24/25).

Meanwhile, a Turkish citizen is going through a similar kind of hell for expressing political ideas a government dislikes. Except in her case, the government doing the repression isn’t Turkey, it’s the United States. In chilling video footage (New York Times, 3/26/25) obtained by several news outlets, Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University outside of Boston, can be seen being abducted by plainclothes agents.

‘Relishes the killing of Americans’

“It looked like a kidnapping,” software engineer Michael Mathis, whose camera recorded Ozturk’s abduction, told AP (3/26/25).  “They approach her and start grabbing her with their faces covered. They’re covering their faces. They’re in unmarked vehicles.”

Her crime was reportedly being part of recent student protests against the genocide in Gaza. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson (AP, 3/26/25) declared:

DHS and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans…. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated.

The group StopAntisemitism bragged about the arrest on X (3/26/25), saying Ozturk led “pro-Hamas, violent antisemitic and anti-American events” during her time at Tufts, which has led her to deportation proceedings. The group snarkily added, “Shalom, Rumeysa.” (“Shalom” can mean peace, hello or goodbye in Hebrew.)

Ozturk is now part of a growing list of foreign students who have been abducted by secret police and are facing deportation for participating in pro-Palestine speech, which the government is labeling support of Hamas, which is designated by the US as a terrorist group (FAIR.org, 3/19/25). As I recently said on the Santita Jackson Show (3/27/25), reporting these things as “arrests” by federal agents—rather than abductions by secret police—understates the authoritarian moment Americans are witnessing. (DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar treated “supporting Hamas” as synonymous with “pro-Palestinian activity” in an interview with NPR—3/13/25.)

‘Fundamentally at odds with our values’

The op-ed (Tufts Daily, 3/26/24) that may get Rumeysa Ozturk deported.

Ozturk, however, might be the first of the bunch to be targeted specifically for engaging in journalism deemed offensive by the state. Many of the reports of her arrest (e.g., New York Times, 3/26/25; CNN, 3/27/25; Forbes, 3/27/25) cite that she co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts Daily (3/26/24) calling on the university administration to accept Tufts Community Union Senate resolutions “demanding that the University acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” and “disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” The op-ed also “affirm[s] the equal dignity and humanity of all people.”

If this is truly a part of the government’s rationale for targeting Ozturk, then we as the American press have to assume that the US law enforcement regime will consider any article in a newspaper that advocates for Palestinian rights or harshly criticizes Israel as some kind of suspicious or unacceptable speech.

Said Seth Stern, director of advocacy of Freedom of the Press Foundation (3/26/25):

If reports that Ozturk’s arrest was over an op-ed are accurate, it is absolutely appalling. No one would have ever believed, even during President Donald Trump’s first term, that masked federal agents would abduct students from American universities for criticizing US allies in student newspapers. Anyone with any regard whatsoever for the Constitution should recognize how fundamentally at odds this is with our values and should be deeply repulsed as an American, regardless of political leanings. Canary Mission is aptly named—it may serve as the canary in the coal mine for the First Amendment.

The Canary Mission named by Stern is a pro-Israel group that operates as a doxxing operation against pro-Palestine campus activists (The Nation, 12/22/23). The FPF said of Ozturk, “The sole ‘offense’ that Canary Mission flagged was an op-ed Ozturk cowrote criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza.”

A crime against journalism

Donald Trump (CNN, 3/14/25): “I believe that CNN and MSDNC [sic], who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal. What they do is illegal.”

Of course, the government has now used its authority to strip a lawful resident of her visa, putting her in the opaque gulag system of the US immigration system. That has a terrible chilling effect on any legal resident in the US who might make a living putting pen to paper. Their next article could get them shipped home at a moment’s notice without legal recourse.

That is inhumane treatment of the rights of legal residents, but it is also a crime against journalism. How will this motivation be used against writers who are citizens, natural-born and otherwise? Will outlets that publish pieces like the one in Tufts Daily be harassed in other ways? (One should not assume that when Trump at the Justice Department accused major news outlets of “illegal” reporting that he meant it as a figure of speech—CNN, 3/14/25.)

FAIR (11/14/24, 12/16/24, 2/26/25) has been among the many groups who have warned that a second Trump administration could see a severe attack against the free press and free speech generally. Ozturk’s arrest is a warning that the Trump administration takes all levels of speech and journalism seriously, and will do whatever they can to terrorize the public into keeping quiet.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250328.mp3

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

 

Mondoweiss (3/18/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Israel has abandoned the ceasefire agreement and restarted its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, a war that has destroyed the region and killed tens of thousands of human beings. The ceasefire, as Gaza-based writer Hassan Abo Qamar among others reminds, still allowed Israel to deprive Palestinians in Gaza of “food, water, medical care, education and freedom of movement.” But it wasn’t enough and, as Belén Fernández writes for FAIR.org, Israel’s US-endorsed resumption of all-out genocide killed at least 404 Palestinians right off the bat, but was reported in, for instance, the New York Times as “Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages.”

We know that elite media will tell us someday that the whole world was horrified by the genocide of Palestinians, and that journalists decried it. But someday is not today. We need reporters who aren’t not afraid they will be targeted, but who may be afraid and are nevertheless bearing witness. Reporters like Hossam Shabat, 23-year-old Palestinian correspondent for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, targeted and killed March 24, and not even the first Israeli journalist assassination for the day: Hours earlier, Palestine Today reporter Mohammad Mansour was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza.

The genocide of Palestinians is a human rights emergency, and also a journalism emergency. US reporters who don’t treat it as such are showing their allegiance to something other than journalism. A key part of their disservice is their ignoring, obscuring, marginalizing, demeaning and endangering the many people who are standing up and speaking out. Pretending protest isn’t happening is aiding and abetting the work of the silencers; it’s telling lies about who we are and what we can do. We build action by telling the stories powerful media don’t want told.

We’ll talk about that with reporter Michael Arria, US correspondent for Mondoweiss and the force behind their new feature called “Power & Pushback.”

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250328Arria.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of transphobia, and remembers FAIR board member Robert McChesney.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250328Banter.mp3

 

Jeff Danziger (1/20/25)

“Watch your step,” says the soldier as he and a medic lead a hostage over a mound of corpses labeled “Over 40,000 Palestinians killed…” The caption reads, “Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Years of Merciless War.” This cartoon by Jeff Danzinger (Rutland Herald, 1/20/25) was selected by editorial page editor Tony Doris to run in the Palm Beach Post (1/26/25).

After the cartoon ran last month, a local Jewish activist group took offense at the perceived antisemitic nature of the anti-war cartoon. The Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County was so upset it purchased a full-page ad condemning the cartoon to run in the Sunday edition (2/9/25).

That Doris and Danzinger are both of Jewish descent did not deter the complainers. Neither did their politics. Doris (Stet News, 3/2/25) describes himself as pro-Israel, as well as the Post‘s “only Jewish editor.” Danzinger told comics scholar Kent Worcester (Comics Journal, 11/05) that he agreed “with a great many things that the Republicans have been traditionally for,” and that he voted for George H.W. Bush twice.

For his temerity to run an anti-war cartoon acknowledging the Palestinian dead, Doris was fired by Gannett, the conglomerate that owns hundreds of newspapers across the country, including the Post. Gannett issued a statement that the cartoon “did not meet our standards” and “would not have been published if the proper protocols were followed.” “We sincerely regret the error,” said the spokesperson for the Post, “and have taken appropriate action to prevent this from happening again.” Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) remarked that Gannet executives are “afraid of their shadow.”

The Palestine exception

Rob Rogers (8/7/14)

Doris’ ordeal was similar to the one cartoonist Rob Rogers suffered ten years ago. Rogers drew Palestinians huddled in a tiny prison, beset on all sides by missiles and Israeli soldiers. “Why do they hate us so much?” one trooper muses (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8/7/14).

This cartoon, too, was characterized by pro-Israel readers as antisemitic. Richard Krugel of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Detroit proclaimed it something “out of the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Shturmer [sic]” (Oakland Press, 8/8/14). Rogers’ career survived the incident, but as the editorial page of Rogers’ home paper shifted right, he found himself out of a job (New York Times, 6/15/18; Extra!, 7/18).

The experiences of Doris and Rogers are clear examples of what civil rights lawyer Michael Ratner termed the “Palestine exception to free speech” (Real News Network, 4/27/15). Support for Palestinian rights is deemed to be an antisemitic attack on Israel, and therefore outside the boundaries of acceptable speech. The Palestine exception is glaringly apparent if a survey is conducted of how Palestinians are treated in political cartoons, and what consequences cartoonists suffer for these artistic choices.

‘We side with evil’

Kirk Walters (10/18/23)

Political cartoonists routinely compare Palestinians and the Palestinian cause to Nazis and Nazism. Henry Payne drew Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, as pro-Nazi, with bumper stickers reading “From Rhine River to the North Sea” and “Stop German Genocide” and “Beware Elders of Zion”  (GoComics, 6/4/24). Kirk Walters showed pro-Palestine protesters as tiki-torch wielding white supremacists. One protester looked identical to Adolf Hitler (King Features, 10/18/23).

Gary Varvel drew a student returning home for Thanksgiving dinner clothed in an “I Heart Hamas” sweater and donning a Hitler mustache. “Son,” his father frets, “your mother and I are concerned about how much college has changed you!” (Creators Syndicate, 11/1/23).

Symbols of Palestinian identity are equated with nefariousness. Two-time Pulitzer winner Michael Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/2/24) explicitly placed the Palestinian flag at a rally side by side with a sign reading “We Side With Evil.” Other signs read “We Heart Terrorists” and “We Support Hamas.” Three days later, Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/5/24) pinned a button reading “Hate” on a keffiyeh-wearing protester.

Michael Ramirez (5/2/24)

Editorial cartoonists often make a false connection between pro-Palestine activism and antisemitism. After the first wave of protests on college campuses in Fall 2023, Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 10/18/23) drew a Halloween cartoon featuring a Frankenstein’s Monster labeled “Antisemitism” and a Dr. Frankenstein labeled “College Campuses,” shouting “It’s alive!”

Bob Gorrell (Creators Syndicate, 4/30/24) had Joe Biden informing readers about “all those antisemitic, pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses.” Echoing President Trump’s description of the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Biden declared, “There are very fine people on both sides!”

At Chip Bok’s “Back to School Sale for Your Pro-Hamas Student” (Creators Syndicate, 9/5/24) the title “Antisemitism for Dummies” was sold.

Nor is this solely a quirk of the US: Canadian cartoonist Malcolm Mayes (Edmonton Journal, 11/23) depicted students chanting, “From the river to the sea/killing Jews is fine with me.”

‘Make Gaza great again!’

Henry Payne (9/19/24)

In one anti-Palestinian cartoon, the cartoonist made light of assassinating a member of Congress. After the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah, Henry Payne (National Review, 9/19/24) drew an exploding pager on the desk of Rashida Tlaib, also naming her a member of Hamas.

Tlaib described this as “racism” that would incite “hate and violence against Arab and Muslim communities,” and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud argued it showed that “anti-Arab bigotry and Islamophobia have become normalized in our media.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, herself not an Arab or Muslim, was less direct, although she also condemned the cartoon. “It further stokes the divide in our politics and does absolutely nothing to move us forward on the issues that matter,” she said (Metro Times, 9/20/24).

Chip Bok (2/7/25)

After Trump revealed his plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, cartoonists lined up to endorse this proposed violation of international law. Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 2/7/25) had a beaming Trump announcing, “Make Gaza Great Again!” Chip Bok (Creators Syndicate, 2/7/25) showed Trump’s future casino and riviera as an improvement over United Nations administered refugee camps. Cheekily, it was labeled “Two State Solutions.” Payne (GoComics, 2/6/25) advertised a “Mar-a-Gaza” that will be “Hamas-free”—as well as Palestinian-free—once construction is finished.

No mainstream American cartoonist would draw Israeli soldiers as Nazis, as Varvel, Gorrell and Payne did with Palestinians. It would be considered beyond the pale for an anti-war or pro-Palestinian cartoonist to crack a joke about assassinating a leading pro-Israel politician, as Payne did with Tlaib. Cartoon endorsements of ethnic cleansing of virtually any nationality other than Palestinian would be met with quite accurate comparisons to the oeuvre of Philipp Rupprecht (“Fips”), cartoonist for the pro-Nazi Der Stürmer.

‘Missed something profound’

Michael Ramirez (11/6/23)

The consequences for the two approaches to cartooning could not be more different. When Varvel lost his spot at the Toronto Sun (12/21/23), it was not for his drawings of Palestinians, but rather a take on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (12/20/23) that Jewish groups found offensive. Payne’s cartoons still run in the National Review, and he kept his post as auto critic for the Detroit News.

One of Ramirez’s cartoons (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 11/6/23), showing a snarling hook-nosed Arab labeled “Hamas,” was removed from the Washington Post after reader backlash. Editorial page editor David Shipley said that reader reactions calling the cartoon “racist” and “dehumanizing” showed that the Post “missed something profound, and divisive” (Washington Post, 11/8/23). Ramirez continues to be published at the Post.

Because of syndication and the absorption of many newspapers into chains like Gannett, some media markets are only exposed to one side, cartoon-wise. In Detroit, for example, the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News publish under a joint operating agreement that ensures that the editorial cartoons in the News run in both newspapers. The most prominent syndicated cartoonist in the News is Ramirez, who declared Palestinians ontologically evil. This means that in the metro area with the largest Arab population in America, the political cartoons in both papers are overwhelmingly dominated by a virulently anti-Palestinian viewpoint.

Steve Benson (6/27/82)

Tony Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) expressed concerns that limiting the range of acceptable opinion in editorial pages is bad for democracy. “Democracy needs journalists who care about the mission and not just about page views,” he said.

Not only is it bad for democracy, it trivializes antisemitism and allows promoters of racism and ethnic cleansing off the hook. Indeed, despite acting as defenders of Jewish people, these cartoonists indulge in many of the same tropes that antisemitic caricaturists use. Editorial cartoonists may have progressed past depicting Yasser Arafat as a rodent caught in a Star of David–shaped mousetrap (Arizona Republic, 6/27/82), but there are still images of anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian racism on the editorial pages.

 

 

Robert W. McChesney was a leading voice and a precious colleague in the battle for a more democratic media system, and a more democratic society. Bob passed away on Tuesday, March 25, at the age of 72. No one did more to analyze the negative and censorial impacts of our media and information systems being controlled by giant, amoral corporations.

Bob was a scholar—the Gutgsell endowed professor of communications at University of Illinois—and a prolific author. Each and every book taught us more about corporate control of information. (I helped edit some of his works.)

Particularly enlightening was his 2014 book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy—in which McChesney explained in step-by-step detail how the internet that held so much promise for journalism and democracy was being strangled by corporate greed, and by government policy that put greed in the driver’s seat.

That was a key point for Bob in all his work: He detested the easy phrase “media deregulation,” when in fact government policy was actively and heavily regulating the media system (and so many other systems) toward corporate control.

Robert McChesney speaking at the Berkeley School of Journalism (CC photo: Steve Rhodes).

For media activists like those of us at FAIR—whose board McChesney has served on for many years—it was a revelation to read his pioneering 1993 book Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of US Broadcasting, 1928–1935. It examined the broad-based movement in the 1920s and ’30s that sought to democratize radio, which was then in the hands of commercial hucksters and snake-oil salesmen.

From radio to the internet, a reading of his body of work offers a grand and inglorious tour of media history, and how we got to the horrific era of disinfotainment we’re in today.

Bob McChesney was not just a scholar. He was an activist. He co-founded the media reform group Free Press, with his close friend and frequent co-author John Nichols. Bob told me how glad he was to go door to door canvassing for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. (Bernie wrote the intro to one of McChesney and Nichols’ books.)

Bob was a proud socialist, and a proud journalist—and he saw no conflict between the two. In 1979, he was founding publisher of The Rocket, a renowned publication covering the music scene in Seattle. For years, while he taught classes, he hosted an excellent Illinois public radio show, Media Matters.

In 2011, he and Victor Pickard edited the book Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done. One of Bob’s favorite proposals to begin to address the problem of US media (developed with economist Dean Baker) was to provide any willing taxpayer a voucher, so they could steer $200 or so of their tax money to the nonprofit news outlet of their choosing, possibly injecting billions of non-corporate dollars into journalism.

Bob was a beloved figure in the media reform/media activist movement. We need more scholar/activists like him today. He will be sorely missed.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the date of Robert McChesney’s death. It was March 25.

 

Hossam Shabat (Al Jazeera, 3/24/25): ““If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed—most likely targeted—by the Israeli occupation forces.”

The Israeli military killed Hossam Shabat, a 23-year-old Palestinian journalist and correspondent for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, on Monday, March 24. The deadly targeting of Shabat’s vehicle in the northern Gaza Strip was in fact Israel’s second journalist assassination for the day; hours earlier, Palestine Today reporter Mohammad Mansour was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza.

And yet it was all in a day’s work for Israel, which according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has now killed at least 170 Palestinian journalists and media workers since October 7, 2023, when Israel’s armed forces kicked off an all-out genocide in the besieged enclave. According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, the number of fatalities is actually 208.

No doubt many journalists would be expected to perish in an onslaught as indiscriminate and massive as Israel’s in Gaza, where in February the death toll for the past 16 months was raised to nearly 62,000 to account for the thousands of Palestinians presumed to be dead beneath the rubble. Shockingly, that’s one out of every 35 Gaza residents—but for Gaza journalists, the International Federation of Journalists estimates that Israel has killed one out of every ten.

In Shabat’s case, as in numerous others, Israel does not even pretend the assassination was an accident, but rather it attempts to frame Palestinian journalists as terrorists. Indeed, targeting journalists appears to be part of Israel’s efforts—which also include preventing foreign journalists from entering Gaza—to prevent documentation of its atrocities.

Meanwhile, in the face of such egregious assaults on the press, US media remain shamefully silent.

‘He bore witness’

Hossam Shabat (CPJ, 11/8/24): “Our only crime is that we convey the image and the truth.”

In October 2024, one year into the extermination campaign, Israel accused Shabat and five other Gaza journalists with Al Jazeera—where I myself am an opinion columnist—of being militants in the service of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. CPJ, which has repeatedly excoriated Israel for “accusing journalists of being terrorists without producing credible evidence to substantiate their claims,” condemned the accusations as a “smear campaign” that endangered the lives of journalists.

Yesterday, the Israeli army took to the platform X to celebrate the fact that it had “eliminated” Shabat, offering the charming obituary: “Don’t let the press vest confuse you, Hossam was a terrorist.” This from the people who just killed 200 Palestinian children in a matter of days.

Responding to the initial terror allegation last year, Shabat remarked to CPJ: “Our only crime is that we convey the image and the truth.” And convey the truth he did. As Egyptian-American journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who translated Shabat’s last article for US outlet Drop Site News just after he was killed, wrote in the preface to the translation:

He bore witness to untold death and suffering on an almost daily basis for 17 months. He was displaced over 20 times. He was often hungry. He buried many of his journalist colleagues. In November, he was wounded in an Israeli airstrike. I still can’t believe I am referring to him in the past tense.

Shabat’s article—penned as Israel resumed apocalyptic killing on March 18 and thereby annihilated the truce with Hamas that had ostensibly taken hold in January—is a testament to the young man’s enduring humanity in the face of utter barbarism. Conveying the post-ceasefire landscape in his hometown of Beit Hanoun, Shabat despaired:

Screams filled the air while everyone stood helpless. My tears didn’t stop. The scenes were more than any human being could bear. The ambulances were filled with corpses, their bodies and limbs piled on top and intertwined with one another. We could no longer distinguish between children and men, between the injured and the dead.

Shabat was well aware that he could join the dead at any moment, and, to that end, he had prepared a statement for posthumous publication, in which he noted that, “when this all began, I was only 21 years old—a college student with dreams like anyone else.” For the past year and a half, however, he had “dedicated every moment of my life to my people,” documenting the “horrors” in Gaza in order to “show the world the truth they tried to bury.”

Deafening silence

Ahmad Ibsais (Mondoweiss, 3/25/25) on Western journalists: “Their failure to accurately report on the targeting of their colleagues, their reluctance to challenge Israeli narratives, and their tendency to frame these killings as unfortunate byproducts of conflict rather than deliberate acts—these journalistic failures have real consequences.”

Indeed, like so many of his Palestinian media colleagues, Shabat risked his life to speak truth to genocidal power until his final moment. But following his demise, the corporate media in the United States haven’t managed to say much at all—just google “Hossam Shabat” and you’ll see what I mean. His death was covered in leading international outlets like the Guardian (3/25/25), Le Monde (3/25/25) and the Sydney Morning Herald (3/25/25), and independent US outlets like Truthout (3/24/25), Democracy Now! (3/25/25) and Mondoweiss (3/25/25), among others—but virtually no establishment US news organizations.

The otherwise deafening silence has been punctuated by just a couple of corporate media interventions, including a Washington Post report (3/25/25) that made sure to mention in the first paragraph that Israel had accused Shabat of Hamas membership.

Meanwhile, Trey Yingst, a correspondent for Fox News—an outlet by no means known for pro-Palestinian sympathies—has rankled others in right-wing media by having the audacity to observe that Israel had just killed two Palestinian journalists in Gaza and that, of the 124 journalists killed globally in 2024, “around two-thirds of them were Palestinian.” In response to Yingst’s treachery, the Washington Free Beacon (3/24/25) made it clear that the real crime was Fox News’ failure to refer to the dead Palestinian journalists as terrorists.

‘With no one to hear us’

Robin Andersen (FAIR.org, 5/20/22): “Because journalists document the actions of Israeli occupation forces against the Palestinians, they jeopardize the military’s continued ability to act with impunity.”

The scant US corporate media attention elicited by the assassination of Shabat regrettably comes as no surprise. After all, it would make little sense for the US establishment to pump Israel full of billions of dollars in weaponry and then complain about the casualties of those weapons. When asked on Monday about the killing of Shabat and Mansour, US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce declared that Hamas was to blame for “every single thing that’s happening” in the Gaza Strip.

In a dispatch for FAIR (10/19/23) published less than two weeks after the launch of US-fueled genocide in October 2023, Ari Paul emphasized that “Israel has a long history of targeting Palestinian journalists”—including Palestinian-American ones like 51-year-old Shireen Abu Akleh, murdered in 2022 by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank—”as well as harassing foreign journalists and human rights activists entering the country.” Such attacks, he concluded, “act as filters through which the truth is diluted.”

And dilution has only become turbo-charged since then. By December 2023, CPJ had determined that “more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel/Gaza war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.” Of the at least 68 journalists and media workers killed between October 7 and December 20, CPJ reported that 61 were Palestinian, four were Israeli and three were Lebanese.

On November 20 of that year, for example, Palestinian journalist Ayat Khadura was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home, just weeks after she had shared her “last message to the world,” which included the line: “We had big dreams but our dream now is to be killed in one piece so they know who we are.”

On November 7, Mohamed Abu Hassira, a journalist for the Palestinian Wafa news agency, was killed along with no fewer than 42 family members in a strike on his own home. And on December 15, Al Jazeera camera operator Samer Abudaqa was killed in southern Gaza, where he eventually bled to death after Israeli forces prevented ambulances from reaching him for more than five hours. Needless to say, Israeli impunity for all of these crimes remains the name of the game.

Considering all the lethal obstacles Palestinian journalists must contend with to do their jobs—not to mention the psychological toll of having to report genocide day in and day out while essentially serving as moving targets for the Israelis—it seems the least their international media colleagues might do is acknowledge them in death. Alas, mum’s the word.

And on that note, it’s worth recalling some of Shabat’s own words: “All we need is for you not to leave us alone, screaming until our voices go hoarse, with no one to hear us.”

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Social Security Works’ Nancy Altman about attacks on Social Security for the March 21, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250321Altman.mp3

 

Strong Arm Press (2018)

Janine Jackson: Social Security has been overwhelmingly popular, and under vehement attack from some quarters, since it began. And for decades, elite news media have generated a standard assessment: It’s the most popular program, hence the “third rail” of politicking, and also, based on willful misreading of how it works, it’s about to be insolvent any minute—the latter notion sitting alongside corporate media’s constant refrain that private is always better than public, just because, like, efficiency and all that.

Now, in this frankly wild, “Only losers care about caring for one another” and “Shouldn’t the richest just control everything?” moment, Social Security is on the chopping block for real. Still, as ever, the attack is rooted in disinformation, but with a truly critical press corps largely missing in action, myth-busting might not be enough.

We are joined now by veteran Social Security explainer and defender Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works and author of, among other titles, The Truth About Social Security: The Founder’s Words Refute Revisionist History, Zombie Lies and Common Misunderstandings. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Nancy Altman.

Nancy Altman: Thank you so much for having me.

Truthout (3/16/25)

JJ: A lot of us are in a kind of blurry, “holy heck, is this really happening?” mode, but titrating out what is actually happening today is important—set aside from whether courts will eventually rule against it, or how it might play out. In “what is happening” news, I’m reading in Truthout via Bloomberg that three individuals representing private equity concerns have shown up at the Social Security Administration. How weird is that? What can that possibly mean?

NA: It’s horrible. And if you can believe it, it is even worse. As soon as Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, the DOGE guys—the DOGE boys, as young as 19—were swarming all over the Social Security Administration. As you said in your introduction, there has been a small group of people, completely out of touch, who wanted to do away with Social Security from the beginning. They’ve always been defeated, but unfortunately, they now are in control of the White House.

It’s Donald Trump. Despite all his lies in the campaign that he wouldn’t touch Social Security, he proposed cuts in every one of his budgets in his first term. It’s Elon Musk, who unbelievably called it “the biggest Ponzi scheme” in history, which is such a slander. And it’s Russell Vought, who is the director of the Office of Management and Budget, who’s architect of Project 2025. And what we’re seeing is Project 2025 on steroids. So you’ve got private venture people there, you have DOGE guys stealing our data, all in an effort to undermine our Social Security system.

AP (2/19/25)

JJ: The line is that, “Oh no, they’re not attacking Social Security itself, just fraud within it.” Now, the bad faith is palpable, but what is your response to that notion, that it’s really just the fraud that’s under attack?

NA: As you said, I wrote a book called The Truth About Social Security, and one of the zombie lies is one of the ones you mentioned. They all say, “Oh, this private sector is so much more efficient and so much better and blah, blah, blah.”

Actually, Social Security is extremely efficiently run. Less than about a half a penny of every dollar spent is spent on administration. The other more than 99 cents comes back in benefits. That’s so much more efficient than you find with 401k for private sector insurance, where you can get 15, 20% administrative costs and hidden fees and so forth.

And that’s also with improper payments— there are a lot of overpayments, underpayments, which were done because Congress has made it so difficult to administer, and some of it’s just impossible to avoid. But 99.7% of Social Security benefits are paid accurately to the right people, on time in full, and about 0.3%—and again, there’s much more improper payments in the private sector—but of that 0.3%, the overwhelming amount of what are called improper payments are overpayments and underpayments.

So, for example, Social Security requires, to get your benefit, you have to have been alive every day of the month before. Now I think that’s wrong, and I think you should get a proportion of payments, but that’s not how the law works. So if you die on the last day of the month, and you get your payment on the third day of the following month, and the money is put in your account, that’s an overpayment.

Now, it doesn’t just sit there. As soon as the federal government realizes that the person has died the last day, they go in immediately, usually within a day or two, and take that money back. But that is mainly overpayments, underpayments.

Fraud is vanishingly small, and the way that fraud is caught is, first we have an inspector general. Donald Trump fired the Social Security Administration inspector general as soon as he got into office. And front-line workers, and they’ve been firing and inducing all kinds of workers out who are the ones who would catch the fraud.

So although they say they’re going after fraud, waste and abuse, they are creating so much waste. They are abusing the workforce, and through that, the American people. And they are opening the door to fraud, unfortunately.

JJ: I have seen leftists take issue with the “It’s my money” idea on Social Security, because actually it’s an intergenerational program. Now choosing that as a point of emphasis in the current context is a choice that I have thoughts about. But do you see meaningful confusion about whose money is at stake here, and whether workers paying into it today are truly entitled to it?

New York Times (1/14/25)

NA: Here’s where the confusion is. I don’t think there’s confusion on that point. I think most Americans—which is why the program is so wildly popular—recognize that these are benefits they earned. It is deferred compensation. It is part of your earnings.

So you have your current cash compensation, you have deferred compensation in the form of pensions—whether it’s a pension sponsored by the employer or 401k or a defined benefit plan—and you have Social Security. You also have what are called contingent benefits, which are disability insurance, survivors benefits, and those are all earned.

What is the misunderstanding, and this is, again, people like Elon Musk and others who are just spreading lies about this program, are, “Oh, there are all these immigrants who are undocumented people stealing our money.” That is a lie. Those people who are undocumented are unable to receive Social Security, and even if they become documented, and can show that they had made contributions, they still don’t, and I think this is wrong, but they still don’t get the benefits they have earned.

But Americans who are here paying in, it is an earned benefit. And when Elon Musk and Donald Trump say, “Oh, there’s fraud, and we’re going to cut the benefits,” they are cutting your benefits, and people should keep hold of their wallets.

JJ: The fact that it’s just about fraud is one lie. And another one is that the things that are happening are just kind of tweaks. And now the latest, maybe not the latest when this airs, but we hear that people who file for benefits, or who want to change the banks that their benefits go to, now they can’t do it by phone. They have to do it online, through one of those easy-breezy government interfaces, or go into a field office. And that might sound like a minor thing, unless you actually think about it with human beings in mind.

AP (3/19/25)

NA: It is outrageous. And when you connect the dots, Donald Trump said he wasn’t going to cut our benefits. He said that before when he ran in 2016, and every one of his budgets in the first term cut our benefits.

He said it again in 2024. But now that he’s there, I think they’re trying to figure out ways to do it. And what they are doing is they are throwing the program in complete chaos.

People who receive benefits are disproportionately seniors, people with disabilities. Interestingly, it’s the largest children’s program, too, because it’s survivor’s benefits, but it often covers people who have difficulty with mobility.

The internet, as you said, is very hard to use. And, by the way, some of the people that got fired were the people who maintained the website. So I think it’s going to get harder to use, and that’s where the fraud tends to—there is vanishingly small amounts of fraud, but when it occurs, it tends to be online.

Phones are very secure. There’s been no evidence put forward that there’s any fraud that’s being committed through the phone service.

Requiring everybody to go into field offices, which Donald Trump and Elon Musk have told the General Services Administration to terminate all the leases, so they’re going to be fewer and fewer field offices. They are terribly understaffed, and the staff that’s there is very overworked.

NIRS (1/25)

So you’re asking millions of additional Americans to waste time, when they could have gotten on the phone and done what they had to do over the phone. Although they need to hire people for the phone, too, because that’s another place with long wait times, and they’re going to get longer, given what they’re doing.

Trump and DOGE and the others who Republican President Dwight Eisenhower called a “tiny splinter group” who hate Social Security, but they tried to privatize it. They were unsuccessful in that. And now what they’re doing is they’re trying to destroy it from within. And we will see pretty soon as it collapses, they’ll say, “Oh, the private sector should run it.” That will be horrible. It will undermine all of our economic security.

JJ: Consistent majorities support Social Security. As we’ve said, some recent polls find people saying we spend too little on it. And that’s why people, like Republican congressperson Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, are saying, “Nobody is touching Social Security” in town halls.

New Republic (2/17/25)

But it’s also why Liza Featherstone, for example, is reminding us that cutting popular programs isn’t a mistake, it’s a conscious effort, and this is what you’re just getting at, it’s a conscious effort to make the government actually useless, so that people will stop thinking of it as a source of anything good. And, one supposes, they will then look to beneficent billionaires. But this is not a mistake, this chaos that Social Security is being thrown into.

NA: Not at all. This is Project 2025 on steroids. The architects of Project 2025 really started this crusade back in the 1970s, actually when I started working on the program. It’s been 50 years. They’ve tried undermining confidence in the program, because it is too popular; even the most conservative-minded Republicans love Social Security, do not want to see it cut, and correctly think that it should be expanded. So they can’t directly confront Social Security, because they’ll all get voted out of office.

So the question is, how can they undermine it while looking like they’re protecting it? And the old standby is this vague “fraud, waste and abuse.” Nobody wants fraud, waste or abuse. But the reality is, they are creating waste and abuse. They are opening the door to possible fraudulent actors. And they’re all doing it, as you say, so that people just give up on government and give more and more money, upward redistribution of our earned benefits, into the pockets of Elon Musk and other billionaires.

JJ: Finally, I think the way that news media talk is meaningful. When they say, “They’re saying these things about Social Security, and they’re untrue,” to me, that lands different than, “They’re saying these things although they’re untrue.” One is narrating a nightmare, and the other is noting a disruption that calls for some intervention.

TheHill.com says that Elon Musk’s false rhetoric on Social Security is “confounding experts and worrying advocates.” Doesn’t say advocates of what. I just personally can’t forgive this demonstrative earnestness of elite media, when they can get emotional, you know, about welfare reform and “we need to cut food stamps.” But now they’re trying to be high and dry about cutting lifelines for seniors and disabled people.

And I’m not talking about all media. There are exceptions. But I want to ask you, finally, what would responsible, people-first journalism be doing right now, do you think?

Nancy Altman: “Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid. In my 50 years working on the programs, this is the most severe threat I’ve ever seen to them.”

NA: You so put your finger on it. I mean, it is outrageous, when you think about it, that Donald Trump will be spewing lies about Social Security in a nationwide, televised joint session of Congress, went on for minutes and minutes, talking about all these dead people are getting benefits, and that is a complete lie. It has been debunked a zillion times, including by his own acting commissioner, and yet he went before the nation and said it.

So there is a method to the madness. This is not confounding at all. It’s an effort to convince everybody that the government is full of corruption and fraud, so when they destroy it, they have their cover.

So I think, first of all, what mainstream media should do is call a lie a lie when it happens, and they should try to call it out in real time, and there should be some solidarity. I still can’t believe that the AP was banned from the White House, and all the mainstream media just didn’t all walk out.

So this is a time our institutions, all our institutions, are under a threat. This is the Steve Bannon “Flood the Zone.” So there are so many outrages at once. All of our institutions are being attacked, including the media.

My concern is Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid. In my 50 years working on the programs, this is the most severe threat I’ve ever seen to them. I think everybody’s got to be vigilant. I think they’ve got to make their voices heard, and I know there’s going to be protest on April 5. People should turn out for that. And the media should wake up and realize that everything is under assault, including them.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Nancy Altman from Social Security Works. They’re online at SocialSecurityWorks.org. Nancy Altman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

NA: Again, thank you so much for having me.

 

 

The New York Times (3/21/25) reports the resumption of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza as “pressure…to free more hostages.”

The New York Times produced an article on Friday, March 21, bearing the headline “Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages.” In the first paragraph, readers were informed that Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had undertaken to “turn up the pressure” by warning that Israel was “preparing to seize more territory in Gaza and intensify attacks by air, sea and land if the armed Palestinian group does not cooperate.”

This was no doubt a rather bland way of describing mass slaughter and illegal territorial conquest—not to mention a convenient distraction from the fact that Hamas is not the party that is currently guilty of a failure to cooperate. In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Israel annihilated the ceasefire agreement that came into effect in January following 15 months of genocide by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip.

Over those months, Israel officially killed at least 48,577 Palestinians in Gaza; in February, the death toll was bumped up to almost 62,000, to account for missing persons presumed to be dead beneath the rubble.

The first phase of the ceasefire ended at the beginning of March, and was scheduled to give way to a second phase, in which a permanent cessation of hostilities would be negotiated, along with the exchange of remaining hostages. Rather than “cooperate,” however, Israel and its BFF, the United States, opted to move the goalposts and insist on an extension of phase one—since, at the end of the day, an actual end to the war is the last thing Israel or the US wants.

After all, how will Donald Trump’s fantasy of converting Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” ever come to fruition if the territory is not thoroughly pulverized and depopulated first?

Israel’s US-endorsed resumption of all-out genocide on Tuesday killed at least 404 Palestinians right off the bat—but, hey, that’s just how Israel “turns up the pressure on Hamas.”

Committed to the deployment of euphemism

What the New York Times (3/3/25) calls “pressure,” Amnesty International calls “a crime against humanity and a violation of international law.”

Were the US newspaper of record not so firmly committed to the deployment of grotesque euphemism on behalf of the Israeli war effort, perhaps the discussion of “pressure” might have included a mention of such statistics as that, between Tuesday and Friday alone, at least 200 children were among those massacred. But this, alas, would have required a humanization of Palestinians, and a dangerous encouragement of empathy fundamentally at odds with US/Israeli policy in the Middle East.

Instead, the Times simply noted that “Israel hopes to compel Hamas to free more of the remaining hostages” in its possession, estimated to consist of “as many as 24 living captives—and the remains of more than 30 others.” No reference was made to the thousands of Palestinian captives held in mind-bogglingly inhumane conditions in Israel, though the Times did manage the—judgment-free—observation that,

even before the ceasefire collapsed this week, Israel had blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, preventing shipments of food and medicine from reaching Palestinians still recovering from more than a year of hunger and wartime deprivation.

As Amnesty International (3/3/25) pointed out, that particular Israeli maneuver amounted to a crime against humanity and a violation of international law. But the Western corporate media wouldn’t be the Western corporate media if they reported straight facts.

‘To pressure Hamas on hostages’

Death by bombing and starvation is euphemized by the Wall Street Journal (3/8/25) as “gradually increasing pressure on Hamas.”

For its part, Reuters (3/21/25) explained on Friday that Israel had “intensified a military onslaught to press the Palestinian militant group [Hamas] to free remaining Israeli hostages.” The Wall Street Journal has, meanwhile, spent weeks preparing for the onslaught of “pressure” via such headlines as “Israel Draws Up New War Plans to Pressure Hamas” (3/8/25) and “Israel Chokes Electricity Supply to Gaza to Pressure Hamas on Hostages” (3/9/25).

A BBC article (3/21/25) on Katz’s orders to the military to “seize additional areas in Gaza” in the absence of a comprehensive hostage release is illustrative of the corporate media approach to round two of genocide. Specifying that “Israel and the US have accused Hamas of rejecting proposals to extend the ceasefire,” the BBC quoted Katz as warning that “the more Hamas continues its refusal, the more territory it will lose to Israel.” The article did allow Hamas a line of space in which to respond that it is “engaging with the mediators with full responsibility and seriousness,” but the sandwiching of this quote in between US/Israeli accusations intentionally implied its disingenuousness.

Of course, the unmutilated truth does intermittently seep into media output, as in CNN’s Friday dispatch (3/21/25) containing these two sentences that lay out, in straightforward fashion, who is cooperating and who is not:

Hamas has insisted on sticking to a timeline previously agreed with Israel and the US that would move the warring parties into a second phase of the truce, in which Israel would commit to ending the war. But Israel has refused, saying it wants to extend the first phase instead.

Overall, however, the function of the corporate media is to endow demonstrably false US/Israeli accusations with a veneer of solid credibility, and to portray Hamas as the perennial saboteurs. Ultimately, unquestioningly reporting that Israel and the US have accused Hamas of rejecting proposals to extend the ceasefire is about the equivalent, in terms of journalistic integrity, as unquestioningly reporting that Israel and the US have accused Hamas of manufacturing nuclear jelly beans.

By implicitly blaming Hamas for renewed hostilities and legitimizing Israeli “pressure,” media outlets have offered themselves up as platforms for the de facto justification of mass slaughter.

A Thursday Fox News intervention (3/20/25) on Israel’s decision to “expand… activities in Gaza” noted approvingly that “the Israeli air force has continued to target and dismantle terrorists and terrorist infrastructure throughout” the coastal enclave. The article naturally came equipped with the assertion that Israel had resumed operations “following a short-lived ceasefire after it said the terror group repeatedly rebuffed offers to release the remaining hostages.”

To be sure, “activities” is as good a euphemism for genocide as any. And as the corporate media carry on with their own militant activities, one wishes some sort of pressure could stop the truth from being held hostage.

 

Explaining Columbia’s capitulation, the Wall Street Journal (3/21/25) reported that “the school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.”

President Donald Trump’s campaign against higher education started with Columbia University, both with the withholding of $400 million in funding to force major management charges (Wall Street Journal, 3/21/25) and the arrest and threatened  deportation of grad student Mahmoud Khalil, one of the student leaders of Columbia’s  movement against the genocide in Gaza (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). The Columbia administration is reportedly acquiescing to the Trump administration, which would result in a mask ban and oversight of an academic department, to keep the dollars flowing.

Trump’s focus on Columbia is no accident. Despite the fact that its administration largely agrees with Trump on the need to suppress protest against Israel, the university is a symbol of New York City, a hometown that he hates for its liberalism (City and State NY, 11/16/20). And it was a starting point for the national campus movement that began last year against US support for Israel’s brutal war against Gaza (Columbia Spectator, 4/18/24; AP, 4/30/24).

And for those crimes, the new administration had to punish it severely. The New York Times editorial board (3/15/25) rightly presented the attack on higher education as part of an attack on the American democratic project: “​​Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality.”

But the response to Columbia’s protests from establishment media—including at the Times—laid the groundwork for this fascistic nightmare. Leading outlets went out of their way to say the protests were so extreme that they went beyond the bounds of free speech. They painted them as antisemitic, despite the many Jews who participated in them, following the long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism (In These Times, 7/13/20; FAIR.org, 10/17/23, 11/6/23). Opinion shapers found these viewpoints too out of the mainstream for the public to hear, and wrung their hands over students’ attempts to reform US foreign policy in the Middle East.

‘Incessant valorization of victimhood’

The New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (6/25/24) included Columbia on his list of schools that “have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.”

I previously noted (FAIR.org, 10/11/24) that New York Times columnist John McWhorter (4/23/24), a Columbia instructor, made a name for himself defending the notion of free speech rights for the political right (even the racist right), but now wanted to insulate his students from hearing speech that came from a different political direction.

Trump’s rhetoric today largely echoes in cruder terms that of Times columnist Bret Stephens (6/25/24) last summer, who wrote of anti-genocide protesters:

How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?

They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack—hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity.

In fact, in the month before Khalil’s arrest, Stephens (2/27/25) called for swift and harsh punishments against anti-genocide protesters at Barnard College, which is part of Columbia:

Enough. The students involved in this sit-in need to be identified and expelled, immediately and without exception. Any nonstudents at the sit-in should be charged with trespassing. Face-hiding masks that prevent the identification of the wearer need to be banned from campus. And incoming students need to be told, if they haven’t been told already, that an elite education is a privilege that comes with enforceable expectations, not an entitlement they can abuse at will.

Stephens has been a big part of the movement against so-called cancel culture. That movement consists of journalists and professors who believe that criticism or rejection of bigoted points of views has a chilling effect on free speech. As various writers, including myself, have noted (Washington Post, 10/28/19; FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 5/20/21), this has often been a cover for simply wanting to censor speech to their left, and Stephens’ alignment with Trump here is evidence of that. The New York Times editorial board, not just Stephens, is part of that anti-progressive cohort (New York Times, 3/18/22; FAIR.org, 3/25/22).

‘Fervor that borders on the oppressive’

The Atlantic (5/5/24) identified Iddo Gefen as “a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive psychology at Columbia University and the author of Jerusalem Beach,” but not as an IDF veteran who spent three years in the Israeli military’s propaganda department.

The Atlantic’s coverage of the protests was also troubling. The magazine’s Michael Powell, formerly of the New York Times, took issue with the protesters’ rhetoric (5/1/24), charging them with “a fervor that borders on the oppressive” (4/22/24).

The magazine gave space to an Israeli graduate student, Iddo Gefen (5/5/24), who complained that some “Columbia students are embracing extreme rhetoric,” and said a sign with the words “by any means necessary” was “so painful and disturbing” that Gefen “left New York for a few days.” It’s hard to imagine the Atlantic giving such editorial space to a Palestinian student triggered by Zionist anti-Palestinian chants.

The Atlantic was also unforgiving on the general topic of pro-Palestine campus protests. “Campus Protest Encampments are Unethical” (9/16/24) was the headline of an article by Conor Friedersdorf, while Judith Shulevitz (5/8/24) said that campus anti-genocide protest chants are “why some see the pro-Palestinian cause as so threatening.”

‘Belligerent elite college students’

Paul Berman (Washington Post, 4/26/24) writes that Columbia student protesters “horrify me” because they fail to understand that Israel “killing immense numbers of civilians” and “imposing famine-like conditions” is not as important as “Hamas and its goal,” which is “the eradication of the Israeli state.”

The Washington Post likewise trashed the anti-genocide movement. Guest op-ed columnist Paul Berman (4/26/24) wrote that if he were in charge of Columbia, “I would turn in wrath on Columbia’s professors” who supported the students. He was particularly displeased with the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a chant demanding one democratic state in historic Palestine. Offering no evidence of ill will by the protesters who use the slogan, he said:

I grant that, when students chant “from the river to the sea,” some people will claim to hear nothing more than a call for human rights for Palestinians. The students, some of them, might even half-deceive themselves on this matter. But it is insulting to have to debate these points, just as it is insulting to have to debate the meaning of the Confederate flag.

The slogan promises eradication. It is an exciting slogan because it is transgressive, which is why the students love to chant it. And it is doubly shocking to see how many people rush to excuse the students without even pausing to remark on the horror embedded in the chants.

Regular Post columnist Megan McArdle (4/25/24) said that Columbia protesters would be unlikely to change US support for Israel because “20-year-olds don’t necessarily make the best ambassadors for a cause.” She added:

It’s difficult to imagine anything less likely to appeal to that voter than an unsanctioned tent city full of belligerent elite college students whose chants have at least once bordered on the antisemitic.

‘Death knell for a Jewish state’

While “defenders of the protesters dismiss manifestations of antisemitism…as unfortunate aberrations,” Max Boot (Washington Post, 5/6/24) writes. “But if you read what the protesters have written about their own movement, it’s clear that animus against Israel runs deep”—as though antisemitism and “animus against Israel” were the same thing.

Fellow Post columnist Max Boot (5/6/24) dismissed the statement of anti-genocide Columbia protesters:

The manifesto goes on to endorse “the Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees who have fled Israel since its creation in 1948. Allowing 7 million Palestinians—most of them the descendants of refugees—to move to Israel (with its 7 million Jewish and 2 million Arab residents) would be a death knell for Israel as a Jewish state. The protesters’ slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call not for a two-state solution but for a single Palestinian state—and a mass exodus of Jews.

Boot here gives away the pretense that Israel is a democracy. The idea of “one Palestine” is a democratic ideal whereby all people in historic Palestine—Jew, Muslim, Christian etc.—live with equal rights like in any normal democracy. But the idea of losing an ethnostate to egalitarianism is tantamount to “a mass exodus of Jews.”

Thirty years after the elimination of apartheid in South Africa, the white population is 87% as large as it was under white supremacy. Is there any reason to think that a smaller percentage of Jews would be willing to live in a post-apartheid Israel/Palestine without Jewish supremacy?

The New York Times, Atlantic and Washington Post fanned the flames of the right-wing pearl-clutching at the anti-genocide protests. Their writers may genuinely be aghast at Trump’s aggression toward universities now (Atlantic, 3/19/25, 3/20/25; Washington Post, 3/19/25, 3/21/25), but they might want to reflect on what they did to bring us to this point.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed historian David Perry about MAGA and disability for the March 14, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250314Perry.mp3

 

MSNBC (3/3/25)

Janine Jackson: A fair amount is being written about Linda McMahon’s lack of qualifications to be secretary of education, except the one that matters: an evident willingness to destroy the department she’s charged with leading. Our guest’s piece for MSNBC.com was one of few, so far, to address the impact of the Trump White House, including McMahon’s appointment, on the rights and lives of people with disabilities.

David Perry is a journalist and a historian; he joins us now by phone from Minnesota. Welcome back to CounterSpin, David Perry.

David Perry: It’s so nice to talk to you again.

JJ: McMahon at the DoE is not the only piece of this story, of course, but we might start with that. There’s some confusion, I think, around what the Department of Education does. They don’t really write curricula, but they do have a role in the school experiences of students with disabilities, don’t they?

DP: Yeah. It’s one of the places where the federal level really matters. It matters across the board. It matters that we have a functioning Department of Education that cares about education. But there are specific things it does, when it comes to students with disabilities—like, actually, both of my kids in different ways—particularly around something called a 504 plan. And we don’t need to get into the weeds there, but there’s two different kinds of ways that students with disabilities get services, and one are things we can call special ed, where kids are pulled out or get really modified curricula, but most people just get small accommodations; that really makes a difference.

Conversation (2/13/25)

If there’s a problem, it is the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education, that you appeal to. If there are materials that aren’t accessible—say, for example, you’re blind, and you can’t get materials over audio—you can file an OCR complaint to the Office of Civil Rights and expect to get some kind of response. And certainly under the Obama administration, and even under the first Trump administration, under Betsy DeVos—I’m not a fan of Betsy DeVos, but that office remained functional—and then more recently, all of that was happening. These civil rights offices are not surviving what Trump is doing these first six weeks, and I don’t expect the Ed Department’s to either.

JJ: In your piece for MSNBC, you situate McMahon’s appointment among a number of top-down threats to people with disabilities, and some of it’s old, things people have been pushing for for a while, off and on, but some of it feels kind of new, and some of it is policy, and some of it is, I guess, cultural. What are you seeing?

DP: Yeah, I wrote this piece in MSNBC, and I’ve been thinking about it in some ways since last summer, when I saw this coming. But here’s the version that came out.

AP (3/19/25)

There has been, with incredible amounts of work since the ’50s and ’60s and all the way through to today, the creation of a bipartisan, basic consensus that people with disabilities deserve to be able to work, deserve education, deserve housing that is accessible, deserve healthcare through things like Medicaid.

It has never been a great consensus. It has never been sufficient. The divisions between Democrats and Republicans, or even among Democrats and among Republicans, are vast and important and worth fighting for.

But I do think we achieved that kind of basic consensus, and I do not believe that the current Trump administration supports that consensus, and I have a lot of evidence to talk about it. And we’re going to see more, with the shuttering of Social Security offices, and the things that are coming from Medicaid. And, again, these basic issues around education.

And I think it’s really important for liberals, people like me, to not just say, “Oh, Republicans were always bad on this.” Again, we really disagreed on things, but the example I used is when Fred Trump Jr.—or the third, I can’t always remember their name—the president’s nephew, he has a son who has cerebral palsy and significant needs, went to the first Trump administration for help. He found a lot of people who were ready to help him, who were ready to do important work around access and around medical support.

Guardian (7/24/24)

None of those people are working in the second Trump White House except for Trump, whose famous or infamous response to his nephew is, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if your kid was just dead? It’s too much work. It’s too expensive.” And that’s the attitude we’re seeing now.

And that’s not even getting into what Elon Musk says about disabled people, or RFK, what he’s doing. I mean, we could talk for an hour just about the ways in which anti-disability rhetoric and policy lies at the heart of the second Trump administration.

JJ: It’s so appalling, and so many different appalling things are happening, and yet one can still be surprised to hear people, including Elon Musk, throwing around the r-word. Again, I don’t quite get what is so enjoyable about punching down, but people with disabilities, it seems, are always going to be at the sharp end of that.

DP: It is amazing to me. I’m a historian; I’m pretty cynical about things like progress. I know that things can be cyclical, that things we expect we achieve, we discover that ten, 20 years later, we did not achieve them. We’re seeing that right now with issues of integration, with the attempt to resegregate America racially.

HuffPost (3/14/25)

But I really felt we had gotten somewhere on the r-word, and really basic issues of respect. And all it takes is one billionaire constantly using that as his favorite insult, and now it’s back. It’s back everywhere. I see it all the time on social media. I’m sure it’s being said by kids at school to other kids. That’s something that never happened to my elder son—he’s 18, he’s about to graduate high school—that I’m aware of. I never heard that, but I bet kids following his footsteps are going to be called by the r-word. And I just thought we had beaten that one, and we clearly didn’t.

And I shouldn’t be surprised, as you say, right? I mean, that these things happen. We lose progress. But I’ll tell you that, in my heart, I thought we had beaten at least that slur, and we clearly haven’t.

JJ: I am surprised at my continued capacity to be surprised.

DP: Yeah.

JJ: When we spoke with you some years back, you had just co-written a white paper on extreme use of force by police, and the particular connection to people with disabilities. And part of what we were lamenting then was news media’s tendency to artificially compartmentalize disability issues.

So there were stories that focus on disabled people or on disability, and they can be good or bad or indifferent. They often have a “very special episode” feeling to them. But then, the point was, when the story is wildfires, there’s no thought about what might be the particular impact on people with disabilities. So it’s like spotlight or absence, but not ongoing, integrated consideration.

David Perry: “When you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.”

DP: The thing about disability, as opposed to other categories of difference—by which I mean race, gender, sexuality—is the ways in which people can move in and out of disability, the ways in which disability, while it is associated with issues like poverty, it does transcend it. It’s everywhere. Every family, everyone who lives long enough, if we’re lucky to live long enough, we will experience disability in our own bodies and minds. It is a different kind of difference, is one of the things that I like to say, lots of people like to say.

And so there is no issue in which disability is not part of it, including, as you say, the weather. And one of the things that was cut from my MSNBC story was when the wildfires were raging through California, conservative influencers—and these are not just people who tweet, but people who get to talk to Trump, right? People who get to talk to Musk, like Chris Rufo—started making fun of ASL, American Sign Language interpretation, when it came to wildfire announcements. Like, who are these people gesticulating? Well, there are deaf people who need to know how to evacuate, right? This is not a joke. This is not wokeness, right? This is trying to save lives, and I really do see it all of a piece that when the planes crashed, that first plane crashed right after Trump took office, the first thing Trump did was blame hiring people with disabilities for the FAA.

I think at the heart of their failures around Covid response is a real fear and dislike for disability and disease, and kind of a eugenic mentality. Just again and again, when you start to look—and I never want to say that disability is the only issue, or the most important issue; one of my kids is disabled, but also trans, right? I’m very aware of other ways in which other people are being attacked for different kinds of identities. But when you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.

JJ: You’re speaking also to this absence of intersectionality in media, and we talked about this last time, too, because, “Oh, police brutality is a Black problem. It’s not a disabled problem.” People can’t be Black and have a disability, right? Media just can’t grok that, because those are two different sections in the paper, so it’s like they can’t combine them.

Indianapolis Star (3/6/25)

And I want to say, I have seen some coverage, not a tremendous amount, but some coverage, of likely and already occurring impacts of things like budget cuts and agency dysfunction on people with disabilities. A lot of that coverage was local: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Garden City Telegram in Kansas, the Indianapolis Star: local folks, local reporters—who are, I guess, just listening to folks saying, “This is going to close this program. This is going to impact us in this way”—seem to be doing the story as kind of a local government function story.

DP: Nine years has been a long time, and I would say that the disability community has organized around both media outreach, around getting disabled reporters into the media. There are things I just don’t write anymore, because there are too many better people working on them, who are—I mean, I’m also disabled. I’m dyslexic and have mental illness. But my primary relationship to writing about disability hasn’t always come from that.

Things have gotten better in the media about talking about disability. It’s still something that gets missed. It still gets compartmentalized and sidelined. There’s a number of national outlets, like Mother Jones or the Indypendent or 19th News, that have people who’ve come out of the disability community and are full-time journalists. But also I think local organizations have gotten very good at working with local media to tell better stories. And there’s social media organization, starting really with Crip the Vote, was the phrase on Twitter a long time ago, with Alice Wong out of the Bay Area….

JJ: And Andrew Pulrang.

DP: Yeah, that’s right. I just want to say, things have gotten better, and they’ve gotten better, in part, because the disability community and these wonderful leaders have pushed very hard. And it is particularly trying to show these connections across areas, so that when we talk about Medicaid, we also talk about Social Security, and we also talk about the Department of Education, and we see—that’s what I’m trying to do in this piece, is I’m trying to say, “Look, there’s a consistent problem here that manifests with these different policies.”

Man of Steele (1/15/25)

JJ: There is a line in your MSNBC piece, and maybe it was cut back from more, because you do say in response to Trump’s wild, weird claims after the plane crash, that “with mental illness, their lives are shortened because of the stress they have.” And you say, “Well, no, their lives are shortened when they don’t have healthcare, when they can’t get jobs, when they can’t get housing.”

And it does have the line, “because when a wildfire rages, no one communicates the threat in a way they can understand.” But that sentence alone does not convey the energy with which right wingers attacked the very idea of communicating to, in this case, deaf people or hard-of-hearing people in a wildfire. So just to say those things don’t exist, I see why that one sentence doesn’t convey quite the pushback on that.

DP: I mean, I could have written an entire essay, and I think other people did when it happened, on Chris Rufo’s specific attack on ASL, and the way they got picked up by Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and these other really influential people online, attacking ASL, right, ASL! It should be the least controversial kind of adaptation, right? We’ve had it for a long time. Everyone understands what ASL is, and yet, here we go.

JJ: It’s like pushing the limits to see what we will tolerate.

CBS Mornings (3/3/25)

Finally, I will have a positive note, which was just a little snippet on CBS Mornings on March 3, where they were talking about cuts to DoE, and they had just a fraction of a moment with a woman whose kid has autism, and she was asked what a downsized DoE could mean if federal oversight, as we’re talking about, goes to another agency, which is of course what they’re saying. They’re not just going to shutter DoE, they’re going to shuffle these things off somewhere else. And she said, “My fear is that other schools, instead of helping a child with a disability get the services that they need in the school, they’re going to fix their football field, and it’s going to be OK, because nobody is regulating special education.”

DP: That’s really, really good. Yeah.

JJ: That’s a real good nugget that pulls together the fact of something that might be portrayed as abstract—budget-cutting, efficiency—the way that that actually falls down and affects people’s lives.

DP: We didn’t talk about it, but my framing for this piece was my son, who was 18, saying my name for the first time, which was an amazing moment, and we’ve had lots of these moments, but what I want to say is, they don’t just happen. They’re not just things that magically happen. It takes work and it takes funding and it takes policy and it takes good government and it takes schools, it takes all these different things, and I just don’t see that work being done. And I see where it is being done, the support being stripped away, and it’s terrible to watch.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with David Perry. His piece, “The Trump Administration Is Ready to Abandon Kids Like My Son,” is up at MSNBC.com. Thank you so much, David Perry, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DP: It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

 

As the hack-and-slash crusade of the “Department of Government Efficiency” picked up steam in early February, the Washington Post editorial board (2/7/25) gave President Donald Trump a tip on how to most effectively harness Elon Musk’s experience in “relentlessly innovating and constantly cutting costs”: Don’t just cut “low-hanging fruit,” but “reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent.”

Repeating the “flat Earth–type lie” of looming Social Security insolvency (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) has been a longtime hobby horse of corporate media, as has been reported at FAIR (e.g., 1/88, 6/25/19, 6/15/23) and elsewhere (Column, 8/4/23). While many leading newspapers have rightly called out Musk’s interventions into Social Security and the rest of the administrative state, they still push the pernicious myth that the widely popular social program is struggling and nearing insolvency, with few viable options for its rescue.

‘If nothing changes’

The Washington Post (5/6/24) last year depicted Social Security as literally throwing money down a hole.

An AP report (2/27/25) on Musk’s staffing cuts at the Social Security Administration, published in and then later taken down from the Washington Post (2/27/25), mentioned that “the program faces a looming bankruptcy date if it is not addressed by Congress.” It claimed that Social Security “will be unable to pay full benefits beginning in 2035.” The New York Times (3/5/25) concurred that the program is “in such dire financial trouble that benefit cuts could come within a decade if nothing changes.”

Such sky-is-falling reporting didn’t start with DOGE’s entry on the scene (e.g., New York Times, 1/26/86, 12/2/06; Washington Post, 11/8/80, 5/12/09). Indeed, the Post was beating this drum loudly after the 2024 Report of the Social Security Trustees was released last May. “Financial reality, though, is that if the programs aren’t reformed, and run out of money to pay required benefits, cuts could become unavoidable,” the Post editorial board (5/6/24) lamented.

These arguments misrepresent the structure of Social Security. In general, Social Security operates as a “pay-as-you-go” system, where taxes on today’s workers fund benefits for today’s retirees. While this system is more resilient to financial downturn, it “can run into problems when demographic fluctuations raise the ratio of beneficiaries to covered workers” (Economic Policy Institute, 8/6/10). During the 1980s, to head off the glut of Baby Boomer retirements, the Social Security program raised revenues and cut benefits to build up a trust fund for surplus revenues.

It’s worth noting that by setting up this fund, President Ronald Reagan helped to finance massive reductions in tax rates for the wealthy. By building up huge surpluses that the SSA was then required by law to pour into Treasury bonds, Reagan could defer the need to raise revenues into the future, when the SSA would begin tapping into the trust fund.

As US demographics have shifted, with Boomers comfortably into their retirement years, the program no longer runs a surplus. Instead, the SSA makes up the difference between tax receipts and Social Security payments by dipping into the trust fund, as was designed. What would hypothetically go bankrupt in 2035 is not the Social Security program itself, but the trust fund. If this were to happen, the SSA would still operate the program, paying out entitlements at a prorated level of 83%, all from tax receipts.

In other words, a non-original part of the Social Security program may sunset in 2035. While this could present funding challenges, it is not the same as the entire program collapsing, or becoming insolvent.

Furthermore, the idea that a crisis is looming rests on nothing changing in Social Security’s funding structure. Luckily, Congress has ten years to come up with a solution to the Social Security shortfall. We aren’t fretting today about how to fund the Forest Service’s army of seasonal trail workers for the summer of 2035. There’s no need to lose sleep over Social Security funding, either. As economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) put it:

There is no economic reason that we can’t pay benefits into the indefinite future, as long as we don’t face some sort of economic collapse from something like nuclear war or a climate disaster.

The easy and popular option is not an option

A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll (4/24/24) of swing state voters found 77% in favor of raising taxes on billionaires to aid Social Security.

There are three main solutions that can be found in stories about Social Security’s woes. In the wake of last year’s Trustees’ Report, the Washington Post (5/6/24) listed “the politically treacherous choices of raising the payroll tax, cutting benefits…or taking on more public debt to prop up the system.” The first two options increase the burden on workers, either by raising their taxes, or cutting benefits that they are entitled to, and have already begun paying into. The third option, taking on more public debt, is no doubt a nonstarter for the deficit hawks at the Post.

But this explainer-style news piece, titled “The US Has Updated Its Social Security Estimates. Here’s What You Need to Know,” neglected to mention the easiest and most popular option: raising the cap on income from which Social Security taxes are withheld.

In 2025, income up to $176,100 is taxed for Social Security purposes. Anything beyond that is not. In other words, the architect making close to 200 grand a year pays the same amount into Social Security as the chief executive who takes home seven figures. One simple, and popular, way to increase funding for Social Security is to raise that regressive cap.

To be fair to the Post, the cap increase has been mentioned elsewhere in its pages, including in an opinion piece (5/6/24) by the editorial board published that same day. However, despite acknowledging that “many Americans support the idea” of raising the limit, the editorial board lumps this idea in with “raising the retirement age for younger generations and slowing benefit growth for the top half of earners,” before concluding that “these [solutions] won’t be popular or painless.”

Raising the cap on income is, in fact, popular (as the Post editorial board itself acknowledged), and the only pain it would cause is for the top 6% of income-earners who take home more than $176,100. The New York Times (3/5/25) also mentions a cap increase as an idea to “stabilize” the program, only to say that “no one on Capitol Hill is talking seriously about raising that cap any time soon.” Why that is the case is left unsaid.

Even more popular than raising the cap on wages was President Joe Biden’s proposed billionaires tax, which “would place a 25% levy on households worth more than $100 million. The plan taxes accumulated wealth, so it ends up hitting money that often goes untaxed under current laws” (Bloomberg, 4/24/24). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this kind of solution was not explored in the Times, nor in the billionaire-owned Post.

Useful misinformation

Reports of Social Security’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated. As economist Paul Van De Water wrote for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (7/24/24):

Those who claim that Social Security won’t be around at all when today’s young adults retire and that young workers will receive no benefits either misunderstand or misrepresent the trustees’ projections.

Social Security’s imminent demise may not be true, but it’s very useful to those who want to rob all the workers who have dutifully paid their Social Security taxes, by misleading them into thinking it’s simply not possible to pay them back what they’re owed when they retire.

Compared to the retirement programs of global peers, the United States forces its workers to retire later, gives retirees fewer benefits and taxes its citizens more regressively (Washington Post, 7/19/24). Despite this, Americans still love Social Security, and want the government to spend money on it. Far from cuts called for by anxious columnists, the only overhaul Social Security needs is better benefits and a fairer tax system.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250321.mp3

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

 

Public Information (3/17/25)

This week on CounterSpin: News site Popular Information alerted us to new Social Security Administration policy effectively requiring tens of thousands of recipients, by the agency’s own estimation, to travel to a field office to verify their ID. An internal memo predicts the shift will create “service disruption,” “operational strain” and “budget shortfalls” – unsurprising, given concurrent staffing cuts and field office closures. The inevitable harms will no doubt be declared part of a necessary attempt to purge “fraud” from the system that has disbursed earned benefits to elderly and disabled people for generations.

Journalists have choices. They can, as did the Record-Journal of Meriden, Connecticut, report that the cuts derive from repeated claims of fraud from Elon Musk that are “without evidence,” that Trump echoes Musk’s “unfounded statements,” quote a retiree advocate noting that accusations of loads of dead folks collecting benefits are “baseless, ” and put the words “fact sheet” in appropriate irony quotes when describing a missive from the White House.

Or you can go the route of the Arizona Republic, and lead with the notion that the interference in Social Security is most importantly part of Musk’s “implementing…measures to trim costs throughout the government.” Mention that the actions have “stirred a range of emotions, from cautious hope that the federal government might finally bring its deficit spending under control, to frantic fears that benefit cuts could undermine the financial or health security of millions of Americans,” go on to ask earnestly, “Where does Trump stand on Social Security and other benefits?” and begin with a White House statement “reiterating that the president supports these programs.” In paragraph 19, you might throw in that public polling shows that “most Americans would favor revenue increases rather than benefit cuts to Social Security,” which would include “requiring high-income individuals to pay taxes on more of their earnings.”

In short, easily verified facts, along with “most Americans,” can be centered  or tangential in your reporting on the drastic, opaque changes aimed at the program that keeps the wolf from the door for millions of people, but for Musk/Trump represents yet another pile of money they feel belongs to them and theirs. All that’s in the balance are human lives and health, and the ability of working people to plan for our futures.

We’ll talk about the new, yet also old, attacks on Social Security with Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250321Altman.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Mahmoud Khalil, deportations and the FTC.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250321Altman.mp3

 

 

Donald Trump is back in office. Tech mogul Elon Musk, now a senior adviser to the president, is helming a government advisory body with an acronym derived from a memecoin: DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). That organization is sinking its teeth into the federal government, and drawing blood.

Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of federal employees are being laid off this year. Over a dozen agencies have been affected. Executive power is being wielded so wildly that a federal judge has lamented “what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight.”

The Fourth Estate is tasked with serving as a check on abuses of power. But US media were not designed for this.

Though critical in much of their reporting, corporate outlets have at the same time substantially legitimized the project of DOGE. For one, longstanding fearmongering about government spending in the news sections of corporate outlets has elevated precisely the right-wing vision of government animating DOGE.

Even more worryingly, however, criticism of DOGE by major editorial boards has been weak, and in some cases has been overshadowed by these boards’ support for the ideas behind DOGE, or even for DOGE itself.

Government spending ‘skyrocketed’

The New York Times (1/30/25) claims “even progressives now worry about the federal debt”—though an extensive recent analysis (PERI, 4/20) of the impact of debt by progressive economists found that “the relationship between government debt and economic growth is essentially zero.”

Corporate media’s ever-present fearmongering about spending is well-illustrated by the New York Times, which, within a week and a half of Trump’s inauguration, had already run the headline: “Even Progressives Now Worry About the Federal Debt” (1/30/25). The next day, the paper ran a separate article (1/31/25) by Michael Shear, which stated:

The amount of money the government spends has skyrocketed under Democratic and Republican presidents. Total federal spending in 2015 was $4.89 trillion, according to federal data. In 2024, it was $6.75 trillion. Even when accounting for the growth of the overall economy, spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was higher in 2024 than it was eight years earlier.

The paragraph at least avoided the classic tactic of throwing out raw numbers without giving any sort of metric, like GDP, to measure them against. But it nonetheless gave far from the full picture, not even offering numbers for spending as a percentage of GDP, which showed a minor increase of 3 percentage points over this period, to 23%—the same percentage that was spent in 2011.

Even more useful to include than this data, however, would have been international data showing how much the US spends in comparison to other rich countries. As it turns out, the answer is: quite little. And the US taxes even less.

Readers might also be interested to learn that tax cuts, not spending increases, have been primarily responsible for increases in the US’s debt-to-GDP ratio in recent decades, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress (3/27/23). The group emphasized: “Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently.” Given that reality, CAP concluded:

If Congress wants to decrease deficits, it should look first toward reversing tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy, which were responsible for the United States’ current fiscal outlook.

Federal outlays as a percentage of GDP have been nearly constant for the past 75 years (FRED).

‘The big areas of the budget’

The New York Times‘ Michael Shear (1/31/25) wrote that Trump was attempting “to somehow reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.”

If corporate media like the New York Times were serious about informing readers about the causes of and answers to high government debt, they would, like CAP, debunk right-wing deficit hawk propaganda, rather than reinforce it.

Instead, the Times‘ Shear (1/31/25) decided to provide his readers with extensive quotation from Maya MacGuineas, an extreme deficit hawk who got an early boost in her career “from the patronage of billionaire investment banker and arch-austerian Pete Peterson,” as the New Republic (3/4/21) recounted in a 2021 piece. Shear merely described her as “the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.”

MacGuineas is the only expert Shear cites in the piece, and the article closes with her warning that Musk’s cuts “would not be enough to confront the nation’s burgeoning debt from spending too much over many decades.” “To make a real impact on the debt,” MacGuineas said:

We are going to have to look at the big areas of the budget for savings—Social Security, healthcare and revenues—the very same areas both political parties are tripping over themselves not to address.

The decision to include only an austerity advocate, and to allow her proclamation about the need for cuts to Social Security to end the piece, inevitably grants legitimacy to her claims. These claims are at the very least meant to be taken seriously, even more so since they come from a supposedly independent expert rather than a politician or government official. The decision to include no left-wing expert has a similar effect in reverse.

Meanwhile, in the paper’s piece (1/30/25) from the previous day about “progressive worry,” reporter Lydia DePillis managed to bury the key point in the 21st paragraph:

But mostly, Democrats say, the government simply needs more revenue to support the increasing number of people who are becoming eligible for retirement benefits.

Debt-scolding reporting

The Washington Post (10/8/24) sounds the alarm over the United States having a debt-to-GDP ratio similar to that of Britain, France and Canada—and much lower than Japan’s.

The Times is hardly the only outlet to legitimize alarmism about government spending. In a debt-scolding piece of reporting from last fall, the Washington Post (10/8/24) hammered on the point that runaway spending should be a major concern.

The choice of headline, “US Deficit Hits $1.8 Trillion as Interest Costs Rise,” immediately linked debt concerns to spending, not taxes. The first paragraph described the $1.8 trillion figure as “an enormous sum”—probably equally applicable to any sum over a billion dollars in the average American’s mind—while the fourth paragraph warned:

The nation’s debt compared with the size of the overall economy, a key metric of fiscal stability, is projected to exceed its all-time high of 106% by 2027.

Once again, international comparison would have been helpful here. It could be noted that the US, in fact, has a rather typical amount of debt compared to many other rich countries these days, with Britain, Canada, Spain, France and Italy all posting similar debt-to-GDP numbers. Greece, meanwhile, has a debt-to-GDP ratio close to 170%, while Japan boasts a ratio of around 250%. As Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has noted:

If these countries can sustain debt levels 50–150% higher than our current levels, then the question of whether we can do so has already been answered. Indeed, it does not even need to be asked.

The Post, evidently, had no interest in providing such context. No international figures were cited. Instead, the next lines were a quote from a conservative economist:

A [nearly] $2 trillion deficit is bad news during a recession and war, but completely unprecedented during peace and prosperity…. The danger is the deficit will only get bigger over the next decade due to retiring baby boomers and interest on the debt.

Notice once more the linking of the increase in debt to spending rather than tax cuts.

The ‘soaring’ debt that wasn’t

The federal debt the Wall Street Journal (9/16/24) claimed was “soaring” was a smaller percentage of GDP in 2024 than in 2020.

The piece continued on to cite deficit hawk MacGuineas—described as the president of “a top Washington fiscal watchdog”—denouncing the “patchwork of targeted fiscal bribes” being offered to voters by the presidential candidates. And it ended with a quote from “president of the right-leaning American Action Forum and a former CBO director” Doug Holtz-Eakin, reminding us that debt servicing costs will have to be paid and will crowd out other spending priorities.

Unmentioned by the Post is that Holtz-Eakin held high posts in the George W. Bush administration and the John McCain presidential campaign. He also oversaw the creation of an infamous bogus cost estimate for the Green New Deal. Yet the Post portrays him as just an expert who leans a bit to the right.

Though the Post consulted three right-wing sources, they failed to include a single left-leaning independent expert. It’s not hard to understand how that fails readers, or how it legitimizes a certain set of priorities, while suggesting other views lack credibility.

The Wall Street Journal, for its part, has been more than happy to join the general fretting in corporate media about government spending. Back in the fall, for instance, a piece in its news section (9/16/24) complained that the presidential race was not focusing sufficiently on the issue of rising government debt, and flagged Social Security and Medicare as “the biggest drivers of rising spending.” The headline read: “Federal Debt Is Soaring. Here’s Why Trump and Harris Aren’t Talking About It.”

The problem with that headline? In the fall of 2024, federal debt was decidedly not soaring. This holds whether you look at federal debt in nominal dollar terms or as a percentage of GDP. Federal debt had “soared” briefly in 2020, when the Covid recession hit and the government rapidly expanded its spending to deal with the downturn. But for most of 2024, the quarterly percentage increase in the federal debt in dollar terms was actually below the historical average going back to 1970. And the debt-to-GDP ratio was at roughly the same spot as it had been three-and-a-half years earlier, at the start of Biden’s presidency.

‘Shutting off the lights’

For the Wall Street Journal (2/10/25), refusing to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid “is like saying you want to go on a diet except for the beer, chips and ice cream sundaes.”

Even more concerning than corporate media’s penchant for running articles in the news section fearmongering about government spending, though, is what has been going on in corporate outlets’ opinion sections, specifically with the output of their editorial boards. Here, the legitimization of DOGE has reached its highest heights.

Unsurprisingly, the unabashedly right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board has been the prime offender. Most recently, it published an editorial (3/14/25) with the headline “Don’t Cry for the Education Department,” applauding the unconstitutional DOGE-led attack on the Education Department, which the Journal chastened for “harassing schools, states and districts with progressive diktats on everything from transgender bathroom use to Covid-19 mask rules.”

The final paragraph began: “The closer Mr. Trump can get to shutting off the lights at the Education Department, the better.”

This was just one of numerous Journal editorials in recent weeks cheering on the DOGE project. A sampling of other editorials:

• “Hurricane Musk and the USAID Panic” (2/4/25) argued that Musk should be contained, but that he is “also hitting targets that have long deserved scrutiny and reform, which helps explain the wailing over the US Agency for International Development.”
• “The Federal Spending Boom Rolls On” (2/10/25) declared that “DOGE is a good idea,” and claimed that it had not gone far enough: “But for all of Mr. Musk’s frenetic tweeting, and the Beltway cries of Apocalypse Now, so far DOGE is only nibbling at the edges of Washington’s spending problem.”
• “Judge Wants DOGE Facts, Not Fears” (2/19/25) ended, “Democrats hunting for a constitutional crisis might want to show evidence before they cry ‘dictator.’”

In short, then, the Journal editorial board not only approves of a rogue pseudo-agency operating with no transparency or oversight, but has become a crusader in defense of DOGE’s attacks on constitutional checks and balances—which grant Congress, not a right-wing ideologue from the PayPal Mafia, the power of the purse.

Of course, you can expect little else from the Journal than salivation over cuts to federal spending—it has long been the lapdog of right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch. But it is jarring to witness exactly how rabid the Journal editorial board can be.

Not ‘audacious’ enough

The Washington Post says it’s “true that the $36 trillion national debt is unsustainable and there’s plenty of bloat in government.”

For its part, the Washington Post editorial board, while describing DOGE as a “circus” (2/24/25), has substantially legitimized DOGE’s mission.

An editorial (2/7/25) from early February is case in point. Headlined “Trump Needs to Erect Guardrails for DOGE,” the piece offered five ways for Trump to “be clear about who is boss,” effectively endorsing the mission of slashing government spending while expressing concern over some of Musk’s tactics.

The first four proposed guardrails in the piece, which include “Vet Musk’s operatives” and “Limit Musk’s access to sensitive files,” are all reasonable, but the fifth proposal reveals the board’s substantive concerns about the spending cuts being executed by DOGE. These concerns are not about whether cuts should be made—it is taken for granted that government spending should be reduced. Rather, they have to do with which spending is cut, aligning with the concerns raised by the Wall Street Journal about DOGE not going far enough.

This proposal, labeled “Focus on the biggest drivers of the national debt,” read:

To have any chance of achieving Musk’s audacious goal of $2 trillion in cuts, Trump will need to work with elected representatives in Congress to reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent. Other sensitive areas of the balance sheet, including the Pentagon budget and veterans’ benefits, cannot stay off the table forever.

For the Post, then, the focus on programs such as USAID is simply too limited. We must put Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ benefits on the table!

‘Embrace the same thinking’

The “DOGE ethos,” according to the Washington Post (3/3/25), means making “governments leaner and more efficient.”

The Washington Post’s preference for substantial cuts to federal government is further illustrated by an editorial (3/3/25) published in early March, following Jeff Bezos’s rebranding of the Post as Wall Street Journal–lite.

The editorial, titled “The DOGE Ethos Comes to State Governments,” showered praise on state governments that are capitalizing on DOGE branding while pursuing a more “thoughtful” approach to reducing government spending.

The piece favorably cited Washington state Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson’s insistence that “I’m not here to defend government…. I’m here to reform it.” The board elaborated:

Democrats in DC ought to embrace the same thinking. It’s foolish to defend a status quo that most voters think doesn’t work well. By fighting Trump and Musk tooth and nail, at the expense of presenting an alternative vision, the opposition risks appearing overly keen to protect hidebound institutions even as the world changes rapidly.

The Post’s take on DOGE? Let’s not center its blatant illegality. Let’s instead focus on what we can learn from it. After all, with a few minor tweaks, it’s exactly what we as a country need.

‘A great American success story’

The New York Times (3/8/25) says of Elon Musk, “He’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient.” But he’s going about it the wrong way!

The appallingly low bar set by the competition leaves the New York Times to assume the role of the major national newspaper that will seriously attack DOGE. It takes to this role…poorly.

The Times editorial board’s pushback against DOGE has been embarrassingly feeble. Its most direct assessment of DOGE thus far (3/8/25), for instance, began with an uncomfortably obsequious description of Musk:

Elon Musk’s life is a great American success story. Time and again, he has anticipated where the world was headed, helping to create not just new products but new industries.

The board quickly conceded a major point to Musk:

Mr. Musk claims that the government is a business in need of disruption and that his goal is to eliminate waste and improve efficiency. And he’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient.

The editorial went on to make a number of criticisms of DOGE, but its critique was undermined by this odd willingness to bend over backwards to appease Musk and his supporters.

Meanwhile, though sharply critical of DOGE’s disregard for the Constitution, the editorial made no attempt at presenting a counter-vision of government. It lamented cuts to a hodgepodge of specific government programs, but it had nothing to say in defense of current levels of government spending, let alone in favor of even higher levels of spending. One would hardly know that many wealthy countries have significantly higher levels of government spending and happier populations—in fact, at least 16 OECD countries register both higher spending and higher happiness than the US.

A gaping hole

This, then, is the state of American corporate media at the start of the Trump presidency. Across arguably the three most important national newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal—there is broad agreement that government spending is out of control and that something, perhaps something drastic, needs to be done about it.

Even at the leftmost of these organizations, the New York Times, the editorial board appears incapable of mounting a case for social democratic levels of government spending in the face of extreme attacks on spending by the Trump administration. The Times, instead, finds itself caught between bowing before the titans of American capitalism and confronting their disregard for the US Constitution.

The Washington Post has been able to adopt a somewhat less tortured position, occupying the center/center-right in a way reminiscent of 1990s Democrats, supporting cuts to government, but in a “thoughtful” way.

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, is having the time of its life. Finding itself once again in an era when greed and meanness animate the daily actions of government, it must feel freer than it has in years to bare its teeth at the true enemies of the American republic: teachers’ unions and recipients of government aid.

News consumers have no major paper espousing a truly progressive perspective. On the topic of government spending, at least, the window of acceptable thought appears to span from the center to the far right. There is no direct marketing reason for this—there’s a sizeable audience in the US that would welcome a progressive outlet, the same way there’s a sizeable audience for right-wing outlets like the Wall Street Journal or Fox News.

Who doesn’t want such an outlet to appear? Ultra-wealthy right-wing Americans of the sort that own and sponsor much of the media landscape. If wealthy people aren’t willing to finance a progressive media outlet that can compete with major papers, it seems that such an outlet simply won’t exist. Crowdfunding could help progressive media overcome this issue, but the playing field is not level.

As it stands, a major progressive outlet that can compete with the existing dominant players does not exist, and does not seem to be coming anytime soon. The gaping hole left as a result is becoming only more apparent as we speed into Trump administration 2.0.