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In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow note that the Western notion of freedom derives from the Roman legal tradition, in which freedom was conceived as “the power of the male household head in ancient Rome, who could do whatever he liked with his chattels and possessions, including his children and slaves.”

Because of this, “freedom was always defined—at least potentially—as something exercised to the cost of others.”

You have to understand this notion of freedom—that to be free, you have to make someone else less free—to make sense of the idea that Donald Trump is a champion of “free speech.”

Ezra Klein (New York Times, 2/25/25) thought Martin Gurri’s argument that “maybe Trump is building something more stable, creating a positive agenda that might endure….was worth hearing out.”

This is, unfortunately, not a fringe idea. Last week, the New York Times (2/25/25) ran a long interview Ezra Klein did with Trump-supporting intellectual (and former CIA officer) Martin Gurri, who said his main reason for voting for Trump was that “I felt like he was for free speech.” “Free speech is a right-wing cause,” Gurri claimed.

Trump is the “free speech” champion who said of a protester at one of his rallies during the 2016 campaign (Washington Post, 2/23/16): “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that…? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”

Trump sues news outlets when he doesn’t like how they edit interviews, or their polling results (New York Times, 2/7/25). Before the election, future Trump FBI Director Kash Patel (FAIR.org, 11/14/24) promised to “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections…. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” Trump’s FCC chair is considering yanking broadcast licenses from networks for “news distortion,” or for letting Kamala Harris have a cameo on Saturday Night Live (FAIR.org, 2/26/25).

Nonetheless, Trump is still seen by many as a defender of free speech, because he sticks up for the free speech of people whose speech is supposed to matter—like right-wingers who weren’t allowed to post content that was deemed hate speech, disinformation or incitement to violence on social media platforms. As the headline of a FAIR.org piece (11/4/22) by Ari Paul put it, “The Right Thinks Publishers Have No Right Not to Publish the Right.” Another key “free speech” issue for the right, and much of the center: people who have been “canceled” by being criticized too harshly on Twitter (FAIR.org, 8/1/20, 10/23/20).

Trump (Truth Social, 3/4/25), of course, does not have the power to unilaterally withhold funds that have been authorized by Congress.

Now Trump (Truth Social, 3/4/25) has come out with a diktat threatening sanctions against any educational institution that tolerates forbidden demonstrations:

All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!

The reference to banning masks is a reminder that, for the right, freedom is a commodity that belongs to some people and not to others. You have an inalienable right to defy mask mandates, not despite but mainly because you could potentially harm someone by spreading a contagious disease—just as you supposedly have a right to carry an AR-15 rifle. Whereas if you want to wear a mask to protect yourself from a deadly illness—or from police surveillance—sorry, there’s no right to do that.

But more critically, what’s an “illegal protest”? The context, of course, is the wave of campus protests against the genocidal violence unleashed by Israel against Palestinians following the October 7, 2023, attacks (though Trump’s repressive approach to protests certainly is not limited to pro-Palestinian ones).

On January 30, Trump promised to deport all international students who “joined in the pro-jihadist protests,” and to “cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” He ordered the Justice Department to “quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.”

A federal task force convened by Trump (CNN, 3/3/25) is threatening to pull $50 million in government contracts from New York’s Columbia University because of its (imaginary) “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students,” which has been facilitated, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, by “the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture.”

So the expression of ideas—Palestinian solidarity, US criticism, generic “radicalism”—has to be suppressed, because they lead to, if they do not themselves constitute, “harassment of Jewish students” (by which is meant pro-Israel students; Jewish student supporters of Palestinian rights are frequently targets of this suppression). Those ideas constitute “censorship,” and the way to combat this censorship is to ban those ideas.

No one is talking about cracking down on students who proclaim “I Stand With Israel,” on the grounds that they may intimidate Palestinian students—even though they are endorsing an actual, ongoing genocide (FAIR.org, 12/12/24). That’s because—in the longstanding Western tradition that Trump epitomizes—free speech is the possession of some, meant to be used against others.

Featured Image: Demonstration in London in support of a free Palestine (Creative Commons photo: Kyle Taylor).

Elon Musk (X, 2/26/25) gives his seal of approval to the new univocal Washington Post.

“Bravo, Jeff Bezos!”

That was the congratulatory message Elon Musk posted on X, the platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022 and subsequently turned into a pro-Trump bullhorn. Musk’s “bravo” was in response to Bezos’ shocking announcement that he was taking his media outlet, the Washington Post, in a Trumpian direction as well.

The Post’s opinion section will now advance Bezos’ “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Anyone not on board with this “significant shift” can take a hike, Bezos seemed to tell Post employees, in a note he also shared on X (2/26/25).

That was Wednesday morning. By evening, Bezos was dining with President Trump.

Parker Molloy (Present Age, 2/26/25): “The audacity of claiming that free market ideas are ‘underserved’ in American media is staggering. Has Bezos somehow missed the existence of the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Bloomberg, Fox Business, CNBC and countless other outlets that have spent decades championing free-market capitalism?”

Bezos doesn’t give any detail on what he means by “personal liberties,” but in the context of the billionaire appearing behind Trump at the inauguration, and Amazon contributing $1 million to the inaugural festivities—on top of paying Melania Trump $40 million for her biopic—it’s doubtful that his paper will be talking much about the myriad liberties under attack by the Trump administration.

“When billionaires talk about ‘personal liberties,’” media critic Parker Molloy (Present Age, 2/26/25) noted, “they’re usually thinking about their personal liberty to avoid taxation and regulation.”

Meanwhile, as Bezos professes his love of personal liberties, “his news organization now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section,” said former Post executive editor Marty Baron (American Crisis, 2/27/25):

It was only weeks ago that the Post described itself as providing coverage for “all of America.” Now its opinion pages will be open to only some of America, those who think exactly as he does.

Such limitations may not be limited to the opinion pages. Post media critic Erik Wemple penned a column about Bezos’ directive—and, according to former Post editor Gene Weingarten (Gene Pool, 2/27/25), “It was spiked. Killed, in newspeak.”

Michael Schaffer (Politico, 2/26/25): Bezos’ “latest edict effectively rebrands the publication away from the interests of Washington and toward the politics of Silicon Valley—and looks likely to cost it a chunk of the remaining audience.”

Bezos’ fidelity to his other pillar, “free markets,” is no less questionable, considering his companies hoover up billions of dollars in government contracts, are massively subsidized, and Amazon, which Bezos founded, is an egregious antitrust violator.

And somehow Bezos, the world’s third richest person, believes his so-called free market “viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” But as Politico columnist Michael Schaffer (2/26/25) noted:

Between the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and the Economist, there’s no shortage of outlets that are organized around a generally pro-market editorial line. For that matter, there’s the Washington Post. Do you recall the publication editorializing against the free market? Me neither.

Yet Bezos is now committed to turning his paper into a second Wall Street Journal—a project already under way, as Bezos’ handpicked Post publisher and CEO, Will Lewis, comes from the Journal, as does executive editor Matt Murray.

Naturally, the Journal’s editorial page (2/26/25) welcomed Bezos’ “free markets” pivot, writing, “It will be good to have a wingman in the fight.”

Despite Bezos’ claim that his views are underserved, it’s actually the lefty end of the spectrum for which that’s the case (FAIR.org, 10/9/20). But those wanting anything left of authoritarian capitalism will have to look elsewhere. “Viewpoints opposing [my] pillars will be left to be published by others,” Bezos wrote, adding, “the internet does that job.”

It’s unclear if Bezos was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat as he wrote these words, but it’s unmistakable that he’s aligning his paper with Trump’s so-called “America First” agenda. “I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Bezos wrote.

Sara Fischer (Axios,  2/26/25): ” Efforts by the Trump administration to scrutinize media have forced media, entertainment and tech companies to make difficult decisions about how far they will go to defend their editorial values.”

As shocking as Bezos’ groveling is, it’s just the latest in a string of extraordinary favors he’s done for Trump and the man Trump has turned much of the US government over to, Elon Musk.

Bezos and Amazon have thrown millions of dollars at the billionaire duo running our country. At the same time, the Post has been kind to both men, most noticeably when Bezos killed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris ahead of the election (FAIR.org, 10/30/24). For Musk, the Post not only spiked an ad critical of him, but also dismissed his Nazi salute on Inauguration Day as merely an “awkward gesture” (FAIR.org, 2/19/25, 1/23/25).

With Bezos’ new directive, the Post is all but formalizing its lapdog arrangement with Trump and Musk. How this will impact the Post, which Bezos purchased from the Graham family for $250 million in 2013, remains to be seen. But the fallout has been swift, and it comes on the heels of a mass exodus of both readers and top talent since the election.

Now joining the exodus is Post opinions editor David Shipley. Bezos wanted Shipley to lead the Post’s rightward turn, but only if he was all in. “If the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Bezos told him. But Bezos’ directive was too much even for Shipley, who had previously proven his loyalty by spiking a cartoon depicting Bezos and other tech executives groveling before Trump (FAIR.org, 1/7/25).

Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 2/26/25): “I foresee a mass subscriber defection from an outlet already deep in red ink; that must be something businessman Bezos is willing to live with.”

For those who remain at the Post, they do so warily.

Bezos’ “massive encroachment” into the opinion section “makes clear dissenting views will not be published,” wrote the Post’s Jeff Stein, who only days earlier had been promoted to chief economics correspondent:

I still have not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side, I will be quitting immediately and letting you know.

Former Posties were also quick to weigh in. “Bezos’ move is more than a gut punch; it’s more like a death knell for the once-great news organization,” wrote former Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 2/26/25):

Bezos no longer wants to own a credible news organization. He wants a megaphone and a political tool that will benefit his own commercial interests.

Those commercial interests extend from earth into space.

“Amazon has a big cloud computing business. [Bezos’ space company] Blue Origin is wholly dependent on the US government,” Marty Baron told Zeteo (2/26/25). “Trump can just decide that they’re not going to get any contracts. Is [Bezos] going to put that at risk? Obviously, he’s not going to put that at risk.”

“It’s craven,” said Baron, who led the Post for eight years, nearly all of them under Bezos:

He’s basically fearful of Trump. He has decided that, as timid and tepid as the editorials have been, they’ve been too tough on Trump. He’s saying they’re going to have an opinion page with one point of view.

Back when the Washington Post had “full independence” from Bezos, it was running twisted columns denying that the billionaire had a lot of money (FAIR.org, 10/3/17).

There’s an irony in Baron calling out his former boss, when he spent years attacking others for doing so.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a hair’s breadth away from securing the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, questioned whether his critiques of billionaires (like Bezos) and low-wage behemoths (like Amazon) might be contributing to the Post’s blistering coverage of him (FAIR.org, 8/15/19).

“Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor,” Baron said in response, “Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.”

Fast-forward six years, and the mask is off, so much so that Baron now sounds like Sanders (to whom Baron owes a belated apology).

That the Post’s hard-right turn comes at a time when other corporate and billionaire-owned outlets are also cozying up to Trump, only makes this moment all the more fraught.

This alarming state of affairs highlights the importance of independent media watchdogs. “We launched FAIR nearly 40 years ago with warnings about the influence of media owners on news content,” FAIR founder Jeff Cohen said in an email:

The first issue of our publication featured a cover story on the corporate takeover of news written by legendary journalist and Media Monopoly author Ben Bagdikian. The recent antics of Bezos show that the need to scrutinize and expose corporate media owners is even greater today.

Janine Jackson interviewed Color of Change’s Portia Allen-Kyle about predatory tax preparers for the February 21, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

ProPublica (10/17/19)

Janine Jackson: April is nominally tax season, but right about now is when many people start worrying about it. That’s why TurboTax paid a heck of a lot of money for Super Bowl ads to hard-sell the idea that people could use its service for free—if they hadn’t used it last year, or if they filed by a certain date.

But if free, easy tax-filing is possible, should it be a gift to taxpayers from a for-profit corporation, from a corporation that has already been fined for unfairly charging lower-income Americans, from a corporation that has aggressively lobbied for decades to prevent making tax filing free and/or easy?

Our next guest has looked into not just the top-down inequities of the tax preparation industry—described by one observer as the “wild, wild West”—but how those problems fall hard on Black and brown and low-income communities.

Portia Allen-Kyle is interim executive director at Color of Change. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Portia Allen-Kyle.

Portia Allen-Kyle: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Color of Change/Better IRS (3/24)

JJ: I want to ask you about the report you authored, called “Preying Preparers.” I believe that many, if not enough, people have a sense that poor, low-income folks are at the sharp end of tax policy generally, and tax-filing specifically—that rich people get to keep, not just more money, but a higher fraction of money than low-income folks, who have less money and who need every nickel of it.

But I’m not sure that people understand, that isn’t just the capitalism chips falling where they may. Your report says, “Exploiting low-income taxpayers is core to the business model of tax prep companies.” Tell us what we might not know about that.

PAK: Doing that report was so eye-opening for so many different reasons, both personally and professionally, at Color of Change, in our advocacy. I remember years ago, when I discovered after going to H&R Block, and paying more than $300 for a fairly simple return, and finding out that the person who filed my return wasn’t even an accountant. And I remember how ripped off I felt.

So fast forward, being in this role and doing this work, and this report in particular, just going into how much of a scam the tax preparation industry is, both the storefront tax prep companies—so your H&R Block, your Liberty Tax, your Jackson Hewitts of the world—as well as large corporations, such as Intuit and other software providers, that provide these tax-filing services.

And the reality of the situation is that you have an industry that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars preventing people from being able to either pay the government what they owe or, in many cases, receive money back from the government that is technically already theirs. They have earned it, the government has kept more of it than they were perhaps entitled to, and now people are in the position for a refund.

And these businesses, especially for Black taxpayers, for low-income taxpayers, have found ways to profit off of people’s already-earned money, by inserting themselves as these corporate middlemen in the tax preparation game, where their sole role is to fleece people’s pockets, either from the money that folks have already earned and they are due as a refund, or by upcharging, upselling and preying upon folks who are eligible for certain tax credits, such as the earned income tax credit or the child tax credit, and have made businesses off of selling the equivalent of payday loan products to these taxpayers, where they take a part of their refund and just give people the rest, under the guise of giving them a same-day advance or same-day loan. And so no matter what the angle is, it is all unnecessary and all a scam. And it’s why government products like IRS Direct File are so important to both our democracy, how government works, and how people receive and keep their money.

JJ: A key fact in your report is that the tax preparation industry has these basic competency problems: Tax laws change all the time. You’re looking for someone who can make sure you pay what you’re supposed to, and look for any benefits you’re entitled to. And, of course, throughout this is that the most vulnerable people are the most in need of this help. But an unacceptable number, if we could say, of these tax preparers are not required to really prove that they know how to do it. That’s an industry-wide failing.

PAK: Oh, absolutely. There are no real requirements for tax preparers in these companies. Whereas if you go to an accountant, accountants have professional standards, they have training requirements. Not anybody can hang up a shingle and say, “I am an accountant,” in the same way that not anyone can walk into a hospital, put on a white coat and say, “I am a doctor.” But what we have is an entire industry of people that are able to say, “I am a tax preparer, because I have applied for a job, maybe taken an internal training to these companies, and am now in the business of selling tax preparation.”

JJ: But not to everyone, because let’s underscore that, the fact that these systemic problems, this is a regulatory problem, clearly, but it doesn’t land on everyone equally, and it’s not designed to. And so in this case, you see that these unregulated tax preparers are taking advantage of, well, the people that it’s easiest to take advantage of. Talk a little bit more about the impacts of that particular kind of predation.

Portia Allen-Kyle: “It’s these tax-lobbying corporations that have fought so hard to keep taxes complicated and confusing for the rest of us.”

PAK: One of the ways in which especially storefront preparers are able to prey on communities is simply by location. And so many of these franchise operations, some of them maintain year-long locations, many of them do not, but they pop up, kind of like Spirit Halloween, often around tax season, in neighborhoods that are disproportionately Black or communities of color, disproportionately lower income, disproportionately taxpayers and residents who are eligible for what are expected to be larger refunds, so those who are eligible for the earned income tax credit, those who are eligible for the child tax credit, and really prey upon those folks in selling tax preparation services.

And the key here is selling tax preparation services, because what they really are are salespeople. They have sales goals, it’s why they’re incentivized to upsell products, some of the products that they’re also selling are refund anticipation loans. So they may lure you in and say, “Get a portion of your refund today,” or “Get an advance upfront.” That’s an unregulated bank product. So you have an unregulated tax preparer now selling you an unregulated loan product, that often sometimes reach interest rates of over 30%. And they know what they’re doing, because that is where they make their money, in the selling of product.

And we see that in the data, that free programs such as VITA, the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, disproportionately prepares the taxes of filers who don’t have children, and aren’t eligible for EITC. So many of these companies will refer out other folks, for whom they find that it is not worth it to prepare their taxes, prey on folks that they think they’re getting big refunds, but more importantly, what really illustrates the difference in tax preparation and expectations:  the wealthy millionaires, billionaires, corporations, they’re not going to H&R Block. Mark Cuban is not walking into H&R Block to file his taxes, right?

Folks on the other end of the income and wealth spectrum are relying on accountants, are relying on folks who are not just preparing a service in the moment, but who are providing year-round advice on how to make the system work for them.

And so there’s a service and an additional amount of financial insight and oversight that they are getting, that an entire segment of the market is not, when tax prep is handled in this way. Because, at the end of the day, it’s these tax-lobbying corporations that have fought so hard to keep taxes complicated and confusing for the rest of us, doing this while providing services that they know are subpar in quality, and deliver questionable outcomes. I mean, demonstrated in the report, the error rate of those who prepare taxes for companies like H&R Block, Liberty Tax, Jackson Hewitt and other companies is extremely high, sometimes upwards of 60%. So you have a scenario where you have a portion of taxpayers who disproportionately have their returns prepared by preparers who are unqualified and unregulated, and essentially increases their risk of an audit.

NPR (3/16/23)

And then, when they are audited—it was found that the IRS disproportionately has audited Black taxpayers, and particularly those who are eligible for EITC, etc. And that is not unrelated to the way that it is structured, and the predation of the corporate tax lobby in the first place.

And while it sounds like, when you see advertisements from H&R Block or Intuit about how they stand by and guarantee their services, they’ll defend you in an audit. Well, they need to defend you in an audit. It’s not altruistic. You’ll need that protection, because they’re going to mess it up, and have messed it up, for so many people.

And that part of the story is not often talked about, when we talk about the disproportionate audit rate. It often is not always included how those folks had their returns prepared. And that’s often by these same companies that are presenting and fighting against things like direct file, which is essentially the public option for taxes, in the same way that the Affordable Care Act is the public option for healthcare.

JJ: What is direct file, and why can we expect to hear in the media a lot of folks saying, “Oh, well, you might think direct file is good, but actually…”? What should we know about it?

PAK: What we should know about it is, as I mentioned, direct file is the public option for taxes. And it’s important, because it allows people to file returns, simple returns, directly with the IRS. So last year, the pilot program was only available in 12 states. This year, the program is open to folks living in 25 states. We hope to see and are fighting for the expansion after this season into all 50 states, and recognize the tough road ahead for that.

But it is a program that, in its first year, saved over, I believe it was 130,000 taxpayers, millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours in tax preparation. And already we’ve seen folks flock this season to the direct file system. And in the first two weeks, Color of Change has been doing a lot of advocacy; we are the top referrer of traffic to direct file. And so we’re already saving hundreds of thousands of dollars, and thousands of hours, which is a real benefit to community. This is a system that is government working for you.

It’s also important, because the other thing that private companies have really invested in, and fought so hard about, is that even when you file with H&R Block, when you file with Intuit or TurboTax, when you file with Liberty Tax, that information is still going to the government, to the IRS. But now it also is housed in this private corporation that essentially uses it as a part of their business model, to sell other products to you and prey on you in other ways.

And so it’s not a coincidence that a company like Intuit owns TurboTax, which is a software platform that will take up your data. They also own QuickBooks, so they have a bunch of data on small businesses that keep their accounting in that way. They own MailChimp, and so they have information of millions of folks who join direct marketing email campaigns, and so they can link data in that way. And then they also own Credit Karma. And so for those who are looking to improve their credit scores, for example, they also then have information about Americans in that level. And match this to essentially prey in different ways, with different types of tax products and other banking products.

And we’ve seen this in the expansion of fintech tax product loans that has been going crazy. When Cash App, for example, is telling you that you can file your taxes for free, you should assume that you are the product. And cutting out that corporate middleman is critical and essential, for not just ensuring that families keep money in their pockets, save time, that they are able to put back, spend with their kids, spend with their families, spend pursuing other things, but also is a data protection strategy as well.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Portia Allen-Kyle, interim executive director at Color of Change. The report, “Preying Preparers: How Storefront Tax Preparation Companies Target Low-Income Black and Brown Communities,” can be found at ColorOfChange.org. Portia Allen-Kyle, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PAK: Thanks for having me.

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EarthRights (2/20/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Just because we might witness the daylight robbery of the social benefits we’ve been paying for and counting on for the entirety of our working lives, and just because Black people are no longer officially allowed to even mentor Black people coming in to fields they’ve been historically excluded from, and just because any program receiving public funding will now have to pretend there are “two genders”—doesn’t mean the environment isn’t still in immediate peril. It is.

But the lawsuits of deep-pocketed fossil fuel corporations against any and everyone who dares challenge their profiteering destruction are really also about our ability as non-billionaires to use our voice to speak out about anything. Not speaking out is increasingly a non-option. So where are we? We’ll learn about a case that is “weaponizing the legal system” against anyone who wants a livable future from Kirk Herbertson, US director for advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the FCC, the Washington Post and Medicaid.

As oligarchs Donald Trump and Elon Musk continue their pursuit of power unfettered by the Constitution, many citizens wonder why their elected representatives in Washington are doing so little to stop the administrative coup. They also might well wonder why the media so rarely ask the same question.

GOP congressmembers have mostly remained silent, when not celebrating, as their party leader shreds democratic institutions. Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have largely advised their own members to not make too much of a fuss—precisely the opposite of what leading scholars of authoritarianism are urgently calling for.

House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, for instance, told fellow Democrats not to “swing at every pitch,” while longtime Democratic adviser James Carville suggested Democrats should “play possum,” complaining that progressives voicing outrage were “detrimental” to the opposition and “never, ever learn to shut up.” Many Senate Democrats voted to confirm multiple Trump cabinet picks, who have done nothing to provide checks on unelected billionaire Musk.

Most reporting follows the tired, risk-averse corporate news script that simply quotes Democrats and Republicans in leadership positions, offering that same lens of Democratic (or even Republican!) congressmembers having no power to stop or even slow anything down. That neatly takes pressure off of those official sources to bother to do anything to protect their constituents—or, say, democracy—that might take some political capital.

Anonymous House Democrat to Axios (2/5/25): “I think there is this sense that we have legislative power, and we don’t.”

Just over two weeks into the Trump/Musk dismantling of democracy, Axios (2/5/25) reported:

Congressional Democrats’ offices are being inundated by phone calls from angry constituents who feel the party should be doing more to combat President Trump and his administration.

The volume of calls appears to be at record levels, according to Axios‘ Andrew Solender, who quoted 28-year Rep. Jim McGovern (D–Mass.): “I can’t recall ever receiving this many calls. People disgusted with what’s going on, and they want us to fight back.”

Solender included a one-line summary characteristic of his outlet’s reporting style:

Why it matters: Some lawmakers feel their grassroots base is setting expectations too high for what Democrats can actually accomplish as the minority party in both chambers of Congress.

Of course, others argue that “it matters” because Democrats actually have the ability to do much more—but that perspective apparently doesn’t matter at Axios.

Democrats have done things like send a “flurry of letters” to protest unconstitutional moves, Solender reported. “Yes, but,” he continued, again buttressing the do-nothing Democrat position, “Democrats lack many of the crucial legislative and investigative tools afforded to the congressional majority that would give them the kind of power needed to thwart Trump.”

Common Dreams (2/7/25): “Democrats don’t have the votes to tank Trump nominees in the Senate, but they do have myriad tools at their disposal to grind the chamber to a halt.”

No one would dispute that the minority party can’t pass bills or issue subpoenas without Republican support, as Axios pointed out. But as progressive groups like Indivisible have countered, there are still many tools at Democrats’ disposal.

In the Senate, any member can request “unanimous consent” to help uncontroversial measures move through more quickly. It only takes one member to block unanimous consent, and Republicans used it all the time under President Joe Biden. After consistent pressure from constituents, Democrats finally used this tool to slow down the confirmation of OMB director (and Project 2025 architect) Russell Vought—only to then grant unanimous consent to adjourn for a long weekend, as if this were all business as usual (Common Dreams, 2/7/25).

Or take another Senate rule concerning quorum, the number of members required to be present for a legislative body to be officially in session. Remember when Democratic state legislators in Texas fled their state in 2021 to deny Republicans quorum, temporarily blocking passage of voting restrictions, and drawing attention to the power grab? Well, the US Senate also requires quorum—the presence of a majority of its members, or 51 senators—in order to do anything.

Democrats don’t have enough members to deny quorum on their own, but there’s still a lot they can do with this tool. As Indivisible points out, simply demanding a quorum check takes time, and if fewer than 51 of the 53 GOP senators are present (which happens frequently), Democrats can simply walk out, stopping all Senate work until enough Republicans return to the chamber.

Meanwhile, the federal government will shut down on March 14 if Congress doesn’t pass a bill to keep it funded. Since Republicans hold a whisker-thin majority in the House, and the far right Freedom Caucus in recent years has generally refused to vote to fund the government, the vote on the matter is one place Democrats actually do hold tremendous power to force concessions from the party in power.

Finally, there’s the power of the bully pulpit. Playing possum, as Carville advises, implies to the public that the things that are currently happening are not unacceptably dangerous. Speaking out forcefully—as only a few Democrats, mostly at the state level, are currently doing—would drive more constituent alarm and activism, and give even cowardly media cover to frame the story as at least plausibly the five-alarm fire that it most certainly is.

All Things Considered (2/14/25) highlighted “the tension that congressional Democrats face with a base pushing them to be more aggressive in combating the Trump administration—but with very limited power as the party in the minority.”

In its article, Axios did quote both Indivisible and fellow progressive grassroots organization MoveOn, but only to say things like, “Our member energy is high”—not to reveal to readers what, exactly, they say Democrats could be doing but aren’t. That leaves the obvious impression that progressive groups are doing precisely the counterproductive thing that Democrats say they are doing—shouting at the wrong people, who have no power—and therefore they should stop setting their “expectations too high” for elected Democrats.

Other outlets didn’t even make the minimal effort of quoting those groups, or any other critics, in their reporting on supposed Democratic helplessness. At NPR‘s All Things Considered (2/14/25), for instance, you could find this headline: “Democrats Face Pressure to Fight Trump Agenda, But Have Limited Power in the Minority.” The piece quoted House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.), who said in a press briefing: “What leverage do we have? Republicans have repeatedly lectured America—they control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government.”

Rather than question that premise, NPR‘s Barbara Sprunt called it “a reality that has driven a disconnect between Democratic lawmakers and many of their constituents.” The only sources interviewed were Democratic House members who shared that position.

In the most recent round of Sunday shows, some hosts noted the increasing demands on Democrats. CNN‘s State of the Union host Jake Tapper (2/23/25) interviewed Jeffries, with the opportunity to press him on Democrats’ options for standing up to Trump and Musk’s lawlessness. Instead, he prodded him to give up the single biggest tool House Democrats currently have: “Are House Democrats going to vote to keep the government open? Or are you just going to let the Republicans be in charge of all of it?”

Similarly, on NBC‘s Meet the Press (2/23/25), host Kristen Welker pointed out to her Democratic guest, Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.), that “some of your fellow Democrats are saying they will support shutting down the government to protest President Trump’s policies.” She demanded to know: “You won’t help keep it open?”

“Despite growing Republican discomfort that Musk’s actions are getting the green light from President Donald Trump,” Politico (2/18/25) reported, “there is little the GOP might be able, or willing, to do”—eliding the vast difference between “willing” and “able.”

Obviously Republican elected officials do have vastly more power to stop the Trump/Musk coup, and yet it’s not hard to find reporters letting them completely off the hook, too. Despite reports of many GOP town halls filling up with angry constituents, Republican congressmembers who admit qualms with some Trump or Musk’s actions have even more absurdly than Democrats feigned helplessness.

Politico‘s Hailey Fuchs (2/18/25) reported that Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the longest-serving member of his party in the chamber, claimed that his hands were tied in response to Trump and Musk slashing federal agencies and jobs, since those were part of the executive branch: “Congress can’t do anything except complain.”

Politico added some words of analysis that basically restated and therefore supported Grassley’s laughable contention that Congress is powerless in the face of flagrantly unconstitutional actions from the executive branch:

Grassley’s comments serve as a stark admission that, despite growing Republican discomfort that Musk’s actions are getting the green light from President Donald Trump, there is little the GOP might be able, or willing, to do.

Steve Benen of Maddow Blog (2/19/25), on the other hand, showed how simple it is to do what journalists are actually supposed to do, pointing out that Grassley’s claim was “plainly untrue,” and listing a sampling of the things Grassley could do with his power:

• call a hearing and demand Musk’s testimony;
• issue subpoenas to the quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency;
• introduce legislation limiting DOGE’s authority;
• file lawsuits;
• sign onto amicus briefs filed in courts;
• impose Senate holds until his concerns are addressed;
• vote against nominees and bills until his concerns are addressed.

Sludge (2/24/25): “There are a lot of factors for why the elected Democrats can’t seem to muster a powerful opposition to the administration, one of which is that they have financially tied their political futures to the companies and industries that benefit from it.”

It’s no surprise that Republican congressmembers would cravenly refuse to protect their constituents’ interests in favor of following the marching orders of their party leader.

But it also shouldn’t be so surprising that top Dems would shy away from doing anything to seriously interfere with Musk’s wrecking ball, given that the Democratic party depends upon major corporate donors that include those directly connected to Musk’s rogue pseudo-agency, “DOGE.”

As Sludge (2/24/25) reported, the House Democrats’ campaign arm accepted over $2.5 million in January from the top lobbyist for Musk’s SpaceX and for Peter Thiel’s Palantir, which has been helping to staff DOGE, and whose “artificial intelligence-powered software is well positioned to win contracts to replace functions eliminated by DOGE’s slashing.” $2.5 million represents over a quarter of the DCCC’s entire haul last month.

Meanwhile, corporate media, who have a long history of scorning and marginalizing progressive voices, continue to do so even in the face of an authoritarian administrative coup, giving cover to the elected representatives from both parties whose duty it is to uphold the Constitution.

Deadline (1/22/25) noted that the last FCC chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, dismissed the complaints Brendan Carr reinstated because “they seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment. To do so would set a dangerous precedent.”

Brendan Carr, newly appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, is waging a war on the news media, perhaps the most dangerous front in de jure President Donald Trump and de facto President Elon Musk’s quest to destroy freedom of the press and the First Amendment.

Trump’s FCC has revived right-wing requests to sanction TV stations over their election coverage—complaints that had previously been dismissed by the FCC as incompatible with the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. The media industry news site Deadline (1/22/25) summarized:

The complaints include one against ABC’s Philadelphia affiliate, WPVI-TV, alleging bias in ABC’s hosting of the September presidential debate; one against WCBS-TV in New York that accuses CBS of “news distortion” in the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris; and another against WNBC-TV in New York for alleged violations of the equal time rule when Saturday Night Live featured Harris in a cameo the weekend before the presidential election.

Deadline (2/17/25) followed up:

​​Carr announced an investigation into the diversity, equity and inclusion policies of Comcast and NBCUniversal, and vowed that other media companies would face the same scrutiny. He targeted PBS and NPR for their underwriting practices, while warning that their government funding would be in the crosshairs of congressional Republicans.

Despite his claim that “”I don’t want to be the speech police,” Ars Technica (12/17/24) reports that Carr has “embraced Trump’s view that broadcasters should be punished for supposed anti-conservative bias.”

Carr has also made it clear that will use the FCC to attack dissent. Ars Technica (12/17/24) reported:

Carr has instead embraced Trump’s view that broadcasters should be punished for supposed anti-conservative bias. Carr has threatened to revoke licenses by wielding the FCC’s authority to ensure that broadcast stations using public airwaves operate in the public interest, despite previous chairs saying the First Amendment prevents the FCC from revoking licenses based on content.

Revoking licenses or blocking license renewals is difficult legally, experts told Ars. But Carr could use his power as FCC chair to pressure broadcasters and force them to undergo costly legal proceedings, even if he never succeeds in taking a license away from a broadcast station.

The impulse to go after broadcast licenses for airing unsanctioned viewpoints is similar to the methods used by authoritarian regimes like Hungary, Russia and Turkey to crush the free press (Deutsche Welle, 2/9/21, 9/15/22; Reuters, 10/17/24).

And no Republican crusade would be complete without fearmongering about George Soros‘s alleged control of media and politics. Fox News (2/25/25) reported that Carr “is expected to brief GOP lawmakers on the FCC’s investigation into Soros, including an investment firm he’s linked to purchasing over 200 Audacy radio stations nationwide.”

What Carr “wants to do is use his bully pulpit to bully companies that moderate content in a way he doesn’t like,” Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer told Wired (11/20/24). “And if he continues to do that, he’s very likely to run smack into the First Amendment.”

Carr, one might remember, wrote the policy section on the FCC in Project 2025, a right-wing policy agenda that is guiding the second Trump administration. In it, Carr complained that the “FCC is a New Deal–era agency,” which has the “view that the federal government should impose heavy-handed regulation rather than relying on competition and market forces to produce optimal outcomes.” He vowed to eliminate “many of the heavy-handed FCC regulations that were adopted in an era when every technology operated in a silo.”

It all sounds like old school, free-market Reaganism, but Carr is actually very much inclined to use state power to interfere in the media marketplace when he has a chance to enforce the ideological limits of political discussion in the news media.

US conservatism likes to sell itself as a general resistance to federal regulation in the marketplace, allowing for capitalism to run wild without government interference. In reality, the struggle between American liberals and conservatives is more about what kind of regulation they want to see.

Just look at Carr’s record: He likes regulation when it benefits the right, and opposes it when it doesn’t. His reported use of his FCC power to investigate the Soros-linked fund buying Audacy stations contrast with his rejection of calls to block Musk’s takeover of Twitter (FCC, 4/27/22).

He has spoken out against social media content moderation (Wired, 11/20/24), but he has supported the move to ban TikTok (NPR, 12/23/22), a campaign based on anti-Chinese McCarthyist hysteria (FAIR.org, 3/14/24). And as the first Deadline piece notes, Carr revived FCC complaints about CBS and ABC, both Trump targets, but didn’t reintroduce a similarly dismissed complaint alleging

that the revelations from the Dominion Voting System defamation case against Fox News showed that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch lacked the “character” to hold a broadcast license.

While press freedom advocates fear Carr’s crusade against liberal speech, local television news giant Sinclair (11/18/24), known for its right-wing politics (On the Media, 5/12/17; New Yorker, 10/15/18), embraced Carr’s FCC leadership.

Media Matters’ Matthew Gertz told the Guardian (2/24/25) that Trump plans to “use the power of the state to ensure that the media is compliant, that outlets are either curbed and become much less willing to be critical, or they are sold to owners who will make that happen.”

The aggressive drive to go after outlets like CBS and ABC stems from Trump’s longstanding belief that these networks are conspiring with the Democrats against him. The Trump administration, as FAIR (11/14/24) had predicted, will try to use the state to cripple media it deems too critical to his regime.

The FCC’s tough approach is already having an impact. Trump sued CBS and its parent company Paramount for $20 billion on claims that 60 Minutes had deceptively edited an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris; Paramount is considering settling the suit, despite its baselessness, as the litigation could impede a lucrative potential merger that requires government approval (New York Post, 11/20/24; Wall Street Journal, 1/17/25).

ABC has already settled another bogus Trump lawsuit for $15 million (FAIR.org, 12/16/24)—which indicates that even giving Trump massive amounts of money will not protect media outlets from the wrath of MAGA.

Carr’s ideological campaign will almost certainly have a chilling effect on any media outlet with an FCC license. News managers may veer away from too much criticism of the Trump administration out of fear that the FCC could strangle it with investigations and red tape. The Guardian (2/24/25) cited American University law professor Rebecca Hamilton on the danger that “the FCC investigations could affect journalists’ ability to report on the Trump administration”:

Valid FCC investigations can have a positive impact on the information ecosystem. But the latest FCC investigations launched by Carr are aligned with a broader effort by the Trump administration to punish outlets that Trump dislikes. Such investigations risk creating a chilling effect on the ability of journalists to report without fear of retaliation.

More than a year ago, CNN‘s Oliver Darcy (12/7/23) warned that “the American press is facing, arguably, the gravest potential threat to its freedom in a generation.”

Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, told FAIR that “rather than guessing precisely what  line of attack might come next, broadcasters will be incentivized to tone down their coverage overall, and make it more friendly to the Trump administration.” Worse, he added, the viewers won’t know that such self-censorship is happening. “We only know what gets aired,” he said. “We don’t know what gets pulled.”

Before Trump’s election, CNN‘s Oliver Darcy (12/7/23) fretted that Trump was “overtly vowing to weaponize government and seek retribution against the news media, showing no regard for the First Amendment protections afforded to the Fourth Estate.”

We’re seeing those fears already beginning to materialize in the FCC. The only way to truly resist is for media outlets to simply not comply with the insane, authoritarian dictates of the Trump administration—as AP has done by refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico, despite having its White House correspondents blacklisted (FAIR.org, 2/18/25).

But now is the time to relentlessly and honestly report on the most powerful political figure on earth, and not to back down.

Stern said the press can continue to take legal action to defend the First Amendment under Trump. But also said journalists should advocate for free speech through their outlets. “Journalists are always hesitant to write about press freedom, for fear of making themselves the story, but the time for that is long gone,” he said. “You’re not making yourself the story, Trump is.”

Michelle Goldberg (New York Times, 11/6/24): “Gone will be the hope of vindicating the country from Trumpism…. What’s left is the more modest work of trying to ameliorate the suffering his government is going to visit on us.”

The New York Times editorial board (2/8/25) this month urged readers not to get “distracted,” “overwhelmed,” “paralyzed” or “pulled into [Donald Trump’s] chaos”—in short, don’t “tune out.” But what good is staying informed unless there are concrete actions Trump’s opponents can take to rein him in?

Right after the election, in a column headlined, “My Manifesto for Despairing Democrats,” Times columnist Nick Kristof (11/6/24) suggested readers “hug a lawyer,” get a dog, and/or remain “alert” to “gender nastiness.”

Michelle Goldberg (11/6/24) used her post-election column, “This Is Who We Are Now,” to castigate the voters who “chose” Trump, “knowing exactly who [he] is.”  “This is…who we are [as a country],” she added mournfully, despite the fact that less than 30 percent of US adults voted for Trump. She did not mention the nearly 90 million Americans who were eligible to vote but didn’t, or explore why they were so alienated from politics. Her own instinct, she wrote, was to turn inward, and she predicted the next few months would be “a period of mourning rather than defiance.”

Although she saw “no point” in protesting Trump’s inauguration, she did express a vague hope that people would “take to the streets if [Trump’s] forces come into our neighborhoods to drag migrant families away,” and that they would “strengthen the networks that help women in red states get abortions.” The work of the next four years, she concluded, would be “saving what we can” and “trying to imagine a tolerable future.” But, for the moment, all she could do was “grieve.”

Even in a column headlined “Stop Feeling Stunned and Wounded, Liberals. It’s Time to Fight Back,” the Times‘ Charles Blow (1/29/25) presented fighting back as a strangely inactive process: “People, especially young people, are simply not built to passively absorb oppression,” he wrote; they will, at some point, “inevitably react and resist.” Yet he offered few suggestions for how they might do this, defaulting instead to vague proclamations like “Confidence has to be rebuilt” and “Power and possibility have to be reclaimed.” Finally, he noted, “resistance must be expressed in opinion polls and at the cash registers,” because “the people’s next formal participation in our national politics won’t come until the 2026 midterms.”

Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein (New York Times, 2/2/25): “Elected Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided…. They have no shared understanding of why they lost the election, never mind how they can win in the future.”

While counseling patience, discipline and self-care, the paper runs several headlines per month painting opposition to Trump as pointless, ineffective, disorganized and/or pusillanimous. It is both fair and necessary to report critically on efforts to oppose Trump, and the New York Times has done that to some extent. But in headlines, framing and content, the paper often goes from reporting on Democratic disarray to reinforcing it.

Days after the election, the Times (11/7/24) began a story headlined “Devastated Democrats Play the Blame Game, and Stare at a Dark Future” as follows: “A depressed and demoralized Democratic Party is beginning the painful slog into a largely powerless future.” According to a photo caption in the story, “Many Democrats are left considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable to stop Mr. Trump from enacting a sweeping right-wing agenda.”

From more recent stories like “‘We Have No Coherent Message’: Democrats Struggle to Oppose Trump” (2/2/25), “Venting at Democrats and Fearing Trump, Liberal Donors Pull Back Cash” (2/16/25) and “Democrats Fear They Are Missing the Moment to Remake the Party” (2/17/25), we learn that Trump’s opposition is “demoralized,” plagued by “second-guessing” and “fretting.”

It’s true that many Democratic voters are furious at the Democratic Party. But other reporting suggests that a functional opposition exists. Democrats’ legal strategy is slowing Trump down. His approval ratings have notably declined. A broad majority of Americans feel the president isn’t doing enough to address the high prices of everyday goods, and a slim majority (52%) say he’s gone too far in using his presidential power. This has spurred a fed-up public to lead dozens of mass protests throughout the country. And Bernie Sanders recently held massive rallies in Omaha and Iowa City to pressure the area’s Republican representatives to vote against Trump’s federal budget in March, drawing overflow crowds of more than 2,500 in Omaha and 1,175 in Iowa City.

Shane Goldmacher (New York Times, 2/17/25): “For disillusioned Democrats…what is needed is a deeper discussion of whether the party’s policies and priorities are repelling voters.”

Because the New York Times treats the complaints of mega-wealthy donors as more legitimate than the fury of the Democratic base, it often presents money as the best and/or only means of affecting policy. “Prominent” Democrats have “lost faith in the party’s resolve to pinpoint its problems, let alone solve them” (2/17/25), and rich donors are “furious” over “Democrats’ tactical missteps and wasteful spending”—so they’re withholding their money accordingly (2/16/25).

The Times  (2/17/25) quotes wealthy donors who blame progressives for the party’s losses at length, like personal-injury lawyer John Morgan,  a “major Democratic contributor…who has often backed more moderate candidates”:

When I think “progressive,” I think of the Squad…. And when I think of the Squad, I think of socialism, and when I think of socialism, I think of Communism, and when I think of Communism, I think of the downfall of countries.

The needs and policy preferences of rank-and-file voters don’t get similar attention.

Though it framed the findings differently, the Times  (2/17/25) mentioned a poll that showed a slender majority of Democratic voters—six points more than the share who favor more moderation—want the party to become more liberal or stay the same, and one which shows that a large majority of Democrats across all demographics want the party to focus on economic issues like wages and jobs (63%) rather than cultural debates (31%). These views are strikingly different from those wealthy donors typically express, with different implications than the polls’ headlines suggest.

When it comes to identifying what went wrong, Democrats are more aligned than the Times has indicated. Two weeks after asserting that “leaderless, rudderless and divided” elected Democrats have “no shared understanding of why they lost the election” (2/2/25), the paper reported that there is, in fact, “almost universal agreement on a diagnosis of the party’s problem with the working class” (2/17/25). And despite the fact that far more Americans didn’t vote in 2024 than voted for Trump or Harris, the Times has expanded its coverage of undecided and Trump voters, while demonstrating scant interest in the tens of millions of Americans who stayed home.

Peter Baker (New York Times, 1/20/25): “Trump…opened an immediate blitz of actions to begin drastically changing the course of the country and usher in a new ‘golden age of America.’”

The New York Times’ emphasis on Democratic weakness stands in stark contrast to its treatment of Trump. While the Democratic Party struggles to define “what it stands for, what issues to prioritize and how to confront a Trump administration,” Trump is “carrying out a right-wing agenda with head-spinning speed” (2/2/25).

After years of dismissing Trump as an amateurish reality television star (6/16/15, 12/22/15, 9/16/16)—in 2015, the paper couldn’t come up with a single reason why he might win the GOP nomination, despite having “really tried” (6/16/15)—the Times now sees him as forceful and decisive, if reckless; a born leader fulfilling his mandate with impressive speed and strength. He has engineered a “remarkable political comeback” and an “audacious and stunningly successful legal strategy that could allow him to evade accountability.” He has “redefined the limits of presidential power,” his “success in using his campaign as a protective shield has no parallel in legal or political history” (11/6/24), and he has “little reason to fear impeachment, which he has already survived twice” (2/5/25).

Compared to its headlines about Democrats, the Times’ headlines about Trump could just as easily have been written by the man himself: “With Political Victory, Trump Fights Off Legal Charges” (11/6/24),  “For Trump, a Vindication for the Man and His Movement” (1/20/25), ” “A Determined Trump Vows Not to Be Thwarted at Home or Abroad” (1/20/25), “Trump’s New Line of Attack Against the Media Gains Momentum” (2/7/25) and “Trump Targets a Growing List of Those He Sees as Disloyal” (2/17/25).

The overall message is that Trump is virtually unstoppable, and even high-ranking congressional Democrats and billionaire donors, let alone ordinary Americans, have no idea how to stop him. The Times has answered its own question, “Resisting Trump: What Can Be Done?” (2/10/25) with a resounding very little, aside from responding to opinion polls and meekly waiting to vote in the 2026 midterms.

Acknowledging Trump’s political savvy is partly a business decision—as the Times (1/13/25) has noted, “many reporters, editors and media lawyers are taking [Trump’s threats against the media] seriously…. He is altering how the press is operating.” Some would rather stay proximate to power than take on a vindictive, litigious and power-drunk president. It’s also a mea culpa of sorts; chastened by criticisms from both left and right, elite journalists and editors have spent years thinking maybe they were too quick to dismiss Trump’s appeal and too late to understand it.

The New York Times‘ Jacey Fortin (12/3/24) covered successful resistance to a culture-war bogeyman in Republican-dominated Montana.

Whatever the reasoning, it does not serve readers to present Trump as a force of nature, and avenues for resistance as minimal, especially when there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Ordinary people are fighting Trump’s agenda through long-term political and labor organizing.

And the New York Times has covered elected leaders who have taken effective stands against anti-democratic bullies. When Montana Republicans barred her from the House floor in 2023 for “attempting to shame” them in a debate, state legislator Zooey Zephyr fought back to defend both “democracy itself” and the transgender community to which she belongs (New York Times, 4/26/23).

Her courage paid off. Zephyr was reelected, and in December she joined colleagues in defeating a GOP proposal to restrict which bathrooms lawmakers could use in the Montana State Capitol (New York Times, 12/3/24).

Weeks earlier, Tennessee legislators expelled two Democrats from the state House after they joined constituents in demanding stricter gun laws. An attempt to expel a third Democrat who joined the protest failed by one vote (New York Times, 4/6/23).

After being expelled, state legislators Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were quickly but temporarily reinstated, reelected several months later, and have “risen in national prominence” (New York Times, 2/2/24). Their colleague, Rep. Gloria Johnson, who survived the attempt to expel her, won Tennessee’s 2024 Democratic primary for US Senate. Johnson lost the Senate race to GOP incumbent Sen. Marsha Blackburn in November, but voters reelected her to the Tennessee House.

Even when efforts to prevent the passage of anti-democratic laws and policies ultimately fail, as they did when Texas Democrats fled the state to block voting restrictions in 2021, they inspire people to engage in politics and fight for their communities. The New York Times has a responsibility not to scold its readers for their supposed apathy, but to show them how to take on corrupt and lawless leaders like Trump. Hector a person for tuning out, and they’ll read the news for a day; show them how to use power, and they’ll civically engage for a lifetime.

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

Janine Jackson interviewed the University of Guelph-Humber’s Gregory Shupak about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine for the February 21, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

New York Times (12/23/21)

Janine Jackson: When a Los Angeles police officer killed a child in a department store, the New York Times ran the story with the headline “Stray Bullet Kills Girl as Officers Fire at Suspect in Los Angeles Store.” A later headline from the Times referred to the ”Officer Whose Bullet Killed a 14-Year-Old Girl.”

That used to be thought of as just newspaper speak, but we can now recognize how that distorted, passive-voice language is a choice that obscures agency and undermines accountability. It’s not just words.

We see that obscuring of agency, and undermining of accountability, writ larger when crimes are committed by governments corporate media favor, against populations they don’t care much about. Here, journalistic language takes on another level of import, because calling those crimes by their name brings on particular legal and political responses. New research from our guest explores that question in Gaza and the West Bank.

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

Gregory Shupak: Hi, how are you?

JJ: Well, I’m OK. When Trump declared his plans for Gaza: “You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” and then later he declared that the US would “take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it,” if you still have an outrage bone in your body, you may have thought, surely this will be seen as the wildly illegal, immoral move that it is.

How can it be resisted? Who can counter it? What bodies do we have to protect Palestinians in the face of this? All of those would be questions for journalists to pursue, but you can’t challenge something that you won’t name. Which brings us to the research that you’ve just been working on. Tell us about that.

Politico.eu (2/9/25)

GS: Sure. So this plan that Trump has put forth and stuck to for quite some time—I thought perhaps it would just be one of his many deranged statements that would be later walked back by, if not him, then others in administration, but he keeps pressing on this—it was widely described as ethnic cleansing by people who are positioned to make that assessment. So people like António Guterres of the United Nations, their secretary general, or Navi Pillay, who is another UN official focusing on Palestine. This plan that Trump brought forth was denounced by them and by others, like Human Rights Watch, as ethnic cleansing.

And yet that term has seldom found its way into the coverage. I looked at coverage of the first, just over a week, since Trump’s racist fever dream, and I found that 87% of the articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post did not include the term “ethnic cleansing.” And, in fact, only 26% of the coverage included a term like “ethnic cleansing,” or something similar that captures the violence of what he is proposing. So terms like “forced displacement” or “expel” or “expulsion” or “forced transfer.”

Just automatically, you have a whitewashing of what he’s proposing to do, even in coverage that is critical of it. And that’s really leaving audiences, who’re maybe not terribly well-versed in international law, not in a very strong position to understand just how egregious of a crime it is that Trump is advocating.

JJ: And ethnic cleansing is almost like just a pejorative, as though it had no actual meaning. In fact, I think it was the Wall Street Journal, you found, put it in scare quotes, like it’s an accusation and not a phenomenon.

New York Times (2/11/25)

GS: Exactly. And I talk in my piece about Bret Stephens and a couple of Wall Street Journal pieces that endorsed Trump’s plan. However, I didn’t mention that Stephens had a second piece that addressed Trump’s plan in passing, and he blatantly lied and said that Trump’s plan does not involve forcing Palestinians to leave Gaza. But Trump has been quite clear that that’s exactly what he has in mind. So not only do we have a widespread failure to properly name this plan for ethnic cleansing, we also have quite a few cases of endorsements of what Trump is calling for.

JJ: We know that for many US media—and you illustrated it—US exceptionalism, just the idea that, “Oh, sure, we can do this anywhere in the world,” extends to the point where they don’t even really acknowledge international law. And this is a longstanding problem, where the UN is just kind of meddling in US power, and that sort of thing. But it really comes to the point where they don’t even invoke the idea that there is something called international law.

GS: Yeah, that’s quite important. Only 19% of the coverage of Trump’s proposal for Gaza, if you can even call it that, only 19% include the term “international law,” which is really a key paradigm through which this, and any kind of international armed conflict, needs to be understood. But it’s just not even being presented to the audience as something that they need to think about.

Al Jazeera (2/26/24)

And it put me in mind of Richard Falk and Howard Friel, [who] wrote a book 20 years ago or so, called The Record of the Paper, and it talked about how in coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, international law was totally absent from New York Times editorials that were in various ways endorsing or at least giving credibility to the concept of the attack. And we still see the same pattern with regard to Gaza, as well as the West Bank, where patterns of ethnic cleansing are also unfolding.

JJ: And yet we know they will invoke international law when it suits, when it seems like something that bolsters the US case.

You found, finally, similar issues with coverage of the West Bank, and I think it’s important for folks to understand this is not just a story of Gaza anymore, obviously; this is an expansive story. And when we talk about the West Bank here, as is often the case, you can find an example of an outlet or a journalist who is doing straightforward, informative witnessing, and you can actually use that to contrast with what many powerful, better resourced outlets are doing. And that’s the case in coverage of the West Bank, right? It’s not that everyone is refusing to witness or acknowledge.

GS: No, I think that one of the main problems I see in the way that the events unfolding in the West Bank are being portrayed is that there’s a refusal, you might call it, to connect how each “individual” event or incident connects to others.

So you’ll have reports that’ll say, Israel’s invasion of Jenin refugee camp that has unfolded in recent weeks has largely emptied out the entire area. But the coverage of that fails to situate that in relation to the fact that we are seeing similar types of violence unfolding in other parts of the West Bank that Israel is attacking, particularly the lower West Bank, and that these are part of a longer-term trend towards, as several observers that I cite in the article have pointed out, of ethnic cleansing the territory.

So, for example, I talk about how in October of last year, the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese put forth a report in which she describes escalated patterns of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. And she talks about how, since October 7, 2023, at least 18 West Bank communities have been depopulated under the threat of force.

So what she and others have observed is that this is not a matter of, OK, there’s a couple days of fighting, and people go back to their homes when it’s safe. It’s part of a longer-term trajectory whereby it’s becoming difficult, and often impossible, for people in West Bank towns to go back to their homes once Israel drives them out. So not at all unlike what we have seen in Gaza.

Gregory Shupak: “What we’re talking about is driving out the indigenous population so that settlers can take over their land.”

JJ: But the refusal to connect those dots, and to make it seem as though, oh, a skirmish happened over here today, and oh, a skirmish happened over there yesterday, and not telling the bigger story, is the failure.

GS: Exactly. And as is so often the case with coverage of Palestine, and other issues as well, we get a muddying of the agency of the perpetrators of the violence, right? Everything’s reduced to just “clashes” and “conflict,” rather than efforts to enforce colonial subjugation, and resistance to that. So that kind of power dynamic is completely glossed over, when you get this anodyne language about just conflicts and clashes. There’s no space within that language for communicating that what we’re talking about is driving out the indigenous population so that settlers can take over their land.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Gregory Shupak. He’s a media critic, activist and teacher; his book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media is available from OR Books. And his research on “Media Afraid to Call Ethnic Cleansing by Its Name” can be found on FAIR.org. Gregory Shupak, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

GS: Thanks for having me.

NBC News (2/4/25) put Trump’s unconstitutional attack on USAID in a Cold War frame.

Are the corporate media outlets reporting on Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s authoritarian takeover smarter than a fifth grader? Recent coverage of the president and his henchman’s blatantly unconstitutional dismembering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) would suggest some are not.

Reports on the agency’s shuttering (Politico, 1/31/25, 2/14/25; NBC, 2/4/25) have often failed to sufficiently sound the alarm on how Trump’s efforts are upending the most basic—and vitally important—federal checks and balances one learns about in a Schoolhouse Rock episode. Instead, these reports have framed bedrock constitutional principles as if they were up for debate, and neglected to mention that the Trump administration is purposefully attempting to shirk executive restraints.

Meanwhile, much of corporate media’s justified attention on the foreign aid agency’s demise has wasted ink on a narrower, unjustifiable reason for audiences to draw objections: the loss of the “soft power” USAID gives America in its battle over global influence with its adversaries (CNN 2/7/25; New York Times 2/11/25). This sets up the precedent that Musk’s federal bludgeoning should be assessed based on the value of his target, rather than the fact that he is subverting the Constitution.

Michael Waldman (Brennan Center, 2/19/25): “Trump’s power grab…is the culmination of decades of pressure from conservative organizations and lawyers who have sought a way to dismantle government and curb its power to intervene in markets.”

A lawsuit by the American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees against the Trump administration lays out the five-alarm constitutional fire the shuttering of USAID has set off. USAID was established as an independent agency outside the State Department’s control by an act of Congress in 1998.

Longstanding judicial precedent holds that only Congress has the ability to create and dissolve federal agencies. Last year, the legislature prohibited even a reorganization of USAID without its consultation in an appropriations law. The Trump administration’s actions—justified solely by an extreme interpretation of executive authority—violate the Constitution’s separation of powers, and are indeed designed to do so.

Together Trump and Musk share interest in reconstituting US governance. The checks and balances that help to constrain executive power, along with civil service workers, are also roadblocks to the billions in federal contracts that have underwritten Musk’s empire. USAID has become the first target in their federal bludgeoning, because its relative unpopularity among voters means they might get away with rewriting the Constitution without too much public outrage. Its “the least popular thing government spends money on,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said to a USAID official earlier this month. (Americans tend to vastly overestimate how much the US government spends on foreign aid, and think it should be reduced to a level that is actually far more than USAID’s current budget—Program for Public Consultation, 2/8/25.)  

Trump and Musk’s withdrawal of nearly all foreign aid funded through USAID is another grave challenge to the constitutional order. Since those funds were congressionally appropriated, neither Trump nor Musk has the authority to stop them, especially not on the basis of their political preferences.

The act of a president indefinitely rejecting congressionally approved spending is known as impoundment, which has been effectively outlawed in all forms since 1974. Trump has been explicit about his intent to bring impoundment back, which threatens to render Congress—which is supposed to have the power of the purse—irrelevant.

Politico (2/14/25) would have better helped readers’ understanding if it hadn’t taken “Trump’s plans to shrink the federal workforce” at face value.

Such a threat to democracy requires calling it for what it is. Simple but consequential abdications of responsibility abound, though. Politico (2/14/25), for example, saw fit to reprint at face value Trump and Musk’s claims that they just wish to drastically reduce federal spending. An explainer article on Trump and Musk’s efforts made no mention that they might have ulterior motives.

In response to the question, “What is Trump and Musk’s goal?” Politico simply answered: “With Trump’s blessing, Musk has been clear that his goal is to drastically reduce the size of the government.” That Musk, the richest person in the world, whose business empire spans the globe and dominates whole industries, has resolved to dedicate his undivided attention to the cause of reducing federal spending deserves more skepticism. The fact that Musk has prioritized going after federal agencies that have had the temerity to investigate his businesses suggests a more plausible scenario.

Though the article, which is meant to give readers a brief but comprehensive overview of Trump and Musk’s efforts, briefly mentions some of the court-ordered pauses to Trump’s orders, it doesn’t discuss the overarching implications for US democracy.

Another Politico story (1/31/25), breaking the news that Trump intended to subsume USAID into the State Department, gave the move a stamp of approval by pointing out it was the fulfillment of long-held bipartisan aspirations—corporate media’s highest praise—while ignoring the unconstitutional means that brought it about. For years, the article says, “both Democratic and Republican administrations have toyed with the idea of making USAID a part of the State Department.” That’s because, Politico claimed,

there have always been tensions between State and USAID over which agency controls what parts of the multibillion-dollar foreign aid apparatus, regardless of which party is in power.

The article qualifies that USAID “describes itself” as an independent agency, as if this were up for dispute.

CNN (2/3/25): “Trump’s claim that he can single-handedly shut down USAID is at odds with Congress’ distinct role in forming and closing federal agencies.”

Corporate media’s failure to foreground the authoritarian threat of Trump and Musk’s USAID takedown also includes a narrow focus on its geopolitical ramifications that smooths over the unsavory aspects of the agency’s humanitarian work.

USAID oversees billions in foreign aid that is responsible for lifesaving food, medical care, infrastructure and economic development. The massive disruption in that aid is already causing death, hunger, disease outbreak and economic hardship. But a defense of that lifesaving work, and the democratic norms threatened by its unraveling, need not require a rosy picture of its imperialist motivations.

That’s exactly what the New York Times’ Daily podcast (2/11/25) accomplished, though, in an episode titled “The Demise of USAID and American Soft Power.” As has become all too frequent, nowhere during the episode’s 35-minute run time did the host, Times reporter Michael Barbaro, or his two guests, Times journalists Michael Crowley and Stephanie Nolen, mention the constitutional principles at stake in USAID’s closure (though the following episode was dedicated to the constitutional crises Trump has provoked—Daily, 2/12/25).

Instead, the podcast focused on what Barbaro described as Trump’s overturning of a decades-long bipartisan consensus about the best way to “keep America safe.” That safety, Barbaro learned by way of his guests’ contribution, is a supposedly serendipitous return on investment America receives through its strategic generosity abroad (effective altruism, one might say?). Trump has now abandoned that generosity, leaving a more brutish impression of America’s global role, and ceding ground to geopolitical adversaries, Barbaro and company said.

What threats do they identify that Americans have needed to be kept safe from? At first, Crowley said, it was the Soviet Union’s relative popularity in the developing world. After the Cold War ended, though, USAID’s justification for existence seemed thin, he acknowledged. But that didn’t last long, because it just so happened that after 9/11, “America realized that the Soviet Communist ideology that threatened us had been replaced by a new ideology. It was a terrorist ideology,” Crowley explained.

For one, it wasn’t just USAID, but the entire military industrial complex, that was inevitably going to identify a new justification for its existence, 9/11 notwithstanding. But the podcast also completely leaves out USAID’s modern role in conditioning aid to developing countries on opening up their economies to the International Monetary Fund and multinational corporations, creating the conditions for neo-colonial dispossession and Western dependency.

Dedicating a whole episode to portraying USAID’s work as a mutually beneficial marriage between developing nations’ humanitarian needs and US national security interests, all so that audiences might selfishly conclude that preserving foreign aid is in their own interests, perpetuates imperial propaganda. Pointing out how Trump’s actions harm people, including his own supporters, is well and good. But the loss of imperial soft power is not an example of that. And pointing out the actual harms without discussing the autocratic way they were inflicted risks suggesting that unconstitutional actions are acceptable as long as their results are beneficial.

Some journalists are doing a fine job of exposing the assault on USAID (e.g., New York Times, 1/28/25, 2/5/25; CNN, 2/3/25). But amid this unprecedented blitz on democratic norms, others are showing that they might need to revisit their elementary school textbooks.

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

CNN (2/21/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump has declared that the US is going to “take over” the Gaza Strip, that the Palestinians who live there will be “permanently” exiled. Asked whether Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza under his scheme, Trump said “no.” But even those corporate media who aren’t actually endorsing this illegal, inhumane plan still can’t seem to find it in themselves to call it what it is: ethnic cleansing.

Media critic, activist and teacher Gregory Shupak has been looking into big media’s systematic refusal to use appropriate language about the human rights crimes unfolding before our eyes in Palestine. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and he’s author of the book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books.

Color of Change/Better IRS (3/24)

Also on the show: There is a deep, if muddled, sense that the US tax system is unfair. The little guy pays too much and rich folks and corporations find loopholes and offshore accounts. And then, on a different page, there’s a story about how “we” as a country just don’t have “enough resources” to allow school kids to eat lunch, because that would mean the dreaded higher taxes! But we will shell out another billion for a fighter plane, and shut up about that.

Media outlets that fail to make meaningful connections—between those clever offshore accounts and the supposed inability to fund school lunch; between cutting funding for the IRS and doubling down on people who use the Earned Income Tax Credit—are certainly not the ones to look to for an understanding of the racial impacts of supposedly neutral tax policy and practices, however demonstrable those impacts may be.  We’ll talk about that with Portia Allen-Kyle, interim executive director at Color of Change and author of the report Preying Preparers.

News outlets often preferred euphemisms like “displacing” or “resettling” to the more accurate “ethnic cleansing, as in this CBC headline (2/4/25).

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump said that the US will “take over the Gaza Strip” and “own” it for the “long-term” (AP, 2/5/25), and that its Palestinian inhabitants will be “permanently” exiled (AP, 2/4/25). Subsequently, when reporters asked Trump whether Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza under his plan, he said “no” (BBC, 2/10/25).

After Trump’s remarks, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (Reuters, 2/5/25) said “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing.”

Navi Pillay (Politico, 2/9/25), chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said that

Trump is woefully ignorant of international law and the law of occupation. Forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing.

Human Rights Watch (2/5/25) said that, if Trump’s plan were implemented, it would “amount to an alarming escalation of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Amnesty International (2/5/25) called Trump’s proposal to forcibly transfer the population of Gaza a flagrant violation of international law”—but the phrase “international law” was usually missing from news reports on the plan.

I used the news media aggregator Factiva to survey coverage of Trump’s remarks from the day that he first made them, February 4 through February 12. In that period, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post combined to run 145 pieces with the words “Gaza” and “Trump.” Of these, 19 contained the term “ethnic cleansing” or a variation on the phrase. In other words, 87% of the articles these outlets published on Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza chose not to call it ethnic cleansing.

A handful of other pieces used language that captures the wanton criminality of Trump’s scheme reasonably well. Three articles used “forced displacement,” or slight deviations from the word, while five others used “expel” and another nine used “expulsion.” Two of the articles said “forced transfer,” or a minor variation of that. In total, therefore, 38 of the 145 articles (26 percent) employ “ethnic cleansing” or the above-mentioned terms to communicate to readers that Trump wants to make Palestinians leave their homes so that the US can take Gaza from them.

Furthermore, the term “international law” appears in only 27 of the 145 articles, which means that 81% failed to point out to readers that what Trump is proposing is a “flagrant violation of international law” (Amnesty International, 2/5/25).

A Wall Street Journal op-ed (2/5/25) hailed “Trump’s Plan to Free Palestinians From Gaza”—in the same sense that the Trail of Tears “freed” the Cherokee from Georgia.

Several commentators in the corporate media endorsed Trump’s racist fever dream, in some cases through circumlocutions and others quite bluntly. Elliot Kaufman (Wall Street Journal, 2/5/25) called Trump’s imperial hallucination a “plan to free Palestinians from Gaza.”

While the Journal’s editorial board (2/5/25) called what Trump wants to do “preposterous,” the authors nonetheless put “ethnic cleansing” in scare quotes, as if that’s not an apt description. The paper asked, “Is his idea so much worse than the status quo that the rest of the world is offering?”

Sadanand Dhume (Wall Street Journal, 2/12/25) wondered why “If Indians and Pakistanis Can Relocate, Why Can’t Gazans?” To bolster his case, Dhume noted that 2 million people died as a result of the India-Pakistan partition, and cited other shining moments in 20th century history, such as Uganda’s expulsion of Indians in the 1970s. That these authors implicitly or explicitly advocate Trump’s plan for mass, racist violence demonstrates that they see Palestinians as subhuman impediments to US/Israeli designs on Palestine and the region.

Bret Stephens (New York Times, 2/11/25) wrote that

Trump also warned Jordan and Egypt that he would cut off American aid if they refused to accept Gazan refugees, adding that those refugees may not have the right to return to Gaza. The president’s threats are long overdue.

Al Jazeera (2/26/24): “Settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory.”

A similar pattern exists in coverage of the West Bank, where evidence of ethnic cleansing is hard to miss, but corporate media appears to be finding ways to do just that.

Legal scholars Alice Panepinto and Triestino Mariniello wrote an article for Al Jazeera (2/26/24) headlined “Settler Violence: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Plan for the West Bank”:

Supported by the Israeli security forces and aided and abetted by the government, settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory in order to establish full sovereignty over it and enable settlement expansion.

The authors noted that, at the time they wrote their article, 16 Palestinian communities in the West Bank had been forcibly transferred since October 7, 2023.

In October 2024, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese found that throughout the Gaza genocide, “Israeli forces and violent settlers” have “escalated patterns of ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” In the first 12 months after October 7,  Albanese reported, “at least 18 communities were depopulated under the threat of lethal force, effectively enabling the colonization of large tracts” of the West Bank.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (2/10/25) said that Israel’s “latest ethnic cleansing efforts” entail “forcibly uproot[ing] thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank,” accompanied by

the bombing and burning of residential buildings and infrastructure, the cutting off of water, electricity and communications supplies, and a killing policy that has resulted in the deaths of 30 Palestinians…over the course of 19 days.

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (2/10/25), Israeli military operations in Jenin camp, which expanded to Tulkarm, Nur Shams and El Far’a, displaced 40,000 Palestinian refugees between January 21 and February 10.

I used Factiva to search New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage and found that, since Panepinto and Mariniello’s analysis was published just under a year ago, the three newspapers have combined to run 693 articles that mention the West Bank. Thirteen of these include some form of the term “ethnic cleansing,” a mere 2%. Nine more articles use “forced displacement,” or a variation on the phrase, 31 use “expel,” 11 use “expulsion” and five use some variety of “forced transfer.”

Thus, 69 of the 693 Times, Journal and Post articles that mention the West Bank use these terms to clearly describe people being violently driven from their homes—just 10%. Many of the articles that address the West Bank are also about Gaza, so the 69 articles using this language don’t necessarily apply it to the West Bank.

Of the 693 Times, Journal and Post pieces that refer to the West Bank, 106 include the term “international law.” Evidently, the authors and editors who worked on 85% of the papers’ articles that discuss the West Bank did not consider it noteworthy that Israel is engaged in egregious violations of international law in the territory.

The Washington Post (2/2/25) captioned this image of IDF bombing with Israel’s claim that it was “destroying buildings used by Palestinian militants.”

Rather than equip readers to understand the larger picture in which events in the West Bank unfold, much of the coverage treats incidents in the territory discretely. For instance, the Wall Street Journal (1/22/25) published a report on Israel’s late January attacks on the West Bank. In the piece’s 18th paragraph, it cited the Palestinian Authority saying the Israeli operations “displaced families and destroyed civilian properties.” In the 24th paragraph, the article also quoted UNRWA director Roland Friedrich, saying that Jenin had become “nearly uninhabitable,” and that “some 2,000 families have been displaced from the area since mid-December.” Palestinians being driven from their homes are an afterthought for the article’s authors, who do nothing to put this forced displacement in the longer-term context of Israel’s US-backed ethnic cleansing.

A Washington Post  report (2/2/25) on Jenin says in its first paragraph that the fighting is occurring “where [Israeli] troops have been battling local militants.” The article then describes Palestinian “homes turned to ash and rubble, cars destroyed and small fires still burning amid the debris.” It cited the Palestinian Health Ministry noting that “at least five people were killed in Israeli strikes in the Jenin area, including a 16-year-old.”

Establishing a “troops vs. militants” frame at the outset of the article suggested that that is the lens through which the death and destruction in Jenin should be understood, rather than one in which a racist colonial enterprise is seeking to ethnically cleanse the Indigenous population resisting the initiative.

This New York Times piece (2/4/25) acknowledges that Israeli settlements have “steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians”—but doesn’t call this process ethnic cleansing.

The New York Times (2/4/25) published an article on Republican bills that would require US government documents to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the name that expansionist Zionists prefer. The report discusses how Trump’s return to office “has emboldened supporters of Israeli annexation of the occupied territory.”

The piece notes that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have “settled” the West Bank since Israel occupied it in 1967, and that Palestinians living there have fewer rights than their Israeli “neighbors.” The author points out that “the growing number and size of the settlements have steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians.”

Yet the article somehow fails to mention a crucial part of this dynamic, namely Israel violently displacing Palestinians from their West Bank homes. Leaving out that vital information fails means that readers are not a comprehensive account of the ethnic cleansing backdrop against which the Republican bills are playing out.

Recent coverage of Gaza and the West Bank illustrates that, while corporate media occasionally outright call for expelling Palestinians from their land, more often the way these outlets support ethnic cleansing is by declining to call it ethnic cleansing.