Media Criticism

While the Post has yet to publish the documents in full, the leaks and the other sources clearly painted a picture of a potentially disastrous counteroffensive. Fear was so palpable that the Biden administration privately worried about how he could keep up support for the war when the widely hyped offensive sputtered. In the midst of this, Blinken continued to dismiss the idea of a ceasefire, opting instead to pursue further escalating the conflict.

Despite the importance of these facts, they were hardly reported on by the rest of corporate media, and dropped from subsequent war coverage. When the Post (6/14/23) published a long article citing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s cautious optimism about the campaign, it neglected to mention its earlier reporting about the government’s privately gloomier assessments. The documents only started appearing again in the press after thousands were dead, and the campaign’s failure undeniable.

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Even Rep. Andy Harris (D-Md.), co-chair of the congressional Ukraine Caucus, publicly questioned whether or not the war was “winnable” (Politico, 8/17/23). Speaking on the counteroffensive’s status, he said, “I’ll be blunt, it’s failed.”

I promise that Russia will lose the war tomorrow.

Two days later, the Washington Post (8/12/23) had solidified what can be described as a “discourse of confusion” with the headline, “Maui Fires Not Just Due to Climate Change but a ‘Compound Disaster.’”

There is not just one “standout factor,” it asserted, but different “agents acting together.” The article explained that rising temperatures contributed to the severity of the blaze, but “global warming could not have driven the fires by itself.” Other “human influences” on “climate and environment” are causing these disasters to escalate. Making a distinction between planetary warming and other “human influences” on “environment” muddies the connections between a warming planet and extreme weather events, and confuses the realities of climate disruption. It obscures who is responsible and what must change.

For climate scientist David Ho (Twitter, 8/10/23), a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the cause of the Maui fires was straightforward and stated clearly:

People associate Hawaii with tropical conditions, but rainfall has been decreasing for decades because of climate change, drying out the lush landscape and making it increasingly susceptible to wildfire damage.

Another climate scientist and energy policy expert, Leah Stokes at UC Santa Barbara, was also clear about climate change and the Maui fires. Over a image of Lahaina, she posted (Twitter, 8/9/23): “This is climate change. Every day we delay cutting fossil fuels, more tragedies like this happen.”

(Emphasis original.)

The world needs an antiwar movement willing to consistently speak out and mobilize opposition among poor and working people when it is most difficult and unpopular to resist the endless U.S. wars. In the U.S., we need to oppose the devastating impact of 800 U.S. military bases around the world and a military budget 40% of the world’s total. We need to address the illegal and inhumane U.S. sanctions on 40 countries, comprising a third of the world population.

But most important is that we need an antiwar movement that always links these endless U.S. wars to the war here at home. The racist repression, the world’s largest prison population and three police killings every day, and widening attacks on migrants, LGBTQ2S+ people and others are the outgrowth of U.S. wars.

We are determined to continue to oppose U.S. wars and demand that the hundreds of billions of dollars of the military budget that benefits corporate power in the U.S. be spent on people’s needs.

We are actively building, with many others, for nationally coordinated days of opposition to the U.S./NATO war in Ukraine from Sept. 30 to Oct. 7 in more than 100 U.S. cities.

Unlike others, Singham actually did give away significant parts of his fortune. He gave it to leftist causes — and that’s why he, as well as his life partner Jodie Evans, a founder of Code Pink and a leading political activist, were targeted.

ETA: NYT Reveals That a Tech Mogul Likes China—and That McCarthyism Is Alive and Well

For the NBC report, the first Chinese balloon wasn’t a non-event blown out of proportion, but something that “shined a light” on the “strategic importance” of Alaskan military bases “as adversaries like Russia and China demonstrate new capabilities.” NBC didn’t bother including the Pentagon’s admissions that the balloon was not an intelligence threat, or the likelihood that it drifted into U.S. airspace by accident. Instead, it allowed the earlier pervasive assumption that the balloon represented some kind of crisis to justify the rest of the coverage.

[…]

The message of NBC’s reporting was clear: Russia and China are coming, and we need a robust military to defend ourselves from these threats. The balloon was just a practice run for more threats from Russia and China. The images on screen did the job of reinforcing this message, despite the fact that there was no logical argument about any danger presented to the audience.

(Emphasis original.)

Another Post op-ed, by columnist Max Boot (7/11/23), headlined “Why Liberals Protesting Cluster Munitions for Ukraine Are Wrong,” illustrates the “ends justify the means” rhetoric so pervasive in discourse over the war in Ukraine.

Boot acknowledged the devastating impact of cluster munitions, noting that “in Laos alone, at least 25,000 people have been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance since the US bombing ended.” He added:

Such concerns led more than 100 nations—but not the United States, Russia or Ukraine—to join the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions abolishing the use of these weapons.

Of course, the United States is notorious for isolating itself from the rest of the world when it comes to the signing of international treaties—as the Council on Foreign Relations, where Mr. Boot is a senior fellow, has shown. The US signed but failed to ratify the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (which has 178 state parties) and the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (which has 189 state parties). It refused to even sign the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty (which has 164 state parties).

Some climate scientists are cautious about the new study, suggesting that more observational data is needed to say the collapse could happen so imminently (Grist, 7/26/23). But as climate scientist Jonathan Foley argued (Twitter, 7/27/23), though the study doesn’t offer certainty, the consequences are so dire that “the only prudent reaction to this is to work to address climate change, as quickly as possible, to avoid these kinds of impacts.”

“I really wish that journalists and editors took this as seriously as scientists do, and reported it loudly and accurately, taking the time to get the facts right,” Foley wrote. “The planet is in trouble, and we need to have the best possible information.”

Unfortunately for the planet and those who inhabit it, corporate media would rather look the other way, at worst, and offer scary clickbait headlines with few connections to actionable policy at best.

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The Wall Street Journal, the favored newspaper of the business crowd, didn’t even bother to cover the report, despite the massive economic implications of an AMOC collapse. It did, however, find room on its front page that day for a story headlined “The Manpri Summer: How Men’s Shorts Got So Long.”

(Emphasis original.)

Some Glendale parents are worried that the LA Times, a major source of information in Southern California, has downplayed the fact that the school district overwhelmingly supports LGBTQ rights in schools, and outside far-right activists have been driving much of the hostility.

While the Times (6/6/23) did note that the Proud Boys, a violent far-right group, had reportedly been on-hand at the protest, it also lumped activists on each side together, reporting that “hundreds of protesters had swarmed outside the building, some waving American flags and others waving Pride flags.” It suggested that the transphobic activists were motivated by concern for their children, noting that “those who were protesting the board’s LGBTQ+ policies chanted, ‘Leave our kids alone’ while naming each of the five members of the board.”

(Emphasis original.)

Without a clear exposé of the forces behind M4L, the Post’s analysis reads like a how-to instruction manual for people who may want to follow the group’s methodology. It even includes examples of handwritten complaint cards filed against specific books.

The article goes so far as to suggest that Jennifer Pippin, a M4L member, may have a valid point in objecting to some LGBTQ+ books because of their sexual content, thus making excuses for her homophobia. If sexual content could be considered a valid reason for removing a book, then shelves of library romance and much of the literary fiction sections would be bare, and the Bible would have to go.

Homelessness and poverty are the tragic results of unfettered capitalism and raging inequality, whether it’s in rural West Virginia or in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Drug addiction is a public health crisis that the US healthcare system neglects, like many other ailments. These media pieces aren’t appalled by the conditions that create seas of unhoused people, but are appalled that housed, professional people have to deal with them. The New York Times and CNN are in many ways different from Fox News and the New York Post, but this is where their worldviews meld.

(Emphasis original.)

The Washington Post (5/12/23) described it as a “face off” when (at that point) 30 Palestinians, including six children, were killed by [neocolonial] airstrikes, along with one [neocolonist] killed by Palestinian rocket fire; a New York Times article (5/11/23) described the conflict as [the necolony] and Islamic Jihad “trad[ing] fire.”  Another New York Times (5/12/23) headline vaguely referred to the attack as “A New Round of Middle East Fighting.”

CNN (4/12/23) used the classic whitewashing word “clash” in describing the attacks. CNN’s use of the term was even more striking because it appeared in a headline that included the incongruity between 30 dead Palestinians and one dead [neocolonist].

Outlets gave several “how we got here” pieces that purported to give context for the current escalation (e.g., New York Times, 5/9/23; Washington Post, 5/13/23). Again, not a single article FAIR reviewed used the term “apartheid” or referenced the recent findings from human rights NGOs to describe the current situation in Palestine.

(Emphasis original.)

But, given the unlikelihood of outright default, the more concerning scenario for the Journal has to do with budget talks. The piece noted that, as the largest item on the discretionary side of the federal budget—which excludes social programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are funded on an ongoing basis—military spending could soon find itself on the chopping block. And who’s taking the pain? Your friendly old drone supplier:

Concerns that military spending could be cut—or, at best delayed—in a debt-ceiling fight have weighed heavily on investor sentiment toward the biggest military contractors. Shares in Lockheed Martin are down this year more than 7%, with General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman off 15% and 20%, respectively.

Dear God, no! We must take action to address the “‘wall of worry’ among investors”!

(Emphasis original.)

Characterizing Penny’s chokehold as a generally harmless maneuver gone wrong is irresponsible. Chokeholds like the one Penny used are designed for combat—not the subway. In 2021, the Justice Department banned the use of chokeholds by federal law enforcement agencies unless lethal force was authorized. In a piece for Military.com (5/9/23), Gabriel Murphy, a former Marine who started a petition to prosecute Penny for Neely’s death, explains that these martial arts methods Marines learn in training are “not designed to be non-lethal or safe.”

Likewise with the questions of which claims can go unchallenged in the Times’ news section. These are fundamentally subjective, political decisions. But Sulzberger still refuses to recognize the Times as political:

In the long run, ignoring societal disagreements or actively suppressing certain facts and viewpoints—even with the best of intentions—turns the press into an overtly political actor.

No comment.

Can you really describe a country that imposes such a rule on roughly two million people as a “democracy”?

Anticommunists certainly can!

The Times’ September piece on gender-affirming surgery devoted several paragraphs to people who came to regret having had the surgery. In reality, such experiences are highly uncommon–it’s far more common for trans people to want surgery and be unable to access it than it is for someone to access it and later regret it.

A recent systematic review of 27 studies found the prevalence of regret was only 1%; the most recent National Center for Transgender Equality survey (2016) found that more than half of trans people who sought coverage for gender-affirming surgery in the previous year were denied.

Yet “detransitioners” are held up by the anti-trans movement as a key reason to drastically limit or halt all access to gender-affirming care. Offering them a prominent place in such a piece—and not highlighting any trans people who wanted surgery and were unable to access it—skews readers’ perceptions of the most pressing issues surrounding such care.

Laser‐focusing on irrelevant specifics is an anticommunist tradition, after all.

Kind of hard to blame the rapid decay of the Earth on transgender people, so yeah, I can see why antisocialists wouldn’t care about this.

Reducing a crime suspect to their gender identity in a headline is irresponsible journalism—just as identifying a suspect by their race, religion or sexual orientation, which is why you don’t see headlines talking about an “Asian killer,” a “Mormon killer” or a “bisexual killer.” Such shorthand inevitably holds an entire group responsible for the action of an individual, and, in the case of a group that faces widespread prejudice, puts many people in danger.

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Murdoch’s Fox News (3/28/23) reported that “a radical transgender group said the transgender Nashville shooter felt ‘no other effective way to be seen’” adding that “the Trans Resistance Network (TRN), a far-left transgender ‘collective,’ released an inflammatory statement” that Hale resorted to violence because Hale had “no other effective way to be seen,” while still saying the action was tragic. (The obscure group appears to have gotten no media coverage at all prior to March 27, according to a search of the Nexis database.)

Whoa! Antisocialists grossly inflating the importance of a small and obscure voice that they made a concerted effort to find? I’m so surprised!

He claimed that “any review” of the paper’s coverage “shows that the allegations this group is making are demonstrably false,” without offering any evidence.

Even information that could discredit the “spy balloon” theory was used to bolster it.

That linguistic soft-pedaling and back-stepping language was peppered throughout the piece, describing how police brigades like the “Scorpion” unit these Memphis police were part of are “designed to patrol areas of the city struggling with persistent crime and violence”—just trying to protect Black folks from ourselves, you see—yet they mysteriously “end up oppressing young people and people of color.” Well, that’s a subject for documented reporting, not conjecture.

[M]ost Americans, especially young people, don’t recognize propaganda, because even when it is exposed at the time, it is not incorporated into the broader narratives of war. Debunked tales have gone down the Orwellian memory hole, and most of the true history of war goes down the same hole. As Bryce Greene pointed out on Counterspin (2/24/22), the roots of the escalations leading up to the war in Ukraine were “completely omitted from the Western media.”

(Emphasis original.)

The open letter notes respectfully that there are “many tangible ongoing proposals and projects that work to boost productivity and food security.” That it is Gates’ “preferred high-tech solutions, including genetic engineering, new breeding technologies, and now digital agriculture, that have in fact consistently failed to reduce hunger or increase food access as promised,” and in some cases actually contribute to the biophysical processes driving the problem. That Africa, despite having the lowest costs of labor and land, is a net exporter is not, as Gates says, a “tragedy,” but a predictable and predicted result of the fact that costs of land and labor are socially and politically produced: “Africa is in fact highly productive; it’s just that the profits are realized elsewhere.”

FAIR has also documented the lack of transgender youth quoted in both centrist and far-right news outlets (FAIR.org, 5/5/22). When the Washington Post (1/29/21, 4/15/21) covered the anti-transgender sports campaign in two 2021 articles, sources that were transgender athletes were outnumbered 11 to 1 and 17 to 3, respectively (FAIR.org, 5/6/21). Right-wing efforts to demonize trans people (as well as others in the LGBTQ community) are that much more effective when the targets are denied the ability to speak for themselves.

(Emphasis original.)

Apart from the inconsistency in poll results, the notion that national polls can identify the issues that will determine which party will win control of the House is fundamentally flawed.

The assumption behind the previous analyses is that most voters choose candidates based on the issues. But that is backward for the vast majority of voters. People who identify with a party will overwhelmingly vote for that party, regardless of the issues.

Both Votecast and the network exit poll, for example, report that only 5% to 6% of party identifiers voted for a candidate not of their own party.

Pollsters may ask respondents to identify the important issues for them in this election, but the question is irrelevant for most Republicans and Democrats. They will choose among issues suggested by the poll interviewers. But the issues they choose will almost always be the issues that conform to what their party leaders are already stressing.