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Worthless Media
WELCOME TO WORTHLESS MEDIA WHERE THE FAILURE OF REAL JOURNALISM IS
EXPOSED
april 23, 2019
“The media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.”
–Chomsky
Media lo-lites
(source: politicus usa, raw story, alternet, newshounds)
*UPDATE: The National Enquirer is being sold for $100 million to James Cohen, CEO of Hudson News
Ending an association between a longtime friend of President Trump and the tabloid that favored him during the 2016 election, American Media Inc. LLC (AMI) is selling the National Enquirer for $100 million to James Cohen, CEO of Hudson News. The su ... (Washington Post)
*White supremacists watch Tucker Carlson on Fox News for ‘some tips’ on ‘white nationalist talking points’: report
*Pat Buchanan Tells Laura Ingraham That African-Americans Have Not 'Fully Assimilated' Ah...the unbearable whiteness of Pat Buchanan rears it's paleo-conservative head again.
*Jeanine Pirro Returns – But Offers No Apology For Anti-Muslim Bigotry That Caused Suspension Fox's Jeanine Pirro didn’t have the decency to apologize for her bigoted attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar that her employer "strongly [...]
Fox News media critic laments supposed plight of white male presidential candidates — and gets torn to shreds
Brad Reed - raw story
23 APR 2019 AT 11:36 ET
Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz on Tuesday got hammered after he lamented the purported plight of white men who are running for the presidency in the Democratic primary.
Reacting to a New York Times report on the diverse field of Democratic candidates running in 2020, Kurtz wrote that he feared that “being a white male candidate may well be a liability for Democrats in 2020.” He then asked rhetorically, “How did we get to such a place?”
Despite Kurtz’s lamentation, however, polls have continuously shown white men such as former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg are all among the top contenders.
In fact, two recent polls from Monmouth University and Morning Consult have found that Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg make up the top three most popular candidates among Democratic primary voters.
Given all this, Kurtz proceeded to get buried in mockery by his Twitter followers, many of whom accused him of shamelessly stoking panic about the supposed decline of white men.
Reacting to a New York Times report on the diverse field of Democratic candidates running in 2020, Kurtz wrote that he feared that “being a white male candidate may well be a liability for Democrats in 2020.” He then asked rhetorically, “How did we get to such a place?”
Despite Kurtz’s lamentation, however, polls have continuously shown white men such as former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg are all among the top contenders.
In fact, two recent polls from Monmouth University and Morning Consult have found that Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg make up the top three most popular candidates among Democratic primary voters.
Given all this, Kurtz proceeded to get buried in mockery by his Twitter followers, many of whom accused him of shamelessly stoking panic about the supposed decline of white men.
Sean Hannity Guest Falsely Claims Ilhan Omar Is ‘Infatuated’ With Terrorism
The Muslim congresswoman has received death threats because conservative media took her comments about 9/11 out of context.
By Marina Fang - huff post
4/16/19
While appearing on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show Monday, former NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik falsely claimed Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is “infatuated with Al Qaeda, with Hamas, Hezbollah,” continuing the stream of Islamophobic attacks from right-wing media and conservative politicians, including President Donald Trump, targeted at the Muslim congresswoman.
Hannity concurred with Kerik, who added that Omar “was the keynote speaker” for an event by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — falsely claiming the group is “a terrorist organization,” a designation lobbed by some critics of the Muslim civil rights group.
Kerik served three years in prison for charges of corruption and lying to White House officials when he was considered for President George W. Bush’s cabinet.
Last week, conservative media latched onto an out-of-context comment Omar made at the CAIR event last month, in which she described 9/11 as “some people did something.”
Omar was discussing the ways Muslims in the U.S. were blamed for the attacks and experienced increased amounts of Islamophobic hate.
“CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,” she said.
The organization, formed in 1994, stepped up its work in response to the Islamophobia following the Sept. 11 attacks.
“Far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen,” Omar said during the speech. “Frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.”
Since last week, Omar, one of two Muslim women in Congress and the subject of repeated Islamophobic attacks, has received death threats in response to the uproar over the comments.
Hannity concurred with Kerik, who added that Omar “was the keynote speaker” for an event by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — falsely claiming the group is “a terrorist organization,” a designation lobbed by some critics of the Muslim civil rights group.
Kerik served three years in prison for charges of corruption and lying to White House officials when he was considered for President George W. Bush’s cabinet.
Last week, conservative media latched onto an out-of-context comment Omar made at the CAIR event last month, in which she described 9/11 as “some people did something.”
Omar was discussing the ways Muslims in the U.S. were blamed for the attacks and experienced increased amounts of Islamophobic hate.
“CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,” she said.
The organization, formed in 1994, stepped up its work in response to the Islamophobia following the Sept. 11 attacks.
“Far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen,” Omar said during the speech. “Frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.”
Since last week, Omar, one of two Muslim women in Congress and the subject of repeated Islamophobic attacks, has received death threats in response to the uproar over the comments.
The right wing is bursting with unhinged — and bigoted — conspiracy theories about the Notre Dame fire
ALEX HENDERSON, ALTERNET
16 APR 2019 AT 11:42 ET
Over the years, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris has survived everything from the French Revolution to the Black Plague (which killed tens of millions of Europeans in the 1340s/1350s) to two world wars—and on Monday, April 15, Parisians were shocked to see the historic Medieval building in flames. But the blaze has been extinguished, although Notre Dame suffered extensive damage and will need to be rebuilt. According to French authorities, there is no reason to suspect foul play; the blaze appeared to be the accidental result of renovations work—not terrorism or arson. But that hasn’t stopped far-right extremists and wingnuts from floating conspiracy theories about the Notre Dame fire.
One such extremist is Glenn Beck, founder of the right-wing media company Blaze TV and former AM talk radio host. On Blaze, Beck described the fire as a French equivalent of 9/11 and speculated that the Notre Dame blaze might have been started on purpose by Islamic terrorists—despite the lack of evidence of any type of foul play.
Blaze asserted, “If this was arson, this is going to be bad. It might have just been started by a cigarette; we don’t know. But if this was started by Islamists, I don’t think you’ll find out about it, because I think it would set the entire country on fire. They’ve had killings, they’ve had mass shootings, they’ve had people running people down in the streets. The tension is very high.”
The French government, according to Beck, will not notify the public if it finds evidence of terrorism. “This is their World Trade Center moment,” Beck said on Blaze TV. “And if this was done by terrorists, I think that they will keep it quiet.”
Guest Chad Robichaux concurred with Beck, telling him, “I’m with you” and claiming that French authorities will cover up any evidence of foul play because there “would be a slaughter in the streets” in France.
Beck’s 9/11 comparison is flawed. First, there is no question that the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001 were attacks of terrorism. The Twin Towers were destroyed on purpose; the Notre Dame blaze, French authorities are saying, was an accident. Second, no one died because of the Notre Dame fire, although one firefighter suffered serious injuries—whereas on 9/11, roughly 3000 people were murdered.
When far-right French politician Philippe Karsenty was interviewed on Fox News on Monday, he speculated that the Notre Dame blaze was set on purpose and that the French government would suppress evidence of foul play. Karsenty told Fox News’ Shepard Smith, “Even if nobody died, it’s like a 9/11. It’s a French 9/11, you know?…. Of course, you will hear the story of the political correctness, which will tell you it’s probably an accident.”
But Smith, who is among the more reasonable conservatives at Fox News, shut Karsenty down—telling him, “Sir, we’re not going to speculate here of the cause of something which we don’t know…. We’re not doing that here—not now, not on my watch.”
Alex Jones’ Infowars website, notorious for promoting outlandish conspiracy theories, also floated the claim that the fire was “deliberately” set. Infowars’ “source” was an alleged Notre Dame worker. And anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller claimed that the “Notre Dame Cathedral inferno” was “intentionally set” and implied that there was an ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria) connection.
A troll Twitter account, @CNNPolitics2020, pretended to be CNN and posted, “BREAKING: CNN can now confirm the Notre Dame fire was caused by act of terrorism.” But the account had no connection whatsoever to CNN, and Twitter shut @CNNPolitics2020 down when it learned of the disinformation it was spreading about the Notre Dame blaze.
One such extremist is Glenn Beck, founder of the right-wing media company Blaze TV and former AM talk radio host. On Blaze, Beck described the fire as a French equivalent of 9/11 and speculated that the Notre Dame blaze might have been started on purpose by Islamic terrorists—despite the lack of evidence of any type of foul play.
Blaze asserted, “If this was arson, this is going to be bad. It might have just been started by a cigarette; we don’t know. But if this was started by Islamists, I don’t think you’ll find out about it, because I think it would set the entire country on fire. They’ve had killings, they’ve had mass shootings, they’ve had people running people down in the streets. The tension is very high.”
The French government, according to Beck, will not notify the public if it finds evidence of terrorism. “This is their World Trade Center moment,” Beck said on Blaze TV. “And if this was done by terrorists, I think that they will keep it quiet.”
Guest Chad Robichaux concurred with Beck, telling him, “I’m with you” and claiming that French authorities will cover up any evidence of foul play because there “would be a slaughter in the streets” in France.
Beck’s 9/11 comparison is flawed. First, there is no question that the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001 were attacks of terrorism. The Twin Towers were destroyed on purpose; the Notre Dame blaze, French authorities are saying, was an accident. Second, no one died because of the Notre Dame fire, although one firefighter suffered serious injuries—whereas on 9/11, roughly 3000 people were murdered.
When far-right French politician Philippe Karsenty was interviewed on Fox News on Monday, he speculated that the Notre Dame blaze was set on purpose and that the French government would suppress evidence of foul play. Karsenty told Fox News’ Shepard Smith, “Even if nobody died, it’s like a 9/11. It’s a French 9/11, you know?…. Of course, you will hear the story of the political correctness, which will tell you it’s probably an accident.”
But Smith, who is among the more reasonable conservatives at Fox News, shut Karsenty down—telling him, “Sir, we’re not going to speculate here of the cause of something which we don’t know…. We’re not doing that here—not now, not on my watch.”
Alex Jones’ Infowars website, notorious for promoting outlandish conspiracy theories, also floated the claim that the fire was “deliberately” set. Infowars’ “source” was an alleged Notre Dame worker. And anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller claimed that the “Notre Dame Cathedral inferno” was “intentionally set” and implied that there was an ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria) connection.
A troll Twitter account, @CNNPolitics2020, pretended to be CNN and posted, “BREAKING: CNN can now confirm the Notre Dame fire was caused by act of terrorism.” But the account had no connection whatsoever to CNN, and Twitter shut @CNNPolitics2020 down when it learned of the disinformation it was spreading about the Notre Dame blaze.
Chuck Todd’s interview with Mitt Romney: A massive failure that shows exactly why Americans uninformed on healthcare
by Egberto Willies / Daily Kos - alternet
April 8, 2019
Chuck Todd reverted to form on Sunday’s Meet The Press. He interviewed Senator Mitt Romney with excellent questions. The problem is that he accepted Romney’s answers at face value. Sadly for the average American, after listening to the interview, they would have left more misinformed than when they started.
I am convinced that it is not only being wards of the Plutocracy that causes mainst+-ream media talking heads like Chuck Todd to allow the misinformation. There is a level of wanting to ingratiate with these people of power that may also be causal.
In the short interview, Todd allowed a lie, a spin, and a moral failure to go unchallenged. Ironically in the one with Mayor Pete before the Romney interview, he was holding the mayor to account for every word.
Chuck Todd, 3 strikes & you should be out on healthcare
Chuck Todd correctly pointed out that Obamacare was very similar to Massachusetts’ Romneycare. He then asked Romney if he wanted to start healthcare from scratch.
Before his bloviation, Romney lied. He said that Obamacare only affected 20% or so of Americans. Chuck Todd never pushed back. In not pushing back he left in the ethos that most Americans would not be affected by repeal. The reality is any repeal of Obamacare removes hard fought for protections like the elimination of caps, rescission, and discrimination against women. It also removes preexisting condition protections and the carrying of children up to age 26 on their parents’ policies.
Later when discussing private insurance, Romney claimed that Republicans wanted to create a plan more state-centered. He spoke about magically reducing with no specifics on how they would do it. Todd never reminded him that while in full control of the government, Republicans did absolutely nothing to ease the healthcare pain on Americans. They fought for repeal with nothing to offer in its place.
Lastly, The Utah voters voted for the Medicaid expansion to the Affordable Care Act. Their legislature is attempting to obstruct the people’s vote by getting waivers to be less generous. Romney gave the impression that the only issue was Utah wanted the ability to opt-out if the Federal Government did not fund their share of the program. That was a false statement. But there was a moral component that Chuck Todd did not follow up on at all. In effect, Romney was antiseptic in talking about the health of the people in his state. He just made it a cost issue instead of a human issue and Todd never call him on it.
There is no doubt that any average listener of that interview left much more misinformed than had they not watched it at all. And that is a shame, especially in these times. Our mainstream media is to blame for much of the failings in the body politic.
Chuck Todd is a good barometer of how mainstream press covers (or not) national and international events. Based on the pros vs. cons of his reporting, it isn’t all that good. And that is why as many of us as possible must become the new-media or assist in keeping a vibrant independent media. That is how we get a turn around.
I am convinced that it is not only being wards of the Plutocracy that causes mainst+-ream media talking heads like Chuck Todd to allow the misinformation. There is a level of wanting to ingratiate with these people of power that may also be causal.
In the short interview, Todd allowed a lie, a spin, and a moral failure to go unchallenged. Ironically in the one with Mayor Pete before the Romney interview, he was holding the mayor to account for every word.
Chuck Todd, 3 strikes & you should be out on healthcare
Chuck Todd correctly pointed out that Obamacare was very similar to Massachusetts’ Romneycare. He then asked Romney if he wanted to start healthcare from scratch.
Before his bloviation, Romney lied. He said that Obamacare only affected 20% or so of Americans. Chuck Todd never pushed back. In not pushing back he left in the ethos that most Americans would not be affected by repeal. The reality is any repeal of Obamacare removes hard fought for protections like the elimination of caps, rescission, and discrimination against women. It also removes preexisting condition protections and the carrying of children up to age 26 on their parents’ policies.
Later when discussing private insurance, Romney claimed that Republicans wanted to create a plan more state-centered. He spoke about magically reducing with no specifics on how they would do it. Todd never reminded him that while in full control of the government, Republicans did absolutely nothing to ease the healthcare pain on Americans. They fought for repeal with nothing to offer in its place.
Lastly, The Utah voters voted for the Medicaid expansion to the Affordable Care Act. Their legislature is attempting to obstruct the people’s vote by getting waivers to be less generous. Romney gave the impression that the only issue was Utah wanted the ability to opt-out if the Federal Government did not fund their share of the program. That was a false statement. But there was a moral component that Chuck Todd did not follow up on at all. In effect, Romney was antiseptic in talking about the health of the people in his state. He just made it a cost issue instead of a human issue and Todd never call him on it.
There is no doubt that any average listener of that interview left much more misinformed than had they not watched it at all. And that is a shame, especially in these times. Our mainstream media is to blame for much of the failings in the body politic.
Chuck Todd is a good barometer of how mainstream press covers (or not) national and international events. Based on the pros vs. cons of his reporting, it isn’t all that good. And that is why as many of us as possible must become the new-media or assist in keeping a vibrant independent media. That is how we get a turn around.
Fox & Friends dredges up Pete Buttigieg’s recently deceased father to smear candidate as ‘radical’
David Edwards - raw story
08 APR 2019 AT 11:27 ET
Fox News personality Rachel Campos-Duffy on Monday blasted Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and his dead father, Joseph, as “radicals.”
During a segment on Fox & Friends, Campos-Duffy expressed outrage at Buttigieg because he had suggested that evangelical voters should pick him instead of President Donald Trump.
Campos-Duffy angrily pointed out that Buttigieg “blocked a pregnancy crisis center from opening up in his hometown.”
“One of the things mayor Pete said, they’re hypocrites, evangelicals and Catholics are hypocrites voting for President Trump because he doesn’t care about prisoners and immigrants and the poor,” the Fox News contributor said. “And I would say false on all claims. The poor, the poor don’t want handouts from the government. They want financial independence.”
She continued: “And I think that this economy has actually delivered on that. Two, prisoners, who delivered on criminal justice reform?
And three, immigration, very debatable for me to say that Democrats who want to do nothing to a system that is exploiting and leading to sexual abuse of children and women coming up to the border, not very Christian in my view.”
According to the Fox contributor, Buttigieg is a “radical” underneath his “mild-mannered” appearance.
“I think if you lift up the hood on Mayor Pete, you’ll see [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]. He’s radical, his dad is a radical — was, he recently died — Marxist professor,” Campos-Duffy remarked. “I think he puts a mild face just like Obama on some pretty radical policies.”
In fact, Joseph Buttigieg was a professor at the University of Notre Dame. During his time there, he was known for translating the prison diaries of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist. Joseph Buttigieg died on January 27, 2019.
During a segment on Fox & Friends, Campos-Duffy expressed outrage at Buttigieg because he had suggested that evangelical voters should pick him instead of President Donald Trump.
Campos-Duffy angrily pointed out that Buttigieg “blocked a pregnancy crisis center from opening up in his hometown.”
“One of the things mayor Pete said, they’re hypocrites, evangelicals and Catholics are hypocrites voting for President Trump because he doesn’t care about prisoners and immigrants and the poor,” the Fox News contributor said. “And I would say false on all claims. The poor, the poor don’t want handouts from the government. They want financial independence.”
She continued: “And I think that this economy has actually delivered on that. Two, prisoners, who delivered on criminal justice reform?
And three, immigration, very debatable for me to say that Democrats who want to do nothing to a system that is exploiting and leading to sexual abuse of children and women coming up to the border, not very Christian in my view.”
According to the Fox contributor, Buttigieg is a “radical” underneath his “mild-mannered” appearance.
“I think if you lift up the hood on Mayor Pete, you’ll see [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]. He’s radical, his dad is a radical — was, he recently died — Marxist professor,” Campos-Duffy remarked. “I think he puts a mild face just like Obama on some pretty radical policies.”
In fact, Joseph Buttigieg was a professor at the University of Notre Dame. During his time there, he was known for translating the prison diaries of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist. Joseph Buttigieg died on January 27, 2019.
Child Brides in Africa Are Advertised on Facebook and Sold to Old Men
In one Nigerian community, illiterate fathers have learned from their sons that Facebook is a good way to let buyers know their daughters are for sale.
Philip Obaji Jr. - daily beast
04.04.19 4:57 AM ET
OBANLIKU, Nigeria—Monica, 16, is one of two sisters sold as wives to men who found their photographs on their father's Facebook page and contacted him. She and her 14-year-old younger sister never wanted to get married until they completed their secondary education in Ogbakoko, a small village in Obanliku Local Government Area in Nigeria’s south-central Cross River state. But the teenage sisters fell victims to a culture which subjects little girls, some as young as 10, to de facto slavery through a tradition called “money marriage.”
The sisters belong to the Becheve community, a large tribe of 17 villages in Obanliku where there is a long tradition in which young girls—often referred to as “money women” or “money wives”—are sold in exchange for food or livestock or cash, or to settle debts.
Like hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of girls from the Becheve clan who are victims of money marriages, Monica and her sister were sold without their consent. Their father wanted to clear the debt he owed to a distant relative. The two sisters got married a month apart to men whom they did not know at all and who were old enough to be their grandfathers.
Their respective husbands got in touch with their father after seeing the Facebook page where he posted photos of his six daughters to draw the attention of his tribesmen. The men of the clan have found the new technology helps to extend and expand their old, exploitative traditions.
“My father knew nothing about Facebook until my elder brother bought him a smartphone and convinced him to join Facebook and post our photographs whenever he likes,” Monica told The Daily Beast. “He'll buy new clothes and force me and my sisters to put them on before taking photographs of us.”
Usually in the Becheve community, parents of the money brides take the girls to men who can afford to pay for their daughters whenever they think they are fit for marriage, or wait for interested men to request their daughter's hand in marriage. But in recent months, families who are so desperate to give their children away for money turn to Facebook so their kinsmen can check them out.
“It is young people who convince old men to look for wives on Facebook,” said Monica, who ran away from her husband to live with a friend less than a year after she got married. “The man I married said his oldest son showed him my photo on Facebook and directed him to my father.”
In effect, they use Facebook, quite literally, as a face book, although the actual exchange of money or goods does not take place online.
Spokespeople for Facebook, when contacted by The Daily Beast, were not familiar with the phenomenon as practiced in the Becheve community.
In other cultures where brides have been auctioned online, measures have been taken to stop the transactions.
Reports of Facebook being used as a tool to facilitate child marriage aren’t unique to Nigeria. Last November, the social media platform came under fire after posts discussing the sale of a 16-year-old girl in South Sudan. The victim was married in the process after her father, in exchange for his daughter, received 530 cows, three Land Cruiser V8 cars and $10,000. The teenager reportedly was bid on by five men, including senior officials in the South Sudanese government.
Facebook said it took down the post as soon it learned of of it on Nov. 9, but that wasn't until after the victim, Nyalong Ngong Deng Jalang, had been married off as the 10th wife of Kok Alat, a wealthy businessman from the country’s capital city of Juba, on Nov. 3. The post seeking bids for the teenager reportedly was published on Oct. 25.
After publication of the winning bid, Jalang achieved a certain notoriety in local media as “the most expensive woman in South Sudan.”
But the money wives of Becheve rarely receive any publicity, and often endure very difficult times as, in effect, chattel servants. They are usually not allowed to go to school and could be given out to another man if their husbands so desire. If the husband of a money wife dies, his next-of-kin becomes her new husband. The Becheve custom demands that if a money wife dies without bearing any child, her parents can bring another girl in the family to replace her. Regardless of the treatment she gets in her husband's house, a money wife is not to run back to her parents.
“The practice is meant to boost the status of the men in Becheve community,” Magnus Ejikang, a local chief in Ogbakoko, told The Daily Beast. “The more brides you have, the more respect you gain in the community.”
But for many money wives in the Becheve community, the experience in their husband's home is often disastrous, with reports of marital abuse and exploitation.
“Once he married me, he turned me into his slave and punching bag,” said Monica, who—just like her sister—was given away to her husband for 20,000 Nigerian naira (about $50), along with two goats, a pig and some yams. “He said he paid so much to marry me and so I had to labor hard by working for hours everyday in the farm to prove that I'm a grateful wife.”
Monica and her sister, who is still married to her 65-year-old husband, aren't the only girls to have ended up in forced marriage after their photos appeared on Facebook. Regina, another teenager from the Becheve tribe, was sold in January by her parents to a man already married with two wives and 11 children. Her husband found her photo on the Facebook page of her uncle, who is notorious for putting photographs of his female relatives on the social media site to draw the attention of men from Becheve seeking child brides. She was then forced into marriage after her uncle pressured her parents, to the dismay of her older brother.
“Our greedy uncle, in his usual way of manipulating his brothers into selling their daughters, convinced my parents [to give out their daughter in marriage] because he wanted a share of the bride price money,” John Ashua, brother of 15-year-old Regina, told The Daily Beast. “He earns a living by looking for husbands for the girls in the family even when they are not ready to get married.”
Married life has been difficult for Regina herself. Besides having to drop out of school and carrying out most of the chores at home, she has to look after her husband's livestock, which includes dozens of goats and pigs, and she is punished if she doesn't work as demanded.
“He beat me last night because I said I was tired and couldn't have sex with him,” Regina, who is now pregnant, complained to her brother on the telephone. “Whenever he returns home at night, he demands sex.”
Facebook is hugely popular in Nigeria with about a fifth of the country's 98 million internet users connected to the site. But in rural areas like the Becheve community, where literacy levels are not so high among the elderly, the social media platform is mostly common among young people, who are the greatest owners of smart phones. Activists say youths in the clan are actually the brain behind men searching for money wives on Facebook.
“The majority of Becheve men knew nothing about Facebook until their sons and other young relatives began to show them photos of young Becheve girls on the platform,” Queen Eteng, a researcher with the Nigerian women's rights NGO, Our Women Network, told The Daily Beast. “Most fathers don't run the Facebook pages opened in their names. Rather it is younger family members who create the pages and post the photos.”
In the Becheve community, the practice of child marriage is deeply rooted in its customs and tradition. While rights campaigners admit it will be challenging changing the age-old tradition, they do nevertheless believe that the scale of the practice could easily be reduced.
“Young people have a huge role to play in putting a stop to this brutal tradition,” said Odey, whose organization works to end child marriage in Cross River state. “We are reaching out to young men in Becheve community to put a stop to the use of Facebook to display photos of girls for the purpose of having them married.”
The sisters belong to the Becheve community, a large tribe of 17 villages in Obanliku where there is a long tradition in which young girls—often referred to as “money women” or “money wives”—are sold in exchange for food or livestock or cash, or to settle debts.
Like hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of girls from the Becheve clan who are victims of money marriages, Monica and her sister were sold without their consent. Their father wanted to clear the debt he owed to a distant relative. The two sisters got married a month apart to men whom they did not know at all and who were old enough to be their grandfathers.
Their respective husbands got in touch with their father after seeing the Facebook page where he posted photos of his six daughters to draw the attention of his tribesmen. The men of the clan have found the new technology helps to extend and expand their old, exploitative traditions.
“My father knew nothing about Facebook until my elder brother bought him a smartphone and convinced him to join Facebook and post our photographs whenever he likes,” Monica told The Daily Beast. “He'll buy new clothes and force me and my sisters to put them on before taking photographs of us.”
Usually in the Becheve community, parents of the money brides take the girls to men who can afford to pay for their daughters whenever they think they are fit for marriage, or wait for interested men to request their daughter's hand in marriage. But in recent months, families who are so desperate to give their children away for money turn to Facebook so their kinsmen can check them out.
“It is young people who convince old men to look for wives on Facebook,” said Monica, who ran away from her husband to live with a friend less than a year after she got married. “The man I married said his oldest son showed him my photo on Facebook and directed him to my father.”
In effect, they use Facebook, quite literally, as a face book, although the actual exchange of money or goods does not take place online.
Spokespeople for Facebook, when contacted by The Daily Beast, were not familiar with the phenomenon as practiced in the Becheve community.
In other cultures where brides have been auctioned online, measures have been taken to stop the transactions.
Reports of Facebook being used as a tool to facilitate child marriage aren’t unique to Nigeria. Last November, the social media platform came under fire after posts discussing the sale of a 16-year-old girl in South Sudan. The victim was married in the process after her father, in exchange for his daughter, received 530 cows, three Land Cruiser V8 cars and $10,000. The teenager reportedly was bid on by five men, including senior officials in the South Sudanese government.
Facebook said it took down the post as soon it learned of of it on Nov. 9, but that wasn't until after the victim, Nyalong Ngong Deng Jalang, had been married off as the 10th wife of Kok Alat, a wealthy businessman from the country’s capital city of Juba, on Nov. 3. The post seeking bids for the teenager reportedly was published on Oct. 25.
After publication of the winning bid, Jalang achieved a certain notoriety in local media as “the most expensive woman in South Sudan.”
But the money wives of Becheve rarely receive any publicity, and often endure very difficult times as, in effect, chattel servants. They are usually not allowed to go to school and could be given out to another man if their husbands so desire. If the husband of a money wife dies, his next-of-kin becomes her new husband. The Becheve custom demands that if a money wife dies without bearing any child, her parents can bring another girl in the family to replace her. Regardless of the treatment she gets in her husband's house, a money wife is not to run back to her parents.
“The practice is meant to boost the status of the men in Becheve community,” Magnus Ejikang, a local chief in Ogbakoko, told The Daily Beast. “The more brides you have, the more respect you gain in the community.”
But for many money wives in the Becheve community, the experience in their husband's home is often disastrous, with reports of marital abuse and exploitation.
“Once he married me, he turned me into his slave and punching bag,” said Monica, who—just like her sister—was given away to her husband for 20,000 Nigerian naira (about $50), along with two goats, a pig and some yams. “He said he paid so much to marry me and so I had to labor hard by working for hours everyday in the farm to prove that I'm a grateful wife.”
Monica and her sister, who is still married to her 65-year-old husband, aren't the only girls to have ended up in forced marriage after their photos appeared on Facebook. Regina, another teenager from the Becheve tribe, was sold in January by her parents to a man already married with two wives and 11 children. Her husband found her photo on the Facebook page of her uncle, who is notorious for putting photographs of his female relatives on the social media site to draw the attention of men from Becheve seeking child brides. She was then forced into marriage after her uncle pressured her parents, to the dismay of her older brother.
“Our greedy uncle, in his usual way of manipulating his brothers into selling their daughters, convinced my parents [to give out their daughter in marriage] because he wanted a share of the bride price money,” John Ashua, brother of 15-year-old Regina, told The Daily Beast. “He earns a living by looking for husbands for the girls in the family even when they are not ready to get married.”
Married life has been difficult for Regina herself. Besides having to drop out of school and carrying out most of the chores at home, she has to look after her husband's livestock, which includes dozens of goats and pigs, and she is punished if she doesn't work as demanded.
“He beat me last night because I said I was tired and couldn't have sex with him,” Regina, who is now pregnant, complained to her brother on the telephone. “Whenever he returns home at night, he demands sex.”
Facebook is hugely popular in Nigeria with about a fifth of the country's 98 million internet users connected to the site. But in rural areas like the Becheve community, where literacy levels are not so high among the elderly, the social media platform is mostly common among young people, who are the greatest owners of smart phones. Activists say youths in the clan are actually the brain behind men searching for money wives on Facebook.
“The majority of Becheve men knew nothing about Facebook until their sons and other young relatives began to show them photos of young Becheve girls on the platform,” Queen Eteng, a researcher with the Nigerian women's rights NGO, Our Women Network, told The Daily Beast. “Most fathers don't run the Facebook pages opened in their names. Rather it is younger family members who create the pages and post the photos.”
In the Becheve community, the practice of child marriage is deeply rooted in its customs and tradition. While rights campaigners admit it will be challenging changing the age-old tradition, they do nevertheless believe that the scale of the practice could easily be reduced.
“Young people have a huge role to play in putting a stop to this brutal tradition,” said Odey, whose organization works to end child marriage in Cross River state. “We are reaching out to young men in Becheve community to put a stop to the use of Facebook to display photos of girls for the purpose of having them married.”
HOW THE MEDIA LAUNDERS FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY PROPAGANDA THROUGH BRANDED CONTENT
Sharon Lerner - the intercept
April 3 2019, 10:32 a.m.
THERE IT WAS in black and white — or black, white, and a palette of gentle greens and blues. With a headline predicting that natural gas “will thrive in the age of renewables,” the article made the case that there are limitations on solar and wind power and that — as a subhead spelled out in aquamarine type — natural gas “is part of the solution.” Why was the Washington Post weighing in on the need for continued production of this fossil fuel in the face of climate change?
Or was it? On closer inspection, the report wasn’t coming from the D.C. paper’s newsroom. Though the link takes you to a page published by WashingtonPost.com, the story is actually a publication of WP BrandStudio, the paper’s branded content platform. In other words, the article is really an advertisement, and the copy was paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. The tagline — “Content from American Petroleum Institute” — is plain to see if you’re looking for it, though easy to miss if you’re not.
It’s not surprising that the trade group representing the oil and gas industry would want to leap to the defense of natural gas now. The notion that the energy source is a “bridge fuel” that will somehow safely deliver us to wind and solar — and past the threat of climate change — has been vaporized by recent science.
The combustion of natural gas does in fact create less carbon dioxide than the burning of coal, as the API “article” notes, pointing out that “new natural gas plants emit 50 to 60 percent less carbon into the atmosphere than new coal facilities.”
But what the piece doesn’t mention is that the drilling, extraction, and transport of natural gas also releases methane. And though carbon dioxide is the best-known greenhouse gas and stays in the atmosphere longer than methane, methane traps at least 86 times more heat than carbon dioxide before it degrades.
Nor does it reference the fact that the amount of methane in the atmosphere has increased sharply in the past few years and, scientists warn, threatens to derail efforts to limit warming. While there are questions as to which of several global sources of methane — including cows, wetlands, and coal mines — is driving the recent spike in emissions, evidence has tied it to the boom of natural gas production. And that in turn has led many scientists to assail the idea that natural gas is a “greener” fuel. In fact, depending on the leakage rate during production, natural gas may be even worse for the climate than coal.
“This idea that natural gas is better than coal is just a distraction,” said Robert Howarth, a biogeochemist at Cornell whose research has tied the particular type of methane newly found in the atmosphere to shale gas production. “If you’re serious about keeping the planet below 2 degrees of warming, you can’t do that without cutting down on methane. We need to move away from all fossil fuels as quickly as we can.”
Not surprisingly, the Washington Post piece — or rather, the American Petroleum Institute piece in the Washington Post — doesn’t include any comments from independent scientists like Howarth. Instead, it quotes Wayne Winegarden, a businessperson affiliated with climate-denying organizations such as the Heartland Institute and the Pacific Research Institute.
Fossil fuel companies aren’t the only ones using stories that appear to be part of a journalistic publication, but are actually paid for by advertisers in attempt to improve an image suffering in the coverage done by actual journalists. Native advertising, as it’s called, has spread misinformation on everything from the “superfood” moringa to Thai seafood slavery, and has raised serious questions about journalistic ethics.
And WP BrandStudio, which has also produced spots for BP and Lockheed Martin, is hardly the only example of a branded content shop associated with a mainstream newspaper helping fossil fuel companies spin their message. T Brand Studio, a brand marketing unit within the New York Times, has produced pieces for Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Shell.
At a time when many publications are struggling to stay afloat — and cover the costs of environmental reporting — native advertising is an increasingly important piece of the financial puzzle. The paid features that mimic actual reporting brought in 20 percent of all advertising income for news media organizations in 2017, according to the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and the Native Advertising Institute.
But the issue of fossil fuel companies’ massive spending to greenwash their image is quickly heating up as scientific evidence — and unbiased reporting on it — is pointing to the need to phase out fossil fuels as soon as possible. Industry trade groups spent almost $1.4 billion on PR, advertising and communications contractors over the past decade, according to the Climate Investigations Center, almost half of which came from the American Petroleum Institute.
The five largest publicly traded oil and gas companies have spent some $1 billion on “narrative capture” and lobbying since the Paris Agreement was struck in 2016, according to a report published this month by Influence Map. That spending includes $195 million on “often misleading branding campaigns.”
Even before they kicked into high gear to counter the growing public awareness of climate change, some oil and gas companies were engaged in sly, aggressive, and destructive media efforts to counter their opponents.
In 2014, Chevron launched a publication that appears to exist for the sole purpose of defending its refinery in Richmond, California. The refinery had a long history of chemical leaks, fires, dangerous emissions, and unsafe conditions before a leak led to a massive explosion in 2012. The incident sent a “toxic fireball of smoke” over Richmond and prompted 15,000 residents to seek medical help, as the East Bay Express reported after the federal Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board issued its final report on the incident in 2015.
But the Richmond Standard, a local publication Chevron launched in 2013, didn’t cover the report that way — and doesn’t appear to have covered it at all. The Standard “produces news about what is going on in the surrounding community,” according to Braden Reddall, an external affairs advisor for Chevron. And a recent edition of the site, which included an article on the announcement of a date for the coming Little League parade and a review of the local hot dog joint, bears that out.
Despite appearing to be an unbiased news source, the Standard also includes a section of feel-good news about the refinery that includes no mention of the health and safety issues other publications have reported as linked to the refinery. Chevron’s Reddall pointed out in an email that the section on the refinery is “clearly marked as editorial under the ‘Chevron Speaks’ heading.” His email also noted that “The West Contra Costa County region has embraced the publication.”
But not all locals have a positive view of the Standard. “They created it so they could control the narrative,” said Greg Karras, senior scientist at Communities for a Better Environment, a group that has been calling attention to health impacts of the refinery for decades. “When there’s something they want or don’t want and is really important to the business, they want their story about it to get out, rather than rely on independent reporting.”
Chevron seems to have had an even darker purpose in mind when it created the Amazon Post. The website, which has a “breaking news” column and “most read” section, identifies itself in small type as “Chevron’s Views and Opinions on the Ecuador Lawsuit.” But the Post’s real purpose appears to be the targeting of Steven Donziger — an attorney with whom the company has been engaged in a pitched legal battle over massive pollution in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador for more than two decades.
Chevron’s Reddall says that the company maintains the Amazon Post “to express the company’s views and opinions on a fraudulent lawsuit against the company in Ecuador” and that “the information about Steven Donziger chronicles his long history of illegal activity.”
For his part, Donziger, who was part of a legal team that won a $9.5 billion judgment in the Ecuadorian courts against Chevron over the pollution, says that the Post is just one of the tools the giant energy company has used to personally and professionally destroy him. While three Ecuadorian courts, including the highest court in the land, upheld the judgment, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled that it should not be enforced because parts of it were “corruptly ghostwritten” in return for the promise of a bribe.
Chevron, which has employed at least 2,000 lawyers and legal personnel from more than 60 firms to work on litigation around the pollution in Ecuador, also filed a lawsuit against Donziger in 2011 alleging that he won the judgment in Ecuador through fraud and racketeering. Kaplan decided the case in Chevron’s favor in a trial held without a jury. And recently that decision was the basis for Donziger having his legal license suspended without a hearing and his bank account frozen. While Donziger has denied that he committed misconduct and contested his suspension in court, the company has delighted over his suffering in the Amazon Post.
There may soon be more fossil fuel company publications entirely devoted to smearing the reputation of individuals, according to Robert Brulle. “They’re likely going to attack Alexandria Ocasio Cortez personally and demonize her. They’ve already begun that,” said Brulle, a sociologist and visiting professor of environment and society at Brown University. “It’s an old strategy — to delegitimize your opponents.”
Brulle also thinks that there will soon be more native advertising from oil and gas companies, which he classifies as “classic propaganda.” “We’re going to see a lot more from API, Exxon Mobil, and other companies,” said Brulle, who notes that the share of oil and gas industry spending on think tanks, such as Heartland, is about a tenth of its expenditures on communications. “As the threat of possible change to the fossil fuel industry increases, they ramp up their resources.”
And of course, change to our energy system is not just possible — it’s necessary.
“Nations have barely a decade to take ‘unprecedented’ actions and cut their emissions in half by 2030 to prevent the worst consequences of climate change,” as a December article about the climate talks in Poland explained. That article appeared in the Washington Post — the real one.
Or was it? On closer inspection, the report wasn’t coming from the D.C. paper’s newsroom. Though the link takes you to a page published by WashingtonPost.com, the story is actually a publication of WP BrandStudio, the paper’s branded content platform. In other words, the article is really an advertisement, and the copy was paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. The tagline — “Content from American Petroleum Institute” — is plain to see if you’re looking for it, though easy to miss if you’re not.
It’s not surprising that the trade group representing the oil and gas industry would want to leap to the defense of natural gas now. The notion that the energy source is a “bridge fuel” that will somehow safely deliver us to wind and solar — and past the threat of climate change — has been vaporized by recent science.
The combustion of natural gas does in fact create less carbon dioxide than the burning of coal, as the API “article” notes, pointing out that “new natural gas plants emit 50 to 60 percent less carbon into the atmosphere than new coal facilities.”
But what the piece doesn’t mention is that the drilling, extraction, and transport of natural gas also releases methane. And though carbon dioxide is the best-known greenhouse gas and stays in the atmosphere longer than methane, methane traps at least 86 times more heat than carbon dioxide before it degrades.
Nor does it reference the fact that the amount of methane in the atmosphere has increased sharply in the past few years and, scientists warn, threatens to derail efforts to limit warming. While there are questions as to which of several global sources of methane — including cows, wetlands, and coal mines — is driving the recent spike in emissions, evidence has tied it to the boom of natural gas production. And that in turn has led many scientists to assail the idea that natural gas is a “greener” fuel. In fact, depending on the leakage rate during production, natural gas may be even worse for the climate than coal.
“This idea that natural gas is better than coal is just a distraction,” said Robert Howarth, a biogeochemist at Cornell whose research has tied the particular type of methane newly found in the atmosphere to shale gas production. “If you’re serious about keeping the planet below 2 degrees of warming, you can’t do that without cutting down on methane. We need to move away from all fossil fuels as quickly as we can.”
Not surprisingly, the Washington Post piece — or rather, the American Petroleum Institute piece in the Washington Post — doesn’t include any comments from independent scientists like Howarth. Instead, it quotes Wayne Winegarden, a businessperson affiliated with climate-denying organizations such as the Heartland Institute and the Pacific Research Institute.
Fossil fuel companies aren’t the only ones using stories that appear to be part of a journalistic publication, but are actually paid for by advertisers in attempt to improve an image suffering in the coverage done by actual journalists. Native advertising, as it’s called, has spread misinformation on everything from the “superfood” moringa to Thai seafood slavery, and has raised serious questions about journalistic ethics.
And WP BrandStudio, which has also produced spots for BP and Lockheed Martin, is hardly the only example of a branded content shop associated with a mainstream newspaper helping fossil fuel companies spin their message. T Brand Studio, a brand marketing unit within the New York Times, has produced pieces for Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Shell.
At a time when many publications are struggling to stay afloat — and cover the costs of environmental reporting — native advertising is an increasingly important piece of the financial puzzle. The paid features that mimic actual reporting brought in 20 percent of all advertising income for news media organizations in 2017, according to the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and the Native Advertising Institute.
But the issue of fossil fuel companies’ massive spending to greenwash their image is quickly heating up as scientific evidence — and unbiased reporting on it — is pointing to the need to phase out fossil fuels as soon as possible. Industry trade groups spent almost $1.4 billion on PR, advertising and communications contractors over the past decade, according to the Climate Investigations Center, almost half of which came from the American Petroleum Institute.
The five largest publicly traded oil and gas companies have spent some $1 billion on “narrative capture” and lobbying since the Paris Agreement was struck in 2016, according to a report published this month by Influence Map. That spending includes $195 million on “often misleading branding campaigns.”
Even before they kicked into high gear to counter the growing public awareness of climate change, some oil and gas companies were engaged in sly, aggressive, and destructive media efforts to counter their opponents.
In 2014, Chevron launched a publication that appears to exist for the sole purpose of defending its refinery in Richmond, California. The refinery had a long history of chemical leaks, fires, dangerous emissions, and unsafe conditions before a leak led to a massive explosion in 2012. The incident sent a “toxic fireball of smoke” over Richmond and prompted 15,000 residents to seek medical help, as the East Bay Express reported after the federal Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board issued its final report on the incident in 2015.
But the Richmond Standard, a local publication Chevron launched in 2013, didn’t cover the report that way — and doesn’t appear to have covered it at all. The Standard “produces news about what is going on in the surrounding community,” according to Braden Reddall, an external affairs advisor for Chevron. And a recent edition of the site, which included an article on the announcement of a date for the coming Little League parade and a review of the local hot dog joint, bears that out.
Despite appearing to be an unbiased news source, the Standard also includes a section of feel-good news about the refinery that includes no mention of the health and safety issues other publications have reported as linked to the refinery. Chevron’s Reddall pointed out in an email that the section on the refinery is “clearly marked as editorial under the ‘Chevron Speaks’ heading.” His email also noted that “The West Contra Costa County region has embraced the publication.”
But not all locals have a positive view of the Standard. “They created it so they could control the narrative,” said Greg Karras, senior scientist at Communities for a Better Environment, a group that has been calling attention to health impacts of the refinery for decades. “When there’s something they want or don’t want and is really important to the business, they want their story about it to get out, rather than rely on independent reporting.”
Chevron seems to have had an even darker purpose in mind when it created the Amazon Post. The website, which has a “breaking news” column and “most read” section, identifies itself in small type as “Chevron’s Views and Opinions on the Ecuador Lawsuit.” But the Post’s real purpose appears to be the targeting of Steven Donziger — an attorney with whom the company has been engaged in a pitched legal battle over massive pollution in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador for more than two decades.
Chevron’s Reddall says that the company maintains the Amazon Post “to express the company’s views and opinions on a fraudulent lawsuit against the company in Ecuador” and that “the information about Steven Donziger chronicles his long history of illegal activity.”
For his part, Donziger, who was part of a legal team that won a $9.5 billion judgment in the Ecuadorian courts against Chevron over the pollution, says that the Post is just one of the tools the giant energy company has used to personally and professionally destroy him. While three Ecuadorian courts, including the highest court in the land, upheld the judgment, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled that it should not be enforced because parts of it were “corruptly ghostwritten” in return for the promise of a bribe.
Chevron, which has employed at least 2,000 lawyers and legal personnel from more than 60 firms to work on litigation around the pollution in Ecuador, also filed a lawsuit against Donziger in 2011 alleging that he won the judgment in Ecuador through fraud and racketeering. Kaplan decided the case in Chevron’s favor in a trial held without a jury. And recently that decision was the basis for Donziger having his legal license suspended without a hearing and his bank account frozen. While Donziger has denied that he committed misconduct and contested his suspension in court, the company has delighted over his suffering in the Amazon Post.
There may soon be more fossil fuel company publications entirely devoted to smearing the reputation of individuals, according to Robert Brulle. “They’re likely going to attack Alexandria Ocasio Cortez personally and demonize her. They’ve already begun that,” said Brulle, a sociologist and visiting professor of environment and society at Brown University. “It’s an old strategy — to delegitimize your opponents.”
Brulle also thinks that there will soon be more native advertising from oil and gas companies, which he classifies as “classic propaganda.” “We’re going to see a lot more from API, Exxon Mobil, and other companies,” said Brulle, who notes that the share of oil and gas industry spending on think tanks, such as Heartland, is about a tenth of its expenditures on communications. “As the threat of possible change to the fossil fuel industry increases, they ramp up their resources.”
And of course, change to our energy system is not just possible — it’s necessary.
“Nations have barely a decade to take ‘unprecedented’ actions and cut their emissions in half by 2030 to prevent the worst consequences of climate change,” as a December article about the climate talks in Poland explained. That article appeared in the Washington Post — the real one.
Google resists pressure to pull LGBT "conversion therapy" app
axios
3/21/19
Google has so far refused to take down an app, already barred by Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, that aims to convince people that their same-sex sexual attractions are both sinful and changeable.
Why it matters: The app, from Living Hope Ministries, amounts to a form of conversion therapy, say LGBTQ rights groups that have urged Google to change its stance.
Details:
The big picture: The practice of conversion therapy is roundly opposed by the mainstream medical community as both ineffective and dangerous.
Yes, but: Supporters of the app maintain it isn't endorsing or practicing conversion therapy.
Between the lines: While Apple and Amazon were able to ban the apps due to policies against objectionable content, the wording of Google's terms of service are less broad. Advocacy groups, however, argue the app is tantamount to encouraging self-harm and child endangerment, both of which do violate Google's terms of service.
What they're saying: Several major LGBTQ rights groups told Axios they have written letters to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and have been trying, unsuccessfully, to meet with company executives face-to-face to voice their concerns.
"We are hopeful that technology companies recognize the harm of apps that promote conversion therapy. The Trevor Project hears from conversion therapy survivors in crisis every day, and we remain committed to ending the harmful practice in every state because we know it contributes to an increased risk of suicidal behavior among LGBTQ youth."
— Trevor Project CEO Amit Paley
"We have been urging Google to remove this app because it is life-threatening to LGBTQ youth and also clearly violates the company’s own standards. Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have taken action to remove the app from their platforms, but so far Google has refused despite our warnings about the dangers."
— Human Rights Campaign spokesperson
Google, meanwhile, isn't commenting on its decision.
The bottom line: Pressure will likely continue to mount on Google.
That said, Google could face a backlash from the other side of the ideological divide if it reverses course.
Why it matters: The app, from Living Hope Ministries, amounts to a form of conversion therapy, say LGBTQ rights groups that have urged Google to change its stance.
Details:
- The app offers testimonials and articles and includes sections for men, women, young people, and parents.
- More than 139,000 people have signed a Change.org petition calling on Google to ban the app, which has been downloaded at least 1,000 times. (The Google Play app store no longer gives specific download numbers but reports rough tiers.)
- A separate petition, calling on Apple to reinstate the app, has 20 signatures.
The big picture: The practice of conversion therapy is roundly opposed by the mainstream medical community as both ineffective and dangerous.
- Conversion therapy is opposed by prominent professional medical associations including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
- A 2018 study by The Family Acceptance Project found rates of attempted suicide by LGBT youth whose parents tried to change their sexual orientation were more than double the rate of LGBT youth who reported no such attempts to change their orientation.
- Efforts are under way to ban the practice in all 50 states.
Yes, but: Supporters of the app maintain it isn't endorsing or practicing conversion therapy.
Between the lines: While Apple and Amazon were able to ban the apps due to policies against objectionable content, the wording of Google's terms of service are less broad. Advocacy groups, however, argue the app is tantamount to encouraging self-harm and child endangerment, both of which do violate Google's terms of service.
What they're saying: Several major LGBTQ rights groups told Axios they have written letters to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and have been trying, unsuccessfully, to meet with company executives face-to-face to voice their concerns.
"We are hopeful that technology companies recognize the harm of apps that promote conversion therapy. The Trevor Project hears from conversion therapy survivors in crisis every day, and we remain committed to ending the harmful practice in every state because we know it contributes to an increased risk of suicidal behavior among LGBTQ youth."
— Trevor Project CEO Amit Paley
"We have been urging Google to remove this app because it is life-threatening to LGBTQ youth and also clearly violates the company’s own standards. Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have taken action to remove the app from their platforms, but so far Google has refused despite our warnings about the dangers."
— Human Rights Campaign spokesperson
Google, meanwhile, isn't commenting on its decision.
The bottom line: Pressure will likely continue to mount on Google.
- With letters and requests for meetings having gone unheeded, sources say Human Rights Campaign is weighing whether the decision should impact Google's score in the group's annual Corporate Equality Index, an influential rating of a company's stances on LGBTQ issues. That index is due out late this month.
That said, Google could face a backlash from the other side of the ideological divide if it reverses course.
Facebook Helps Landlords Break Fair Housing Laws
To Settle a Lawsuit, the Troubled Tech Company Agrees to Change Its Advertising Platform
By Terry H. Schwadron, DCReport New York Editor
3/20/19
The swirl of ill will these days about Facebook and other big social media companies sometimes feels a little vague – from dissatisfaction with removing all traces of the New Zealand massacre live stream to discomfort with misuse of data that somehow still seems difficult to put your finger on.
Yesterday, however, we got a view as clear as day about how Facebook, the company, can misuse data. Facebook and fair housing advocates, including the Fair Housing Justice Center in New York and the Department of Justice for the Southern District of New York, reached a legal settlement to stop practices that support housing discrimination.
Say what?
The lawsuit had charged that Facebook’s advertising platform enabled landlords, lenders and housing providers to exclude various populations from seeing housing ads based on race, national origin, gender, family status, disability and other characteristics. What Facebook had been doing was to provide pre-populated lists of people who matched a housing advertiser’s desire to match particular populations.
Those who did the work to discover this trend are fair housing investigators who do systemic testing of housing, often by sending test subjects to try to rent or buy homes. Failure to comply with federal fair housing rules and the New York City Human Rights Law can find themselves on the wrong side of the law.
The legal efforts followed a ProPublica investigation beginning in 2016 that found that Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans. While Facebook later said it would bar housing, employment and credit ads that discriminate based on “ethnic affinity,” it continued to allow other forms of discriminatory targeting, including gender and disability, civil rights groups alleged. Facebook has said the ads were standard for the online world.
Though Facebook denied the allegations, the agreement calls for a reworking of the Facebook platform. Facebook has now agreed to establish a separate advertising portal for housing, employment, and credit ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger to prevent such audience targeting. Also, housing advertisers will not be allowed to target their advertisements based on zip code.
According to the Fair Housing Justice Center, Facebook must restructure its “Lookalike Audience” feature, which had allowed advertisers to target ads to Facebook users who were similar to an advertiser’s existing customers. Moving forward, Facebook will restructure and rename this tool so it does not consider user profile categories including age, gender, relationship status, religious or political views, school, interests, zip code or membership in any Facebook groups. The social media company also will provide a page on which housing advertisers agree to anti-discrimination laws.
Facebook has long allowed advertisers to target potential customers and employees based on their demographics and interests, as gleaned from the vast trove of data the platform collects. Now, the social media giant is stepping away from that approach, amid mounting evidence that its micro-targeting techniques were abused.
“We are fully taking all the steps we can to protect people from discrimination on our platform,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook chief operating officer, told The Washington Post.“We believe this settlement goes not just to [the letter of] the law but beyond the law in taking very, very strong action to make sure any discrimination doesn’t happen,” though she declined to comment on whether the practices were illegal.
Fair housing officials commented that digitally based advertisers have a special obligation to ensure that information is not used in a harmful way.
The settlement agreement includes monetary relief for the four fair housing organizations totaling $1,950,000 along with a $500,000 advertising credit to use for promoting fair housing on Facebook. This agreement also settled four other pending civil rights lawsuits against Facebook.
The FHJC exists to eliminate housing discrimination and to strengthen fair housing enforcement in the New York City region. Other national fair housing groups participating included the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), the Miami-based Housing Opportunities Project for Excellence (HOPE), and the Fair Housing Council of Greater San Antonio (FHCGSA).
You have to love when those involved in a real problem actually produce an answer.
Make America Work Right Again.
Yesterday, however, we got a view as clear as day about how Facebook, the company, can misuse data. Facebook and fair housing advocates, including the Fair Housing Justice Center in New York and the Department of Justice for the Southern District of New York, reached a legal settlement to stop practices that support housing discrimination.
Say what?
The lawsuit had charged that Facebook’s advertising platform enabled landlords, lenders and housing providers to exclude various populations from seeing housing ads based on race, national origin, gender, family status, disability and other characteristics. What Facebook had been doing was to provide pre-populated lists of people who matched a housing advertiser’s desire to match particular populations.
Those who did the work to discover this trend are fair housing investigators who do systemic testing of housing, often by sending test subjects to try to rent or buy homes. Failure to comply with federal fair housing rules and the New York City Human Rights Law can find themselves on the wrong side of the law.
The legal efforts followed a ProPublica investigation beginning in 2016 that found that Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans. While Facebook later said it would bar housing, employment and credit ads that discriminate based on “ethnic affinity,” it continued to allow other forms of discriminatory targeting, including gender and disability, civil rights groups alleged. Facebook has said the ads were standard for the online world.
Though Facebook denied the allegations, the agreement calls for a reworking of the Facebook platform. Facebook has now agreed to establish a separate advertising portal for housing, employment, and credit ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger to prevent such audience targeting. Also, housing advertisers will not be allowed to target their advertisements based on zip code.
According to the Fair Housing Justice Center, Facebook must restructure its “Lookalike Audience” feature, which had allowed advertisers to target ads to Facebook users who were similar to an advertiser’s existing customers. Moving forward, Facebook will restructure and rename this tool so it does not consider user profile categories including age, gender, relationship status, religious or political views, school, interests, zip code or membership in any Facebook groups. The social media company also will provide a page on which housing advertisers agree to anti-discrimination laws.
Facebook has long allowed advertisers to target potential customers and employees based on their demographics and interests, as gleaned from the vast trove of data the platform collects. Now, the social media giant is stepping away from that approach, amid mounting evidence that its micro-targeting techniques were abused.
“We are fully taking all the steps we can to protect people from discrimination on our platform,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook chief operating officer, told The Washington Post.“We believe this settlement goes not just to [the letter of] the law but beyond the law in taking very, very strong action to make sure any discrimination doesn’t happen,” though she declined to comment on whether the practices were illegal.
Fair housing officials commented that digitally based advertisers have a special obligation to ensure that information is not used in a harmful way.
The settlement agreement includes monetary relief for the four fair housing organizations totaling $1,950,000 along with a $500,000 advertising credit to use for promoting fair housing on Facebook. This agreement also settled four other pending civil rights lawsuits against Facebook.
The FHJC exists to eliminate housing discrimination and to strengthen fair housing enforcement in the New York City region. Other national fair housing groups participating included the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), the Miami-based Housing Opportunities Project for Excellence (HOPE), and the Fair Housing Council of Greater San Antonio (FHCGSA).
You have to love when those involved in a real problem actually produce an answer.
Make America Work Right Again.
Trump uses bad poll question to claim half of America thinks Mueller’s on a “witch hunt”
The president capitalizes on a poorly framed question in an outlier poll.
By Aaron Rupar@atrupar - vox
Mar 18, 2019, 5:00pm EDT
Pissident Donald Trump trumpeted a new Suffolk/USA Today poll on Monday that he says shows half of America believing that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is a “witch hunt.”
Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump
Wow! A Suffolk/USA Today Poll, just out, states, “50% of Americans AGREE that Robert Mueller’s investigation is a Witch Hunt.” @MSNBC Very few think it is legit! We will soon find out?
8:07 AM - Mar 18, 2019
If true, that finding suggests Trump’s regular, repetitive attacks on the special counsel are working.
It would also indicate anti-Mueller sentiment has significantly increased since December, when an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that only 33 percent of American adults viewed Mueller’s investigation as a “witch hunt,” compared to 54 percent who viewed it as a fair investigation.
It turns out, however, that Trump’s tweet was based on a poorly framed poll question and an even more poorly framed USA Today story about it that’s headlined: “Poll: Half of Americans say Trump is victim of a ‘witch hunt’ as trust in Mueller erodes.”
But the poll question on which that headline rests is seriously flawed. The question reads as follows: “President Trump has called the Special Counsel’s investigation a ‘witch hunt’ and said he’s been subjected to more investigations than previous presidents because of politics. Do you agree?”
It’s true that 50.3 percent of the poll’s 1,000 respondents said “yes” to that question. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they believe the Mueller investigation is a “witch hunt.” The prompt packs two different questions into one — a poor strategy for a poll question.
Respondents simply may have meant to agree that Trump has been “subjected to more investigations than previous presidents because of politics” — a controversial but defensible position — without intending to go further and indicate they think Trump is the victim of a “witch hunt.”
Of course, Trump is not big on nuances, especially when it comes to polls that can be spun favorably for him or stories he can use to exonerate himself of Russia-related wrongdoing. Just last Friday, for instance, he falsely told reporters during a White House event that it “was proven” during Paul Manafort’s sentencing hearing earlier in the day that he didn’t collude with Russia. In fact, all the judge said was that the question of whether Trump’s campaign “conspired or colluded” with Russia “was not presented in this case.”
In any event, the poorly constructed Suffolk/USA Today poll question about Mueller represents a bit of an outlier. In addition to the aforementioned NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll that found only 33 percent of people regarded the special counsel’s investigation as a witch hunt, a Washington Post/Schar School poll conducted last month found that 56 percent of people regard Mueller as more credible than Trump, compared to only 33 percent who found Trump to be more credible. And a Hill.TV/American Barometer poll conducted in December found that 58 percent of people regarded Mueller’s investigation as “unbiased.”
Other parts of the Suffolk/USA Today poll contained bad news for Trump. Fifty-two percent of respondents said they have “little or no trust” in “President Trump’s denial that there was collusion in his campaign with Russian meddling,” compared to 30 percent who said they have “a lot of trust” in Trump’s word. A plurality of respondents also indicated they think congressional Democrats are doing the right thing in pursuing “aggressive” investigations of Trump.
On the prospect of impeachment, however, the poll does indicate that a solid majority — 62 percent — do not think that “the House of Representatives should seriously consider impeaching President Trump.” The poll was conducted after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said in an interview with the Washington Post Magazine that she’s “not for impeachment” because the process “is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”
While Pelosi’s comments frustrated many Trump critics, it appears her position is in line with the vast majority of Americans.
Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump
Wow! A Suffolk/USA Today Poll, just out, states, “50% of Americans AGREE that Robert Mueller’s investigation is a Witch Hunt.” @MSNBC Very few think it is legit! We will soon find out?
8:07 AM - Mar 18, 2019
If true, that finding suggests Trump’s regular, repetitive attacks on the special counsel are working.
It would also indicate anti-Mueller sentiment has significantly increased since December, when an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that only 33 percent of American adults viewed Mueller’s investigation as a “witch hunt,” compared to 54 percent who viewed it as a fair investigation.
It turns out, however, that Trump’s tweet was based on a poorly framed poll question and an even more poorly framed USA Today story about it that’s headlined: “Poll: Half of Americans say Trump is victim of a ‘witch hunt’ as trust in Mueller erodes.”
But the poll question on which that headline rests is seriously flawed. The question reads as follows: “President Trump has called the Special Counsel’s investigation a ‘witch hunt’ and said he’s been subjected to more investigations than previous presidents because of politics. Do you agree?”
It’s true that 50.3 percent of the poll’s 1,000 respondents said “yes” to that question. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they believe the Mueller investigation is a “witch hunt.” The prompt packs two different questions into one — a poor strategy for a poll question.
Respondents simply may have meant to agree that Trump has been “subjected to more investigations than previous presidents because of politics” — a controversial but defensible position — without intending to go further and indicate they think Trump is the victim of a “witch hunt.”
Of course, Trump is not big on nuances, especially when it comes to polls that can be spun favorably for him or stories he can use to exonerate himself of Russia-related wrongdoing. Just last Friday, for instance, he falsely told reporters during a White House event that it “was proven” during Paul Manafort’s sentencing hearing earlier in the day that he didn’t collude with Russia. In fact, all the judge said was that the question of whether Trump’s campaign “conspired or colluded” with Russia “was not presented in this case.”
In any event, the poorly constructed Suffolk/USA Today poll question about Mueller represents a bit of an outlier. In addition to the aforementioned NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll that found only 33 percent of people regarded the special counsel’s investigation as a witch hunt, a Washington Post/Schar School poll conducted last month found that 56 percent of people regard Mueller as more credible than Trump, compared to only 33 percent who found Trump to be more credible. And a Hill.TV/American Barometer poll conducted in December found that 58 percent of people regarded Mueller’s investigation as “unbiased.”
Other parts of the Suffolk/USA Today poll contained bad news for Trump. Fifty-two percent of respondents said they have “little or no trust” in “President Trump’s denial that there was collusion in his campaign with Russian meddling,” compared to 30 percent who said they have “a lot of trust” in Trump’s word. A plurality of respondents also indicated they think congressional Democrats are doing the right thing in pursuing “aggressive” investigations of Trump.
On the prospect of impeachment, however, the poll does indicate that a solid majority — 62 percent — do not think that “the House of Representatives should seriously consider impeaching President Trump.” The poll was conducted after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said in an interview with the Washington Post Magazine that she’s “not for impeachment” because the process “is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”
While Pelosi’s comments frustrated many Trump critics, it appears her position is in line with the vast majority of Americans.
Amnesiac Chuck Todd wonders why President Obama failed to unite the country despite historic Republican opposition
by Joan McCarter / Daily Kos - alternet
March 18, 2019
Oh, boy, did NBC’s Chuck Todd step in it this Sunday, displaying Chris Cillizza-levels of brainless political punditry in attempting to both-sides the disaster Republicans have installed in the White House. He suggested in an interview with Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke that it’s all President Obama’s fault.
“You’re not the first candidate to say, ‘I’m going to bring this country together,'” Todd told O’Rourke. “The most recent Democratic president a lot of people put their hope in and thought he was the answer that was going to do that. Why do you think that didn’t happen in Obama’s eight years?” Oh, gosh, why didn’t the nation’s first black president single-handedly erase 400 years of white supremacy and the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and voter suppression still happening to this very day? What a failure, huh?
Perhaps Chuck just had a few minutes of amnesia there. In the interest of helping restore his memory, let’s travel back to 2010. Then-House Republican leader John Boehner on Obama’s agenda: “We’re going to do everything—and I mean everything we can do—to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
That help, Chuck? Ring any bells? In response, O’Rourke did what he could to not alienate his gormless host and try to set the record straight. “I know that President Obama worked incredibly hard to find common ground with Republicans. […] He was able to achieve a heck of a lot in those eight years.” Maybe the next time, though, that Chuck or any other witless both-sider tries to pull that one, the Democrat in the hot seat will bring some hard truths to the game.
“You’re not the first candidate to say, ‘I’m going to bring this country together,'” Todd told O’Rourke. “The most recent Democratic president a lot of people put their hope in and thought he was the answer that was going to do that. Why do you think that didn’t happen in Obama’s eight years?” Oh, gosh, why didn’t the nation’s first black president single-handedly erase 400 years of white supremacy and the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and voter suppression still happening to this very day? What a failure, huh?
Perhaps Chuck just had a few minutes of amnesia there. In the interest of helping restore his memory, let’s travel back to 2010. Then-House Republican leader John Boehner on Obama’s agenda: “We’re going to do everything—and I mean everything we can do—to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
That help, Chuck? Ring any bells? In response, O’Rourke did what he could to not alienate his gormless host and try to set the record straight. “I know that President Obama worked incredibly hard to find common ground with Republicans. […] He was able to achieve a heck of a lot in those eight years.” Maybe the next time, though, that Chuck or any other witless both-sider tries to pull that one, the Democrat in the hot seat will bring some hard truths to the game.
Despite Crackdowns, White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi Videos Take Stubborn Root on YouTube
The ideas in a treatise by Brenton Tarrant, the alleged gunman responsible for the massacres at two New Zealand mosques, are also circulating on many of the world’s most popular social media platforms.
by A.C. Thompson and Lucas Waldron, ProPublica, and Christopher Mathias, HuffPost
March 15, 8:14 p.m. EDT
In his 74-page manifesto, Brenton Tarrant, the alleged gunman responsible for the massacres at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, lays out a hyper-extreme worldview animated by racist and fascist thought.
While the authorities say Tarrant posted his treatise on 8chan — a relatively obscure web forum that attracts trolls, hackers and hardcore white supremacists — the ideas in the document are also circulating on many of the world’s most popular social media platforms.
Over the past four months, for instance, a YouTube user known as Third Positionist posted over 100 videos espousing extremist ideas that closely resemble what the authorities have identified as Tarrant’s writings. The user’s videos — full of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic views — have attracted more than a half-million views.
YouTube said on Friday that it had terminated the Third Positionist account after being alerted to it by ProPublica and HuffPost. It said it had found no evidence that the account belonged to the accused New Zealand gunman.
Social media giants have long struggled to moderate extremist content, and most have waged periodic crackdowns. But in recent months, YouTube has emerged as something of a flourishing option for white supremacist and neo-Nazi videos.
The material posted by the user named Third Positionist — mirroring much of the hateful content subscribed to and promoted by the gunman in New Zealand — is but one example. Third Positionism is a variant of fascism that blends elements of the extreme right and left.
Tarrant’s online writings praised Sir Oswald Mosley, a mid-20th-century British fascist leader who supported Adolf Hitler and fiercely opposed immigration. At least two speeches by Mosley are featured in Third Positionist videos. The symbol used as the logo for Third Positionist’s YouTube channel — nine interlocking crosses — was also drawn on one of the gunman’s rifles. The graphic on the front page of Tarrant’s treatise also appears repeatedly in Third Positionist videos, albeit in a slightly altered form.
A recent video posted to the Third Positionist channel featured a discussion about the merits of Nazi Germany and the need to remove all Jews from “positions of power. Another, uploaded late last year, argued that the U.S. fought on the wrong side during World War II. On March 11, 2019, the channel posted an interview with Thomas Rousseau, one of the organizers of the 2017 white power rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and leader of Patriot Front, a right-wing extremist group that uses the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Rousseau said the group is focused on “reclaiming America” for white men.
White supremacist YouTube channels have been online for years, but many appear to have launched — or relaunched — in the past few months. Banned videos seem to reappear regularly, sometimes with new titles, confounding the efforts of content moderators.
“It’s a war of attrition against those who keep coming back, keep coming back and posting,” said Oren Segal, director of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. White supremacist content “is a huge challenge” for social media platforms. “They don’t have the technology to assure that once you’re banned you can’t come back.”
Much of the material on the Third Positionist channel is drawn from podcasts and livestreams originally posted by Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, a New York City-based white nationalist and anti-Semite.
Peinovich, who helms a racist media micro-empire called The Right Stuff, maintains a YouTube channel, as well. “The muslims are in the process of conquering Europe through migration and birth rates,” wrote one commenter on the TRS Radio page. “Something needs to be done about this above all else. ” Another added: “It’s time to become Vikings and wipe these people out .”
A media organization calling itself Vanguard Streaming Network is typical of the recent activity on YouTube. The network has created an array of channels on YouTube over the past year, many of them featuring the same content in an apparent attempt to elude censors. The network is quite open about its beliefs: Its logo features the SS insignia used by the Nazis, and one of the hosts calls himself Goebbels.
One Vanguard video features a cross-Atlantic conversation between Richard Spencer, the American white nationalist, and Mark Collett, a longtime racial extremist in England. Some of the videos include links to Streamlabs, a streaming service that white nationalists have been using to collect donations. Streamlabs has taken some action against racist material, recently shutting down two Vanguard channels.
Carla Hill, a senior investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League, said she’d heard of the Vanguard Streaming Network through Augustus Sol Invictus, a far-right attorney who attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and defends white supremacists. “He is collectively working with these other individuals to form these media outlets for podcasting, which is the new way for white supremacists to get their messages out,” she said.
Invictus, which is his legal name, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
One relatively new show on the Vanguard Streaming Network is called “Goy Talk” co-hosted by a masked man calling himself “Dino.” Prominent white supremacist and neo-Nazi figures have appeared on the show, including Christopher Cantwell and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
As reported by the anti-racist blog Angry White Men, in November, a “Goy Talk” host wore a large rubber nose and pretended to be a Jewish man named “Finky Heebstein,” talking in a nasal voice about the “caravan of love” moving through Mexico. The skit was meant to promote the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews are hastening immigration to the U.S. as a way to replace white people. It’s the same conspiracy theory that prosecutors say motivated Robert Bowers to massacre 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in October, only a few weeks before the episode of “Goy Talk” aired.
Both the Third Positionist and Vanguard Streaming channels share followers with The Red Elephants, a channel that predominantly features controversial political commentary from the channel’s owner, Vincent James, and livestreams of anti-Muslim and pro-Trump rallies and protests. At times, James has been a vocal supporter of the Rise Above Movement, a white power gang.
James livestreamed an event billed as the “March Against Sharia” in San Bernardino, California, in June 2017. In his video, streamed to his Facebook page and later published on the Red Elephants YouTube channel, James bantered with Rise Above Movement leader Robert Rundo. On camera, James asked Rundo to “say the 14 words,” a reference to a neo-Nazi slogan about preserving the white race. Rundo responded by saying, “I’m a big fan of the 14 words.”
Later in the video, James filmed Rundo and fellow RAM member Ben Daley running through the crowd, boasting that they had “physically removed” counterprotesters. Rundo added, “We chased ’em down the block, smashed up their car.”
Late last year, Rundo, Daley and six other members or associates of RAM were jailed on federal rioting charges. Rundo and Daley have pleaded not guilty and are currently incarcerated while awaiting trial. Two of their co-defendants have already admitted their guilt and taken plea deals.
Segal, of the Anti-Defamation League, credited YouTube and other major platforms with having become more aggressive about policing white supremacist content. Still, he noted, “It’s pretty easy still to find anti-Semitic and white supremacist videos online.”
Becca Lewis, of Data and Society, a New York-based research center, said YouTube has historically taken a “hands-off, laissez faire” approach to white supremacist content, focusing mostly on eradicating “explicit slurs or threats to violence” from the platform. But white supremacists, she said, have become “extremely adept at masking use of slurs and the inherent violence in their discourse.”
“There are certain white supremacist channels that have been running for upwards of 10 years on YouTube,” said Lewis, an affiliate researcher with the center.
YouTube did not respond to a request for comment on its efforts over the years to deal hateful content. It did promise to investigate the channels brought to its attention by ProPublica and HuffPost.
The killings in Christchurch are part of an international pattern of attacks on Muslims, which seem to have increased over the past two years. In January 2017, a man entered a mosque in Quebec City and shot and killed six people. He was sentenced to at least 40 years in prison this year. The killer followed white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and right-wing commentators online, and he was fixated on Muslims and immigrants. He was a fan of President Donald Trump and his Muslim ban.
Since 2016, at least three U.S. mosques have been set afire, and at least three other Islamic institutions across the country have targeted for terrorist attacks.
YouTube is owned by Google, which is a ProPublica Donor.
While the authorities say Tarrant posted his treatise on 8chan — a relatively obscure web forum that attracts trolls, hackers and hardcore white supremacists — the ideas in the document are also circulating on many of the world’s most popular social media platforms.
Over the past four months, for instance, a YouTube user known as Third Positionist posted over 100 videos espousing extremist ideas that closely resemble what the authorities have identified as Tarrant’s writings. The user’s videos — full of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic views — have attracted more than a half-million views.
YouTube said on Friday that it had terminated the Third Positionist account after being alerted to it by ProPublica and HuffPost. It said it had found no evidence that the account belonged to the accused New Zealand gunman.
Social media giants have long struggled to moderate extremist content, and most have waged periodic crackdowns. But in recent months, YouTube has emerged as something of a flourishing option for white supremacist and neo-Nazi videos.
The material posted by the user named Third Positionist — mirroring much of the hateful content subscribed to and promoted by the gunman in New Zealand — is but one example. Third Positionism is a variant of fascism that blends elements of the extreme right and left.
Tarrant’s online writings praised Sir Oswald Mosley, a mid-20th-century British fascist leader who supported Adolf Hitler and fiercely opposed immigration. At least two speeches by Mosley are featured in Third Positionist videos. The symbol used as the logo for Third Positionist’s YouTube channel — nine interlocking crosses — was also drawn on one of the gunman’s rifles. The graphic on the front page of Tarrant’s treatise also appears repeatedly in Third Positionist videos, albeit in a slightly altered form.
A recent video posted to the Third Positionist channel featured a discussion about the merits of Nazi Germany and the need to remove all Jews from “positions of power. Another, uploaded late last year, argued that the U.S. fought on the wrong side during World War II. On March 11, 2019, the channel posted an interview with Thomas Rousseau, one of the organizers of the 2017 white power rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and leader of Patriot Front, a right-wing extremist group that uses the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Rousseau said the group is focused on “reclaiming America” for white men.
White supremacist YouTube channels have been online for years, but many appear to have launched — or relaunched — in the past few months. Banned videos seem to reappear regularly, sometimes with new titles, confounding the efforts of content moderators.
“It’s a war of attrition against those who keep coming back, keep coming back and posting,” said Oren Segal, director of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. White supremacist content “is a huge challenge” for social media platforms. “They don’t have the technology to assure that once you’re banned you can’t come back.”
Much of the material on the Third Positionist channel is drawn from podcasts and livestreams originally posted by Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, a New York City-based white nationalist and anti-Semite.
Peinovich, who helms a racist media micro-empire called The Right Stuff, maintains a YouTube channel, as well. “The muslims are in the process of conquering Europe through migration and birth rates,” wrote one commenter on the TRS Radio page. “Something needs to be done about this above all else. ” Another added: “It’s time to become Vikings and wipe these people out .”
A media organization calling itself Vanguard Streaming Network is typical of the recent activity on YouTube. The network has created an array of channels on YouTube over the past year, many of them featuring the same content in an apparent attempt to elude censors. The network is quite open about its beliefs: Its logo features the SS insignia used by the Nazis, and one of the hosts calls himself Goebbels.
One Vanguard video features a cross-Atlantic conversation between Richard Spencer, the American white nationalist, and Mark Collett, a longtime racial extremist in England. Some of the videos include links to Streamlabs, a streaming service that white nationalists have been using to collect donations. Streamlabs has taken some action against racist material, recently shutting down two Vanguard channels.
Carla Hill, a senior investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League, said she’d heard of the Vanguard Streaming Network through Augustus Sol Invictus, a far-right attorney who attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and defends white supremacists. “He is collectively working with these other individuals to form these media outlets for podcasting, which is the new way for white supremacists to get their messages out,” she said.
Invictus, which is his legal name, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
One relatively new show on the Vanguard Streaming Network is called “Goy Talk” co-hosted by a masked man calling himself “Dino.” Prominent white supremacist and neo-Nazi figures have appeared on the show, including Christopher Cantwell and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
As reported by the anti-racist blog Angry White Men, in November, a “Goy Talk” host wore a large rubber nose and pretended to be a Jewish man named “Finky Heebstein,” talking in a nasal voice about the “caravan of love” moving through Mexico. The skit was meant to promote the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews are hastening immigration to the U.S. as a way to replace white people. It’s the same conspiracy theory that prosecutors say motivated Robert Bowers to massacre 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in October, only a few weeks before the episode of “Goy Talk” aired.
Both the Third Positionist and Vanguard Streaming channels share followers with The Red Elephants, a channel that predominantly features controversial political commentary from the channel’s owner, Vincent James, and livestreams of anti-Muslim and pro-Trump rallies and protests. At times, James has been a vocal supporter of the Rise Above Movement, a white power gang.
James livestreamed an event billed as the “March Against Sharia” in San Bernardino, California, in June 2017. In his video, streamed to his Facebook page and later published on the Red Elephants YouTube channel, James bantered with Rise Above Movement leader Robert Rundo. On camera, James asked Rundo to “say the 14 words,” a reference to a neo-Nazi slogan about preserving the white race. Rundo responded by saying, “I’m a big fan of the 14 words.”
Later in the video, James filmed Rundo and fellow RAM member Ben Daley running through the crowd, boasting that they had “physically removed” counterprotesters. Rundo added, “We chased ’em down the block, smashed up their car.”
Late last year, Rundo, Daley and six other members or associates of RAM were jailed on federal rioting charges. Rundo and Daley have pleaded not guilty and are currently incarcerated while awaiting trial. Two of their co-defendants have already admitted their guilt and taken plea deals.
Segal, of the Anti-Defamation League, credited YouTube and other major platforms with having become more aggressive about policing white supremacist content. Still, he noted, “It’s pretty easy still to find anti-Semitic and white supremacist videos online.”
Becca Lewis, of Data and Society, a New York-based research center, said YouTube has historically taken a “hands-off, laissez faire” approach to white supremacist content, focusing mostly on eradicating “explicit slurs or threats to violence” from the platform. But white supremacists, she said, have become “extremely adept at masking use of slurs and the inherent violence in their discourse.”
“There are certain white supremacist channels that have been running for upwards of 10 years on YouTube,” said Lewis, an affiliate researcher with the center.
YouTube did not respond to a request for comment on its efforts over the years to deal hateful content. It did promise to investigate the channels brought to its attention by ProPublica and HuffPost.
The killings in Christchurch are part of an international pattern of attacks on Muslims, which seem to have increased over the past two years. In January 2017, a man entered a mosque in Quebec City and shot and killed six people. He was sentenced to at least 40 years in prison this year. The killer followed white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and right-wing commentators online, and he was fixated on Muslims and immigrants. He was a fan of President Donald Trump and his Muslim ban.
Since 2016, at least three U.S. mosques have been set afire, and at least three other Islamic institutions across the country have targeted for terrorist attacks.
YouTube is owned by Google, which is a ProPublica Donor.
Advertisers begin dropping Jeanine Pirro’s show
Other companies say they're reconsidering their relationships with the program.
JOSH ISRAEL - thinkprogress
MAR 13, 2019, 11:58 AM
At least five companies say they’re pulling advertisements from Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show, Justice with Judge Jeanine, after she questioned whether Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) religious beliefs were “antithetical to the United States Constitution.”
Fox News has since condemned Pirro’s remarks, saying they had “addressed the matter with her directly.”
NerdWallet told The Hollywood Reporter on Monday that it would stop airing spots on Pirro’s show moving forward. “We’re no longer advertising on this show and don’t have plans to in the future,” the personal finance company said.
Allergan similarly told ThinkProgress on Monday that it would “not be advertising on [Justice with Judge Jeanine] moving forward.” The company’s ad for Botox Cosmetic aired during Saturday’s program.
A spokesperson for the mobile company GreatCall, which aired a spot for its Jitterbug Flip phone during Pirro’s late night re-broadcast, told ThinkProgress it too had pulled advertising from the show.
And a spokesperson for letgo, whose app allows people to buy and sell used items, told ThinkProgress in an email that it would also cease advertising on the program. “We absolutely condemn Ms. Pirro’s comments, which are offensive and completely contrary to our values,” a spokesperson said. “We are in the process of ensuring our ads will no longer run during her show.”
On Wednesday, a spokesperson for New Vitality, makers of Ageless Male and Super Beta supplements, told ThinkProgress it has pulled ads from both Justice with Judge Jeanine and Tucker Carlson Tonight.
A sixth company, Novo Nordisk, told ThinkProgress it was “reevaluating [its] advertising” on Pirro’s show.
Pirro is one of several Fox News personalities who’ve faced advertising backlash over racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive remarks. Others include Sean Hannity, former O’Reilly Factor host Bill O’Reilly, and Tucker Carlson, who came under fire again this week for previous comments he made in radio interviews defending statutory rape, comparing Iraqis to monkeys, questioning whether racial minorities were human, and using several lewd and sexually graphic remarks about a Miss Teen USA contestant.
Host Laura Ingraham faced a mass advertising exodus last year after she attacked teen survivors of the Parkland shooting on Twitter. She apologized for those remarks later, but only after several sponsors said they would boycott her show.
ThinkProgress reached out to 60 companies this week to ask about their advertisements on Pirro’s and Carlson’s programs. A few, such as MyPillow and WeatherTech stood firm in their decisions to advertise on the program, while most did not respond.
Omar thanked Fox News on Monday for condemning Pirro’s comments, tweeting, “No one’s commitment to our constitution should be questioned because of their faith or country of birth.”
Fox News has since condemned Pirro’s remarks, saying they had “addressed the matter with her directly.”
NerdWallet told The Hollywood Reporter on Monday that it would stop airing spots on Pirro’s show moving forward. “We’re no longer advertising on this show and don’t have plans to in the future,” the personal finance company said.
Allergan similarly told ThinkProgress on Monday that it would “not be advertising on [Justice with Judge Jeanine] moving forward.” The company’s ad for Botox Cosmetic aired during Saturday’s program.
A spokesperson for the mobile company GreatCall, which aired a spot for its Jitterbug Flip phone during Pirro’s late night re-broadcast, told ThinkProgress it too had pulled advertising from the show.
And a spokesperson for letgo, whose app allows people to buy and sell used items, told ThinkProgress in an email that it would also cease advertising on the program. “We absolutely condemn Ms. Pirro’s comments, which are offensive and completely contrary to our values,” a spokesperson said. “We are in the process of ensuring our ads will no longer run during her show.”
On Wednesday, a spokesperson for New Vitality, makers of Ageless Male and Super Beta supplements, told ThinkProgress it has pulled ads from both Justice with Judge Jeanine and Tucker Carlson Tonight.
A sixth company, Novo Nordisk, told ThinkProgress it was “reevaluating [its] advertising” on Pirro’s show.
Pirro is one of several Fox News personalities who’ve faced advertising backlash over racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive remarks. Others include Sean Hannity, former O’Reilly Factor host Bill O’Reilly, and Tucker Carlson, who came under fire again this week for previous comments he made in radio interviews defending statutory rape, comparing Iraqis to monkeys, questioning whether racial minorities were human, and using several lewd and sexually graphic remarks about a Miss Teen USA contestant.
Host Laura Ingraham faced a mass advertising exodus last year after she attacked teen survivors of the Parkland shooting on Twitter. She apologized for those remarks later, but only after several sponsors said they would boycott her show.
ThinkProgress reached out to 60 companies this week to ask about their advertisements on Pirro’s and Carlson’s programs. A few, such as MyPillow and WeatherTech stood firm in their decisions to advertise on the program, while most did not respond.
Omar thanked Fox News on Monday for condemning Pirro’s comments, tweeting, “No one’s commitment to our constitution should be questioned because of their faith or country of birth.”
2018 was a year of alarming climate reports, but you wouldn’t know it watching TV news
The networks mostly ignored climate solution in 2018, but that's changing in 2019 thanks to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
JOE ROMM - thinkprogress
MAR 11, 2019, 1:38 PM
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Broadcast news coverage of climate change dropped a remarkable 45 percent last year despite growing evidence for, and alarm about, the existential threat it poses, according to a new study.
Climate coverage on nightly news programs and Sunday morning political shows on the major U.S. networks dropped from 260 minutes in 2017 to a mere 142 minutes in 2018, Media Matters reported Monday. And nearly one-third of all 2018 coverage (a full 46 minutes) came at year’s end, in a December 30 episode of NBC’s Meet The Press which was devoted to climate change.
This overall collapse in coverage came despite the fact 2018 was one of the biggest years for alarming climate reports and deadly warming-worsened disasters.
Last year, a major U.N. climate report warned that we need deep cuts in carbon pollution by 2030 to avoid catastrophe. The U.S. National Climate Assessment, meanwhile, warned that climate inaction will cost Americans $500 billion per year. There were also several massive extreme weather events linked to climate change — including California wildfires and two monster hurricanes — that killed nearly 250 people and caused almost $100 billion in damage.
And yet the networks continued to underreport the growing scientific evidence that climate change is worsening extreme weather. As Media Matters notes, “none of the networks’ news reports on the major hurricanes of 2018 even mentioned climate change.”
For its analysis, Media Matters looked at segments mentioning climate change on ABC, CBS, and NBC — plus Fox Broadcasting Co.’s syndicated show, Fox News Sunday.
Coverage was down sharply for ABC, CBS, and Fox. The only reason it wasn’t also down for NBC was the 46 minutes they spent in their end-of-year Meet The Press climate episode.
The networks aired a total of nine climate segments that included footage of Trump denying climate science, but, as Media Matters reports, only two of them actually “rebutted his comments by noting the scientific consensus around climate change.”
Equally worrisome was the lack of 2018 coverage of either solutions or responses to the problem. Fox News Sunday failed to mention solutions or responses in any of its five climate segments. And of the 75 climate segments that aired on ABC, CBS, and NBC in 2018, just 15 of them — one in five, or 20 percent — mentioned solutions. And four of those segments came in the December 30 episode of NBC’s Meet The Press.
We know from social science research that talking about solutions in addition to the problem more successfully engages the audience. When the media reports only about the threat of climate change or political inaction, that can drive public frustration and disengagement. But when the media focuses on the solution to the problem, it can “help build more positive public engagement,” as one 2015 study reported.
Clearly, 2019 is going to be a very different story when it comes to broadcast TV stories. We’ve already seen much more media coverage of the climate crisis — and a much greater focus on climate solutions.
For that we can partly thank Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and the activism of young people who have brought to the national forefront the issue of climate change and all of its solutions in the form of the Green New Deal. Without that activism, the mainstream media would no doubt continue underreporting on the greatest preventable threat to our nation.
Climate coverage on nightly news programs and Sunday morning political shows on the major U.S. networks dropped from 260 minutes in 2017 to a mere 142 minutes in 2018, Media Matters reported Monday. And nearly one-third of all 2018 coverage (a full 46 minutes) came at year’s end, in a December 30 episode of NBC’s Meet The Press which was devoted to climate change.
This overall collapse in coverage came despite the fact 2018 was one of the biggest years for alarming climate reports and deadly warming-worsened disasters.
Last year, a major U.N. climate report warned that we need deep cuts in carbon pollution by 2030 to avoid catastrophe. The U.S. National Climate Assessment, meanwhile, warned that climate inaction will cost Americans $500 billion per year. There were also several massive extreme weather events linked to climate change — including California wildfires and two monster hurricanes — that killed nearly 250 people and caused almost $100 billion in damage.
And yet the networks continued to underreport the growing scientific evidence that climate change is worsening extreme weather. As Media Matters notes, “none of the networks’ news reports on the major hurricanes of 2018 even mentioned climate change.”
For its analysis, Media Matters looked at segments mentioning climate change on ABC, CBS, and NBC — plus Fox Broadcasting Co.’s syndicated show, Fox News Sunday.
Coverage was down sharply for ABC, CBS, and Fox. The only reason it wasn’t also down for NBC was the 46 minutes they spent in their end-of-year Meet The Press climate episode.
The networks aired a total of nine climate segments that included footage of Trump denying climate science, but, as Media Matters reports, only two of them actually “rebutted his comments by noting the scientific consensus around climate change.”
Equally worrisome was the lack of 2018 coverage of either solutions or responses to the problem. Fox News Sunday failed to mention solutions or responses in any of its five climate segments. And of the 75 climate segments that aired on ABC, CBS, and NBC in 2018, just 15 of them — one in five, or 20 percent — mentioned solutions. And four of those segments came in the December 30 episode of NBC’s Meet The Press.
We know from social science research that talking about solutions in addition to the problem more successfully engages the audience. When the media reports only about the threat of climate change or political inaction, that can drive public frustration and disengagement. But when the media focuses on the solution to the problem, it can “help build more positive public engagement,” as one 2015 study reported.
Clearly, 2019 is going to be a very different story when it comes to broadcast TV stories. We’ve already seen much more media coverage of the climate crisis — and a much greater focus on climate solutions.
For that we can partly thank Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and the activism of young people who have brought to the national forefront the issue of climate change and all of its solutions in the form of the Green New Deal. Without that activism, the mainstream media would no doubt continue underreporting on the greatest preventable threat to our nation.
Leaked chat messages show members of white supremacist group Identity Evropa are obsessed with Tucker Carlson
Chats show extremists claim Carlson has “done more for” white supremacists than they “could ever hope to.
CRISTINA LóPEZ G. - media matters
3/8/19
A trove of leaked chat messages reportedly from members of white supremacist group Identity Evropa shows the group’s appreciation for Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Members praised segments from Tucker Carlson Tonight and fantasized about the idea of him running for president someday.
On March 6, the nonprofit media organization Unicorn Riot released chat logs from a Discord server reportedly used by members of Identity Evropa, a group attempting to sanitize white supremacy by rebranding its racist beliefs as pro-white “identitarianism.” The chat server’s name, “Nice Respectable People Group,” reflects Identity Evropa’s focus on “optics,” a strategy of intentionally rebranding away from obvious extremism to avoid the negative press that supposedly keeps their ideas from appealing to the mainstream.
Media Matters reviewed hundreds of chat messages containing mentions of Carlson -- who extremists refer to with familiarity as “Tuck” or “Tucker” -- and can confirm that the white supremacists routinely turn on Fox News to watch him deliver messages aligned with their extremist cause. They see Carlson’s prime-time audience as an effective opportunity to rebrand themselves and get positive media coverage for their extremism.
Users in the leaked chats shared a Media Matters video that shows how closely Carlson’s rhetoric aligns with that of white supremacists like American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor (a point extremists have made as well), with users asking, “Where’s the lie?” and calling the video a “red-pill compilation” (the phrase “red-pilling,” a reference to the movie The Matrix, is far-right shorthand for radicalizing).
The leaked chats clearly show the admiration that some of the Discord server users have for Carlson. They include users praising the Fox host, claiming that he’s the sole reason they tune in to cable, and calling him “a lone voice of reason in the media.” Borrowing language from anonymous message board 4chan, white supremacists call Carlson “our guy” (users of 4chan have anointed white supremacist Rep. Steve King (R-IA) with the same title -- and they call far-right actress Roseanne Barr “our girl”).
The chats show many users praising Carlson for his subtlety in delivering extremist talking points as a strategic way of remaining on the airwaves, explicitly crediting Carlson with “normalizing 80% of [Identity Evropa’s] talking points,” and pointing out that figures like Carlson and Nazi sympathizer Ann Coulter “know exactly what they’re doing” to “nudge people further to the right.” It is clear is that Carlson’s fearmongering about changing demographics comes across to these extremists as an explicitly white supremacist talking point.
Members of Identity Evropa praise the Fox host for “doing divine work” that has “done more for” white supremacists than they “could ever hope to” do, while crediting Carlson’s rhetoric with moving the Overton Window, a measure of what’s considered acceptable public discourse, closer to extremism. In fact, they suggest staying within the limits of Carlson’s rhetoric to be effective with mainstream conservatives, calling it “the edge of the acceptable” and claiming that “acceptable … moves toward us daily.”
The messages also show that white supremacists consider Carlson to be an effective mouthpiece for their messages and pet narratives. They view him as an essential part of the informational “food chain” that funnelstheir interests to President Donald Trump, who they believe is “being exposed” to their issues through Carlson’s show. And they’re not wrong about that. Last year, a segment on Carlson’s show pushing a white nationalist narrative about South African farmers inspired a presidential tweet, exciting white supremacists around the globe. A leaked chat message shows that members of Identity Evropa actively organized an online campaign to boost Carlson’s South Africa segment using sock accounts -- online accounts with false identities -- and turn the segment into a tool for recruiting on social media.
Because they deem Carlson’s show to be a valuable platform for the white supremacist movement, some chats show users rallying to get Carlson’s eyes on stories they consider important, or discussing getting their leader, Patrick Casey, on Tucker Carlson Tonight. But to these white supremacists, Carlson is more than a useful mouthpiece, and his show is more than a valuable platform. They look at him as a thought leader and an influential thinker. A user of Identity Evropa’s Discord server promoted Carlson’s Twitter account as one of numerous “serious accounts comprising of European and American Identitarian and reactionary thought leaders.” Another user suggested Carlson’s latest book Ship of Fools as a blueprint for the group’s actions.
Additionally, Carlson’s Fox show provides his audience with a reason to build communities centered around extremism. The Identity Evropa chats show a user promoting a Carlson-themed Facebook group that was also promoted by The Daily Shoah or TDS, a fascist podcast whose hosts also admire Carlson.
The leaked chats show that Identity Evropa’s conversations about Carlson are often centered around positively discussing segments of his Fox show -- such as pushing a segment in which Carlson elevated white nationalist outlet VDare as “laying the groundwork for a White Identity politics apologetics” -- and promoting links to his Twitter videos and YouTube clips, creating an incentive for Fox News to continue profiting from extremism.
Identity Evropa’s conversations about Carlson also reflect a degree of sycophancy that includes wishful thinking about a joint Carlson-Coulter appearance at the group’s national conference and active fantasizing about having Carlson in a presidential ticket.
On March 6, the nonprofit media organization Unicorn Riot released chat logs from a Discord server reportedly used by members of Identity Evropa, a group attempting to sanitize white supremacy by rebranding its racist beliefs as pro-white “identitarianism.” The chat server’s name, “Nice Respectable People Group,” reflects Identity Evropa’s focus on “optics,” a strategy of intentionally rebranding away from obvious extremism to avoid the negative press that supposedly keeps their ideas from appealing to the mainstream.
Media Matters reviewed hundreds of chat messages containing mentions of Carlson -- who extremists refer to with familiarity as “Tuck” or “Tucker” -- and can confirm that the white supremacists routinely turn on Fox News to watch him deliver messages aligned with their extremist cause. They see Carlson’s prime-time audience as an effective opportunity to rebrand themselves and get positive media coverage for their extremism.
Users in the leaked chats shared a Media Matters video that shows how closely Carlson’s rhetoric aligns with that of white supremacists like American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor (a point extremists have made as well), with users asking, “Where’s the lie?” and calling the video a “red-pill compilation” (the phrase “red-pilling,” a reference to the movie The Matrix, is far-right shorthand for radicalizing).
The leaked chats clearly show the admiration that some of the Discord server users have for Carlson. They include users praising the Fox host, claiming that he’s the sole reason they tune in to cable, and calling him “a lone voice of reason in the media.” Borrowing language from anonymous message board 4chan, white supremacists call Carlson “our guy” (users of 4chan have anointed white supremacist Rep. Steve King (R-IA) with the same title -- and they call far-right actress Roseanne Barr “our girl”).
The chats show many users praising Carlson for his subtlety in delivering extremist talking points as a strategic way of remaining on the airwaves, explicitly crediting Carlson with “normalizing 80% of [Identity Evropa’s] talking points,” and pointing out that figures like Carlson and Nazi sympathizer Ann Coulter “know exactly what they’re doing” to “nudge people further to the right.” It is clear is that Carlson’s fearmongering about changing demographics comes across to these extremists as an explicitly white supremacist talking point.
Members of Identity Evropa praise the Fox host for “doing divine work” that has “done more for” white supremacists than they “could ever hope to” do, while crediting Carlson’s rhetoric with moving the Overton Window, a measure of what’s considered acceptable public discourse, closer to extremism. In fact, they suggest staying within the limits of Carlson’s rhetoric to be effective with mainstream conservatives, calling it “the edge of the acceptable” and claiming that “acceptable … moves toward us daily.”
The messages also show that white supremacists consider Carlson to be an effective mouthpiece for their messages and pet narratives. They view him as an essential part of the informational “food chain” that funnelstheir interests to President Donald Trump, who they believe is “being exposed” to their issues through Carlson’s show. And they’re not wrong about that. Last year, a segment on Carlson’s show pushing a white nationalist narrative about South African farmers inspired a presidential tweet, exciting white supremacists around the globe. A leaked chat message shows that members of Identity Evropa actively organized an online campaign to boost Carlson’s South Africa segment using sock accounts -- online accounts with false identities -- and turn the segment into a tool for recruiting on social media.
Because they deem Carlson’s show to be a valuable platform for the white supremacist movement, some chats show users rallying to get Carlson’s eyes on stories they consider important, or discussing getting their leader, Patrick Casey, on Tucker Carlson Tonight. But to these white supremacists, Carlson is more than a useful mouthpiece, and his show is more than a valuable platform. They look at him as a thought leader and an influential thinker. A user of Identity Evropa’s Discord server promoted Carlson’s Twitter account as one of numerous “serious accounts comprising of European and American Identitarian and reactionary thought leaders.” Another user suggested Carlson’s latest book Ship of Fools as a blueprint for the group’s actions.
Additionally, Carlson’s Fox show provides his audience with a reason to build communities centered around extremism. The Identity Evropa chats show a user promoting a Carlson-themed Facebook group that was also promoted by The Daily Shoah or TDS, a fascist podcast whose hosts also admire Carlson.
The leaked chats show that Identity Evropa’s conversations about Carlson are often centered around positively discussing segments of his Fox show -- such as pushing a segment in which Carlson elevated white nationalist outlet VDare as “laying the groundwork for a White Identity politics apologetics” -- and promoting links to his Twitter videos and YouTube clips, creating an incentive for Fox News to continue profiting from extremism.
Identity Evropa’s conversations about Carlson also reflect a degree of sycophancy that includes wishful thinking about a joint Carlson-Coulter appearance at the group’s national conference and active fantasizing about having Carlson in a presidential ticket.
Mainstream press circles the wagons as Democrats bar Fox News from 2020 primary debates
Defending Fox News has always been a sucker bet. Anybody who hasn't figured that out in the past two years never will.
ALAN PYKE - thinkprogress
MAR 7, 2019, 1:56 PM
In the 24 hours since Democratic National Committee (DNC) head Tom Perez announced that Fox News would be barred from participating in the party’s 2020 presidential debates, the network’s defenders within the larger community of mainstream news figures and elite political operatives have come to its aid, decrying the DNC’s decision.
This, despite the fact that a fresh New Yorker expose from Jane Mayer, which lent a substantial amount of fresh credence to the idea that the famously right-leaning cable channel had essentially become a propaganda arm of the Trump administration, hit the web in the days leading up to Perez’s announcement.
Whether the Mayer article prompted the DNC to rethink its previous decision or merely offered the pretext to announce a plan laid long-in-advance is, for the moment, the province of mind-readers. Nevertheless, the new details showing how Fox has become something akin to “state TV” were all but ignored by those bent on tut-tutting Perez.
Progressive consigliere Alyssa Mastromonaco said Thursday she was “disappointed” by the decision, drawing an affirming response from MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. USA Today columnist, and one-time Fox contributor, Kirsten Powers acknowledged the network’s role in propagandizing for President Donald Trump’s administration but told CNN’s Anderson Cooper the party “would be smart” to let Fox host a debate because “they would have access to a large audience.”
Fox’s own Howard Kurtz, who made his name at mainstream outlets over a period of years before joining the right-wing network, sidestepped the details in the New Yorker story to chastise the magazine for failing to mention “that Fox has a very professional and very solid news division.”
The language differs but the core claim is the same: Maybe Fox’s evening pundits and morning zoo crew are open propagandists who occasionally serve as hype men at Trump rallies, but the hosts Fox tags as straight news figures — Shep Smith, Brett Baer, Martha MacCallum, Chris Wallace, and the like — can be trusted to be fair to Democrats. This entire notion rests on the conviction that the network’s straight news hosts are meaningfully distinguishable from the broader Fox machine. That conviction is wrong, and one need not think any of the aforementioned anchors are personally unjust toward people outside the Republican tribe to understand how it’s wrong.
Here’s a brief thought exercise: Imagine you had a friend who behaved erratically every time they ingested cocaine but who, when not in the throes of their addiction was a fairly decent person. Would you trust them to house sit for you? Or would you choose somebody who doesn’t threaten to go on a bender that ends with your dog swallowing an eight-ball of blow by accident while you’re at your cousin’s wedding in Denver?
Delineating between the sober, decent version of your friend and the manic, dangerous version is not a luxury you can afford to rely upon in that situation. Neither can the Democratic Party afford to forget that whatever Fox’s much-ballyhooed straight news team does will get shoved immediately up the nose of the Sean Hannity/Tucker Carlson/Lou Dobbs smear machine.
Fox has always stridently insisted that its news and opinion arms act in similar fashion to those of any other media outlet. The well-worn playbook for that public crowing is directly contradicted by how the network actually operates day to day, as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz detailed Thursday. That PR push is central to how Fox “works the refs” to prevent other media figures from ostracizing the network. It’s also succeeded, as the above protestations aired on other networks illustrate.
Cable news is a club. The people who make it earn good money. They look out for each other, setting and policing boundaries on how their competitors can be criticized.
Fox is not merely conservative. It is a conduit for the worst and least credible slanders the right-wing fever swamp can generate, plucking ideas from the Alex Joneses and Lara Loomers and QAnon conspiracists of the world and injecting them into major media discussion. If Fox covers something enough, other media organizations feel they have to follow suit. Whatever scruples this or that individual staff personality might have about a given story or spin, the network as a whole will find some way to launder derangement into the mainstream.
In this way, Fox has worked to the detriment of many of the media organizations whose employees have lately defended the network against the DNC’s decision. But other media critics have figured out the gambit and begun to call it out.
“Episodic truth-telling about Trump doesn’t excuse fulsome conspiracy-theorizing about Trump,” the Post’s Erik Wemple wrote last fall at the height of Fox’s fluffing of the president’s obsession with a group of Central American migrants traveling north together. “How many people who listen to Hannity or Carlson or Dobbs talking about the ‘invaders’ in the caravan cross-check this sentiment stuff on other shows?”
Though some of the media rubes still rushing to Fox’s defense this week at least acknowledge that Trump’s reign has brought out an extra bug-eyed approach from the network, it’s a mistake to think that things were tolerable in the past just because they’ve gotten worse in the present. Mayer’s latest expose on just how intimately Fox executives have been involved in helping and shaping the administration over the past two years isn’t some grand break from a once-credible and independent journalistic enterprise.
In 2009 alone, Fox’s daytime block of supposedly straight news programs broadcast stories claiming that Democrats were seeking to protect pedophiles; it ran a Republican National Committee press release, typos and all, without acknowledging the source of the statistics; it claimed a six-month-old clip of Joe Biden talking about the economy was from “recent interviews this weekend” in order to ding the Obama administration as out of touch; and asserted that the Department of Justice “thinks it’s okay to intimidate white people, not okay to intimidate black people.”
Ten years later, there’s no excuse for pretending Fox knows how to stay sober — or that it even wants to try.
This, despite the fact that a fresh New Yorker expose from Jane Mayer, which lent a substantial amount of fresh credence to the idea that the famously right-leaning cable channel had essentially become a propaganda arm of the Trump administration, hit the web in the days leading up to Perez’s announcement.
Whether the Mayer article prompted the DNC to rethink its previous decision or merely offered the pretext to announce a plan laid long-in-advance is, for the moment, the province of mind-readers. Nevertheless, the new details showing how Fox has become something akin to “state TV” were all but ignored by those bent on tut-tutting Perez.
Progressive consigliere Alyssa Mastromonaco said Thursday she was “disappointed” by the decision, drawing an affirming response from MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. USA Today columnist, and one-time Fox contributor, Kirsten Powers acknowledged the network’s role in propagandizing for President Donald Trump’s administration but told CNN’s Anderson Cooper the party “would be smart” to let Fox host a debate because “they would have access to a large audience.”
Fox’s own Howard Kurtz, who made his name at mainstream outlets over a period of years before joining the right-wing network, sidestepped the details in the New Yorker story to chastise the magazine for failing to mention “that Fox has a very professional and very solid news division.”
The language differs but the core claim is the same: Maybe Fox’s evening pundits and morning zoo crew are open propagandists who occasionally serve as hype men at Trump rallies, but the hosts Fox tags as straight news figures — Shep Smith, Brett Baer, Martha MacCallum, Chris Wallace, and the like — can be trusted to be fair to Democrats. This entire notion rests on the conviction that the network’s straight news hosts are meaningfully distinguishable from the broader Fox machine. That conviction is wrong, and one need not think any of the aforementioned anchors are personally unjust toward people outside the Republican tribe to understand how it’s wrong.
Here’s a brief thought exercise: Imagine you had a friend who behaved erratically every time they ingested cocaine but who, when not in the throes of their addiction was a fairly decent person. Would you trust them to house sit for you? Or would you choose somebody who doesn’t threaten to go on a bender that ends with your dog swallowing an eight-ball of blow by accident while you’re at your cousin’s wedding in Denver?
Delineating between the sober, decent version of your friend and the manic, dangerous version is not a luxury you can afford to rely upon in that situation. Neither can the Democratic Party afford to forget that whatever Fox’s much-ballyhooed straight news team does will get shoved immediately up the nose of the Sean Hannity/Tucker Carlson/Lou Dobbs smear machine.
Fox has always stridently insisted that its news and opinion arms act in similar fashion to those of any other media outlet. The well-worn playbook for that public crowing is directly contradicted by how the network actually operates day to day, as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz detailed Thursday. That PR push is central to how Fox “works the refs” to prevent other media figures from ostracizing the network. It’s also succeeded, as the above protestations aired on other networks illustrate.
Cable news is a club. The people who make it earn good money. They look out for each other, setting and policing boundaries on how their competitors can be criticized.
Fox is not merely conservative. It is a conduit for the worst and least credible slanders the right-wing fever swamp can generate, plucking ideas from the Alex Joneses and Lara Loomers and QAnon conspiracists of the world and injecting them into major media discussion. If Fox covers something enough, other media organizations feel they have to follow suit. Whatever scruples this or that individual staff personality might have about a given story or spin, the network as a whole will find some way to launder derangement into the mainstream.
In this way, Fox has worked to the detriment of many of the media organizations whose employees have lately defended the network against the DNC’s decision. But other media critics have figured out the gambit and begun to call it out.
“Episodic truth-telling about Trump doesn’t excuse fulsome conspiracy-theorizing about Trump,” the Post’s Erik Wemple wrote last fall at the height of Fox’s fluffing of the president’s obsession with a group of Central American migrants traveling north together. “How many people who listen to Hannity or Carlson or Dobbs talking about the ‘invaders’ in the caravan cross-check this sentiment stuff on other shows?”
Though some of the media rubes still rushing to Fox’s defense this week at least acknowledge that Trump’s reign has brought out an extra bug-eyed approach from the network, it’s a mistake to think that things were tolerable in the past just because they’ve gotten worse in the present. Mayer’s latest expose on just how intimately Fox executives have been involved in helping and shaping the administration over the past two years isn’t some grand break from a once-credible and independent journalistic enterprise.
In 2009 alone, Fox’s daytime block of supposedly straight news programs broadcast stories claiming that Democrats were seeking to protect pedophiles; it ran a Republican National Committee press release, typos and all, without acknowledging the source of the statistics; it claimed a six-month-old clip of Joe Biden talking about the economy was from “recent interviews this weekend” in order to ding the Obama administration as out of touch; and asserted that the Department of Justice “thinks it’s okay to intimidate white people, not okay to intimidate black people.”
Ten years later, there’s no excuse for pretending Fox knows how to stay sober — or that it even wants to try.
Soledad O’Brien scorches CNN for booking Trump flacks to say ‘crazy stuff’ for ratings
Tom Boggioni - raw story
05 MAR 2019 AT 09:19 ET
Responding to a tweet from CNN media analyst Brian Stelter saying he was “gobsmacked” by a CNN discussion over a comment made by Trump 2020 spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany, former CNN and MSNBC contributor Soledad O’Brien called him out, saying inviting guests on to say outrageous things is part of the network’s strategy.
Late Monday night Stelter tweeted, “Kayleigh McEnany says Dems have “zero chance at winning legitimately” in 2020. She’s “sowing the seeds of fundamental distrust in our electoral process,” @margarethoover said on @CNNTonight. I was gobsmacked.”
According to O’Brien, who has become an avid critic of the way the major cable networks cover politics, Stelter should know better than to be surprised.
“Brian’s boss Zucker on McEneny. GQ/April 2017,” O’Brien began in a multi-tweet response on Twitter. “She’s a character ‘in a drama’ “Everybody says, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you have Jeffrey Lord or Kayleigh McEnany,’ but you know what? Zucker told me with some satisfaction. ‘They know who Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany are’.”
O’Brien then followed up with what ails CNN’s panel broadcasts.
“So—I don’t think you’re ‘gobsmacked,'” she lectured. “In fact, I think if Kayleigh still worked for CNN, as a paid contributor, you would book her for your show ‘to discuss thoughtfully her latest statements’, crazy as they are. Remember-Jeff Lord stayed employed til he tweeted the nazi slogan.”
She added, “I think this is—in part—why distrust in the media is so high. I think viewers understand this disingenuousness. They get that some interviewees are just booked—and rebooked—because they’re willing to say crazy stuff, regardless of whether it’s true.”
Late Monday night Stelter tweeted, “Kayleigh McEnany says Dems have “zero chance at winning legitimately” in 2020. She’s “sowing the seeds of fundamental distrust in our electoral process,” @margarethoover said on @CNNTonight. I was gobsmacked.”
According to O’Brien, who has become an avid critic of the way the major cable networks cover politics, Stelter should know better than to be surprised.
“Brian’s boss Zucker on McEneny. GQ/April 2017,” O’Brien began in a multi-tweet response on Twitter. “She’s a character ‘in a drama’ “Everybody says, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you have Jeffrey Lord or Kayleigh McEnany,’ but you know what? Zucker told me with some satisfaction. ‘They know who Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany are’.”
O’Brien then followed up with what ails CNN’s panel broadcasts.
“So—I don’t think you’re ‘gobsmacked,'” she lectured. “In fact, I think if Kayleigh still worked for CNN, as a paid contributor, you would book her for your show ‘to discuss thoughtfully her latest statements’, crazy as they are. Remember-Jeff Lord stayed employed til he tweeted the nazi slogan.”
She added, “I think this is—in part—why distrust in the media is so high. I think viewers understand this disingenuousness. They get that some interviewees are just booked—and rebooked—because they’re willing to say crazy stuff, regardless of whether it’s true.”
Reporter blows lid off Fox-Trump partnership: ‘They make money by enraging Americans’
TRAVIS GETTYS - raw story
04 MAR 2019 AT 08:00 ET
Reporter Jane Mayer came out Monday with a bombshell article probing the symbiotic relationship between President Donald Trump and Fox News — and she said their shared business model is undermining U.S. democracy.
The New Yorker investigative journalist appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to discuss the article, and she said her reporting found the relationship between the president and his favorite channel was even closer than it appeared.
“What Fox does is it makes money by enraging Americans, that’s how they keep them glued to the television set,” Mayer said. “It’s very much the same model that Trump has to keep his base engaged. So you’ve got a rage-based model for both of them, and what it’s doing is it’s spinning the country in an increasingly inflamed direction, and so it has a huge effect on our national politics.”
Mayer said the president and Fox News worked together to amplify their messages.
“It carries his message and it also gives him a message a lot of the time,” she said. “Trump picks up on what he sees on Fox, and I’ve got quotes from people who are very close in to the White House, people who worked in the White House, in and out of Fox, saying what you’ve got is a dysfunctional White House all of the time with no normal decision-making process, where a lot of the policy-making is the president picking up what’s on Fox.”
“Then I describe how Fox puts on what it does on the news, which is shocking in many ways,” Mayer added. “I mean, taking stuff straight off of the most crackpot blogs. Don’t take it me, take it from the people who are quoted from Fox saying so.”
The New Yorker investigative journalist appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to discuss the article, and she said her reporting found the relationship between the president and his favorite channel was even closer than it appeared.
“What Fox does is it makes money by enraging Americans, that’s how they keep them glued to the television set,” Mayer said. “It’s very much the same model that Trump has to keep his base engaged. So you’ve got a rage-based model for both of them, and what it’s doing is it’s spinning the country in an increasingly inflamed direction, and so it has a huge effect on our national politics.”
Mayer said the president and Fox News worked together to amplify their messages.
“It carries his message and it also gives him a message a lot of the time,” she said. “Trump picks up on what he sees on Fox, and I’ve got quotes from people who are very close in to the White House, people who worked in the White House, in and out of Fox, saying what you’ve got is a dysfunctional White House all of the time with no normal decision-making process, where a lot of the policy-making is the president picking up what’s on Fox.”
“Then I describe how Fox puts on what it does on the news, which is shocking in many ways,” Mayer added. “I mean, taking stuff straight off of the most crackpot blogs. Don’t take it me, take it from the people who are quoted from Fox saying so.”
Trump is being played by right-wingers who profit from ‘ignorance and paranoia’: Ex-Bush speechwriter
Tom Boggioni - raw story
26 FEB 2019 AT 10:45 ET
In a brutally blunt column for the Washington Post, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush accused Donald Trump of being easily manipulated by Fox News media personalities — among others — who make a living by feeding the paranoia and hysteria of their gullible fans.
According to Michael Gerson, a friend recently lamented the state of conservative talk radio, saying, “Right-wing talk radio is using language that can’t get much more apocalyptic. It’s all about coups, and Mueller as a Soviet-style prosecutor, and the left wanting to destroy America, and off-the-charts rage at the media.”
Gerson explains that Trump both buys into the conspiracy theories pushed by ratings-driven prophets of paranoia but repeats them creating a feedback loop that continues to metastasize.
“The president of the United States himself argues that he is the victim of a plot by the ‘deep state’ — a conspiracy he locates in any part of government that refuses to affirm and demonstrate loyalty to his person,” Gerson writes. “It is worth noting, first of all, that all these comparisons and conspiracies are utter rubbish — the work of people who monetize hysteria or benefit from ignorance and paranoia.”
According to Gerson, Trump’s problems are the result of the president’s own actions and the activities of the cronies he surrounds himself with.
“The current investigations targeting the Trump administration are not partisan witch hunts,” Gerson explained. “They are the natural result when a leader surrounds himself with crooks, cronies and con men. Trump’s inner circle — including, at various points, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone — constitutes a sliminess hall of fame.”
“Another problem with apocalyptic language is that the comparisons don’t allow for limits,” he elaborated. “If we are really facing a subversive and sinister deep state, why not use the Marines, or the Secret Service, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement to clean out the subversion?”
“The problem, of course, is that of all these comparisons are absurd, dangerous, inappropriate metaphors, used by adults who should know better. What we have in this country are serious political disagreements, which can be decided only through political means,” Gerson wrote. “We are not really on a hijacked plane, or in a bloody civil war, or dealing with a coup, or hunting witches, or facing the apocalypse.”
Gerson then warned that the problem of Trump and his media boosters feeding off each other is something that should be taken seriously because it can have disastrous real-world implications.
“It is a sad thing when a president manipulates the public. It is a sad and scary thing when the president is manipulated by people with a vested interest in cultivating crisis,” he cautioned. “The worst danger of civil war or subversion comparisons is that Trump might actually believe them. And act on them.”
You can read the whole thing here.
According to Michael Gerson, a friend recently lamented the state of conservative talk radio, saying, “Right-wing talk radio is using language that can’t get much more apocalyptic. It’s all about coups, and Mueller as a Soviet-style prosecutor, and the left wanting to destroy America, and off-the-charts rage at the media.”
Gerson explains that Trump both buys into the conspiracy theories pushed by ratings-driven prophets of paranoia but repeats them creating a feedback loop that continues to metastasize.
“The president of the United States himself argues that he is the victim of a plot by the ‘deep state’ — a conspiracy he locates in any part of government that refuses to affirm and demonstrate loyalty to his person,” Gerson writes. “It is worth noting, first of all, that all these comparisons and conspiracies are utter rubbish — the work of people who monetize hysteria or benefit from ignorance and paranoia.”
According to Gerson, Trump’s problems are the result of the president’s own actions and the activities of the cronies he surrounds himself with.
“The current investigations targeting the Trump administration are not partisan witch hunts,” Gerson explained. “They are the natural result when a leader surrounds himself with crooks, cronies and con men. Trump’s inner circle — including, at various points, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone — constitutes a sliminess hall of fame.”
“Another problem with apocalyptic language is that the comparisons don’t allow for limits,” he elaborated. “If we are really facing a subversive and sinister deep state, why not use the Marines, or the Secret Service, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement to clean out the subversion?”
“The problem, of course, is that of all these comparisons are absurd, dangerous, inappropriate metaphors, used by adults who should know better. What we have in this country are serious political disagreements, which can be decided only through political means,” Gerson wrote. “We are not really on a hijacked plane, or in a bloody civil war, or dealing with a coup, or hunting witches, or facing the apocalypse.”
Gerson then warned that the problem of Trump and his media boosters feeding off each other is something that should be taken seriously because it can have disastrous real-world implications.
“It is a sad thing when a president manipulates the public. It is a sad and scary thing when the president is manipulated by people with a vested interest in cultivating crisis,” he cautioned. “The worst danger of civil war or subversion comparisons is that Trump might actually believe them. And act on them.”
You can read the whole thing here.
Right-wing radio host slapped down hard for pushing ridiculous Kamala Harris/Jussie Smollett conspiracy theory
Tom Boggioni - raw story
24 FEB 2019 AT 13:33 ET
A right-wing radio host in New York City took a beating from conservatives and liberals alike after he tried to push a conspiracy theory that California Sen. Kamala Harris (D) is the aunt of embattled actor Jussie Smollett.
In a tweet that he has since deleted, Salem Media radio host Kevin McCullough made mention of Harris’s previous support form Smollett before his story about being attacked by Trump fans fell apart, before pushing a theory that she was hiding her family ties to the actor.
“So there is this….” McCullough tweeted, “Turns out @KamalaHarris is @JussieSmollett’s aunt. As in his mother’s sister. Which in several of her photo-op updates on the story to date she has yet to reveal.”
While Smollett’s mother’s maiden name is indeed Harris, she is not Kamala’s sister Maya.
As Jim Swift at The Bulwark wrote, “It is unclear how McCullough came across the theory, but it seems popular among the Q-Anon conspiracy crowd on Twitter. Naturally, some believer in the theory (or troll) temporarily edited Harris’s Wikipedia page. Or possibly it came from the pro-Trump Twitter personality Terrence K. Williams, who refers to Smollett as Harris’s ‘crazy nephew.'”
Called out on the fake news, McCullough deleted the tweet, then argued that Harris had called the now-disproven attack a “modern-day lynching,” for which he was lambasted.
“Is this meant to defend your provably false allegations?” the host was challenged.
“It’s meant — to openly demonstrate the left’s entirely one-sided worldview. Harris leaves up an inflammatory tweet for 23 days that effects crime, public safety, millions of $$$ in police costs, etc. Her supports have complete meltdowns over rumors that are up for two hours,” he snapped back
You can see a screenshot of McCullough’s tweet below as well as some form his critics.
In a tweet that he has since deleted, Salem Media radio host Kevin McCullough made mention of Harris’s previous support form Smollett before his story about being attacked by Trump fans fell apart, before pushing a theory that she was hiding her family ties to the actor.
“So there is this….” McCullough tweeted, “Turns out @KamalaHarris is @JussieSmollett’s aunt. As in his mother’s sister. Which in several of her photo-op updates on the story to date she has yet to reveal.”
While Smollett’s mother’s maiden name is indeed Harris, she is not Kamala’s sister Maya.
As Jim Swift at The Bulwark wrote, “It is unclear how McCullough came across the theory, but it seems popular among the Q-Anon conspiracy crowd on Twitter. Naturally, some believer in the theory (or troll) temporarily edited Harris’s Wikipedia page. Or possibly it came from the pro-Trump Twitter personality Terrence K. Williams, who refers to Smollett as Harris’s ‘crazy nephew.'”
Called out on the fake news, McCullough deleted the tweet, then argued that Harris had called the now-disproven attack a “modern-day lynching,” for which he was lambasted.
“Is this meant to defend your provably false allegations?” the host was challenged.
“It’s meant — to openly demonstrate the left’s entirely one-sided worldview. Harris leaves up an inflammatory tweet for 23 days that effects crime, public safety, millions of $$$ in police costs, etc. Her supports have complete meltdowns over rumors that are up for two hours,” he snapped back
You can see a screenshot of McCullough’s tweet below as well as some form his critics.
CNN hammered for hiring ‘right-wing hack’ who pledged loyalty to Trump as political editor for 2020 campaign
Brad Reed - raw story
19 FEB 2019 AT 13:00 ET
CNN is getting crushed online after Politico reported Tuesday that it has hired longtime Republican operative Sarah Isgur Flores to be a political editor who will “coordinate political coverage for the 2020 campaign.”
Flores had previously served as a spokeswoman at the Department of Justice under former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the Washington Post reported last year that she had to pledge her loyalty to the president and his agenda as a precondition for getting the job.
“Trump’s advisers knew there was only one way Sessions would be able to hire her: If she kowtowed to Trump,” the Post reported. “So she paid her respects to the president in the Oval Office — a cordial visit during which she told the president she was on board with his agenda and would be honored to serve him.”
Flores, who in the past has worked for Republicans ranging from Trump to Sessions to Mitt Romney to Ted Cruz, also has no experience working in journalism.
CNN’s decision to hire Flores for such a senior position drew swift condemnation from liberals and Democrats on Twitter — check out some of the top reactions below.
Flores had previously served as a spokeswoman at the Department of Justice under former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the Washington Post reported last year that she had to pledge her loyalty to the president and his agenda as a precondition for getting the job.
“Trump’s advisers knew there was only one way Sessions would be able to hire her: If she kowtowed to Trump,” the Post reported. “So she paid her respects to the president in the Oval Office — a cordial visit during which she told the president she was on board with his agenda and would be honored to serve him.”
Flores, who in the past has worked for Republicans ranging from Trump to Sessions to Mitt Romney to Ted Cruz, also has no experience working in journalism.
CNN’s decision to hire Flores for such a senior position drew swift condemnation from liberals and Democrats on Twitter — check out some of the top reactions below.
fox is pro - nazi!!!
Fox News Bans Ad For Documentary About American Nazi Rally in 1939
Matt Novak - gizmodo
2/14/19
Fox News has refused to air an ad for the short documentary film A Night at the Garden, according to a new report from the Hollywood Reporter.
The 7-minute movie, which was recently nominated for an Academy Award, explores the terrifying day on February 20, 1939 when thousands of American Nazis held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. The CEO of Fox News reportedly claims that an ad for the anti-Nazi movie is “not appropriate for our air.”
The 30-second ad, titled “It Can Happen Here,” was supposed to run during the Sean Hannity Show earlier this week. The title of the ad is a reference to the 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis which predicted a rise of fascism in the United States during the 1930s. But Fox News apparently doesn’t want anti-Nazi content on its channel.
From the Hollywood Reporter:
The ad was bought to air during Monday night’s edition of Sean Hannity’s primetime show through a local advertising buy on Charter Communication’s Spectrum service in Los Angeles, but was precluded by breaking news — coverage of President Trump’s rally in Texas.
The film’s distributor, Field of Vision, then decided to purchase a national spot on Hannity’s show, but was rebuffed by the network, which controls national advertising.
“It’s amazing to me that the C.E.O. of Fox News would personally inject herself into a small ad buy just to make sure that Hannity viewers weren’t exposed to this chapter of American history,” the film’s director told the Hollywood Reporter in a statement.
Fox News sent Gizmodo a strange statement after this article was first published.
“The ad in question is full of disgraceful Nazi imagery regardless of the film’s message and did not meet our guidelines,” Marianne Gambelli, president of ad sales at Fox News, told Gizmodo in a statement emailed by Fox News PR.
The media relations person also stressed to Gizmodo that “no other national network has taken the ad.”
You can watch the TV ad that was banned below to judge for yourself whether the ad is “disgraceful.” And you can watch the full 7-minute Oscar-nominated film on Vimeo.
We’ve looked at a lot of Nazi history here on the Paleofuture blog over the past few years. Like how American PR pros helped sell the Nazis to Americans, how the Nazis kept a list of powerful friends in Los Angeles, how America’s top Nazi sued Warner Bros. for libel, and how the publisher of the L.A. Times was buddying up with Nazis during the 1930s.
The Nazis movement in the U.S. was a very real thing and it’s terrifying to see the parallels to today. As just one recent example, a man wearing a MAGA hat assaulted a BBC cameraman this week at one of President Donald Trump’s neo-fascist rallies in El Paso, Texas. President Trump often calls the media “fake news” as a way to rile up his supporters.
“I covered endless Trump rallies in the run-up to the election and since - and there is a pattern,” the BBC’s North America editor explained yesterday.
“The attacks on the media are hugely popular with his supporters. They are every bit as much a part of his ‘set’ as Honky Tonk Woman and Satisfaction are part of a Rolling Stones concert. You just can’t imagine it not happening.”
Trumpism isn’t literal Nazism. But it doesn’t have to be in order to create dangerous conditions in the United States. It can happen here. And Sean Hannity knows that better than most people.
The 7-minute movie, which was recently nominated for an Academy Award, explores the terrifying day on February 20, 1939 when thousands of American Nazis held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. The CEO of Fox News reportedly claims that an ad for the anti-Nazi movie is “not appropriate for our air.”
The 30-second ad, titled “It Can Happen Here,” was supposed to run during the Sean Hannity Show earlier this week. The title of the ad is a reference to the 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis which predicted a rise of fascism in the United States during the 1930s. But Fox News apparently doesn’t want anti-Nazi content on its channel.
From the Hollywood Reporter:
The ad was bought to air during Monday night’s edition of Sean Hannity’s primetime show through a local advertising buy on Charter Communication’s Spectrum service in Los Angeles, but was precluded by breaking news — coverage of President Trump’s rally in Texas.
The film’s distributor, Field of Vision, then decided to purchase a national spot on Hannity’s show, but was rebuffed by the network, which controls national advertising.
“It’s amazing to me that the C.E.O. of Fox News would personally inject herself into a small ad buy just to make sure that Hannity viewers weren’t exposed to this chapter of American history,” the film’s director told the Hollywood Reporter in a statement.
Fox News sent Gizmodo a strange statement after this article was first published.
“The ad in question is full of disgraceful Nazi imagery regardless of the film’s message and did not meet our guidelines,” Marianne Gambelli, president of ad sales at Fox News, told Gizmodo in a statement emailed by Fox News PR.
The media relations person also stressed to Gizmodo that “no other national network has taken the ad.”
You can watch the TV ad that was banned below to judge for yourself whether the ad is “disgraceful.” And you can watch the full 7-minute Oscar-nominated film on Vimeo.
We’ve looked at a lot of Nazi history here on the Paleofuture blog over the past few years. Like how American PR pros helped sell the Nazis to Americans, how the Nazis kept a list of powerful friends in Los Angeles, how America’s top Nazi sued Warner Bros. for libel, and how the publisher of the L.A. Times was buddying up with Nazis during the 1930s.
The Nazis movement in the U.S. was a very real thing and it’s terrifying to see the parallels to today. As just one recent example, a man wearing a MAGA hat assaulted a BBC cameraman this week at one of President Donald Trump’s neo-fascist rallies in El Paso, Texas. President Trump often calls the media “fake news” as a way to rile up his supporters.
“I covered endless Trump rallies in the run-up to the election and since - and there is a pattern,” the BBC’s North America editor explained yesterday.
“The attacks on the media are hugely popular with his supporters. They are every bit as much a part of his ‘set’ as Honky Tonk Woman and Satisfaction are part of a Rolling Stones concert. You just can’t imagine it not happening.”
Trumpism isn’t literal Nazism. But it doesn’t have to be in order to create dangerous conditions in the United States. It can happen here. And Sean Hannity knows that better than most people.
Western Media Fall in Lockstep for Cheap Trump/Rubio Venezuela Aid PR Stunt
ADAM JOHNSON - fair
2/9/19
The Trump administration’s now completely overt effort to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had a very successful public relations effort this week, as major Western media outlets uniformly echoed its simplistic, pre-packaged claim that the Venezuelan government was heartlessly withholding foreign aid:
All of the above articles—and scores more like it—repeated the same script: Maduro was blocking aid from the US “out of refusal to relinquish power,” preferring to starve “his own people” rather than feed them. It’s a simple case of good and evil—of a tyrannical, paranoid dictator not letting in aid to feed a starving population.
Except three pieces of key context are missing. Context that, when presented to a neutral observer, would severely undermine the cartoonish narrative being advanced by US media.
(1) Not only has the international aid community not asked for the “aid,” earlier this week, both the International Red Cross and United Nations warned the US to explicitly not engage in these types of PR stunts. As Washington Post contributor Vincent Bevins pointed out, the transparent cynicism of these efforts was preemptively warned about by the groups actually charged with keeping starving people fed:
Red Cross Warns US About Risks of Sending Aid to Venezuela (PBS NewsHour, 2/1/19):
The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned the United States about the risks of delivering humanitarian aid to Venezuela without the approval of security forces loyal to President Nicolas Maduro.
***
UN Warns Against Politicizing Humanitarian Aid in Venezuela(Reuters, 2/6/19):
UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations warned on Wednesday against using aid as a pawn in Venezuela after the United States sent food and medicine to the country’s border and accused President Nicolas Maduro of blocking its delivery with trucks and shipping containers.
Indeed, as Bevins also noted, the Red Cross has long been working with local authorities inside Venezuela to deliver relief, and just last week doubled its budget to do so. We have ample evidence the Maduro government is more than willing to work with international aid when it’s offered in good faith, not when it’s a thinly veiled mechanism to spur civil war and contrive PR victories for those seeking to overthrow the government. It’s not just Maduro—as the Western media are presenting it—who opposes the US aid convoy; it’s the UN and Red Cross. Why do none of the above reports note this rather key piece of information, instead giving the reader the impression it’s only the stance of a sadistic, power-hungry madman?
(2) Despite dozens of media outlets giving the impression (and sometimes explicitly saying) that the Venezuelan government shut down an otherwise functioning pathway into the country, the bridge in question hasn’t been open for years.
It’s true the Venezuelan government appears to have placed an oil tanker and cargo containers on the bridge to prevent incursion from the Colombian side, but the other barriers, as writer and software developer Jason Emery noted, have been in place since at least 2016.
According to La Opinion (2/5/16), after its initial construction in 2015, the bridge has never been open to traffic. How can Maduro, as the BBC suggested, “reopen” a bridge that was never open?
The reality is BBC and other Western media were just going along with the narrative pushed by Sen. Marco Rubio and Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, not bothering to check if their primary visual narrative was based on a bad faith, context-free PR stunt.
This point is a relatively superficial one, but in a long term PR battle to win over Western liberals for further military escalation, the superficial matters a lot. Rubio and the Trump administration cooked up a gimmicky visual metaphor, and almost every outlet uncritically passed it along, often making factually inaccurate assumptions along the way—assumptions the Trump State Department and CIA coordinating the effort knew very well they would make.
(3) The Venezuelan government has an entirely rational reason to suspect the US would use humanitarian aid as a cover to smuggle in weapons to foment armed conflict: The person running quarterback for Trump on the current Venezuela operation, Elliot Abrams, literally did just that 30 years ago.
From the first two paragraphs (emphasis added) of a 1987 AP/New York Times article on Elliott Abrams, “Abrams Denies Wrongdoing in Shipping Arms to Contras” (8/17/87—h/t Kevin Gosztola):
Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams has defended his role in authorizing the shipment of weapons on a humanitarian aid flight to Nicaraguan rebels, saying the operation was ”strictly by the book.”
Mr. Abrams spoke at a news conference Saturday in response to statements by Robert Duemling, former head of the State Department’s Nicaraguan humanitarian assistance office, who said he had twice ordered planes to shuttle weapons for the Contras on aid planes at Mr. Abrams’ direction in early 1986.
It’s literally the same person. It’s not that Maduro is vaguely paranoid the US, in general, would dust off its 1980s’ Contra-backing Cold War playbook, or some unspecified assumption about a higher-up or two at State. It’s literally the exact same person in charge of the operation who we know—with 100 percent certainty, because he admitted to it—has a history of using aid convoys as a cover to smuggle in arms to right-wing militias.
It’s all playing out right now, in real time. The same actors, the same tricks, the same patently disingenuous concern for the starving poor. And the US media is stripping it of all this essential context, presenting these radical regime-change operators as bleeding heart humanitarians.
The same US media outlets that have expressly fundraised and run ad campaigns on their image as anti-Trump truth-tellers have mysteriously taken at face value everything the Trump White House and its neoconservative allies have said in their campaign to overthrow the government of Venezuela. The self-aggrandizing “factchecking” brigade that emerged to confront the Trump administration is suddenly nonexistent as it rolls out a transparent, cynical PR strategy to delegitimize a Latin American government it’s trying to overthrow.
- Tensions Rise as Venezuela Blocks Border Bridge in Standoff Over Aid (CNN, 2/7/19)
- Maduro Blocks Critical Aid Sent to Venezuela (CNN, 2/7/19)
- Aid Arrives at Venezuela Border as US Demands Maduro Let It In(ABC News, 2/7/19)
- Venezuela Crisis: Pompeo Demands Aid Corridor Opened (BBC, 2/7/19)
- The US Says Maduro Is Blocking Aid to Starving People. The Venezuelan Says His People Aren’t Beggars. (Washington Post, 2/8/19)
- Humanitarian Aid Arrives for Venezuela — But Maduro Blocks It(NPR, 2/8/19)
All of the above articles—and scores more like it—repeated the same script: Maduro was blocking aid from the US “out of refusal to relinquish power,” preferring to starve “his own people” rather than feed them. It’s a simple case of good and evil—of a tyrannical, paranoid dictator not letting in aid to feed a starving population.
Except three pieces of key context are missing. Context that, when presented to a neutral observer, would severely undermine the cartoonish narrative being advanced by US media.
- Both the Red Cross and UN warned the US not to engage in this aid PR stunt.
- The bridge in question is a visual metaphor contrived by the Trump administration of little practical relevance.
- The person in charge of US operations in Venezuela has a history of using aid as a cover to deliver weapons to right-wing mercenaries.
(1) Not only has the international aid community not asked for the “aid,” earlier this week, both the International Red Cross and United Nations warned the US to explicitly not engage in these types of PR stunts. As Washington Post contributor Vincent Bevins pointed out, the transparent cynicism of these efforts was preemptively warned about by the groups actually charged with keeping starving people fed:
Red Cross Warns US About Risks of Sending Aid to Venezuela (PBS NewsHour, 2/1/19):
The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned the United States about the risks of delivering humanitarian aid to Venezuela without the approval of security forces loyal to President Nicolas Maduro.
***
UN Warns Against Politicizing Humanitarian Aid in Venezuela(Reuters, 2/6/19):
UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations warned on Wednesday against using aid as a pawn in Venezuela after the United States sent food and medicine to the country’s border and accused President Nicolas Maduro of blocking its delivery with trucks and shipping containers.
Indeed, as Bevins also noted, the Red Cross has long been working with local authorities inside Venezuela to deliver relief, and just last week doubled its budget to do so. We have ample evidence the Maduro government is more than willing to work with international aid when it’s offered in good faith, not when it’s a thinly veiled mechanism to spur civil war and contrive PR victories for those seeking to overthrow the government. It’s not just Maduro—as the Western media are presenting it—who opposes the US aid convoy; it’s the UN and Red Cross. Why do none of the above reports note this rather key piece of information, instead giving the reader the impression it’s only the stance of a sadistic, power-hungry madman?
(2) Despite dozens of media outlets giving the impression (and sometimes explicitly saying) that the Venezuelan government shut down an otherwise functioning pathway into the country, the bridge in question hasn’t been open for years.
It’s true the Venezuelan government appears to have placed an oil tanker and cargo containers on the bridge to prevent incursion from the Colombian side, but the other barriers, as writer and software developer Jason Emery noted, have been in place since at least 2016.
According to La Opinion (2/5/16), after its initial construction in 2015, the bridge has never been open to traffic. How can Maduro, as the BBC suggested, “reopen” a bridge that was never open?
The reality is BBC and other Western media were just going along with the narrative pushed by Sen. Marco Rubio and Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, not bothering to check if their primary visual narrative was based on a bad faith, context-free PR stunt.
This point is a relatively superficial one, but in a long term PR battle to win over Western liberals for further military escalation, the superficial matters a lot. Rubio and the Trump administration cooked up a gimmicky visual metaphor, and almost every outlet uncritically passed it along, often making factually inaccurate assumptions along the way—assumptions the Trump State Department and CIA coordinating the effort knew very well they would make.
(3) The Venezuelan government has an entirely rational reason to suspect the US would use humanitarian aid as a cover to smuggle in weapons to foment armed conflict: The person running quarterback for Trump on the current Venezuela operation, Elliot Abrams, literally did just that 30 years ago.
From the first two paragraphs (emphasis added) of a 1987 AP/New York Times article on Elliott Abrams, “Abrams Denies Wrongdoing in Shipping Arms to Contras” (8/17/87—h/t Kevin Gosztola):
Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams has defended his role in authorizing the shipment of weapons on a humanitarian aid flight to Nicaraguan rebels, saying the operation was ”strictly by the book.”
Mr. Abrams spoke at a news conference Saturday in response to statements by Robert Duemling, former head of the State Department’s Nicaraguan humanitarian assistance office, who said he had twice ordered planes to shuttle weapons for the Contras on aid planes at Mr. Abrams’ direction in early 1986.
It’s literally the same person. It’s not that Maduro is vaguely paranoid the US, in general, would dust off its 1980s’ Contra-backing Cold War playbook, or some unspecified assumption about a higher-up or two at State. It’s literally the exact same person in charge of the operation who we know—with 100 percent certainty, because he admitted to it—has a history of using aid convoys as a cover to smuggle in arms to right-wing militias.
It’s all playing out right now, in real time. The same actors, the same tricks, the same patently disingenuous concern for the starving poor. And the US media is stripping it of all this essential context, presenting these radical regime-change operators as bleeding heart humanitarians.
The same US media outlets that have expressly fundraised and run ad campaigns on their image as anti-Trump truth-tellers have mysteriously taken at face value everything the Trump White House and its neoconservative allies have said in their campaign to overthrow the government of Venezuela. The self-aggrandizing “factchecking” brigade that emerged to confront the Trump administration is suddenly nonexistent as it rolls out a transparent, cynical PR strategy to delegitimize a Latin American government it’s trying to overthrow.
Fox News Host Accuses Women Of Having 'Recreational Abortions' If They Don't Let Fetuses Die In Womb
A host on Fox News claimed over the weekend that women are having "recreational abortions" in their final trimester.
By David - crooks & liars
1/27/19 11:22am
A host on Fox News claimed over the weekend that women are having "recreational abortions" in their final trimester of pregnancy.
After Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law allowing late-term abortions in New York, Fox News host Katie Pavlich spoke to Dr. Omar Hamada, who incorrectly insisted that there is never a reason to abort a fetus in the third trimester.
"So this New York abortion law which allows abortion up til the day before birth is, essentially, a recreational abortion bill," Pavlich opined.
"I thought it was a travesty," Hamada said of the New York law. "You know, there are some reasons that we will end a pregnancy in the first trimester or other reasons in the second trimester, but there's absolutely no reason to end a pregnancy so that the child dies in the third trimester."
According to the doctor, women should wait for their fetus to die instead having third-trimester abortions.
"Remarkably there's a group of female physicians and nurses who have come out very hard, trying to threaten my career," Hamada explained. "I've gotten some death threats, which I don't really take seriously."
"I think that's just a common method that the left uses, they want to invalidate and destroy," he continued. "There's no desire for common ground."
Hamada predicted that the new legislation would "increase the number of abortions that are done in the state of New York."
While 99% of abortions occur in the first 21 weeks of pregnancy, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) says that there are reasons a woman might be forced to terminate in the third trimester.
“Abortions that occur at this stage in pregnancy are often the result of tragic diagnoses and are exactly the scenarios wherein patients need their doctors, and not obstructive politicians,” says Stanford Dr. Jennifer Conti told the Guardian. “Asking a woman to carry a fatally flawed pregnancy to term is, at the very least, heartbreaking. I’ve often heard women say that they chose to end such pregnancies because of unselfish reasons: they couldn’t bear the thought of putting their fetus through even more pain or suffering.”[...]
After Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law allowing late-term abortions in New York, Fox News host Katie Pavlich spoke to Dr. Omar Hamada, who incorrectly insisted that there is never a reason to abort a fetus in the third trimester.
"So this New York abortion law which allows abortion up til the day before birth is, essentially, a recreational abortion bill," Pavlich opined.
"I thought it was a travesty," Hamada said of the New York law. "You know, there are some reasons that we will end a pregnancy in the first trimester or other reasons in the second trimester, but there's absolutely no reason to end a pregnancy so that the child dies in the third trimester."
According to the doctor, women should wait for their fetus to die instead having third-trimester abortions.
"Remarkably there's a group of female physicians and nurses who have come out very hard, trying to threaten my career," Hamada explained. "I've gotten some death threats, which I don't really take seriously."
"I think that's just a common method that the left uses, they want to invalidate and destroy," he continued. "There's no desire for common ground."
Hamada predicted that the new legislation would "increase the number of abortions that are done in the state of New York."
While 99% of abortions occur in the first 21 weeks of pregnancy, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) says that there are reasons a woman might be forced to terminate in the third trimester.
“Abortions that occur at this stage in pregnancy are often the result of tragic diagnoses and are exactly the scenarios wherein patients need their doctors, and not obstructive politicians,” says Stanford Dr. Jennifer Conti told the Guardian. “Asking a woman to carry a fatally flawed pregnancy to term is, at the very least, heartbreaking. I’ve often heard women say that they chose to end such pregnancies because of unselfish reasons: they couldn’t bear the thought of putting their fetus through even more pain or suffering.”[...]
In avoidable error, CBS takes heat for the lack of black voices on its campaign team
Memo to news organizations: Race will be a big part of the story in 2020.
SAM FULWOOD III - thinkprogress
JAN 14, 2019, 2:53 PM
Executives at CBS News hoping to commemorate the newly minted “boots on the ground” team of reporters and producers handpicked to cover the 2020 presidential campaign, instead drew withering attacks over the weekend because none among the announced eight-member team journalists or quartet of producers were black Americans.
A broad array of media observers — including a prominent member of the U.S. House of Representatives — rightfully complained that CBS’s failure to include any African Americans among its core campaign staff didn’t bode well for comprehensive coverage of the racial issues that are almost certain to arise during the 2020 campaign. In particular, it seems likely that there could be a number of black candidates that figure prominently among the large and diverse group seeking the Democratic nomination.
Last week, one white journalist covering Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) — who is expected to join the Democratic presidential primary fray — suffered a humbling moment when her lack of facility with black Greek letter organizations created a firestorm on Twitter, after she referred to the celebrated “skee-wee” call of Harris’ Alpha Kappa Alpha, Inc. sisters as a “screech.” As The Root’s Michael Harriott opined, the incident was a prime example of why “we need more black journalists.”
Beyond that, such an oversight is all the more glaring because President Donald Trump built his successful 2016 presidential run by appealing to voters with racist themes — a tactic he is widely expected to return to in his reelection bid. What’s more, issues related to suppression of black voters figured prominently in the 2016 campaign and may well reappear in the next presidential voting cycle.
Christopher Isham, CBS News’ Washington bureau chief, said in an news release announcing the appointments that the journalists formed the network’s “boots on the ground for the 2019-2020 election cycle.” The so-called “political embed unit” is a prestigious role among political journalists because they travel with the various candidates, develop deep sources among staffers, and are likely to rise in stature and visibility as various candidates run the cross-country maze of primary and general election campaigns.
While CBS officials said other journalists would be announced later as on-air correspondents for the campaigns, it acknowledged no African-American reporters were among this first set of staffers. Among the eight reporters and four producers, four are persons of color: Musadiq Bidar, a native of Afghanistan, Alex Tin, Jack Turman and Stephanie Ramirez.
CBS’s failure to include any black journalists among this elite corps drew attacks after associate producer Ben Mitchell tweeted his pride over the network’s announcement.
Expressing dismay that CBS News didn’t staff its campaign team with an awareness that race would be a big-issue feature of the upcoming political season, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), denounced CBS News in a weekend tweestorm, calling the staffing “Unacceptable in 2019.”
Due to Ocasio-Cortez’s huge Twitter base — she has more than 2.3 million followers — and the knee-jerk opposition she engenders among right-wingers, the freshman congresswoman’s comments drew immediate responses, which in turn brought greater attention to the CBS decision.
Naturally, there was quite a bit of disdain over CBS’s decision from black journalists who have long complained about being shut out of prominent roles in the industry.
To be sure, the campaign for the White House 2020 is just getting started and there’s ample room for the news outlets to gear up properly. And as CBS News noted in an earlier news release, its Washington news desk operations are headed by Lorna Jones, who is African-American. Nevertheless, in terms of getting off to a grand start of a campaign season that will require the perspectives of black journalists to make it fully scrutable, CBS failed to impress or persuade a large bloc of its viewers that it has the chops to recognize — let alone cover — an important part of this national story.
A broad array of media observers — including a prominent member of the U.S. House of Representatives — rightfully complained that CBS’s failure to include any African Americans among its core campaign staff didn’t bode well for comprehensive coverage of the racial issues that are almost certain to arise during the 2020 campaign. In particular, it seems likely that there could be a number of black candidates that figure prominently among the large and diverse group seeking the Democratic nomination.
Last week, one white journalist covering Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) — who is expected to join the Democratic presidential primary fray — suffered a humbling moment when her lack of facility with black Greek letter organizations created a firestorm on Twitter, after she referred to the celebrated “skee-wee” call of Harris’ Alpha Kappa Alpha, Inc. sisters as a “screech.” As The Root’s Michael Harriott opined, the incident was a prime example of why “we need more black journalists.”
Beyond that, such an oversight is all the more glaring because President Donald Trump built his successful 2016 presidential run by appealing to voters with racist themes — a tactic he is widely expected to return to in his reelection bid. What’s more, issues related to suppression of black voters figured prominently in the 2016 campaign and may well reappear in the next presidential voting cycle.
Christopher Isham, CBS News’ Washington bureau chief, said in an news release announcing the appointments that the journalists formed the network’s “boots on the ground for the 2019-2020 election cycle.” The so-called “political embed unit” is a prestigious role among political journalists because they travel with the various candidates, develop deep sources among staffers, and are likely to rise in stature and visibility as various candidates run the cross-country maze of primary and general election campaigns.
While CBS officials said other journalists would be announced later as on-air correspondents for the campaigns, it acknowledged no African-American reporters were among this first set of staffers. Among the eight reporters and four producers, four are persons of color: Musadiq Bidar, a native of Afghanistan, Alex Tin, Jack Turman and Stephanie Ramirez.
CBS’s failure to include any black journalists among this elite corps drew attacks after associate producer Ben Mitchell tweeted his pride over the network’s announcement.
Expressing dismay that CBS News didn’t staff its campaign team with an awareness that race would be a big-issue feature of the upcoming political season, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), denounced CBS News in a weekend tweestorm, calling the staffing “Unacceptable in 2019.”
Due to Ocasio-Cortez’s huge Twitter base — she has more than 2.3 million followers — and the knee-jerk opposition she engenders among right-wingers, the freshman congresswoman’s comments drew immediate responses, which in turn brought greater attention to the CBS decision.
Naturally, there was quite a bit of disdain over CBS’s decision from black journalists who have long complained about being shut out of prominent roles in the industry.
To be sure, the campaign for the White House 2020 is just getting started and there’s ample room for the news outlets to gear up properly. And as CBS News noted in an earlier news release, its Washington news desk operations are headed by Lorna Jones, who is African-American. Nevertheless, in terms of getting off to a grand start of a campaign season that will require the perspectives of black journalists to make it fully scrutable, CBS failed to impress or persuade a large bloc of its viewers that it has the chops to recognize — let alone cover — an important part of this national story.
STUDY: U.S. NEWSPAPERS ARE MORE THAN TWICE AS LIKELY TO CITE ISRAELI SOURCES IN HEADLINES THAN PALESTINIAN ONES
Murtaza Hussain - the intercept
January 12 2019, 4:30 a.m.
AT THE HEIGHT of the 2014 war between the Israeli military and Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip, the New York Times ran an article headlined, “Israel Says That Hamas Uses Civilian Shields, Reviving Debate.” It was an apparent reference to the hundreds of Palestinian civilians who had been killed in Israeli attacks by that point in the war. There was no question about who had killed them, yet the language shifted the subject to a “debate” about who was really responsible. A few weeks earlier, after an Israeli airstrike killed several Palestinian soccer fans, the Times ran the absurd title, “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup,” later amending the headline in the face of widespread disgust expressed on social media.
Headlines matter. As studies have repeatedly shown, when it comes to reaching the general public, the words at the top of the page might be as important, if not more, than the text of articles themselves — to the chagrin of many writers. In the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, inappropriate, misleading, and biased headlines like those that appeared in the New York Times during 2014 Gaza War have been all too common.
This is the conclusion of a new study titled “50 Years of Occupation” published by 416Labs, a research and data analytics firm based in Canada. The firm analyzed nearly 100,000 news headlines about the conflict in the American press over the past five decades and found that the Israeli point of view was featured much more prominently than the Palestinian one, and that references to Palestinians’ experiences of being “refugees” or living under “occupation” have steadily declined.
“The findings demonstrate a persistent bias in coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian issue — one where Israeli narratives are privileged and where, despite the continued entrenchment of the occupation, the very topics germane to Palestinians’ day-to-day reality have disappeared,” Owais Zaheer, one of the study’s authors, told The Intercept. “It calls to attention the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the issue.”
The study, released this week, analyzed 50 years of news headlines on the Israel-Palestine conflict from five major American publications — the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal — employing Natural Language Processing, or NLP, techniques to analyze the massive database of headlines published over this period. NLP is a “Big Data” analysis approach used to identify statistical trends and patterns in large caches of text. In this case, the researchers analyzed nearly 100,000 headlines and identified dozens of frequently recurring terms and word sequences in stories about Israel-Palestine. While studies of media coverage on Israel-Palestine have been conducted before, the 416Labs analysis is the largest and most comprehensive look at headline coverage since the conflict began.
The patterns identified seem to show a clear slant toward the Israeli perspective. Headlines like the one from the 2014 New York Times story about civilian deaths in Gaza — that used the term “Israel says” — were 2 1/2 times more likely to appear than headlines citing Palestinian equivalents. Headlines centering Israel were published four times more than those centering Palestinians, and words connoting violence, such as “terror,” appeared three times more than the word “occupation.” Since 1967, the year that the Israeli military took control of the West Bank, there has been an 85 percent overall decrease in mention of the term “occupation” in headlines about Israel, despite the fact that the Israeli military’s occupation of Palestinian territory has in fact intensified over this time. Mention of the term “Palestinian refugees,” meanwhile, has declined a stunning 93 percent. While subtle, a consistent disproportion in article headlines — which by default gives a greater airtime to one side or occludes certain key issues — can impact public perception.
The study also found that media attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict in the United States has tended to peak during periods of heightened violence. In a sense, this dynamic reflects how international news is generally covered in the United States. The key difference, however, is that the U.S. government is a vital player in helping maintain the status quo in Israel-Palestine through its provision of massive military aid and diplomatic support to the Israeli government.
Despite this ongoing American involvement, the total volume of U.S. media coverage about the conflict has been in overall decline since the time of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords — a negotiated agreement between then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin intended to establish conditions for peace in the region. That decline says little about conditions on the ground. The hopes briefly raised by the Oslo Accords effectively died in 1995 after an Israeli extremist assassinated Rabin, and a wave of terrorist attacks by the then-obscure militant group Hamas killed large numbers of Israeli civilians. Riding a wave of disillusionment, a new hard-line Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, took power in 1996. Since then, the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank has expanded, with new settlements eating away at the remaining areas of Palestinian control, even while global media attention has declined.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has taken a hard line in favor of the Israeli government, slashing humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees and unilaterally recognizing the city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. These measures have been taken over the objections of Palestinian leaders, but also some senior Israeli military officials who have warned that they could destabilize the region. Peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis meanwhile show no signs of reviving, despite repeated promises by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner of an “ultimate deal” that will resolve the conflict.
Despite this grim political reality, there have been significant changes in U.S. media coverage of the conflict, driven in part by popular pressure coming from social media. There are also signs that Israel is becoming a partisan issue dividing liberals and conservatives in the United States, with polls showing that growing numbers of Americans would like their government to take a more evenhanded stance on the conflict. U.S. government policy has yet to reflect these shifts in public sentiment, with the Trump administration falling over itself to project an unprecedentedly hostile and uncompromising stance toward Palestinian claims. Hard-line supporters of the Israeli government have seemingly shifted their approach from winning “hearts and minds” to punishing opponents: publishing blacklists of Palestinian activists, censoring public figures vocal about the conflict, and advocating for laws to restrict boycotts of Israeli goods.
Nonetheless, people who have followed U.S. debate on the conflict for decades say that there are serious tectonic changes occurring at the level of the American public, both in media and popular sentiment.
“Although news coverage is not evenhanded and is still generally skewed towards the Israeli perspective, there has been a massive shift over the past five years in how this issue is both reported and discussed in the United States,” said Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a D.C.-based progressive think tank. “We are seeing a shift in the types of stories that are being covered by major outlets, as well as the stances that public figures are willing to take. There are still huge problems, but things are changing. The discourse on Israel-Palestine is nothing like it was in decades past.”
Headlines matter. As studies have repeatedly shown, when it comes to reaching the general public, the words at the top of the page might be as important, if not more, than the text of articles themselves — to the chagrin of many writers. In the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, inappropriate, misleading, and biased headlines like those that appeared in the New York Times during 2014 Gaza War have been all too common.
This is the conclusion of a new study titled “50 Years of Occupation” published by 416Labs, a research and data analytics firm based in Canada. The firm analyzed nearly 100,000 news headlines about the conflict in the American press over the past five decades and found that the Israeli point of view was featured much more prominently than the Palestinian one, and that references to Palestinians’ experiences of being “refugees” or living under “occupation” have steadily declined.
“The findings demonstrate a persistent bias in coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian issue — one where Israeli narratives are privileged and where, despite the continued entrenchment of the occupation, the very topics germane to Palestinians’ day-to-day reality have disappeared,” Owais Zaheer, one of the study’s authors, told The Intercept. “It calls to attention the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the issue.”
The study, released this week, analyzed 50 years of news headlines on the Israel-Palestine conflict from five major American publications — the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal — employing Natural Language Processing, or NLP, techniques to analyze the massive database of headlines published over this period. NLP is a “Big Data” analysis approach used to identify statistical trends and patterns in large caches of text. In this case, the researchers analyzed nearly 100,000 headlines and identified dozens of frequently recurring terms and word sequences in stories about Israel-Palestine. While studies of media coverage on Israel-Palestine have been conducted before, the 416Labs analysis is the largest and most comprehensive look at headline coverage since the conflict began.
The patterns identified seem to show a clear slant toward the Israeli perspective. Headlines like the one from the 2014 New York Times story about civilian deaths in Gaza — that used the term “Israel says” — were 2 1/2 times more likely to appear than headlines citing Palestinian equivalents. Headlines centering Israel were published four times more than those centering Palestinians, and words connoting violence, such as “terror,” appeared three times more than the word “occupation.” Since 1967, the year that the Israeli military took control of the West Bank, there has been an 85 percent overall decrease in mention of the term “occupation” in headlines about Israel, despite the fact that the Israeli military’s occupation of Palestinian territory has in fact intensified over this time. Mention of the term “Palestinian refugees,” meanwhile, has declined a stunning 93 percent. While subtle, a consistent disproportion in article headlines — which by default gives a greater airtime to one side or occludes certain key issues — can impact public perception.
The study also found that media attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict in the United States has tended to peak during periods of heightened violence. In a sense, this dynamic reflects how international news is generally covered in the United States. The key difference, however, is that the U.S. government is a vital player in helping maintain the status quo in Israel-Palestine through its provision of massive military aid and diplomatic support to the Israeli government.
Despite this ongoing American involvement, the total volume of U.S. media coverage about the conflict has been in overall decline since the time of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords — a negotiated agreement between then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin intended to establish conditions for peace in the region. That decline says little about conditions on the ground. The hopes briefly raised by the Oslo Accords effectively died in 1995 after an Israeli extremist assassinated Rabin, and a wave of terrorist attacks by the then-obscure militant group Hamas killed large numbers of Israeli civilians. Riding a wave of disillusionment, a new hard-line Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, took power in 1996. Since then, the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank has expanded, with new settlements eating away at the remaining areas of Palestinian control, even while global media attention has declined.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has taken a hard line in favor of the Israeli government, slashing humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees and unilaterally recognizing the city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. These measures have been taken over the objections of Palestinian leaders, but also some senior Israeli military officials who have warned that they could destabilize the region. Peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis meanwhile show no signs of reviving, despite repeated promises by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner of an “ultimate deal” that will resolve the conflict.
Despite this grim political reality, there have been significant changes in U.S. media coverage of the conflict, driven in part by popular pressure coming from social media. There are also signs that Israel is becoming a partisan issue dividing liberals and conservatives in the United States, with polls showing that growing numbers of Americans would like their government to take a more evenhanded stance on the conflict. U.S. government policy has yet to reflect these shifts in public sentiment, with the Trump administration falling over itself to project an unprecedentedly hostile and uncompromising stance toward Palestinian claims. Hard-line supporters of the Israeli government have seemingly shifted their approach from winning “hearts and minds” to punishing opponents: publishing blacklists of Palestinian activists, censoring public figures vocal about the conflict, and advocating for laws to restrict boycotts of Israeli goods.
Nonetheless, people who have followed U.S. debate on the conflict for decades say that there are serious tectonic changes occurring at the level of the American public, both in media and popular sentiment.
“Although news coverage is not evenhanded and is still generally skewed towards the Israeli perspective, there has been a massive shift over the past five years in how this issue is both reported and discussed in the United States,” said Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a D.C.-based progressive think tank. “We are seeing a shift in the types of stories that are being covered by major outlets, as well as the stances that public figures are willing to take. There are still huge problems, but things are changing. The discourse on Israel-Palestine is nothing like it was in decades past.”
Here's what the media really means when they talk about the 'working class'
Mainstream media’s fetish for the “working class” seems to refer entirely to culturally conservative white folks
By John McCullough / FAIR - alternet
November 14, 2018, 5:52 AM GMT
Since the 2016 elections, corporate media narratives about U.S. politics have fixated on the “white working class” as a pivotal demographic, presented as a hardscrabble assortment of disaffected outsiders. Piece after piece has been published in establishment outlets attempting to decipher the motivations of this racialized socioeconomic group, depicted as fighting from the Heartland against “cultural elites” on both coasts.
Numerous articles on the 2018 midterm elections furthered this narrative. The New York Times spoke of white workers’ place in the Democratic electoral strategy:
Mr. Trump’s success among white working-class voters spanned much of the Midwest, powering victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio… . Here in Iowa and elsewhere, [Democrats] are also making appeals to small-town voters who went for Mr. Trump.
The Washington Post reported that Kentucky congressional candidate Amy McGrath hoped that the endorsement of Joe Biden would bolster her chances with this demographic:
Biden is the Democrat who worries the president and his team the most because they fear he could cut into Trump’s working-class white support in several swing states.
The Atlantic explored Democratic candidates’ “burgeoning chances” with white working-class voters in the Rust Belt:
But the biggest explanation for the shifting numbers … is that the portions of the white working class hostile to Trump appear somewhat more likely to vote next month than those who support him.
If you’ve seen a piece on the impact of the working class on the midterm elections, it has most likely dealt specifically with working whites. But the media focus distorts the composition of this class, racially and otherwise. As Sarah Jaffe points out in the New Republic, “Only around 11 percent of the working class are white men in industrial jobs.” Americans who make their living by selling their labor (mostly in the service industry) are in fact disproportionately people of color, who are projected by the Economic Policy Institute to constitute an outright majority of the working class by 2032.
This misrepresentation of working-class whiteness extends to discussion of the voting habits of organized labor, as in a Washington Post piece speculating that Sen. Sherrod Brown’s pro-union rhetoric in Ohio might help Democrats “reverse the flight of the white working class to President Trump.” Though the typical union worker is often depicted as a gruff white man nearing his 50s, union membership is more common among African-American workers than whites, at 13.0 percent vs. 10.5 percent.
Despite the significant number of people of color in the working class, nonwhite members of this class are rarely talked about as such.
While use of the phrase “white working class” has been ubiquitous in political journalism in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, the “black working class” is discussed much less often. While the New York Times will occasionally put out a piece with explicit analysis of working people of color — including one op-ed by Tamara Winfrey-Harris and another by Alexis Okeowo — they are few and far between compared to the multitude of pieces published on their white counterparts.
This promotes a homogeneous image of the working class as sweaty, middle-aged white men in hard hats, with MAGA bumper stickers on their pickup trucks and a fear of social change in their hearts. This depiction erases the multitude of working people who do not meet this stereotype, and ignores the fact that the working class has far more people of color and more women than the professional and ownership classes.
Aside from misrepresenting workers as predominantly white, media outlets often use the term “white working class” to refer to white voters who aren’t even working class by any common-sense definition. A recurrent media proxy for this demographic group is Americans who haven’t attended college, which the New York Times has treated as synonymous:
Because Mr. Trump drew support from white voters with less formal education — the “white working class” — many attributed his victory to Americans’ economic anxiety.
While there is undeniably a relation between class and access to education, defining class only along this line replaces an economic identity with a cultural one. By this definition, a suburban millionaire could be counted as “working class” as a result of joining Dad’s company at 18 instead of going off to school. This fuzziness helps cast the “white working class” as the president’s reliable base: Many of them are not workers in any recognizable sense.
(It also helps explain why exit polls diverge on education and income: Fifty-five percent of respondents with college degrees – and 65 percent with advanced degrees – voted for Democratic House candidates in 2018, whereas 51 percent of people making $100,000-$200,000 a year, and 52 percent making over $200,000, voted for Republicans.)
This flawed conception of the “white working class” (not necessarily working, but definitely white) is brought to spurious life in the reporting of New York Post and Washington Examiner columnist Salena Zito. In a November 2017 piece for the Washington Examiner on the midterm implications of the narrow re-election of Kathy Dahlkemper, county executive of Erie County, Pennsylvania, Zito writes of the difficulty of Democratic candidates winning “in working-class regions” (read: white working-class regions) where, she says, such workers are moderate, pro-gun, pro-life voters in counties across the Great Lakes Rust Belt … [who] turned out to vote for Barack Obama twice and then later voted Donald J. Trump.
She explains that despite an incumbency advantage and a large number of registered Democrats, the sitting executive came very close to being voted out. Zito’s solution is to elect more conservative Democrats — “Democrats need the Kathy Dahlkempers of their party to win all kinds of races up and down the ballot” — despite starting her piece by pointing out that the incumbent just barely won.
This depiction of the working class as synonymous with small-town whites in the Rust Belt is politically convenient for Zito, who writes primarily for right-wing publications and has been a featured speaker at CPAC, the annual convention of the American Conservative Union. In addition to being downright inaccurate, her misleading depiction of “working-class” voters bears the implication that the only way for Democrats to win them is to lurch right on social issues, rather than to move left on economics and address their material concerns.
Media narratives of the political landscape leading to the 2018 midterm elections constructed an image of the “working class” in popular culture that actually depicts the white, comfortable, culturally conservative small-business class. This stands in the way of building a politics which simultaneously addresses issues of race, class and gender — which, as has previously been argued by FAIR, will be essential in building a progressive alternative.
In the current environment, it is imperative to remain wary of themes in media which whitewash the working class, render working people of color invisible and encourage the perception that racial and economic justice are at odds.
Numerous articles on the 2018 midterm elections furthered this narrative. The New York Times spoke of white workers’ place in the Democratic electoral strategy:
Mr. Trump’s success among white working-class voters spanned much of the Midwest, powering victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio… . Here in Iowa and elsewhere, [Democrats] are also making appeals to small-town voters who went for Mr. Trump.
The Washington Post reported that Kentucky congressional candidate Amy McGrath hoped that the endorsement of Joe Biden would bolster her chances with this demographic:
Biden is the Democrat who worries the president and his team the most because they fear he could cut into Trump’s working-class white support in several swing states.
The Atlantic explored Democratic candidates’ “burgeoning chances” with white working-class voters in the Rust Belt:
But the biggest explanation for the shifting numbers … is that the portions of the white working class hostile to Trump appear somewhat more likely to vote next month than those who support him.
If you’ve seen a piece on the impact of the working class on the midterm elections, it has most likely dealt specifically with working whites. But the media focus distorts the composition of this class, racially and otherwise. As Sarah Jaffe points out in the New Republic, “Only around 11 percent of the working class are white men in industrial jobs.” Americans who make their living by selling their labor (mostly in the service industry) are in fact disproportionately people of color, who are projected by the Economic Policy Institute to constitute an outright majority of the working class by 2032.
This misrepresentation of working-class whiteness extends to discussion of the voting habits of organized labor, as in a Washington Post piece speculating that Sen. Sherrod Brown’s pro-union rhetoric in Ohio might help Democrats “reverse the flight of the white working class to President Trump.” Though the typical union worker is often depicted as a gruff white man nearing his 50s, union membership is more common among African-American workers than whites, at 13.0 percent vs. 10.5 percent.
Despite the significant number of people of color in the working class, nonwhite members of this class are rarely talked about as such.
While use of the phrase “white working class” has been ubiquitous in political journalism in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, the “black working class” is discussed much less often. While the New York Times will occasionally put out a piece with explicit analysis of working people of color — including one op-ed by Tamara Winfrey-Harris and another by Alexis Okeowo — they are few and far between compared to the multitude of pieces published on their white counterparts.
This promotes a homogeneous image of the working class as sweaty, middle-aged white men in hard hats, with MAGA bumper stickers on their pickup trucks and a fear of social change in their hearts. This depiction erases the multitude of working people who do not meet this stereotype, and ignores the fact that the working class has far more people of color and more women than the professional and ownership classes.
Aside from misrepresenting workers as predominantly white, media outlets often use the term “white working class” to refer to white voters who aren’t even working class by any common-sense definition. A recurrent media proxy for this demographic group is Americans who haven’t attended college, which the New York Times has treated as synonymous:
Because Mr. Trump drew support from white voters with less formal education — the “white working class” — many attributed his victory to Americans’ economic anxiety.
While there is undeniably a relation between class and access to education, defining class only along this line replaces an economic identity with a cultural one. By this definition, a suburban millionaire could be counted as “working class” as a result of joining Dad’s company at 18 instead of going off to school. This fuzziness helps cast the “white working class” as the president’s reliable base: Many of them are not workers in any recognizable sense.
(It also helps explain why exit polls diverge on education and income: Fifty-five percent of respondents with college degrees – and 65 percent with advanced degrees – voted for Democratic House candidates in 2018, whereas 51 percent of people making $100,000-$200,000 a year, and 52 percent making over $200,000, voted for Republicans.)
This flawed conception of the “white working class” (not necessarily working, but definitely white) is brought to spurious life in the reporting of New York Post and Washington Examiner columnist Salena Zito. In a November 2017 piece for the Washington Examiner on the midterm implications of the narrow re-election of Kathy Dahlkemper, county executive of Erie County, Pennsylvania, Zito writes of the difficulty of Democratic candidates winning “in working-class regions” (read: white working-class regions) where, she says, such workers are moderate, pro-gun, pro-life voters in counties across the Great Lakes Rust Belt … [who] turned out to vote for Barack Obama twice and then later voted Donald J. Trump.
She explains that despite an incumbency advantage and a large number of registered Democrats, the sitting executive came very close to being voted out. Zito’s solution is to elect more conservative Democrats — “Democrats need the Kathy Dahlkempers of their party to win all kinds of races up and down the ballot” — despite starting her piece by pointing out that the incumbent just barely won.
This depiction of the working class as synonymous with small-town whites in the Rust Belt is politically convenient for Zito, who writes primarily for right-wing publications and has been a featured speaker at CPAC, the annual convention of the American Conservative Union. In addition to being downright inaccurate, her misleading depiction of “working-class” voters bears the implication that the only way for Democrats to win them is to lurch right on social issues, rather than to move left on economics and address their material concerns.
Media narratives of the political landscape leading to the 2018 midterm elections constructed an image of the “working class” in popular culture that actually depicts the white, comfortable, culturally conservative small-business class. This stands in the way of building a politics which simultaneously addresses issues of race, class and gender — which, as has previously been argued by FAIR, will be essential in building a progressive alternative.
In the current environment, it is imperative to remain wary of themes in media which whitewash the working class, render working people of color invisible and encourage the perception that racial and economic justice are at odds.
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The Empty Piety of the American Press
Chris Hedges - truthdig
3/12/18
The press, giddy with its newfound sense of mission and purpose, is carrying out a moral crusade against Donald Trump. The airwaves and print have shed their traditional claims of “impartiality” and “objectivity.” They fulminate against Trump, charging—falsely—that he was elected because of Russian interference and calling him a liar, ignorant and incompetent. They give airtime to his bitterest critics and bizarre associates, such as Omarosa Manigault-Newman, a onetime star of “The Apprentice” and now a fired White House aide, and Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who says she had a sexual relationship with Trump. It is great entertainment. It is great for ratings. It is great for profits. But it is not moral, and it is not journalism.
The empty piety is a mask for self-interest. It is accompanied by the veneration of the establishment politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, corporate heads and hired apologists who carried out the corporate coup d’état that created our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” The corporate structures that have a stranglehold on the country and have overseen deindustrialization and the evisceration of democratic institutions, plunging over half the country into chronic poverty and misery, are unassailable. They are portrayed as forces of progress. The criminals on Wall Street, including the heads of financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, are treated with reverence. Free trade is equated with freedom. Democratic politicians such as Barack Obama—who assaulted civil liberties, transferred trillions of dollars upward to reigning oligarchs, expanded the drone wars to include targeted assassinations of American citizens, and used the Espionage Act to silence investigative journalism—are hailed as champions of democracy. Deference is paid to democratic processes, liberties, electoral politics and rights enshrined in our Constitution, from due process to privacy, that no longer exist. It is a vast game of deception under the cover of a vacuous morality.
Those cast aside by corporate capitalism—Noam Chomsky calls them “unpeople”—are rendered invisible and reviled at the same time. The “experts” whose opinions are amplified on every issue, from economics to empire and politics, are drawn from corporate-funded think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or are former military and intelligence officials or politicians who are responsible for the failure of our democracy and usually in the employ of corporations. Cable news also has the incestuous habit of interviewing its own news celebrities. Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of many former officials now on the airwaves, has morphed into a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Brennan was the architect of the disastrous attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria, oversaw the huge expansion of our drone wars and instigated the canard that Russia stole the last U.S. presidential election. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky. Those who decry the waste within the military, such as MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, who has exposed the useless $13 billion anti-ballistic missile program, are unheard. Advocates of universal health care, such as Dr. Margaret Flowers, are locked out of national health care debates. There is a long list of the censored. The acceptable range of opinion is so narrow it is almost nonexistent.
Where is the flood of stories about families being evicted or losing their homes because of foreclosures and bank repossessions? Where are the stories about the banks and lending agencies that prey on recent college graduates burdened with crippling loans and unable to find work? Where are the stories about families going into bankruptcy because they cannot pay medical bills and the soaring premiums of for-profit health care? Where are the stories about the despair that drives middle-aged white men to suicide and millions of Americans into the deadly embrace of opioid addiction? Where are the stories on the cruelty of mass incarceration, the collapse of our court system and the reign of terror by police in marginal communities? Where are the investigative pieces on the fraud and the tax boycott that have been legalized for Wall Street, the poisoning of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries? Why is climate change a forbidden subject, even as extreme weather devastates the nation and much of the rest of the planet? Why are the atrocities we commit or abet in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen ignored? Why are the war crimes carried out by Israel against the Palestinians erased from news coverage?
The relentless pillorying of Trump is news-as-reality-television. Trump fills in for Richard Hatch of the old “Survivor” show. Trump’s imbecility, dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence are at once revolting and riveting. The press, ostensibly seeking a more polished brand to improve the public presentation of empire and corporate capitalism, is in fact further empowering the lunatics who will dominate the political landscape.
“America is ceasing to be a nation,” reporter and author Matt Taibbi writes in his book “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” “and turning into a giant television show.”
The stunts pulled during the last presidential election—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wearing goggles as he chain-sawed the tax code in half, Trump inviting women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to a presidential debate and Ben Carson having to defend himself against allegations he lied when he wrote that as a child he attempted to stab another boy—will become staples of political campaigning. Voters, stripped of all meaningful power or control over their own destiny, used only as stage props in rallies and at party conventions, are permitted to vote only for a system they hate. And the winners are those who can give the best and most entertaining expression of that hatred. “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Taibbi writes. “It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
If the press sided with citizens and exposed the corporate systems of power that hold them captive, its advertising income would dwindle and it would be treated as an enemy of the state. Since corporations own the airwaves and declining city newspapers, this will not happen. Journalism will remain burlesque. The Public Broadcasting System, along with National Public Radio dependent on corporate money, including the Koch brothers, is as loath to take on the corporate establishment as its for-profit competitors. Dissenters and critics exist only on the margins of the internet, and the abolition of net neutrality will see them silenced.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, one of the high priests in the Trump Inquisition, was quite open about the narrowness of the assault. Being interviewed on “The Axe Files” podcast, hosted by former Obama White House aide David Axelrod, Tapper addressed charges that he opposes Trump’s policies by saying, “Whenever anybody says that to me, I say, you can’t find any evidence about what I think about his tax plan or repealing Obamacare or DACA or immigration or trade or any of these issues—terrorism or ISIS or Syria. I’m agnostic on that. I want to have full and interesting and provocative debates and call balls and strikes. But I’m not putting out there an immigration proposal.”
The corporate airwaves have a depressing habit of taking political hacks like Axelrod or the former Clinton strategist George Stephanopoulos and transforming them into journalists. Even Chelsea Clinton got a shot at journalism, being paid $600,000 a year to do fluff pieces for NBC. The fusion of news and celebrity, with figures like Tapper appearing on late night talk shows, fits with the reality-television presidency the corporate press empowers.
The press, like the Democratic Party, is playing a very dangerous game. It is banking, as Hillary Clinton did, on Trump being so repugnant he and those who support him will be replaced with Democrats. It relies on polls to guide its tactics and strategy, forgetting that every national poll offered assurance that Trump would lose in 2016. This gamble may work. But it may not. Policy issues accounted for only 10 percent of the media coverage during the 2016 presidential race. News reports concentrated on the latest polls, scandals, publicity stunts, campaign tactics and strategy as well as Trump’s bombastic remarks, according to a report issued by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. In short, there was little substance to the coverage. This will only get worse. The gossip, trivia and invective masquerading as news are not only irrelevant to most of the electorate but reinforce the image of liberal elites being out of touch with the pain and rage rippling across the nation.
Corporations that own the press look at news as a revenue stream. The news division competes against other revenue streams. If news does not produce comparable profits, its managers are replaced and its content is altered and distorted to draw in more viewers. Journalism is irrelevant. The disease of celebrity and greed, which warps and deforms the personality of Trump, warps and deforms celebrities in the media. They share Trump’s most distasteful characteristics. The consequences are ominous. An ignored, impoverished and frustrated underclass will turn to increasingly bizarre politicians and more outlandish con artists and purveyors of hate. Trump is only the beginning. The grotesque mutations to come, ones that will make Trump look reasonable, are being spawned in newsrooms across the country.
The empty piety is a mask for self-interest. It is accompanied by the veneration of the establishment politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, corporate heads and hired apologists who carried out the corporate coup d’état that created our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” The corporate structures that have a stranglehold on the country and have overseen deindustrialization and the evisceration of democratic institutions, plunging over half the country into chronic poverty and misery, are unassailable. They are portrayed as forces of progress. The criminals on Wall Street, including the heads of financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, are treated with reverence. Free trade is equated with freedom. Democratic politicians such as Barack Obama—who assaulted civil liberties, transferred trillions of dollars upward to reigning oligarchs, expanded the drone wars to include targeted assassinations of American citizens, and used the Espionage Act to silence investigative journalism—are hailed as champions of democracy. Deference is paid to democratic processes, liberties, electoral politics and rights enshrined in our Constitution, from due process to privacy, that no longer exist. It is a vast game of deception under the cover of a vacuous morality.
Those cast aside by corporate capitalism—Noam Chomsky calls them “unpeople”—are rendered invisible and reviled at the same time. The “experts” whose opinions are amplified on every issue, from economics to empire and politics, are drawn from corporate-funded think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or are former military and intelligence officials or politicians who are responsible for the failure of our democracy and usually in the employ of corporations. Cable news also has the incestuous habit of interviewing its own news celebrities. Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of many former officials now on the airwaves, has morphed into a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Brennan was the architect of the disastrous attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria, oversaw the huge expansion of our drone wars and instigated the canard that Russia stole the last U.S. presidential election. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky. Those who decry the waste within the military, such as MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, who has exposed the useless $13 billion anti-ballistic missile program, are unheard. Advocates of universal health care, such as Dr. Margaret Flowers, are locked out of national health care debates. There is a long list of the censored. The acceptable range of opinion is so narrow it is almost nonexistent.
Where is the flood of stories about families being evicted or losing their homes because of foreclosures and bank repossessions? Where are the stories about the banks and lending agencies that prey on recent college graduates burdened with crippling loans and unable to find work? Where are the stories about families going into bankruptcy because they cannot pay medical bills and the soaring premiums of for-profit health care? Where are the stories about the despair that drives middle-aged white men to suicide and millions of Americans into the deadly embrace of opioid addiction? Where are the stories on the cruelty of mass incarceration, the collapse of our court system and the reign of terror by police in marginal communities? Where are the investigative pieces on the fraud and the tax boycott that have been legalized for Wall Street, the poisoning of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries? Why is climate change a forbidden subject, even as extreme weather devastates the nation and much of the rest of the planet? Why are the atrocities we commit or abet in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen ignored? Why are the war crimes carried out by Israel against the Palestinians erased from news coverage?
The relentless pillorying of Trump is news-as-reality-television. Trump fills in for Richard Hatch of the old “Survivor” show. Trump’s imbecility, dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence are at once revolting and riveting. The press, ostensibly seeking a more polished brand to improve the public presentation of empire and corporate capitalism, is in fact further empowering the lunatics who will dominate the political landscape.
“America is ceasing to be a nation,” reporter and author Matt Taibbi writes in his book “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” “and turning into a giant television show.”
The stunts pulled during the last presidential election—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wearing goggles as he chain-sawed the tax code in half, Trump inviting women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to a presidential debate and Ben Carson having to defend himself against allegations he lied when he wrote that as a child he attempted to stab another boy—will become staples of political campaigning. Voters, stripped of all meaningful power or control over their own destiny, used only as stage props in rallies and at party conventions, are permitted to vote only for a system they hate. And the winners are those who can give the best and most entertaining expression of that hatred. “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Taibbi writes. “It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
If the press sided with citizens and exposed the corporate systems of power that hold them captive, its advertising income would dwindle and it would be treated as an enemy of the state. Since corporations own the airwaves and declining city newspapers, this will not happen. Journalism will remain burlesque. The Public Broadcasting System, along with National Public Radio dependent on corporate money, including the Koch brothers, is as loath to take on the corporate establishment as its for-profit competitors. Dissenters and critics exist only on the margins of the internet, and the abolition of net neutrality will see them silenced.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, one of the high priests in the Trump Inquisition, was quite open about the narrowness of the assault. Being interviewed on “The Axe Files” podcast, hosted by former Obama White House aide David Axelrod, Tapper addressed charges that he opposes Trump’s policies by saying, “Whenever anybody says that to me, I say, you can’t find any evidence about what I think about his tax plan or repealing Obamacare or DACA or immigration or trade or any of these issues—terrorism or ISIS or Syria. I’m agnostic on that. I want to have full and interesting and provocative debates and call balls and strikes. But I’m not putting out there an immigration proposal.”
The corporate airwaves have a depressing habit of taking political hacks like Axelrod or the former Clinton strategist George Stephanopoulos and transforming them into journalists. Even Chelsea Clinton got a shot at journalism, being paid $600,000 a year to do fluff pieces for NBC. The fusion of news and celebrity, with figures like Tapper appearing on late night talk shows, fits with the reality-television presidency the corporate press empowers.
The press, like the Democratic Party, is playing a very dangerous game. It is banking, as Hillary Clinton did, on Trump being so repugnant he and those who support him will be replaced with Democrats. It relies on polls to guide its tactics and strategy, forgetting that every national poll offered assurance that Trump would lose in 2016. This gamble may work. But it may not. Policy issues accounted for only 10 percent of the media coverage during the 2016 presidential race. News reports concentrated on the latest polls, scandals, publicity stunts, campaign tactics and strategy as well as Trump’s bombastic remarks, according to a report issued by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. In short, there was little substance to the coverage. This will only get worse. The gossip, trivia and invective masquerading as news are not only irrelevant to most of the electorate but reinforce the image of liberal elites being out of touch with the pain and rage rippling across the nation.
Corporations that own the press look at news as a revenue stream. The news division competes against other revenue streams. If news does not produce comparable profits, its managers are replaced and its content is altered and distorted to draw in more viewers. Journalism is irrelevant. The disease of celebrity and greed, which warps and deforms the personality of Trump, warps and deforms celebrities in the media. They share Trump’s most distasteful characteristics. The consequences are ominous. An ignored, impoverished and frustrated underclass will turn to increasingly bizarre politicians and more outlandish con artists and purveyors of hate. Trump is only the beginning. The grotesque mutations to come, ones that will make Trump look reasonable, are being spawned in newsrooms across the country.
worthless media funnies
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https://teespring.com/fox-news-toilet-2#pid=369&cid=6513&sid=front
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