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People On SSI Should Not Have to Sustain RSN
We literally have people on SSI sending us whatever money they can spare to help keep RSN going. When we become aware that someone on SSI is doing that we send the money back.
It does however speak to the importance of RSN to people in greatest need. That we take great comfort in.
We always need donors who can afford slightly more substantial “matching” contributions.
Who can?
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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13 May 21
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Dan Rather | The Big Lie Is a Big Deal
Dan Rather, Steady
Rather writes: "Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. It wasn't particularly close. He won the total national vote overwhelmingly and won decisively in the Electoral College. There is no credible suggestion to the contrary."
his Sunday Essay opens with a fair warning. You may find what I’ve written below to be a little different in tone and style from some of the previous fare on Steady.
For starters, let’s consider the idea of “steady.” I remain committed to the concept and the community we are building here where we try to take a long view on the news of the moment with a sense of, well, steadiness. But being steady doesn’t mean you can’t also get more steamed than a locomotive. And that’s where I find myself today. So usher out the children. Cover sensitive ears. Because this old reporter is full of a little fire.
The topic at hand is the truth, and not some esoteric notion to be debated in a college philosophy seminar. This is a truth so urgent, so important, so obvious, that attempts to undermine it would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous. So here it is.
Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. It wasn’t particularly close. He won the total national vote overwhelmingly and won decisively in the Electoral College. There is no credible suggestion to the contrary. Election officials confirmed it. The courts confirmed it. It is apparent to everyone who doesn’t live in an alternate reality, who doesn’t harbor seditionist impulses, who isn’t a craven opportunist, or who doesn’t marinate in the cesspool of these forces, otherwise known as Fox News. For those who suggest otherwise (who say that Biden is not the legitimately elected President of the United States), many have been deceived and others are willfully deceiving them for their own cynical, and dangerous, ends.
And yet that’s where a majority of Republicans find themselves today, if you believe the polls. And it is certainly where a majority of elected officials are if you just listen to what they say, or more importantly don’t say. Now the origin of this lie-laden authoritarianism is the former president, who couldn’t fall back on his usual playbook of suing, sulking, and skedaddling to get himself out of the loser spotlight. So he decided to do what he does best, the tool he used to propel himself to the presidency. He lied. Not a small half-truth. Not a wee fib. Not even a bald-faced lie. A lie so big it deserves to be written as a proper noun — the Big Lie.
This Big Lie led to violent insurrectionists storming the United States Capitol, attempting to stop final certification of election results. It has led to Republican state representatives falling over themselves to try to cut back on voting rights. And how do they try to justify it? They say their supporters have lost faith in the voting system. But that is because their supporters have been lied to by the same politicians who are now using that as an excuse to stifle democracy. Propaganda and authoritarianism play on in a destructive feedback loop.
Now to be fair, not EVERY Republican has fallen in line. Take the high-profile case of Liz Cheney, the daughter of former vice president, Dick Cheney. She’s certainly no liberal (her voting record has been solidly pro-Trump), but she has had the temerity to say what her colleagues won’t, that the would-be emperor has no clothes (please spare yourself the mental image). For this act of bravery her fellow House Republicans are coming for her like a political version of Murder on the Orient Express, except in this case they have no problem brandishing their guilt for the world to see.
So who thrives in such an environment? Craven opportunists like Elise Stefanik. You would think this Harvard-educated congresswoman from upstate New York would know better about the Constitution and the ridiculousness of the Big Lie, but she long ago pegged her future to prostrating at the altar of The Donald. And now she is poised to replace Cheney in Republican leadership. Some conservative groups are grumbling that Stefanik’s voting record is far more “liberal” than they would like, but Trump broke whatever tenuous links the Republican Party had to a consistent ideology. It’s now a cult of personality, not a political party. And fealty is prized over all else. Of course as many associates of Trump have learned over the years, loyalty for him is like most streets in Manhattan — it only goes one way.
It brings me no joy in saying that one of the factors that is exacerbating this dangerous era in our national history is a Washington press corps that is struggling to make sense of a disorienting landscape. The bedrock of American democracy, for better and worse, has been a stable two party system — with some notable moments of exception. The press is used to two opposing forces waging battle over policy. At least nominally. Now the no man’s land between Republicans and Democrats is over a belief in democracy itself and not things like taxes or foreign policy.
Once again, this is not a theoretical musing. Is it too much to say that giving oxygen to the Big Lie, let alone actively espousing it, is a form of sedition? Full stop. Think about it. Is lying about the truth of last November making a mockery of any pledge of patriotism? No matter how many flag lapel pins you wear or how often you quote the “Founding Fathers,” to deny a fair and honest election and the orderly transfer of power risks placing you squarely in the camp of dictators and autocrats, and helping with the demise of democracy.
The press needs to start taking this even more seriously than it does now. Every elected Republican who has played footsie with the Big Lie should have to defend that record before they can speak on any other topic. They can’t be allowed to dodge. The questions aren’t difficult. Did Joe Biden win the election? Where is your evidence to the contrary? And because there is no such evidence, if they try to quote something, they should be pressed on the truth. Live interviews are particularly problematic because politicians can stretch out a string of lies so long that they can spin their way to a commercial break. Those with a history of such actions should not be given prominent platforms for their performance art.
The Big Lie must be the context for everything that is taking place in Washington, and political stories across the country. It is not old news. January 6 is not old news. This denial of reality is the animating principle driving the Republican Party. We can’t talk about legislation in Washington, immigration, climate change, fiscal policy, foreign policy, civil rights, education, or any other issue politicians are “debating” without talking about the Big Lie. Because if we have roughly half of elected officials espousing rhetoric and taking actions that undermine our elections and the legitimacy of our chosen leaders then our ability to do anything productive, to respond to the needs of the American people, will be undermined.
Republicans desperately want the mainstream press to cover the daily news cycle through the lens of traditional party politics. At the same time, they go on their propaganda channels and stir up their base against the mechanics of fair and open elections. They spread the poison of illegitimacy to attack the Biden Administration. On Fox News you get a concerted and coordinated attack. Outside of that echo chamber you get what was once the normal news diet of a spectrum of different stories. But this is not a normal news environment. This is an attack on American values, and our ability to continue to function as a government that represents the will of the majority of Americans. The Big Lie is everything right now and the press and the American people must not provide safe harbor for it to continue to metastasize.
I want to end with a note of some optimism. I believe the Big Lie is so ludicrous and outrageous that it can be made to collapse under the weight of its own perfidy. If it is put into the proper spotlight, if it becomes so radioactive that big business, the press, and the public at large refuse to bestow any legitimacy to those who traffic in it, then it can and will be defeated. American democracy might even emerge stronger in its wake. That will take perseverance, stamina, and yes, remaining steady.
—Dan
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) leaves the House floor surrounded by reporters on Feb. 2. (photo: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Rep Greene Aggressively Confronts Rep Ocasio-Cortez, Causing New York Congresswoman to Raise Security Concerns
Marianna Sotomayor, The Washington Post
Sotomayor writes: "Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene aggressively confronted Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday and falsely accused her of supporting 'terrorists,' leading the New York congresswoman’s office to call on leadership to ensure that Congress remains 'a safe, civil place for all Members and staff.'"
Two Washington Post reporters witnessed Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) exit the House chamber late Wednesday afternoon ahead of Greene (Ga.), who shouted “Hey Alexandria” twice in an effort to get her attention. When Ocasio-Cortez did not stop walking, Greene picked up her pace and began shouting at her and asking why she supports antifa, a loosely knit group of far-left activists, and Black Lives Matter, falsely labeling them “terrorist” groups. Greene also shouted that Ocasio-Cortez was failing to defend her “radical socialist” beliefs by declining to publicly debate the freshman from Georgia.
“You don’t care about the American people,” Greene shouted. “Why do you support terrorists and antifa?”
Ocasio-Cortez did not stop to answer Greene, only turning around once and throwing her hands in the air in an exasperated motion. The two reporters were not close enough to hear what the New York congresswoman said, and her office declined to discuss her specific response.
“Representative Greene tried to begin an argument with Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and when Rep. Ocasio-Cortez tried to walk away, Congresswoman Greene began screaming and called Rep. Ocasio-Cortez a terrorist sympathizer,” Ocasio-Cortez spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said in a statement. “We hope leadership and the Sergeant at Arms will take real steps to make Congress a safe, civil place for all Members and staff — especially as many offices are discussing reopening. One Member has already been forced to relocate her office due to Congresswoman Greene’s attacks.”
Before walking away, Greene said that the encounter was intended to hold Democrats accountable for their policy proposals.
“She’s a chicken, she doesn’t want to debate the Green New Deal,” she said to a small group of reporters and onlookers near the entrance to the chamber. “These members are cowards. They need to defend their legislation to the people. That’s pathetic.”
Greene has been a controversial figure since her 2020 campaign, and Democrats voted to strip her of her committee assignments earlier this year because of extremist statements. Greene has made a number of incendiary and false statements in recent years, among them that Black people “are held slaves to the Democratic Party,” that Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — the first two Muslim women elected to Congress — represented “an Islamic invasion into our government offices,” and that Jewish megadonor George Soros collaborated with Nazis.
She has also expressed support for the radical ideology of QAnon, a sprawling set of false claims that have coalesced into an extremist ideology that has radicalized its followers, some of whom participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Her behavior toward Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday was similar to her effort to confront young gun-control activist David Hogg — who survived the 2018 mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school — as he walked around the Capitol grounds amid a lobbying push in 2019 for new gun laws. Greene shot cellphone video of the incident.
Greene has also been an outspoken defender of former president Donald Trump and his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Earlier Wednesday, House Republicans voted to remove Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from her leadership position for repeatedly speaking out against Trump’s falsehoods, saying she had become a distraction from the party’s efforts to win back the House in the 2022 midterm elections.
This is not the first confrontation Greene has had with a Democratic member of Congress that has caused them to raise safety concerns.
Earlier this year Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) accused Greene and her staff for accosting her in a tunnel beneath a House office building after she asked Greene to wear a mask “out of concern for the health of my staff, other members of Congress, and their congressional staff.” Greene denied the allegation and accused Bush of “lying” and of leading a “terrorist mob” because Bush supported Black Lives Matter.
The incident prompted Bush to ask Democratic leadership if she could move her office away from Greene at a time when the Georgia congresswoman was already under heavy scrutiny for her rhetoric and behavior.
In February, Greene also got into a confrontation with the office of a neighboring congresswoman over transgender rights. After Rep. Marie Newman (D-Ill.) hung a transgender pride flag outside her office in honor of her transgender daughter to push back against Greene’s opposition to legislation that would extend civil rights protections to the LGBTQ community, Greene hung up a poster across the hall that read: “There are TWO genders. MALE & FEMALE. Trust the Science!”
“Thought we’d put up ours so [Newman] can look at it every time she opens her door,” she said in a video.
Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) called Greene’s poster “sickening, pathetic, unimaginably cruel.”
Greene has been a headache for Republican leaders at times, but they have not taken any punitive steps in response to her actions and they decried Democrats voting to take away her committee assignments.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) spoke to Greene before she was removed from her committees and after Republicans started to complain about her attempts to delay routine floor actions, but neither those nor other conversations resulted in punishment.
“Past comments from and endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene on school shootings, political violence, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories do not represent the values or beliefs of the House Republican Conference,” he said in a statement released during the debate over her committee assignments. “I made this clear to Marjorie when we met. I also made clear that as a member of Congress we have a responsibility to hold ourselves to a higher standard than how she presented herself as a private citizen. Her past comments now have much greater meaning. Marjorie recognized this in our conversation. I hold her to her word, as well as her actions going forward.”
Since asking earlier this year to debate Ocasio-Cortez, Greene has confronted her one other time on the House floor, when she approached the New York congresswoman last month to try to schedule a date for a debate over the Green New Deal, a set of environmental policies intended to combat climate change. In a video posted to social media a day later, Greene criticized Ocasio-Cortez for not debating her.
“If she chickens out, then she shows who she really is: a scared little girl that is pretty stupid and doesn’t know anything about the economy or economics,” Greene said.
Biden meet with bipartisan congressional leaders to discuss infrastructure bill. (photo: Getty)
Biden Threatens to Pass Huge Infrastructure Bill Without Republicans if Needed After High Stakes White House Meeting
Andrew Buncombe, Independent
Buncombe writes: "Joe Biden has vowed to pass a massive infrastructure bill without GOP support if necessary, after a high stakes meeting at the White House with senior Republicans."
‘I’m not going to give up on a whole range of things that go to the question of productivity, jobs, and employment’
The president on Wednesday met in the Oval Office with top Republicans Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy to discuss if they can work together on Mr Biden’s wish to invest heavily in rebuilding and renewing the nation’s fading infrastructure.
After the meeting, Mr McCarthy, the GOP leader in the House of Representatives, said Republicans were willing to work with the president, but would not support any tax increases to pay for the programmes.
“You won’t find any Republicans who are gonna go raise taxes. I think that’s the worst thing you can do in this economy,” said Mr McCarthy, who earlier in the day had overseen the removal of Liz Cheney from her position as the third-ranking Republican in the lower chamber. She was forced out after refusing to accept Donald Trump’s false claim the 2020 election was rigged, and voted to impeach him.
Mr Biden had campaigned for the presidency with a vow to work with Republicans to pass bills to address the nation’s most pressing needs.
Yet, after the meeting he said that while he would rather work with Republicans, he was also prepared to go it alone if he needed to.
“I want to make it clear. I want to get a bipartisan deal on as much as we get a bipartisan deal on. And that means roads, bridges, broadband and all infrastructure,” he said in an interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.
“But I’m not giving up on the fact that we have two million women not able to go back to work because all the day care centres are closed, they’re out of business. And so they can’t go back to work.”
He added: “I’m not going to give up on a whole range of things that go to the question of productivity, of increasing jobs, of increasing employment, increasing revenues.”
The meeting at the Oval Office, also attended by vice president Kamala Harris, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, was the first formal conversation with the opposition party since the president took office.
At stake are the future of two huge bills the president is determined to pass and sign into law – a $2.25 trillion infrastructure bill and a $1.8 trillion education and childcare plan. Earlier this year, shortly after taking office, he oversaw the passage a $1.9 trillion Covid relief plan that passed, without Republican support, in March.
In order to pay for the measures, Mr Biden and other Democrats have suggested rolling back the huge 2017 Republican reforms that cut taxes for companies and the wealthy.
On Wednesday, Mr McConnell said Republicans would not go for such a move.
“We both made that clear to the president: that’s our red line,” Mr McConnell said.
At this stage, the words and drama may represent little more than shadow boxing. Polls show there is broad public support for infrastructure spending, and it is an area Republicans are keen to be seen to be delivering on too.
What they do not support is spending another $2 trillion at a time when some are questioning whether the country needs such a boost.
Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Democrat, said on Tuesday the Biden administration was “not going to wait a long time if we don’t see that agreement is possible.”
Yet the president does not have a huge amount of room to manoeuvre; while Democrats hold both chambers of Congress, their margin in the Senate could not be be more narrow. Pointedly, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a rare Democratic elected politician in a heavily red state, has made clear he does not want to rush through such a bill.
“For the sake of our country, we have to show we can work in a bipartisan way,” he said this week. “I don’t know what the rush is.”
Asked in the Oval Office on Wednesday how he expected to come to a compromise, Mr Biden joked that he would just “snap my fingers”.
Later White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Mr Biden did not seek to raise taxes on working Americans.
“His bottom line is that inaction is unacceptable, and that he is not going to raise taxes on the American people who are making less than $400,000 a year, but he’s open to a range of proposals,” she told a briefing.
Mr Biden has said he wants to raise the US corporate tax rate to between 25 per cent and 28 per cent from 21 per cent, to help pay for the infrastructure.
Some Republicans have suggested putting the traditional infrastructure elements – roads, ports and bridges – into a smaller bill that could be passed more easily with bipartisan support.
But Mr Biden has said he wants to expand the idea of what constitutes “infrastructure”, and adopt a more holistic vision that is suitable to the 21st Century. This includes access to high speed internet, clean drinking water and sewage, that his party has described as the part of the “care infrastructure.”
Reality Winner at a courthouse in Augusta, Ga., in June 2017. A new documentary shows how a young woman who tried to get alarming information to the public was caught up in forces beyond her control. (photo: Sean Rayford/Getty)
Margaret Sullivan | Reality Winner Was the FBI's 'Head on a Pike' for Trump. It's Time to Set Her Free.
Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post
Sullivan writes: "At 25, Reality Leigh Winner was a remarkable young woman. Fluent in Farsi and other languages spoken in Iraq and Afghanistan, she was, in 2017, a decorated Air Force veteran working as a contractor for the National Security Agency."
She was more than smart enough to see something significant, and alarming, in a classified document on Russia’s efforts to hack into election-related websites and voter-registration databases in the United States. She thought it was something the public should know about.
But she also made some unwise decisions.
She anonymously mailed a copy of a single document to the investigative news organization the Intercept. But despite that outlet’s reputation for taking top-secret information and turning it into news stories, its staffers didn’t take all the precautions that might have protected their source. Then, when a fleet of FBI agents showed up at her home, Winner didn’t insist on first consulting a lawyer.
Soon, she was indicted under the Espionage Act and eventually pleaded guilty to one felony count of transmission of national defense information. No one has ever received a longer sentence, more than five years, for leaking classified information to a media outlet.
A heartbreaking — and infuriating — new documentary about how the Trump Justice Department went after her reinforced my long-held belief that, although her prison term is due to end in November, it’s high time for our government to set Winner free.
The centerpiece of “United States vs. Reality Winner” is an appalling audio recording that the filmmakers obtained through a Freedom of Information request. We hear the voices of the FBI agents who blindsided her, failing to inform her of her Miranda rights. This was in the wake of James B. Comey’s promise to President Donald Trump that he’d pursue those who gave inside information to the media, according to the former FBI director’s own memo about a February 2017 meeting in the Oval Office.
“I said I was eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message,” Comey wrote. “I said something about it being difficult and he replied that we need to go after the reporters.” He went on: “I said something about the value of putting a head on a pike as a message.”
Reality Winner became that head on a pike.
“She was the first whistleblower of the Trump era, and she was easy to go after: a young nobody,” said James Risen, the highly respected investigative reporter who heads the Press Freedom Defense Fund. Like the Intercept, it is part of First Look Media, which has paid Winner’s legal bills.
As Risen noted, high-level government officials who leak classified information are likely to get off with a slap on the wrist. Case in point: David Petraeus, the former CIA director who disclosed reams of classified information to his biographer and former lover Paula Broadwell and later lied to investigators about it. In 2015, he was punished only with probation and a fine.
“But low-level ones get the book thrown at them,” Risen told me.
He sees what happened to Winner as “all of a piece” with recent developments in the intersecting worlds of national security and the press.
One was last week’s troubling news that the Trump Justice Department secretly obtained Washington Post journalists’ phone records and tried to get email records related to their reporting on Russia’s role in the 2016 election.
Another was a federal judge’s accusation last week that then-Attorney General William P. Barr misled the court and public about how he decided that Trump should not be charged with obstructing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation.
“These are all connected,” Risen told me. “The administration’s number one priority was to deny that Trump was elected with the help of Russia.”
Trump did speak in support of Winner once, calling her sentence “so unfair,” but this was just another way of needling then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom he later fired.
What he didn’t do was include Winner in his 2020 pardons, instead favoring dozens of corrupt politicians and criminal business executives — and even the four mercenaries convicted of murdering Iraqi civilians in 2007.
J. William Leonard, the “secrecy czar” in the George W. Bush administration, responsible for overseeing the government’s system for protecting classified information, wrote a few months ago that Winner accomplished something important.
“Her action was the first time the vulnerability of our election system to foreign interference had been brought to the attention of many Americans, including state and local election officials,” he wrote.
Yet she couldn’t make a public-interest defense, because that’s not allowed under the Espionage Act.
“Winner’s actions have clearly been in the public interest and I can attest that they far outweigh any claims of damage by the government,” Leonard wrote.
The documentary (which premiered at SXSW Online film festival in March and is seeking a distributor now) makes it clear how she was mistreated, while painfully detailing her family’s anguish.
Meanwhile, we keep learning more about the Trump administration’s relentless moves to hush up Russian interference in the 2016 election and to portray it as nothing but a hoax.
Reality Winner ended up as collateral damage.
President Biden could send her home a few months early. That wouldn’t make things right — but it would help.
Attorney General Merrick Garland. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
White Supremacy Is Top Security Threat, Garland Says
Alexander Nazaryan, Yahoo! News
Nazaryan writes: "Attorney General Merrick Garland told Congress on Wednesday that violence incited by white supremacists poses 'the most dangerous threat to our democracy.' That assertion reflects near-universal consensus among national security experts, including those who worked for the Trump administration."
Garland’s warning came during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, which was conducted by supporters of then-President Donald Trump and incited by white supremacist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Five people died as a result of the attack.
“In my career as a judge and in law enforcement, I have not seen a more dangerous threat to democracy than the invasion of the Capitol,” Garland said, calling the attack an “attempt to interfere with a fundamental element of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power.” The attorney general went on to say that “there has to be a hierarchy of things that we prioritize. This would be the one we’d prioritize.”
In 1995, Garland investigated the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City by white supremacists, an attack that killed 168 people, including 19 children. The bombing came at a time when militants were galvanized by violent encounters with federal authorities in Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
The threat of domestic terrorism receded in the public imagination after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia and other nations. But as that threat has diminished in recent years, militant white nationalism has returned as a top concern.
“The horror of domestic violent extremism is still with us,” Garland said in his opening remarks, discussing his work on the Oklahoma City bombing and the Unabomber case. He noted that encrypted internet messaging and the increased availability and sophistication of “lethal weaponry” make the threat of domestic terror greater than it has ever been.
Some of the Trump administration’s own top advisers came to the same conclusions. Last fall, the FBI warned about extremists planning violent actions to coincide with November’s presidential election. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security tried to get Trump to pay attention to white nationalist groups, some of which expressed open affinity for him and his political movement.
Trump infamously told one such group, the Proud Boys, to “stand back and stand by” during a presidential debate when a moderator confronted him on the topic. But instead of taking meaningful steps to address the white supremacist threat, Trump urged officials in his administration to focus on antifa, a loosely organized network of leftist radicals that is not widely considered a threat to national security.
Republicans continue to insist that antifa and Black Lives Matter are as great a threat to national security as white supremacy, though research has shown that most of last summer’s Black Lives Matter-inspired protests were peaceful. While some violence and looting did occur, intense media coverage — in particular by conservative outlets like Fox News — may have provided a distorted image of those protests.
That strategy was evident on Wednesday, with Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., wondering if what he called last summer’s “rioting and pilfering” should have been subject to federal prosecution. Garland noted that violence and destruction of property were, in fact, crimes — but not necessarily ones deserving scrutiny from the Department of Justice.
Testifying alongside Garland was Alejandro Mayorkas, who heads the Department of Homeland Security. Republicans questioned him intensely about the situation on the border with Mexico, in what appeared to be another attempt to turn the hearing away from Jan. 6.
“The foreign threats persist,” Mayorkas said at one point. “It’s not as though they have disappeared. But the threat landscape is always evolving.” Much like Garland, he plainly sees that evolution favoring the continued emergence of homegrown terrorists with white nationalist ties.
Palestinians observe the site after Israeli air strikes collapsed a fourteen-story Palestinian building in Gaza City. (photo: Mustafa Hassona/Getty)
On Palestine, the Media Is Allergic to the Truth
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin
Marcetic writes: "Once again, the media are trying to depict the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians as a round of meaningless violence from 'both sides' of an equally matched contest - the reality on the ground be damned."
here are two ways you could report on the bloody conflict unfolding right now in Israel and Palestine.
One would be to put every new headline and story, whether that’s about Hamas’s rocket attacks or Israel’s wildly disproportionate airstrikes, in context.
That would mean explaining that the rockets came in the wake of a series of outrageous and criminal Israeli provocations in occupied East Jerusalem: a series of violent police raids on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam during its holiest month, that have damaged the sacred structure and injured hundreds, including worshippers; that Israeli forces were attacking Palestinians who were occupying Aqsa both to pray and to protect it from bands of far-right Israeli extremists who have been marching through East Jerusalem, attacking Palestinians, and trying to break into the compound; and that all of this sits in the shadow of protests against Israel’s most recent attempt to steal land from Palestinians in the city, and the ramping up of Israel’s theft of Palestinian land more broadly under Trump.
While you’re at it, you might at least make clear that the Israeli attacks on Gaza have been far more vicious and deadly than the rockets they’re supposedly “retaliating” against, having killed forty-three people so far, including thirteen children, and leveled an entire residential building. You might make clear that Hamas’s rockets are, owing to their own cheapness and Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, at this point closer to the lashing-out-in-impotent-frustration part of the spectrum (which, of course, is not to say they don’t do damage or occasionally take lives — they’ve killed six Israelis thus far). All of this would help people understand why what they’re seeing unfold on their screens is happening, and what might be done to stop it.
Or there’s the more traditional way of reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict in Western media. That way involves boiling systemic injustice down to nondescript “rising tensions,” describing state violence and resistance to it as nebulous “clashes,” subtly presenting Israeli and Palestinian violence as roughly equivalent in scale and moral propriety, and generally making it impossible for casual consumers of news to do anything but throw their hands up in frustration and ask: “When will they learn to live together in peace?”
At the time of this writing, the second option is, yet again, the approach most mainstream US media has taken to reporting on the latest litany of Israeli government crimes and the Palestinian response to them. Back is the ever-present and much derided overreliance on “clash” to describe the violence, helpfully clouding some of those basic details reporters are, in theory, supposed to illuminate for readers: who did what to whom, for instance, and how it all started.
As media critics have pointed out for years, if you came in with little to no idea of what was going on and simply surveyed the headlines from the past few days about “clashes” between Israeli forces and Palestinians, you’d never know Palestinians were protesting an Israeli land grab. Nor would you know the “clashes” were happening because Israeli police had decided to attack Palestinian worshippers in one of Islam’s holiest sites. In fact, in one particularly egregious case, you might have been completely misled in the opposite direction, with the New York Post attributing to Hamas the killings Israel had carried out on Palestinians, who were in turn recast as Israelis (the Post later corrected the headline).
While the Post’s error here was a unique low point, news headlines consistently failed to provide readers with context for what was going on, and even actively obscured it. “Hamas fires rockets into Israel as tensions in Jerusalem boil over,” was a typical headline, from NBC. “Jerusalem violence leads to rockets, air strikes,” went another from Reuters. Such headlines not only strip the events of human agency and present Israeli state repression as more akin to a natural disaster — whose “violence”? “Tensions” from what? — but also present the vastly lopsided attacks from Israeli forces and Hamas as equal and proportionate.
This latter point was a theme of numerous headlines, for many people the only part of these stories they’ll actually read and absorb. “Israel Hits Gaza With Airstrike After Hamas Rocket Attacks,” went one Yahoo! News headline. “Gaza militants, Israel trade new rocket fire and airstrikes,” went a different Associated Press one, using a widely adopted construction. “Israel, Hamas escalate heavy fighting with no end in sight,” ABC told its readers. “Israel to ramp up deadly airstrikes on Gaza as rockets rain down and deaths mount on both sides,” went the CBS attempt.
It’s impossible to single any party out for blame here — after all, these appear to be simply two evenly matched foes trading blows, though for what reason, no one can say. Sometimes, it’s not even possible to work out who was responsible for which deaths or how many, as in this Axios headline (“Dozens dead as Israel and Hamas intensify aerial bombardments”), or this NBC one (“33 killed in Israeli airstrikes, Hamas rocket attacks as unrest spreads beyond Jerusalem”).
What might a good headline look like? You could do worse than this example from the Havana Times, an online magazine written by Cuban contributors and edited from Nicaragua: “Israeli Forces Attack Palestinians Protesting Expulsions” — six words that accurately sum up and put in context the events mainstream reporting tends to hazily describe as “clashes” and “tensions,” albeit at the price of abandoning the shrugging attempt at neutrality mainstream news is abiding by.
Sometimes a lamentable headline has been balanced out by the body of the report itself. Such was the case with the Financial Times’ “Hamas rocket attacks provoke Israeli retaliation in Gaza,” which, upon clicking through that headline, nonetheless did a decent job putting the fighting in context and explaining its causes without equivocating. But often, the flaws in the headlines have carried over into the reporting proper.
In its report, for instance, ABC only mentions the thirty-five Palestinians that Israel killed in its blitz on Gaza last, well after leading with Israel’s claim of “killing at least three militants,” and after first noting the Israeli death toll of five. We don’t learn the cause of the current conflict until halfway through, when we’re briskly informed that “critics say [emphasis mine] heavy-handed Israeli police measures in and around Jerusalem’s Old City helped stoke nightly unrest,” as well as about the attempt to evict Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem.
Over at NBC, the lede — meant to sum up the report for the reader by condensing it to its most important points — tells us that “Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip fired rockets toward Jerusalem on Monday in a major escalation after hundreds of Palestinians were hurt during earlier clashes with Israeli forces.” In other words, Hamas militants fired rockets in what was a major escalation; but Palestinians were hurt in clashes (How and by who? Perhaps they all tripped), in an act that presumably wasn’t a major escalation, despite it involving sacrilegious police attacks that arguably constitute a war crime.
Particularly comical was the lede in this CNN piece: “Tensions between Israelis and Palestinians have escalated further on Tuesday as Palestinian militants in Gaza fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, which in turn ramped up airstrikes on the coastal enclave.” Besides the vague reference to “tensions,” notice that the rocket attacks are both attributed to someone (Hamas) and quantified (hundreds), while Israel’s airstrikes are neither. Notice, too, that Israel’s airstrikes are cast as almost natural phenomena, “ramped up” — or in other words, caused — by the Palestinians themselves.
Special mention has to be made of the paper of record. One New York Times piece on the police raids on the Aqsa compound had its abstract serially edited, which at one point morphed from
The police entered the compound and fired rubber-tipped bullets. Anger was already building in response to the looming expulsion of several Palestinians from their homes in the city…
to the substantially worse and misleading
Gaza militants fired rockets toward Jerusalem and the Israeli police fought with Palestinian protesters in an escalation of violence after a week of increasing tensions.
A later, separate piece on the Israeli airstrikes on Gaza was substantially edited after the fact, some of the changes positive, some less so. (The original version doesn’t appear to have been archived anywhere, but was copied and pasted here).
Gone are the two paragraphs noting that the “immediate trigger” for the fighting was the police raid on the Aqsa compound, but added in is a reference to the attempt to evict Palestinian families from East Jerusalem. Less advisedly, so is a paragraph clarifying that “Israeli airstrikes aim for strategic targets” in contrast to Hamas’s deliberate targeting of population centers, a highly dubious assertion. And while a paragraph describing the Israeli police raids is gone, three paragraphs describing how “Palestinians rampaged” in Israeli cities have been left in.
This is just a small sampling. One could spend dozens of hours and thousands of words going through the various reports produced on these same events and find countless more similar examples.
By bending over backward to appear fair and neutral, or at least not too critical of Israel, mainstream news is forced to serially violate some of the most basic no-no’s of journalistic writing and structure. The result is that its audience is delivered a confusing and even misleading picture of the Israel-Palestine conflict that reinforces what many of them already feel after years of being bombarded with similarly framed mainstream reporting: it’s all too complicated for a normal person to get their head around, so why bother?
But the reality is not all that complicated. Hamas’s rockets and Palestinians protesting, throwing rocks, or even rioting: these are all desperate responses to sustained, systematic, and brutal repression and land theft by Israel that has been going on for decades, and has sharply escalated over the last decade in particular. It is the “language of the unheard,” as Martin Luther King called the African-American riots of the 1960s, which, like their counterparts last year and in the decades between, are a similar howl of frustration from those who have been relentlessly dispossessed and brutalized with seemingly no recourse.
There are ways of putting an end to such things, whether rocket attacks or property destruction from rioters. But to do that requires first accurately describing the injustices that drive them.
An area of forest the size of France has regrown around the world over the past 20 years. (photo: iStock)
Forests the Size of France Regrown Since 2000, Study Suggests
Helen Briggs, BBC News
Briggs writes: "An area of forest the size of France has regrown naturally across the world in the last 20 years, a study suggests."
The restored forests have the potential to soak up the equivalent of 5.9 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide - more than the annual emissions of the US, according to conservation groups.
A team led by WWF used satellite data to build a map of regenerated forests.
Forest regeneration involves restoring natural woodland through little or no intervention.
This ranges from doing nothing at all to planting native trees, fencing off livestock or removing invasive plants.
William Baldwin-Cantello of WWF said natural forest regeneration is often "cheaper, richer in carbon and better for biodiversity than actively planted forests".
But he said regeneration cannot be taken for granted - "to avoid dangerous climate change we must both halt deforestation and restore natural forests".
"Deforestation still claims millions of hectares every year, vastly more than is regenerated," Mr Baldwin-Cantello said.
"To realise the potential of forests as a climate solution, we need support for regeneration in climate delivery plans and must tackle the drivers of deforestation, which in the UK means strong domestic laws to prevent our food causing deforestation overseas."
The Atlantic Forest in Brazil gives reason for hope, the study said, with an area roughly the size of the Netherlands having regrown since 2000.
In the boreal forests of northern Mongolia, 1.2 million hectares of forest have regenerated in the last 20 years, while other regeneration hotspots include central Africa and the boreal forests of Canada.
But the researchers warned that forests across the world face "significant threats".
Despite "encouraging signs" with forests along Brazil's Atlantic coast, deforestation is such that the forested area needs to more than double to reach the minimal threshold for conservation, they said.
The project is a joint venture between WWF, BirdLife International and WCS, who are calling on other experts to help validate and refine their map, which they regard as "an exploratory effort".
One of the simplest ways to remove carbon dioxide from the air is to plant trees. But scientists say the right trees must be planted in the right place if they are to be effective at reducing carbon emissions.
