technocrit

In this News Brief we detail how The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN took a pathological liar with a clear ideological agenda at his word he's worried about "waste" for the sole reason he’s rich and powerful.

In this inauguration coverage recap we detail how elite #resistance to Trump is MIA, how grassroots liberals and leftists are working behind the scenes anyway to fight back and why Trump and the billionaires who back him are now, more than ever, simply Too Big To Fail.

"Clinton seeks common ground with Republicans," reported the Associated Press in 1994. "Obama hosts dinner, urges bipartisanship," announced the AP again, in 2009. "Resist Trump? On Immigration, Top Democrats See Room for Compromise," stated The New York Times in late 2024.

For decades, we’ve heard Democratic policymakers extol the virtues of working with Republicans. Through a series of stock terms, e.g. bipartisanship, finding common ground, reaching across the aisle, compromising, they tout their willingness to set aside their political differences with Republicans in order to stop quibbling, quit stalling, work pragmatically, and––the holiest of the holies––Get Things Done.

This all might sound well and good; surely an active government is better than an idle, incapacitated one. But which things, exactly, are getting done? Why is it that the act of making decisions or passing legislation is deemed more important to elected officials than the actual content of those decisions and legislation? And how does an incurious, largely compliant media contribute to the harms of a Democratic party that, in its embrace of Republican ideology under the seeming noble banner of "bipartisanship" continues to move further to the right on key issues?

On this episode, we dissect the popular appeal for bipartisanship, examine how folksy calls for “Washington” to “work together” more often than not serve to promote war, austerity, anti-LBGTQ policies and crackdown on vulnerable migrants, and show how this seemingly high minded formulation serves to push Republicans further right and launder the Democrats’ increasingly conservative political agenda.

Our guest is journalist and author Malaika Jabali.

In this News Brief we detail how The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN took a pathological liar with a clear ideological agenda at his word he's worried about "waste" for the sole reason he’s rich and powerful.

... Currently, the public appears broadly supportive of mass deportations—that is, if you ask them directly and provide no further details. However, once more details are given, support for mass deportations declines.

One poll from about a month ago gauged support for the following policy: “Detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants.” It found 52% of Americans in favor and 45% opposed. But with the addendum “even if it means businesses will face worker shortages,” the result changed to 46% in favor, 51% opposed. The effect of including other information about the negative economic effects of mass deportations was not tested, but it seems highly probable that other information—like the potential for a hit to GDP or a spike in inflation—would similarly turn Americans against mass deportation policy.

The problem is, the details about the potentially disastrous economic effects of mass deportations are likely known by only a small minority of the population. If corporate media outlets took their job seriously, they would make those details very well known. That could have major political effects, and could help turn the tides against extremist immigration policies.

Failing to inform the public likewise has major political effects. Passivity means greater leeway for Trump and his backers to shape public opinion, with their claims perhaps continuing to go unchallenged by outlets like Politico. Elon Musk, for one, is known as a prolific propagator of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, and has frequently used X to amplify his message in the past. If corporate media fail to confront such misinformation, they effectively acquiesce to its corruption of the popular consciousness.

Ultimately, it’s up to corporate media to make a decision about what journalism means to them. They can’t escape making a decision with significant political consequences—political consequences are coming no matter what. But they can decide whether they care more about not appearing political to Trump supporters, or about protecting millions of people—and the health of the US economy.

The Gaza government’s Detainee Media Office has issued a statement slamming what it called "international double standards" in media treatment of Palestinian prisoners freed by Israel as opposed to three Israeli captives released by Hamas in a prisoner exchange on Saturday.

Media reports on Saturday focused on the gaunt and emaciated condition of the three released captives – Eli Sharabi, 52, Eli Levy, 34, and Ohad Ben-Ami, 58.

The Israeli government said that their treatment by Hamas was "a crime against humanity", with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is himself wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, threatening that their condition would “not pass without a response”.

The Israeli health ministry said that the released captives had suffered severe malnutrition.

However, the Detainee Media Office pointed out that dozens of Palestinian detainees had died as a result of malnutrition, abuse, and medical neglect in Israeli prisons without any international condemnation or media coverage, and said that this was an example of "double standards in dealing with the prisoner issue".

It said that hundreds of released Palestinian prisoners had left Israeli prisons with permanent injuries, "broken psychologically and physically" after years of abuse and torture, without the international community taking any notice.

The Detainee Media Office said that the emaciated condition of the released Israeli captives was due to Israel’s siege and its restrictions on the entry of food into the Gaza Strip, which have affected the population of the territory as a whole, causing a humanitarian catastrophe.

"Where was the outcry when [Israeli] prison cells turned into human slaughterhouses? Where was the emergency when Palestinian detainees came out of prison as shadows of their former selves, after being deprived of food, medicine, and their most basic human rights?"

While the Israeli captives released on Saturday appeared emaciated and gaunt, leading to outcry in Israel, captives released previously have appeared in better health, with no signs of malnutrition.

By contrast, Palestinians previously released by Israel have shown visible signs of starvation and severe mental and physical trauma.

183 Palestinian prisoners were released to Gaza and the West Bank in Saturday’s exchange, with at least seven being rushed to hospital as soon as they were released due to mistreatment in Israeli detention facilities.

Israel’s extreme right-wing Public Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has previously boasted about the "abominable" and "squalid" conditions Palestinian prisoners were kept in in Israel, saying that he had reduced food and shower times for prisoners.

Israeli right wing figures have also defended soldiers who brutally raped Palestinian detainees at the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility.

While hundreds of Palestinian prisoners have been released in exchanges with Hamas following the Gaza ceasefire, there are still over 10,000 in Israeli jails, including hundreds of children and hundreds held without charge or trial in administrative detention.

... over the course of Israel’s genocide, Western media have actively avoided investigating—and even downplayed—the true human costs of the war by eagerly parroting Israeli officials who cast doubt on the claims of the Gaza Health Ministry. Despite those supposed doubts, Western media default to citing the health ministry tally in day-to-day coverage of the war, while making little mention of the long-held consensus among health experts that far more Palestinians were dying than were being recorded (New York Times, 12/27/24; CNN, 8/16/24).

The downplaying can be seen in Western media’s repeated refrain that the health ministry is “Hamas-run” or “Hamas-controlled” (BBC, 12/3/23; New York Times, 10/19/23; CNN, 12/4/23) and therefore not to be trusted. More than adding doubt, labeling civilian infrastructure as “Hamas-controlled” puts Palestinians in harm’s way. Israel’s desire to paint anything Palestinian as Hamas is “an implicit association of Palestinians with evil, essentially making Palestinian lives dispensable,” writes Noora Said in Mondoweiss (12/29/23).

It stretches the mind to imagine a more pressing task for journalism than accurately reporting on an unfolding genocide. For US audiences, whose tax dollars are bankrolling the slaughter, news outlets should be making every effort to help them appreciate the full consequences of their government’s foreign policy.

That’s undoubtedly a difficult job. The sheer scale of destruction in Gaza, and its status as an open-air death camp walled off from the rest of the world, means outsiders don’t have the ability to get a complete picture of the devastation. That would require an exhaustive cross-referencing of Gaza Health Ministry documents and (Israeli-controlled) population registers, as well as a broad collection of witness testimonies that international observers just don’t have unfettered access to. But major Western media outlets need to ask themselves a question similar to what the International Court of Justice asked in January 2024: “What’s plausible?”

In addition to the most recent direct death estimate, a letter in the Lancet (7/20/24) by public health researchers took a stab at answering the broader question of all attributable deaths last July. Taking into account historical wartime data, the researchers suggested that for each death directly caused by Israeli weaponry, there could be four or more indirect deaths. “It is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza,” they wrote.

In October, 99 American medical practitioners who served in Gaza wrote a letter to then-President Joe Biden, estimating that at least 118,908 Palestinian had already been killed, directly or indirectly, by Israel. The physicians used a variety of methods, including a calculation of the minimum number of deaths likely to result from the number of civilians classified as facing catastrophic and emergency-level starvation.

Ideally, the vast resources of an outlet like the Times could be used to begin to corroborate these estimates from public health and medical researchers. At the very least, the fact that researchers estimate the true scale of death in Gaza to be three or more times the official tally should bear constant repetition in paragraphs that add context to daily news stories on the topic.

Sana Saeed, a leading critic of Western media’s coverage of Israel’s genocide, noted: "If your article can include a line about how the IDF denies yet another war crime that it’s very clearly committed, then your article can include how leading health studies are estimating that the number of slaughtered Palestinians exceeds 100,000."...

... over the course of Israel’s genocide, Western media have actively avoided investigating—and even downplayed—the true human costs of the war by eagerly parroting Israeli officials who cast doubt on the claims of the Gaza Health Ministry. Despite those supposed doubts, Western media default to citing the health ministry tally in day-to-day coverage of the war, while making little mention of the long-held consensus among health experts that far more Palestinians were dying than were being recorded (New York Times, 12/27/24; CNN, 8/16/24).

The downplaying can be seen in Western media’s repeated refrain that the health ministry is “Hamas-run” or “Hamas-controlled” (BBC, 12/3/23; New York Times, 10/19/23; CNN, 12/4/23) and therefore not to be trusted. More than adding doubt, labeling civilian infrastructure as “Hamas-controlled” puts Palestinians in harm’s way. Israel’s desire to paint anything Palestinian as Hamas is “an implicit association of Palestinians with evil, essentially making Palestinian lives dispensable,” writes Noora Said in Mondoweiss (12/29/23).

It stretches the mind to imagine a more pressing task for journalism than accurately reporting on an unfolding genocide. For US audiences, whose tax dollars are bankrolling the slaughter, news outlets should be making every effort to help them appreciate the full consequences of their government’s foreign policy.

That’s undoubtedly a difficult job. The sheer scale of destruction in Gaza, and its status as an open-air death camp walled off from the rest of the world, means outsiders don’t have the ability to get a complete picture of the devastation. That would require an exhaustive cross-referencing of Gaza Health Ministry documents and (Israeli-controlled) population registers, as well as a broad collection of witness testimonies that international observers just don’t have unfettered access to. But major Western media outlets need to ask themselves a question similar to what the International Court of Justice asked in January 2024: “What’s plausible?”

In addition to the most recent direct death estimate, a letter in the Lancet (7/20/24) by public health researchers took a stab at answering the broader question of all attributable deaths last July. Taking into account historical wartime data, the researchers suggested that for each death directly caused by Israeli weaponry, there could be four or more indirect deaths. “It is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza,” they wrote.

In October, 99 American medical practitioners who served in Gaza wrote a letter to then-President Joe Biden, estimating that at least 118,908 Palestinian had already been killed, directly or indirectly, by Israel. The physicians used a variety of methods, including a calculation of the minimum number of deaths likely to result from the number of civilians classified as facing catastrophic and emergency-level starvation.

Ideally, the vast resources of an outlet like the Times could be used to begin to corroborate these estimates from public health and medical researchers. At the very least, the fact that researchers estimate the true scale of death in Gaza to be three or more times the official tally should bear constant repetition in paragraphs that add context to daily news stories on the topic.

Sana Saeed, a leading critic of Western media’s coverage of Israel’s genocide, noted: "If your article can include a line about how the IDF denies yet another war crime that it’s very clearly committed, then your article can include how leading health studies are estimating that the number of slaughtered Palestinians exceeds 100,000."...

As Musk and Trump continue to behave like kings, it’s incumbent upon news media to not just report on their actions, but put them in the proper context for the public to understand the threat level they represent; otherwise, we can’t respond appropriately.

That kind of reporting takes real bravery in the kind of moment we are in: Musk has already (falsely) called it a crime to reveal the names of those working for him at the agencies DOGE is targeting, which Wired and others have done. The Trump-installed DC attorney general has obsequiously promised Musk to go after those who identify his underlings—and to prosecute “anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people”.

While that might sound laughable, media outlets have already paid Trump handsome settlements to settle lawsuits that should have been seen as similarly laughable. When prominent news outlets won’t summon the courage to vigorously oppose this descent into autocracy, they are accessories to the coup. We must demand better from them, and support the outlets and journalists doing the critical work we as citizens require to defend our democracy.

As Musk and Trump continue to behave like kings, it’s incumbent upon news media to not just report on their actions, but put them in the proper context for the public to understand the threat level they represent; otherwise, we can’t respond appropriately.

That kind of reporting takes real bravery in the kind of moment we are in: Musk has already (falsely) called it a crime to reveal the names of those working for him at the agencies DOGE is targeting, which Wired and others have done. The Trump-installed DC attorney general has obsequiously promised Musk to go after those who identify his underlings—and to prosecute “anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people”.

While that might sound laughable, media outlets have already paid Trump handsome settlements to settle lawsuits that should have been seen as similarly laughable. When prominent news outlets won’t summon the courage to vigorously oppose this descent into autocracy, they are accessories to the coup. We must demand better from them, and support the outlets and journalists doing the critical work we as citizens require to defend our democracy.