Wall Street Journal (4/16/26): “Israel’s military wants to retain its hold on a deep security buffer zone inside southern Lebanon in the event of a cease-fire with Hezbollah militants.”

Since October 2023, Israel has occupied vast stretches of territory in Gaza, Syria and, most recently, Lebanon. Corporate media have been reluctant to use clear, direct language to characterize US-backed Israeli land grabs in each of these places, preferring to describe Israel’s policies with euphemistic terminology.

“Buffer” is chief among these. For instance, a Wall Street Journal article (4/9/26) told readers that “Israeli forces now hold buffer zones inside Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.”

Merriam-Webster defines a “buffer zone” as “a neutral area separating conflicting forces.” The UN defines it as “neutral space created by the withdrawal of hostile parties or a demilitarized zone.”

The Journal‘s uncritical use of the term makes it sound as if these Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian lands are demilitarized zones, when in reality they have been taken over by a belligerent foreign army that intends to remain for the long term.

‘Setting up a buffer zone’

The Washington Post (4/12/26) reports that “Israel is continuing military operations in south Lebanon, where it says a bigger buffer zone is needed to prevent strikes by Hezbollah on northern Israel.” Hezbollah’s missiles have a range of at least 300 kilometers (186 miles), which implies a “buffer zone” larger than all of Lebanon.

A Boston Globe piece (4/5/26) noted that

Israel has said even after the war with Hezbollah, it plans to occupy part of southern Lebanon, setting up a buffer zone inside the area and keeping security control over the territory. Some analysts say that the move could lead to the permanent displacement of communities from the region.

“Setting up” is part of the same obfuscatory process as “buffer zone.” Amnesty International’s Kristine Beckerle (3/6/26) offered this account of the evacuation orders Israel issued to over 100 villages and towns in Lebanon’s south and east, and the entirety of Beirut’s southern suburbs, key components of how Israel has gone about “setting up a buffer zone”:

The sweeping evacuation orders have sown panic and terror, displaced hundreds of thousands of people and fueled yet another humanitarian catastrophe for a population already exhausted and reeling from multiple crises.

And it’s not just “some analysts” who say that creating this “buffer” could lead to “permanent displacement.” Israeli Defense minister Israel Katz (BBC, 3/31/26) said that the state plans to maintain control over Lebanon south of the Litani River, a 19-mile stretch of territory, even after Israel’s current war on the country ends. Katz added that Israel will demolish “all houses” in Lebanese villages near the Lebanon/Israel armistice line, a move that would make the displacement of the residents of those houses seem awfully permanent. That’s not a “buffer zone”—that’s occupation.

A Washington Post report (4/12/26) noted that Israel was “continuing military operations in south Lebanon, where it says a bigger buffer zone is needed to prevent strikes by Hezbollah on northern Israel.” The article amplified Israel’s benign description of its policies in Lebanon without offering anything to contradict this description.

Another Post report (4/20/26) said “the Israeli military published a map Sunday delineating a buffer zone in southern Lebanon that it called a ‘forward defense line.’” By the time this article was published, it was clear that Katz’s threats had been actualized. A team of UN experts described Israeli actions in Lebanon thusly:

The issuance of blanket evacuation orders, combined with the destruction of urban and village housing that displaced persons would have returned to, is consistent with the pattern of domicide that was initiated during the genocide in Gaza.

“Delineating a buffer zone” sounds like part of a peace-making process, but what the UN described were acts of war.

‘Security zone’

CNN (3/31/26): “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced another expansion of the military buffer zone inside Lebanon to ‘finally thwart the threat of invasion and to push the anti-missile threat away from our border.’” 

“Security zone” is another euphemism. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to live somewhere secure? The trouble is that the “security” being created isn’t for the zone’s inhabitants. CNN anchor Lynda Kinkade (4/2/26) told viewers:

The United Nations says more than a million people, that’s about 20% of Lebanon’s population, have now been displaced. Many of them won’t be able to return home right away, even after the war, because Israel plans to set up a security zone in much of the south of Lebanon.

As Human Rights Watch (3/23/26) noted, those displaced people “have sought refuge with friends and relatives or in government-run shelters, or have simply set up camp along the coastline of Beirut, itself the site of a recent Israeli strike.”

In sum, Israeli aggression drove Lebanese people from the south of the country, causing some to camp on a beach that Israel then bombed, and CNN blithely adopted Israel’s language to sanitize it as “set[ting] up a security zone.”

A front-page Chicago Tribune piece (4/17/26) read:

Netanyahu said Israeli troops will stay in an expanded security zone in southern Lebanon “much stronger, more extensive and more continuous than before.”

“That is where we are, and we are not leaving,” he said.

The article offered no counter to Netanyahu’s characterization, nor did it put the term “security zone” in quotation marks. After a two-paragraph interval, the authors wrote, “It’s unclear when the 1 million people displaced by the war will be able to safely return.”

But the million people weren’t simply “displaced by the war.” Nor were they displaced, as in CNN‘s formulation, by some unidentified force. They were displaced by Israel’s US-backed military. Without such obscurantism, the fiction that Israel is simply “setting up a security zone” would fall apart.

Ethnic cleansing erased

In the New York Times (4/1/26), rather than carrying out ethnic cleansing, Israel is issuing “evacuation guidance.”

Such accounts also omit a rather important facet of what Israel has done in its war on Lebanon, which is to target Lebanon’s Shia Muslims. As Human Rights Watch (3/23/26) pointed out:

On March 16, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said, “Shiite residents of southern Lebanon who have evacuated…will not return to their homes south of the Litani area until the safety of Israel’s northern residents is guaranteed.” Through this lens, the displacement of the Shia population looks less like a temporary military necessity and more like a move to permanently displace the civilian population based on their religion.

“Permanently displac[ing] the civilian population based on their religion” is another way of saying “ethnic cleansing,” a point raised by the UN experts (4/15/26) who condemned Israel’s forced displacements as war crimes and crimes against humanity .

BBC Verify (4/16/26) said that satellite and video images they obtained showed that “towns and villages in southern Lebanon are being leveled by Israeli demolitions.” The outlet quoted professor Ben Saul, UN Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights:

In places the pattern of attacks appears aimed to “cleanse” predominantly [Shia] villages and populations from the south, collectively punishing civilian populations within which Hezbollah fighters may be mingled.

A New York Times article (4/1/26) headlined “Israel’s Message to a Broad Swath of Lebanon: Shiites Must Go” painted a similar picture. The paper reported:

In private calls to local leaders across southern Lebanon, Israeli military officials have assured several Christian and Druse communities that they could remain in the evacuation zone. They have pressed them, however, to force out any Lebanese from neighboring Shiite Muslim communities who have sought refuge among them as Israeli bombardments flatten Shiite towns, according to local Christian, Druse and Shiite leaders who spoke to the New York Times. The Shiites make up the majority of southern Lebanon.

Local leaders took the messages as a clear signal: Israel is trying to force out one group in the south—Shiites, who are from the same sect as Hezbollah.

That’s a textbook case of ethnic cleansing—down to the injunction against giving “refuge” to Shia Anne Franks—but the Times inexplicably falls short of using the term.

They are hardly the only corporate media outlet with this failing. I used the media aggregator Factiva to search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and CNN for coverage that describes Israeli policy in Lebanon as “ethnic cleansing.” I looked at material published since April 15, the day the UN officials used that term. None of the coverage in that period gave voice to the perspective that Israeli actions in Lebanon constitute ethnic cleansing, even though a search that pairs “Lebanon” and “Israel” returns nearly 1,800 results.

It’s not only the many UN experts who say that Israel is carrying out an ethnic cleansing in Lebanon. That’s the position of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and independent journalists based in the region, like Qassam Muaddi (Mondoweiss, 4/4/26) and Lylla Younes (Drop Site, 4/2/26). But it’s a view that’s subject to de facto censorship in the corporate media.

Gaza’s ‘Yellow Line’

“Buffer zone” appears to be AP‘s language (2/2/24), not the Israeli government’s, as “Israel’s military declined to answer whether it is carving out a buffer zone when asked by the AP.”

Similar rhetorical sleights of hand are at work in coverage of Gaza.

The October 2025 Israel/Hamas ceasefire required Israel to withdraw its troops beyond a boundary in Gaza called the “Yellow Line.” Under the agreement, Israel’s presence in Gaza is supposed to be temporary, but Israeli military chief Eyal Zamir called the Yellow Line “a new border” on which the Israeli military “will remain”; this location gives Israel control of most of Gaza, including the majority of its agricultural land as well as its border with Egypt (Guardian, 12/8/25).

In the same vein, Katz (Ynet, 12/25/25) said that “Israel will never leave Gaza territory. There will be a security strip surrounding inside Gaza to protect the settlements.”

Israel has frequently moved the yellow blocks demarcating the line deeper into Gaza, producing what the UN called “‘new waves’ of displacement.” By January 2026, 16 Israeli occupation forces’ positions had been moved to take control of more Palestinian land (BBC, 1/15/26).

Katz (BBC, 1/15/26) also said that anyone who crossed the Yellow Line would be “met with fire.” Because of the constantly shifting line, many of Gaza’s residents are “struggling to know” where what Israeli occupation forces call a “dangerous combat zone” begins, where they might be killed without warning.

As of late April, Israel had killed over 700 Palestinians during the supposed “ceasefire,” 269 of whom were shot near the Yellow Line, more than 100 of whom were children (Guardian, 4/22/26). That Israel’s stated policy is to remain in the Gaza Strip, and to shoot Palestinians who approach the ever-shifting Yellow Line, suggests de facto Israeli annexation of the majority of Gaza (Al-Shabaka, 4/21/26; Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, 4/16/26).

Nevertheless, coverage such as that from Associated Press (1/18/26) and Reuters (4/29/26) referred to a “buffer” in Gaza, even as these sources report on aggressive Israeli violence and land theft.

Corporate media have tended to avoid language like “annexation” or even “occupation” to describe Israeli policy in the “Yellow Line.” I used Factiva to search Gaza coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Associated Press and Reuters from the beginning of the year through the time of writing on May 12. The outlets ran a combined total of 4,863 pieces that refer to Gaza, but none engaged with the idea that Israel is attempting to annex part of the Strip.

Of these pieces, 853 (less than 18%) included variations on the term “occupied,” such as “occupation” or “occupying forces.”

Erasing occupation in Syria

Guardian (12/18/24): “Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israeli troops will occupy a recently seized buffer zone in Syria for the foreseeable future.”

Discursive parallels in Syria coverage are hard to miss.

Israel has illegally occupied and settled Syria’s Golan Heights since 1967, declaring it had annexed the nearly 500-square mile territory in 1981, in violation of international law. Since the Assad government fell in December 2024, Israel has “effectively taken control” of several southern Syrian towns, “in a widening military occupation that shows no sign of reversing” (+972, 12/23/25). Notably, Israel took Syria’s strategically significant Mount Hermon immediately after the change of regime (CNN, 12/17/24).

To do so, Israel launched airstrikes throughout Syria, invading with ground troops, occupying territory in violation of the 1974 Israel/Syria disengagement deal, “confiscating land and homes, killing farmers,” sowing sectarian discord and “expanding [Israeli] road networks and other communications infrastructure” (+972, 4/10/25).

By late 2025, the Israeli army had “set up seven or eight permanent bases” (Le Monde, 11/10/25) in Syria. Israel now occupies 177 square miles more Syrian territory than it did when the Assad government was in power (Truthout, 4/28/26).

Over the period of this land grab, outlets like CNN (3/13/26) and Reuters (4/19/26) have called the Israeli-held territories in Syria a “buffer,” while the New York Times (7/15/25) and Reuters (8/25/25) have labelled them a “security zone.”

I used Factiva to search CNN, New York Times and Reuters coverage of Syria and Israel since the Assad government’s overthrow, and there were 3,127 results. When I added some version of “occupation,” “occupied” and “occupying,” I got only 427 hits, or 14% of the results.

To see how much of the coverage that includes references to occupation mentions not only the long-standing occupation of the Golan Heights, but also Israel’s more recent usurpations of Syrian land, I expanded the search terms to include variations on the phrase “southern Syria.” I got 43 results, or 1% of all articles with the words “Syria” and “Israel.” In other words, 99% of the material that refers to both Syria and Israel failed to clearly state that Israel has used the post-Assad period to dramatically expand its military occupation of the southern portion of the country.

US corporate media consistently muddy Israeli expansionism in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon through a combination of abstruse language and linguistic balms like “buffer zone” and “security zone.” That doesn’t ensure that the US populace will continue to allow their government to go on underwriting such crimes, but obscuring occupation with euphemisms makes it harder for readers to see that that’s what’s happening.

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

FIFA, the governing body of association football, concocted a “FIFA Peace Prize”—described as recognizing “individuals for exceptional contributions to peace and unity”—in order to award it to Donald Trump. Alongside revelations of deep-seated corruption—collusion, bribery—involving official bodies and executives, and now ticket prices for this year’s World Cup being called not just excessive but “extortionate,” you might say more folks are “following” football (or soccer) these days, but not necessarily as fans.

OR Books (2026)

Sports has always been a big part of news media, but typically segregated into its own section on stats and personalities, ignoring the economic, social and environmental impacts sports have always had. Think about cities enticed into building new arenas with promises of jobs and commerce that never arrive. Or whole communities uprooted for temporary “Olympic Villages.”

Jules Boykoff has been following the relationships of sport and society for years now; he’s a former professional soccer player himself, as well as a critic and writer, now teaching political science at Pacific University. He’s author of a number of books, including What Are the Olympics For? (Bristol University Press, 2024).

He joins us to discuss his latest: Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing and the FIFA Greed Machine, out now from OR Books.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press.

Featured Image: Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok

The recently proposed budget from the Trump administration includes a $1.6 billion cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The reduction would eliminate NOAA climate, weather and ocean research labs; zero out grants aimed at improving rainfall and flood prediction; and cut the Integrated Ocean Observing System, which monitors what’s happening in the ocean, where hurricanes strengthen and where coastal flooding begins. This comes on top of the 2025 DOGE layoffs of some 880 people from the agency.

Some lawmakers are pushing back, either because they don’t think climate change is fake news, or they’re from flood-prone regions. But a detail being missed, as noted by Emily Atkin at Heated (5/7/26), is that while these cuts would substantially harm the agency’s work, the proposed “savings” of $1.6 billion is equivalent to the cost of 1.3 days of the war on Iran—which Popular Information estimated to have cost $72 billion in its first 60 days.

That figure is much higher than the one you will likely have heard in the news. The acting Pentagon comptroller put the figure at $25 billion when talking to Congress at the end of April, and he raised that number to $29 billion in widely covered hearings this week (USA Today, 5/12/26). CNN (4/29/26) said anonymous officials suggested the $25 billion figure was actually closer to $50 billion, once repairs to US bases in the region were included.

You’re likely to see lowball estimates of the true cost of the Iran war in corporate media (USA Today, 5/12/26). 

But Popular Information (5/6/26) did a cost estimate of the Iran War based on officials’ statements, military procurement and operations data, and reporting on deployments and armament use. It considered direct war costs—expenses for military operations, munitions and the like—but not indirect costs, including broader economic impacts, interest on the national debt and longer-term expenses like veterans’ care. It also corrected the flawed Pentagon method for tracking munition expenditures, which reflects historical costs rather than the much higher replenishment costs.

Harvard public policy expert Linda Bilmes (Fortune, 4/15/26) estimated that once indirect costs like lifetime disability benefits to US troops are included, the costs will run far higher: “I am certain we will spend $1 trillion for the Iran War.” 

You can find Popular Info‘s methodology on their Substack, and Bilmes’s detailed interview on Harvard’s website. But in the meantime, you can question lowball estimates of the costs of this illegal, reckless war.

Media Matters (5/4/26)

Janine Jackson: With our First Amendment rights under threat everywhere, it’s heartening to see folks pushing back, and that pushback having impact. But advocates sometimes seem to spend more time lamenting setbacks than understanding victories.

So let’s pay attention to this story: The Federal Trade Commission, weaponized along with so many nominally nonpartisan agencies in service of MAGA and Trumpism, launched a particular sort of legal attack on the group Media Matters because of a report they produced that rattled Elon Musk. Three years later, the FTC is throwing in the towel on that bullying with a legally binding settlement.

Media Matters president Angelo Carusone says the victory “shows the importance of holding power to account and the importance of fighting instead of folding.” He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Angelo Carusone.

Angelo Carusone: Thanks for having me.

JJ: Well, congratulations on the win, first of all. And thank you for fighting for it, because really it’s a win for free speech, and everybody who values that.

AC: Thank you.

JJ: Folks can get the detailed story, with all of the legal back-and-forths, on MediaMatters.org. But for those who might not have heard of it, I’ll ask you just to talk through the key events. What, first of all, was the report and the fallout that made Elon Musk himself initially threaten a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against you?

Media Matters (11/17/23)

AC: I’m glad you started there, because it is all connected. Back in the fall of 2023, we published some reports about ad adjacency for big advertisers and pro-Nazi content. And Elon Musk was very upset about that, and he didn’t just threaten, but ultimately initiated what he describes as “thermonuclear lawsuits” in Texas, in Singapore and Ireland.

But at the same time that that happened, Stephen Miller, who was not the deputy chief of staff at the time, because Trump wasn’t reelected, said publicly, in addition to your lawsuits, you should get Republican attorney generals to investigate Media Matters as well. And that’s what happened. They ginned up these investigations where Ken Paxton and Andrew Bailey in Missouri launched them.

And we sued to get injunctions against those investigations, and that was a novel theory that we had at the time. We got some new case law, some new precedents.

Reuters (6/2/25)

And it wasn’t just about protecting ourselves. We saw this new playbook emerging. So if you fast forward, one of the things that happened is we got new precedent, Ken Paxton appealed, he lost at the appellate court.

So now we’re in May of 2025, so Trump is back in office. The same week that the circuit court secured our victory against and shut down fully the other investigations, the FTC, Trump’s administration, took up the charge, and basically issued a nearly identical investigation.

They claimed it wasn’t related to Texas at the time, but as we later found out, there was tons of overlap and cross pollination. In fact, apparently Ken Paxton was working with the FTC on some of these matters, and they even referenced the articles that we published as a part of it.

And the investigation was expansive. It went back all the way to 2019. The types of materials they were seeking had nothing to do with what you would expect.

And, also, we’re a nonprofit. So it wasn’t about getting to some kind of core commercial interest. It was about, as you noted in your intro, using the levers of government to either bully or intimidate or maybe break, through a whole bunch of means, including just the cost of complying, because of the process of the punishment.

And so we sued to get an injunction, and there’s a little bit of back and forth there. But what happened is we got an injunction, and then they filed an emergency appeal and they lost the emergency appeal, and then they filed a secondary appeal. And in the circuit court, it looked like they were going to lose, that they were going to get a bad judgment. And so they withdrew their demand, and they said, “OK, we can go home now. We’re no longer investigating. It’s all over.”

And so when we talk about a settlement, a lot of times, usually, that’s a bad thing, because it means that you caved in some way. But it’s the opposite here. We secured victories in court, and then we didn’t let them off the hook. When they tried to withdraw, we said, “No, no, no, not so fast. If you want to withdraw, you’re going to need to give assurances and protections that are extended beyond just letting this whole thing be done. We’re going to need to know this can’t happen again, and that we’ll be able to battle this out in the future, if we need to, in jurisdictions that are safe, or that are at least relevant for us, like DC,” as opposed to letting them drag us to Florida or someplace else.

So that’s the genesis, a lot of legal back and forth. But it has been two years and eight months of investigations, and yesterday was the first day where the organization was not under investigation from some hostile government entity.

JJ: Let me ask you, as a point of clarification: People hear the FTC was “going to investigate,” but you’re talking about investigative demands. It wasn’t so much they were going to do homework and learn about Media Matters. They were demanding things from you. What was that like?

Angelo Carusone: “What we showed is that you don’t have to take this. You could go to court, and you can get these demands shut down before they even get a chance to start.”

AC: Yes. And that’s the tell. What they asked for was seven years’ worth of records, and the records included everything from all of our donors, all of our fundraising communications, all of the staff that ever worked at Media Matters, included during that time period, all of the editorial decisions that were made for every piece of content that we published, every article, all sources that we relied on, that we talked to.

We have reporters on staff. They wanted a list of all the sources and all the articles that they connected with, and that’s just one page.

They asked for a copy of all of the discovery material in the Musk cases, the Texas cases, which is millions of documents. And they asked for all of our communications with name and entity, whether it be news outlets, third parties, civil society organizations, voting rights organizations. I mean, it’s expansive.

And part of what is so significant about this, and I think this is the real tell, is that because these demands are always such a huge amount, they have a lot of power, because then you typically want to negotiate with them, and that’s what other players are doing, because then you say, “I’ll give you half. Let’s just make this go away.” But they have a lot of power to do these investigations, without having to get warrants or other things. They could sue you in court, and usually they get a lot of latitude to do that.

What we argued, and why it’s so significant, is not just that it protects us. We actually got a lot of new precedent. And what we showed is that you don’t have to take this. You could go to court, and you can get these demands shut down before they even get a chance to start. You don’t have to be trapped in the administrative bureaucracy, which, as we know, right now is being weaponized by the Trump administration. And that’s the significance. The real takeaway from all of this is not just that we’re having a sigh of relief, it’s that a lot of civil society organizations and news outlets, they now have a new tool in the toolkit to say, “I don’t need to negotiate. I can go to court, and I can get you to stop this without trapping me under the administrative process.”

JJ: And it’s an example that you can say, “you can try that, and it can work,” rather than, “In theory, maybe this is something we should try.” You have actually a case in which it succeeded.

AC: That’s right.

JJ: Can I ask you to take a second here to define “jawboning”? Because I think some might say, “Well, it was onerous, but the FTC was just asking for information, and that’s not retaliation. So we shouldn’t be bringing the First Amendment into it. ” But jawboning—and we can talk about what that means—it does come under the First Amendment.

AC: It does. It’s a form of using really intense, coercive pressure from a government entity, or legislative entity, to force a desired result. So it’s using some official channels, and the specter of those official channels, to make you comply in one way or another.

A lot of times, in the Trump era, people talk about it as sort of anticipatory obedience, and it’s that you know they’re going to misuse their power, the government. And so a lot of entities, big and small, say, “OK, I’ll give you what you ask for, so I don’t have to deal with this. ”

And it’s true, government agencies do investigations, they can do demands, but there are tells that it’s jawboning, and that it’s retaliatory. One is, who was involved in this? Some of the key decision-makers, or those that were involved at the FTC, have been on the record publicly, before they got into these positions, talking about their intention to use their power to go after organizations like Media Matters, even naming us.

So that was one example. The other is that, as I noted in that long intro, the arc, they keep coming at us to get the same information, which is, “What were you doing in 2020 related to the election? And what were you saying about what you’re claiming is disinformation to these other civil society organizations? And tell us your donor information.” And they keep coming.

And also that it’s not connected to anything related to the work that we did with respect to X.

And yet, as evidence came out, it was clear that they were coordinating with Paxton, when they jawboned the major advertisers into giving them a settlement. And when they filed their stipulation, they did it in Texas, even though they didn’t need to—the FTC, that is.

So it is a real thing to consider. And that’s the environment we’re in now, is that the Trump administration will use the levers of government power, not just to prosecute, but to ultimately achieve a desired result through these other coercive tactics.

JJ: You can think of Brendan Carr from the FCC talking about Jimmy Kimmel last fall, and saying:

We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.

That sounds like what somebody says with a knife to you. That doesn’t sound like someone’s “suggesting” policy, the way they’d like to see it go. It’s clearly coercive.

AC: Totally. And these administrative agencies, the assumption has been, I mean, we live in a world of norms, right? We’ve benefited from having some stability in our governance, even though we’ve known for a long time that it’s unfair, the advantage is to the powerful, it is a new twist to blow up all those norms, and at the same time weaponize all the instruments of these agencies. And as we’re seeing it play out, time and again, that is very significant.

And the part that I think is one of the “so what’s” of this is, at the same time that we were receiving [demands from] the FTC, they were pressuring all these major entities into giving them consent decrees, which is essentially an agreement from one of the targets. They got major media buyers to agree they would no longer move advertisements off places that were considered controversial, which has been a hobby horse of right-wing media for a long time.

And it was all the spectre of using these investigations, and their investigatory power to do it. They’re the companies, they’re the entities that have the deepest pockets to fight these fights. And so when they took themselves off the field, what they basically did was sharpen the blade for the administration to use this tactic against other players, because other players are smaller and have less resources and less ability to fight. So it became all the more important to try to do something proactive, that created some new case law to then give a tool in the toolkit.

And I’ll give the example that, even in the first year, that original precedent that we established in the Paxton case, it was applicable in our victory against the FTC, but it’s also been used in almost 30 cases against the Trump administration’s overreach against individuals and other entities. So it has provided a really useful tool to protect against the types of jawboning and other coercive tactics that they could deploy.

JJ: I thought it was interesting that Media Matters v. FTC had an amicus brief from the Cato Institute, who many probably don’t think of as progressive warriors, but because they said, “This is a violation of the First Amendment, and we’re against it. ” So this wasn’t even a partisan issue, if you think about it.

AC: No, and we had 48 amicus briefs, one of which was a whole bunch of news organizations, the AP, the New York Times, Reuters, many major news outlets filed advocacy on the same thing. Everybody came at it with a similar angle—it’s an attack on the First Amendment—but in slightly different ways. News outlets were looking at it from the free press perspective, places like Cato were on the expression.

We had a whole bunch of voting rights organizations and civil society organizations come at it from the free assembly perspective. Because if you think, one of these things they were looking for, like I said, was the donors. That’s not relevant. Even if everything they claimed they were investigating was significant, who was funding it is not their charge. And getting access to nonprofits’ donors is designed to be protected, because the effect is if they can get that, they can harass them, and ultimately chill the contributions to civil society.

And there was a fairly wide buy-in that this was a critical case, and you don’t get to the amicus stage unless you stand up the first time around. And I think that, to me, is the ultimate takeaway. It sucks, and it’s unfortunate that we have to do it, but if you don’t fight, you’re guaranteed to lose, and you just don’t lose for yourself, you actually make it easier for them to do it again and again and again. And that, I think, is the big takeaway from all of this, is that there does need to be a little bit of a stiff spine if we’re all going to get through this with some of our rights intact.

JJ: It’s not identical to Trump’s EEOC bringing suit against the New York Times because a white man didn’t get the promotion he felt he deserved, but it feels like the same project.

AC: Yeah. Part of Miller’s strategy early on was to do these one-two punches of deploying civil lawsuits and state power in some way. And this is before Trump got back into office, but one of the projects that he had been engaging in, and that’s where that AG idea came from, is that when you launch these broad scale of suits, follow that up with these types of investigations, because you can box in your target. And even if you’re not successful, you get them to change their behavior in anticipation of the next one. And now that they’re in government power, they’re using it. And I think that’s, to your point, it’s the same thing. They’re leveraging this repeated civil lawsuits, and then some type of follow-up of a government attack, because it weakens the target even more.

JJ: Finally, and you’ve kind of answered this, but I think if folks hear the story, and they get the short version—”Oh, Media Matters fought the FTC and they won”—they miss a lot, because, as you’ve indicated, there have been costs to the group, on your time, on your resources. And it’s not like those impacts are erased with a legal settlement, and it’s not like another group would’ve been able to do exactly what you’ve done, depending on their size and their strength.

And then the other piece of that, which you’ve also addressed, but what has been the real cost to the government? Because their coffers aren’t going down. And so what is really, materially, to dissuade them from doing this again and again? So in terms of impacts on you and on them, it’s not like everything goes back to zero because you’ve won this settlement.

AC: No, it’s so true. And when Trump first got into power, and they went after big law firms, I think one of the big takeaways from all of that is that if you get all those big firms that do a lot of the pro bono work, you make it a lot easier to engage in these types of attacks, because you suck out the resources from the community that would need to fight back.

And I’m really grateful that, at least at the appellate level, we were able to secure some pro bono support from Washington Litigation Group, and we lucked out. But in this environment, that’s rare, because of how little pro bono resources remain, just given the Trump wave of attacks.

And it gets to your point: They’re willing to do a trench warfare approach, and inch this along if they have to, to keep moving the needle. It doesn’t go back, but the one thing that I think has been guiding a lot of our thinking around these fights is that you can’t stop people from speeding, but if you put some speed bumps in, you can slow them down.

And that’s kind of how I think about this. I’m not wide-eyed about it. It is bleak and brutal, but there are some speed bumps now, and hopefully others can pick that up, and continue to undermine and neutralize these jawboning tactics.

JJ: It certainly has provided some hope for lots of us.

So we’ve been speaking with Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters. They’re online at MediaMatters.org. Thank you so much, Angelo Carusone, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AC: Thank you.

Futurism (12/16/26): “At NeurIPS, one of the big AI research conferences…visions of AI doom were clearly on the mind of many scientists in attendance.”

You ever wonder why people who make AI talk about how AI might destroy humanity—but still keep making AI? Brian Phillips of the Ringer (5/6/26) has a plausible explanation.

Writing about Anthropic’s announcement that it wasn’t going to release a new product, Claude Mythos, to the public because it was too dangerous, Phillips notes:

The AI industry has been driven from the beginning by wildly overwrought claims, many of them pertaining to the destructive potential of its products. Too dangerous to release to the public is a move the industry has pulled before….

It may seem like a strange tactic for companies to scaremonger about their own products. When Ford rolls out a new pickup truck, the CEO generally doesn’t go around giving keynote addresses about how much more lethal it will make American highways. But the AI industry is selling a narrative—a mythos, if you will—as much as it’s selling a product, and that narrative is one of revolutionary, transformational power. “Our product can make your life a bit easier, although there are still a lot of kinks to iron out” is not a trillion-dollar sales pitch; “we’ve invented something so powerful that it has the potential to destroy humanity” is.

Brian Phillips (Ringer, 5/6/26): “The decision to portray the new model as too dangerous to release into the wild suggests an attempt to answer a follow-up question: ‘And how can we maximize the attention we get for it?’”

In this read, apocalyptic narratives about AI are largely if not entirely designed to justify more investment in a technology that has already sucked up so much money that analysts wonder if it will ever show a profit:

Think about the way the industry talks about itself. AI isn’t just another tech gizmo. It’s bigger than the internet. It’s bigger than the smartphone. It’s going to reshape human society. It’s going to put millions out of work. It’s going to eliminate money. It’s going to surpass human intelligence. It’s going to replace humans altogether. It’s going to kill all humans. It’s going to be profitable beyond your wildest dreams, at least at some point, although definitely not today.

The artificial-intelligence boom has ushered in one of the costliest building sprees in world history,” reports the Wall Street Journal (9/25/25). “No one is sure how they will get their investment back—or when.”

This serves, says Philips,

to distract from the fact that their products thus far have been largely underwhelming. If the integration of AI into Google Search had been rolled out quietly and evaluated on its merits, it would have gone down as one of the most disastrous tech launches of all time. Your only job is to give me accurate information; you did a decent job of it yesterday, and today you’re telling me to put glue on pizza? But when the same rollout comes slathered in hype—when I’ve been conditioned to experience it as part of a narrative about civilizationally transformative technological innovation—I’m less likely to judge it on its merits, because even its shortcomings can be reframed as marks of the disruptive nature of progress.

Harris Cameron (Medium, 4/27/20): H.P. Lovecraft, creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, “has come to be a kind of mascot to the very geek culture which dominates Silicon Valley and, by extension, much of our media landscape.” (Creative Commons 3.0 image by Sanskarans.)

And this is why it makes sense for Anthropic to talk about how their latest creation could destroy the internet: If it’s that powerful, maybe it’s worth giving its creators $1 trillion (which is what it’s hoping to raise in an IPO), in hopes that you’ll own a piece of that power:

The tendency of AI companies to talk about the dangers of their products may make people hate the industry (and people really hate the industry). But it also keeps people from saying, “This is kind of neat, I guess? But it’s super buggy and not all that useful.” The Mythos announcement can be understood in that light: It might make people leery of Anthropic, but it makes Mythos seem like a huge deal, which is ultimately what Anthropic wants.

Note that in the nerd culture that dominates Silicon Valley, the first association with the word “mythos” is the Cthulhu Mythos, a series of horror stories about an alien monster that will one day destroy humanity. That’s very on brand.

New York Times (5/4/26): “The Costume Institute is important for preserving the history of fashion as a decorative art form, and that outweighs the whining.”

Plenty of people felt that the Met Gala, a celebration of wealth and celebrity—where a ticket cost $100,000 and a table $350,000—was painfully tone deaf right now as our country spends billions of dollars to attack other countries and bankroll a genocide, people are being snatched off the street and sent to camps, and the White House goes after anyone who says anything about it they don’t like.

That the event was sponsored this year by megabillionaire Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who were also designated honorary co-chairs, a position traditionally reserved for artists and celebrities, took it even more over the top. As blogger Ali McIntyre (alimcforever, 5/5/26) put it:

Critics cited Bezos’ Amazon for documented labor violations, for providing cloud infrastructure to ICE immigration enforcement operations, for his intervention at the Washington Post suppressing editorial independence, and for his $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration fund. The Observer noted the Gala was “entering its billionaire era”—as if it had ever left.

The New York Times (5/4/26) had a hot take: That’s just resentment. According to Vanessa Friedman, the paper’s fashion director and chief fashion critic:

Bezos has become the embodiment of a certain kind of egregious wealth in America, just as the Met Gala has become the embodiment of a certain kind of egregious elevation of wealth and celebrity, and that makes them useful targets for a lot of current rage and unrest.

Friedman knows people’s “whining” is silly, because “even people who criticize the Met Gala end up looking at the pictures.”

And she’s got an answer, which presumably could apply to just about anything people oppose: “If people who criticize the Met Gala want it to end, they should just stop talking about it.”

Featured image: Jeff Bezos and  Lauren Sánchez Bezos at the Met Gala (Business Insider, 5/7/26).

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

Media Matters (11/16/23)

This week on CounterSpin: In 2023, the group Media Matters reported that social media platform X was placing ads for major brands like Apple and IBM alongside content touting Hitler and the Nazi Party—despite the claim of X’s CEO that brands are “protected from the risk of being next to” toxic posts on the platform.

Musk threatened a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters for reporting the truth, and many in state and federal government were happy to take that work on. Three years and several court cases later, Media Matters announced victory in what wound up being Media Matters v. Federal Trade Commission. The case and the victory are not just hopeful but instructive, offering what the group calls a “roadmap” for other newsgathering and nonprofit organizations facing, or at risk of, government retaliation.

We hear about the case and the outcome from Media Matters president Angelo Carusone.

Washington Post (4/19/23)

Also on the show: Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the dominant method of abortion in the US has become mifepristone, particularly as it can be administered by telehealth, without the need for an in-office visit. But now Louisiana, which has a near-total abortion ban, sued the FDA over telehealth, and though it got support from a federal appeals court to block remote prescription, a visit by the drug’s makers to the Supreme Court led to a temporary stay on that. As the debate continues, we revisit a conversation we had a few years ago with Rachel K. Jones, principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, who knows more than most about mifepristone.

A lawyer representing some Sandy Hook parents said that Alex Jones was “trying to keep the bloated corpse of a media organization alive” (AP, 4/30/26).

Silence had never sounded so sweet, blankness had never looked so beautiful. A visit to the far-right conspiracy outlet Infowars website had no “Jesus Returns”–sized headlines about government-tainted water turning the frogs gay, or fresh anti-vaccine claims. No promotions for host Alex Jones’ supplements, either, or videos of him screaming gibberish about politicians eating babies. Just a white screen and two very small words: “Off Air.”

Jones’ media career, anchored in his hysterical performance, is still hanging on for dear life. As AP (4/30/26) reported, Infowars

is facing liquidation because of the more than $1 billion in defamation lawsuit judgments Jones owes relatives of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting for calling the Connecticut massacre a hoax.

The news service explained that the new deal would give the satirical news outlet the “Onion temporary authority to use Infowars’ trademarks, copyrights and intellectual property while a state receiver in Texas works toward liquidation.”

The judgment against him in the defamation case signaled that a society that values truth over lies finally drew the line at a media empire profiting and inciting hatred at the expense of more than two dozen murdered children and their families.

‘Unprecedented legal stalling’

NPR (4/30/26): “Jones says he is still being forced to leave his Infowars studio, and plans to move to a new one Thursday night and rebuild under new ownership.”

The transfer has not been completely ratified, which is why the site is now blank. The Onion expected the deal to be finalized at the end of April, “letting it license the Infowars brand name and turn the show into a mockery of itself,” with proceeds going to the Sandy Hook families (NPR, 4/30/26). But as NPR explained, “Jones won a reprieve from a Texas appeals court, and the families’ attorneys filed their own appeal to the Supreme Court of Texas,” leaving control of Infowars “in limbo until the higher courts weigh in.”

Onion CEO Ben Collins (Threads, 4/29/26) offered fighting words:

This newly insane, unprecedented legal stalling does nothing but delay our deal with the receiver to take control of InfoWars. We now expect new traps in Alex Jones’ amoral war to deny paying the Sandy Hook families, but we’re freshly surprised by the US legal system’s appetite to put up with it.

And the court process hasn’t stopped the Onion from taking on the Infowars name and hiring comedian Tim Heidecker to turn the site into a parody of itself (Rolling Stone, 5/2/26).

Difficult to overstate

Alex Jones (2/21/11): “They tell your kids they gotta love Justin Biebler [sic], and then Biebler says ‘hand in your guns,’ ‘pass the Cyber Security Act,’ and ‘the police state is good,’ and then your children are turned into  mindless vassals—who now, they look up to some twit, instead of looking up to Thomas Jefferson, or looking up to Nikola Tesla, or looking up to Magellan.”

Few have matched Jones’ ability to turn rancid delusions into mainstream talking points, influencing a xenophobic, racist and transphobic political movement that has taken power in the United States.

“The reason there’s so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation,” he said in June 2010 (NBC, 8/7/18). “I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children.”

“These wicked globalists are so threatened by human potential they poison the water, the vaccines, the food to turn us into a bunch of slugs, a bunch of lobotomized sloths so they can control us,” he declared in 2011 (Alex Jones Show, 2/21/11).

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Jones declared at the Million MAGA March (Newsweek, 12/12/20): “World government is here, and the system is publicly stealing this election from the biggest landslide and the biggest political realignment since 1776.”

Jones is not solely responsible for the fact that a growing sector of the American public believes anti-vaccine pseudoscience (Gallup, 8/7/24; Scientific American, 4/26/26), paving the way for RFK Jr.’s anti-human policies (FAIR.org, 12/5/24), but it’s impossible to ignore his contribution to this mess.

While Trump recently turned on Jones along with a number of other right-wing media personalities, like Tucker Carlson (KOMO, 4/17/26), Jones’ act—along with Carlson’s—is inseparable from Trump’s rise (New Yorker, 6/23/16; New York Times, 11/16/16, 4/20/22; Frontline, 7/28/20).

Bucking the trend

“Right now, our industry is afraid of the wrong things,”  60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi told the National Press Club (Guardian, 4/30/26). “We’re afraid of offending power. We’re afraid of losing access. We’re afraid of another baseless lawsuit. But what we should all be afraid of is silence.”

The Trump administration destroyed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (FAIR.org, 10/1/25) and it installed Kari Lake, a fanatical Jones wannabe, to run the US government’s international propaganda broadcaster Voice of America, although a court recently found her administration to be unlawful (All Things Considered, 3/8/26). The Ellison family takeover of CBS has been a catastrophe for the storied network (Zeteo, 4/29/26; USA Today, 4/30/26), especially its flagship news show 60 Minutes (Guardian, 4/30/26).

All of this has been a part of the contraction in media under an administration that has no time for journalism that holds government and corporations accountable. One arm of the right’s media machine folding into the Onion, which skewers US foreign policy and corporate greed better than most bona fide corporate media, would be a small victory against this anti-democratic trend.

If anyone thinks it’s unfair for a media outlet to be turned into a parody of itself, well, it’s already happened to the Washington Post under the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

None of this will bring true justice to the Sandy Hook parents, but to the rest of us it provides some catharsis, giving hope that not every change to the media landscape needs to be for the worse.

Janine Jackson interviewed Consumer Reports‘ Derek Kravitz about dynamic pricing for the May 1, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Forbes (6/24/24)

Janine Jackson: If you’re just trying to assess the way corporations view a particular development, you can learn more from how they talk among themselves than whatever narrative is crafted for general consumption. On dynamic pricing, let’s look just at headlines from Forbes Magazine.

In 2024, we have “Harnessing AI for Dynamic Pricing for Your Business,” saying “AI has emerged as a critical tool for implementing dynamic pricing strategies, enabling businesses to adjust prices in real-time based on market demand.”

In 2025, we get “Making Dynamic Pricing a C-Suite Imperative.” That declares that “in order to elevate pricing in your company, own it and ensure your leadership teams are treating pricing as the strategic lever it is.”

Some potential obstacles creep in. Later, Forbes offers “Dynamic Pricing: A Balance Between Strategy and Consumer Perception,” which tells us that “in the ever-evolving landscape of business strategies, dynamic pricing has emerged as a contentious yet fascinating approach.”

And then early this year, we have “Preparing Now for Continuous Dynamic Pricing,” which leads with, “Unfortunately, dynamic pricing isn’t a passing trend; it’s the new normal.” And it includes the telling sentence: “Consumers are increasingly being trained to accept dynamic pricing.”

Well, if only there were as much public-interest press interrogating this latest mechanism as there are owner-focused outlets talking about how to most profitably exploit it.  But there is work going on, and our guest is part of it.

Consumer Reports

Investigative journalist Derek Kravitz is deputy editor of special projects at Consumer Reports, and a lead behind a collaborative investigation on pricing with Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Derek Kravitz.

Derek Kravitz: Hi, thanks for having me.

JJ: As your reporter—one of them in this series—notes early on, “Charging different amounts to different customers for the same products is not illegal or new.” So maybe let’s start with just some clarification, because folks will hear about “algorithmic pricing,” about “dynamic pricing,” about “surveillance pricing.” What is meaningful to distinguish there? There is a difference between a flight being cheaper on a Wednesday, than a can of soup costing you more than your next-door neighbor.

Consumer Reports (12/9/25)

DK: Yeah, so that’s a good question. We as Americans have been accustomed to price changes for things like airline tickets or hotel reservations or concert tickets for years. In fact, dynamic pricing goes back decades. It basically means charging different prices based on supply and demand. So when you are closer to a flight, a few days out from a potential trip, the price of that ticket is going to be higher than it would be weeks in advance. And so, in many ways, we’ve become accustomed to that type of dynamic or shifting price changes.

With respect to algorithmic pricing, that is new, because only in the last five to ten years have we started to use mobile apps and online shopping more and more, and to such a degree that now that has overtaken in-person and brick-and-mortar shopping. And so because of that, algorithmic and online shopping allows for really, really quick and precise price changes for customers.

And this is where you’re starting to see a groundswell of reaction to those pricing tactics, to those strategies that companies use in order to attract more money from customers. I mean, it’s Capitalism 101, but it’s supercharged now with the new technology that they have available.

JJ: And I want to ask you specifically about the Instacart research that you did some months back, because that makes it specific. What were you looking for there? How hard was it to find it? And then, what were your particular takeaways from that work?

DK: Instacart is the largest third-party grocery delivery platform in the United States, and it works with a lot of different grocery chains, some of the largest in the country, including Kroger, Albertsons, Safeway, Costco, Whole Foods. And it’s become ubiquitous, especially since the pandemic, for people ordering, including the elderly and those on SNAP benefits, and those in rural food deserts that might not have the transportation to go to a brick-and-mortar grocery store.

And so we wanted to understand how pricing worked on Instacart, because they’ve been very upfront for years that they use algorithmic pricing, and that they can rapidly change prices in order to not just respond to supply and demand, but also personalize prices—to give a different price to customer A than customer B for the same product at the same time from the same store.

Derek Kravitz: “No one really knows that this is going on, and no one can really see behind the curtain how this algorithmic pricing works in practice.”

So we designed some tests where we would bring in volunteers, Consumer Reports members, to join us online—virtual shopping trips—and price goods from the same stores at the same time. And we started to see very clear signals, where people were grouped into distinct price buckets. And because of that, we could very clearly see that for the same box of Wheat Thins, there were five different price points, and those five different price points would range from, say, $3 to $5. But then, of course, if you extrapolate that over the cost of an entire grocery basket over the cost of an entire year, that can add up to real money if you are on the losing side of that equation. And the point of all this, too, is that no one really knows that this is going on, and no one can really see behind the curtain how this algorithmic pricing works in practice. And so we basically tried to uncover that, to show how it worked in the real world.

JJ: And I’m maybe going to bring you back to transparency in a second, but I just want to say, on that work, there were results from that investigation, right?

DK: Yeah, there was a reaction. We got a lot of reaction from consumers and shoppers who were upset that they were seeing different prices for the same goods than their neighbor. And we got a lot of reaction from state and federal officials, including the FTC, which launched a probe. The attorneys general of New York and California launched their own investigations. Instacart themselves stopped the practice of testing out different prices on customers about two weeks after our story.

And there’s still now dynamic and surveillance pricing legislation moving through statehouses across the country. Maryland just recently passed the first ban on personalized grocery prices in that state.

USA Today (4/15/26)

JJ: I think it’s very interesting that states are already passing bans. I think I saw a headline that was kind of like, “What Is Dynamic Pricing? Maryland Is Banning It,” and it sort of suggests a mislink. Something is galloping forward before people really understand even what it is, and that’s part of the problem, yeah?

DK: Yeah, that’s a good way of describing it. Maryland officials, when we interviewed them, said, we want to get ahead of this. We don’t quite understand how this works and what the underlying issue is for day-to-day consumers, but we can tell that this is going to be a problem if we don’t address it. And so they are trying and actually passed the law where you cannot personalize grocery prices down to the individual customer.

The problem there is that you can actually still segment customers. You can group them into really small numbers, say five, or ten, and offer those five or ten customers one price and a group of another five or ten customers a different price. In industry parlance, that’s segmentation; that’s the industry jargon for it. But the Maryland law just doesn’t address that yet.

But for them, this is a line in the sand, right? This is a first step in trying to really address this type of pricing tactic.

JJ: Well, because it seems that companies are sensitive to the problem. Certainly you can read about “managing the conception,” and “making consumers” just get used to it. So in other words, it’s not so much about selling it as just making it inevitable. And it’s funny, because we hear “if you build it, they will come,” and this seems to be “no, just build it and then make clear that there’s no other way for anybody to do anything except to work through this process.” It doesn’t match what we’re told is the idea of free enterprise, of building a better mousetrap, and people do it because they like it more.

DK: Yeah, at its core, algorithmic pricing is not capitalism at its base level, right? It’s extracting more money from individual shoppers for the same product or service, and it’s basically trying to increase a company’s margins, margins being the profit that they make on an individual product or service.

And, of course, this is a way to eke out more margins, greater margins, for companies. Grocery stores don’t make a lot of money. Their margins are low. It’s about 1 to 3%, for the most part, according to different trade groups. For them, this makes a lot of sense, to extract even very small percentages in additional margin, because it adds a ton of value to these companies.

Tennessean (3/10/26)

JJ: There was at least one direct response to this Instacart work that you did, which was an op-ed that I saw that said that the Instacart experiments were actually testing “market elasticity, not targeted profiling.” And you teased out how, during the pandemic, folks were relying on Instacart, particularly people with disabilities, people on SNAP benefits, people who couldn’t get out. And this person is saying, well, you’re saying that’s malice, and “we must distinguish economic reality from malice,” it said, which kind of gave me a chill.

But anyway, the point of this piece was–so don’t use the Instacart app, just go to the brick-and-mortar store and you can solve the whole problem. And that seems to me to be skipping over something important here.

DK: Just to demystify this a bit, we’ve actually investigated grocery chains themselves, too, in addition to Instacart and other retailers, and grocery chains have their own e-commerce platforms, their own mobile apps, their own online shopping, and they employ the same pricing strategies that Instacart does.

Consumer Reports (5/21/25)

We did a full investigation of the second-largest grocery chain in the United States, Kroger, which has a free “loyalty” program with 62 million consumer profiles, that you can access if you live in a state that has a law that allows for that direct access to personal company profiles, but, in essence, groups you into a particular segment for Kroger, and gives you personalized promotions and discounts. When half the store is discounted, that means that there’s no one true price, and that promotions and discounts end up being the ultimate true final price for a lot of products sold there.

So that’s all to say that, just because Instacart was caught or flagged in this particular instance, doesn’t mean that other retailers are not doing this. In fact, every retailer is doing this. It just depends on the amount and the gravity and the scale.

And one additional point: I’ve read all the op-eds, I’ve seen all the responses to this. I’ve read Instacart’s blog posts. We actually engaged with Instacart over the course of four months, four rounds of questions with about, I’d say, 50 questions. And they answered the vast majority of them. We shared all of our underlying data and all of our methodology, and they actually weighed in on that, and we incorporated that into our story.

That’s sort of Journalism 101. It’s actually the scientific method. We didn’t go in with a theory or a thesis that we had to prove or disprove. We were asking basic questions and then trying to figure out, is this a problem, or is this an issue? And clearly, the story speaks for itself, and Instacart’s response in that story speaks for itself.

So I really stress to people when they have an instinctual, sort of gut reaction to a company’s defending itself, or saying X, Y, Z, if a piece of journalism, or a piece of academic research, is fully reported out and actually looks and talks to the other side, and incorporates that into the work product, that means they’re doing due diligence. And it means you can actually take all of the information there at face value, as being a good-faith representation of what’s actually happening.

JJ: And start with transparency. I mean, transparency is the beginning and end, right? If you are making very clear your methods, and putting forward that back and forth, then folks can read it. I get tripped up when media trips into ideology, like, for example, in, and I’m going to unfortunately quote from this same person, but I think it’s important, this column, in opposing this Instacart research, says, “By forcing price uniformity and ‘parity’”—which is in scare quotes, “’parity’”:

we break the feedback loops that make these complex networks work. This likely forces companies to raise baseline prices for everyone or bake costs into higher service fees.

Now, there’s a lot going on there, but I love how companies are “forced” to raise prices for everyone. There’s never any other option. There’s never lower CEO pay. There’s never lower shareholder profits; they’re not an option. It’s always that capitalism works in a subtle way that you, dummy, don’t understand, and you’re breaking “feedback loops,” and that’s going to backfire, and it’s going to raise prices for everyone. I guess I object most vehemently to the patronizing of this kind of coverage.

DK: Without directly characterizing the messaging there, right, one thing I think we can confidently say, from a purely independent journalistic perspective, is that these systems, while the architecture of them, the tech, is complex, the end result is not. When you have five different prices for the same product, sold at the same time from the same store, that is price manipulation, that is profit maximization. That means that some customers win and some customers lose. And you don’t know if you are on the winning side of that equation or on the losing side of that equation. And that is the net result.

These systems, this tech, and especially things that involve large language models or AI—yes, they are incredibly sophisticated. They are incredibly complex, but the end result is not.

And that’s why I think customers and regulators are really responding to this, because they see the practical import, and the impact on real-life Americans, and they want to have a first-order conversation: “Do we want this? Is this something that we should allow, or should we structure things in a different way, where we address it before we let the tech set prices and do what it wants?”

And so I think that’s a really important thing to stress, is to just sort of step back, 30,000-foot view. Do we want this? And is this something that affects people? And the answer, clearly, on the latter point is yes. It is a huge impact on people’s pocketbooks, and it’s something that really affects Americans every single day in their financial lives.

PC World (3/28/25)

JJ: And just finally, in terms of our media, the space to have that conversation about, do we want this? Because what I’m now seeing is a wave of coverage that’s kind of like, “Here’s how you can take steps to counter algorithms.” So it seems like media are going to sell us the disease and then sell us the cure. So now I don’t need to just work 60 hours a week. I have to come home and puzzle out how to outsmart the supermarket so I can make my wages pay for food.

At a certain point, what do we ask of journalism, in terms of who they’re representing, who they’re speaking for, and whether they will provide the space to have that conversation that you’re talking about, about is this something we want?

DK: Yeah, and I’m glad you asked that last question, because when experts speak to what should consumers do, or how should they react with this information in hand: There’s differential pricing happening at the grocery store, or at a retailer or with a travel booking company; how should you respond? In a lot of cases, it means basically a prescription for a more Luddite existence, which is, again, not necessarily a salve for many people that rely on these services and that really have no other option.

But really, when you speak to experts and ask them: What should people do? a lot of them say: Go to a store, maybe a company or a brand, that doesn’t practice this type of surveillance or dynamic pricing en masse. Buy in bulk, because academic, peer-reviewed research shows that buying in bulk does reduce prices. Look at price labeling, and that’s required, usually, by weights and measures departments at the state level. Look at per-unit pricing. So when you want to compare prices, hopefully in a brick-and-mortar store, you can actually see the per-unit pricing and compare products, and shop accordingly. And go slow and have a shopping list and be deliberate about your interactions with companies.

Those are not really artful, sort of cool solutions, with an app you can download, or a browser extension you can download. But those are the things that actually, meaningfully help when you’re navigating this.

JJ: Well, thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Derek Kravitz. He’s an investigative journalist with Consumer Reports. You can find their work on this and many other issues on ConsumerReports.org. Derek Kravitz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DK: Thank you.

Marc Novicoff (Atlantic, 6/30/25): “The aging populations of rich countries are relying on ever fewer workers to support their economy, dooming those younger generations to a future of higher taxes, higher debt, or later retirement—or all three.”

If you haven’t heard the argument that civilization is about to collapse because women aren’t having enough babies, you haven’t been consuming much media.

“The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard—It’s Worse,” announced the Atlantic (6/30/25). Business Insider (8/21/25) ran a piece titled “America’s Great People Shortage,” which opened, “America is about to tumble off the edge of a massive demographic cliff.” And NPR‘s Brian Mann warned on PBS (4/10/26) that, as a result of the birth rate decline, “many people say” that the US soon “will be unrecognizable.”

It’s repeatedly in the news in part because it’s a priority of the “pronatalist” right, which has prominent backers in the Trump administration. Vice President J.D. Vance has called the US birth rate decline a “civilizational crisis.” He said people with children should have “more power” at the polls, and “more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic” than those without.

Elon Musk, who regularly posts on the subject and has fathered at least 14 children, has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” “There will be no West if this continues,” he said. And President Donald Trump has called for a new “baby boom.”

The story generally goes like this: Fewer babies being born in the US leads to fewer working-age adults relative to retired adults, which means—as the Atlantic piece put it—”higher taxes, higher debt or later retirement—or all three.”

But there’s a lot more to the story, and ignoring it masks the white nationalism, regressive gender ideals and economic inequality driving the narrative.

Hidden xenophobia

CNN (4/9/26): “Experts generally agree that a falling fertility rate can have real consequences—particularly related to the economy.”

The numbers might look striking on the surface: As news reports pointed out (e.g., CNN, 4/9/26), the number of births and the fertility rate (births per 1,000 women) in the US have dropped to record lows. Both decreased by 1% from 2024 to 2025; the fertility rate has fallen by about 20% over the past 20 years.

In terms of births per woman, that’s about 1.6—well below the “replacement” rate of 2.1, which would be required to maintain a population without migration.

But that last detail is key. If you believe we need a certain number of working-age adults to support an aging population of retirees, there are—or at least were, until Trump’s brutal immigration regime—millions of people willing and eager to come to this country and help make up that deficit. Even with the declining birth rate, the US population grew by more in 2023–24 than it did in 2003–04.

Even so, immigration was conspicuously missing from too much of the birth rate coverage. For instance, in a long piece on Trump contemplating a “baby bonus,” CBS (4/25/25) reported:

A declining birth rate can spell long-term economic problems, including a shrinking labor force that’s financially strapped to pay for medical services and retirement benefits for an aging population.

It managed to go in depth on why the birth rate might be declining, what a baby bonus might look like, how much it would cost and whether it could work. But it never mentioned immigration policy.

On CNN (4/18/26), anchor Michael Smerconish explored the falling birth rate with economist Melissa Kearney, who told him:

We’re now looking at, you know, being a society that’s aging, with fewer young people going to school, entering the workforce. This poses demographic headwinds for our economic growth and dynamism going forward.

They discussed the “threat posed in terms of the sustainability of Social Security” and ways to address the problem, but neither ever raised the impact of immigration.

When news outlets ignore that obvious facet of the issue, they hide the xenophobic assumptions underlying the claims of “crisis.”

‘To save civilization, reject feminism’

Victor Joecks (Daily Signal, 8/10/25): “What’s needed is a change in society’s values. Modern feminism doesn’t view motherhood as something to celebrate but as the cause of female oppression.”

And then there’s the misogyny. Right-wing media are quick to blame women for this impending “crisis.”

A New York Post column (9/9/25) by Rikki Schlott, for instance, drummed up the “fear of a baby bust,” blaming it in particular on Gen Z (which is having fewer kids than previous generations at the same age) lacking “positive, empowering messaging that teaches you can prioritize marriage, family and children while also valuing independence, career and financial stability”:

“I don’t need a spouse” (or, for that matter, children) feminism has told left-leaning young women that pretty much everything else is more important than family.

That’s a very sad development.

Columnist Victor Joecks, syndicated from the Las Vegas Review-Journal (8/2/25; reposted in Daily Signal, 8/10/25), took things even further in a piece headlined “To Save Civilization, Reject Feminism and Honor Mother.” He opened by declaring, “The triumph of modern feminism has put society on the path to demographic collapse.”

Joecks further opined:

Society applauds women for becoming executives, not moms with kids. Reports on the mythical [sic] gender pay gap describe motherhood with the word “penalty.”… Modern feminism has left many women lonely and depressed. It has put the globe into a demographic downward spiral that’s going to be hard to reverse.

‘National motherhood medal’

New York Times‘ Caroline Kitchener (4/21/25) on pronatalists: “If the birthrate is not turned around, they fear, the country’s economy could collapse and, ultimately, human civilization could be at risk.”

Women-blaming in right-wing media is no surprise, particularly given the surge of pronatalism on the right. But centrist media coverage of that movement also sometimes boosts it.

The New York Times (4/21/25) ran an article on the pronatalist groups pushing the Trump administration on increasing birth rates, noting that “advocates expressed confidence that fertility issues will become a prominent piece of the agenda.” Among their ideas: a “National Motherhood Medal” awarded to women with six or more children, and tax credits to married—but not unmarried—couples with children that increase with successive children.

It’s instructive to recall, as Vogue (5/3/25) does, that fertility was likewise central to the Nazis, who also offered medals to (Aryan) women who bore many children.

While the misogyny embedded in the pronatalist movement generally comes through loud and clear in the Times article, the paper insisted on normalizing it, calling the coalition “broad and diverse,” including both “Christian conservatives” who see a “cultural crisis” in need of more marriage and gender inequality, as well as those who “are interested in exploring a variety of methods, including new reproductive technologies, to reach their goal of more babies.”

‘Collapse of our civilization’

“Is It Here?” USA Today‘s headline (3/10/26) asks of a new baby boom. The article answers: “Not really, experts say—or at least not yet.”

The New York Times repeated the economic collapse narrative in its description of the pronatalist movement’s

warning of a future in which a smaller work force cannot support an aging population and the social safety net. If the birth rate is not turned around, they fear, the country’s economy could collapse and, ultimately, human civilization could be at risk.

By making no effort to analyze that narrative, the Times lent it legitimacy.

Similarly, in a USA Today piece (3/10/26) on whether Trump’s effort to be known as the “fertilization president” was sparking a baby boom (“that question is complicated,” the paper concluded), reporter Madeline Mitchell quoted a pronatalist podcaster saying that the declining birth rate “is going to lead to the collapse of our civilization.”

That piece was part of a package that interviewed many women of varying ages to understand why they were or were not having children; those pieces included perspectives about the financial and existential struggles facing women who want to have children and feel they can’t afford to, or don’t feel the world is stable enough to bring children into.

It’s an important perspective, and interviewing women on this subject is something all outlets should be doing. But without addressing the question of whether a falling birth rate will, in fact, bring about imminent civilizational collapse, as the widely disseminated right-wing narrative claims, the framing pits women’s feelings and choices against the survival of civilization—hardly a fair contest.

Since birth rate is not a significant problem for the US in the foreseeable future unless you prevent immigration, the idea repeated in these pieces that “civilization” will collapse from a falling birth rate actually means “white civilization.” Pronatalists, you see, tend to share a lot in common with Christian white nationalists.

‘The problem is teens’

Fox News senior medical analyst Marc Seigel (4/10/26) warns teens: “You might want to have a kid but maybe as you get older you might not be able to.”

Another New York Times article (2/27/26) headlined “The Birthrate Is Plunging. Why Some Say That’s a Good Thing,” pointed out that the drop in the US is mostly among teens and women in their early 20s, and reminded readers that

30 years ago, the growing number of teenage and single mothers was seen as a societal crisis, with poor economic and health outcomes for mother and baby. The most vociferous critics called these women “welfare queens” and said they were draining public coffers.

It is indeed whiplash-inducing to hear today’s right-wing mouthpieces, like Fox News‘ senior medical analyst Marc Seigel (4/10/26; Media Matters, 4/10/26), saying:

The problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15–19, the fertility rate is down 7%, and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation.

In any case, despite its better gender framing, the Times still pushed the “not enough workers” economic narrative—and downplayed the administration’s xenophobia with euphemism:

If the birthrate drops too far for too long, it could eventually present problems, as the country needs workers to support an aging population. The population can grow through immigration too, but that issue has become politically sensitive, with numbers falling sharply under the Trump administration.

Vanishing productivity

Alexander Puutio (Forbes, 6/9/25): “The global economy, led by the aging West and now followed by much of East Asia, has sprinted confidently into the abyss of demographic collapse.”

The economic doomsday argument being spread applies both in the US and globally. Declining fertility isn’t just happening in the US—it’s a worldwide phenomenon. In fact, the US’s “demographic cliff” is much less dramatic than in many countries. China, for instance, has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and that nation’s population is already beginning to shrink.

While some might think this slowdown (and even potential reversal, many decades from now) in global human population growth could be a positive development, there are plenty of media outlets looking to fearmonger about it. “The demographic cliff will end us, unless we act quickly,” declared Forbes‘ Alexander Puutio (6/9/25).

The Atlantic‘s Marc Novicoff (6/30/25) presaged that within a few decades “rich countries will all have become like Japan, stagnant and aging.” After arguing that UN population growth projections are overly optimistic, he addressed those who remain skeptical of doomsday warnings:

If you’re not sure why this is all so alarming, consider Japan, the canonical example of the threat that low fertility poses to a country’s economic prospects. At its peak in 1994, the Japanese economy made up 18% of world GDP, but eventually, the country’s demographics caught up with it. Now Japan’s median age is 50 years old, and the country’s GDP makes up just 4% of the global economy. Measured per hours worked, Japan’s economic growth has always been strong, but at some point, you just don’t have enough workers.

Who cares what percentage of world GDP a country produces? If you’re a resident of Japan, what you care about is your quality of life. As Novicoff acknowledges, Japan’s productivity hasn’t weakened. And if you look at the human development index, which measures gross national income per capita, years of schooling and life expectancy, Japan continues to improve over time. So it’s entirely unclear on what basis he makes his claim that Japan doesn’t “have enough workers.”

But it is clear what readers are being primed for: governments and companies cutting retirement benefits. As the Atlantic piece concludes:

If the birth rate continues to drop around the world at its current pace, economic growth and workers’ retirement prospects will go the way of those projections: adjusting every few years to a smaller, sadder, poorer future.

Productivity swamps demographics

“Many demographers and economists see the apparent shift toward smaller families and fewer children as a significant concern for the nation and its labor force,” NPR (4/9/26) reported, “especially as immigration into the US has also plunged under the Trump administration.” Why isn’t the story that anti-immigrant policies are a cause for concern, especially since Americans are shifting toward smaller families?

That neoliberal push for austerity is the third ideological agenda that lurks behind many of these population crisis stories. Even those news outlets that acknowledged the role of immigration in a country’s economy often took it as further evidence that the economic outlook is bleak. NPR (4/9/26), for instance, told its audience that

many demographers and economists see the apparent shift toward smaller families and fewer children as a significant concern for the nation and its labor force, especially as immigration into the US has also plunged under the Trump administration.

What such economic warnings hide is that, just as population size isn’t solely dependent on the native fertility rate, economic growth isn’t solely dependent on the working-age population.

It’s true that increasing life expectancies mean that the ratio of the US working-age population to the retired population is slowly decreasing, even with a growing population. That can put pressure on things like Social Security, which operates like a social insurance program in which taxes from current workers go into a fund for current retirees. A shrinking, aging population does require some policy adjustments. But it doesn’t mean the sky is falling. Progressive economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 1/11/19) explains:

Even pulling out the impact of immigrants, the reality is that we have been seeing a fall in the ratio of workers to retirees pretty much forever. Life expectancies have been rising as people have better living standards and better healthcare. (Recent years have been an exception, where life expectancies have stagnated.) In 1950 there were 7.2 people between the ages of 20 and 65 for every person over the age of 65. This ratio now stands at just 3.6 to 1.

Over this 70-year period, we have seen huge increases in living standards for both workers and retirees. The key has been the growth in productivity, which allows workers to produce much more in each hour of work. (We also have a much higher rate of employment among workers between the ages of 20 and 65, as tens of millions of women have entered the labor force.) The impact of productivity growth swamps the impact of demographics.

Not enough babies? Too many billionaires

“Fewer births mean fewer future workers to support programs like Social Security and Medicare,” reports CNBC (5/30/25)—ignoring the fact that workers can move to your country if they aren’t born there.

The US has experienced an average of over 2% annual productivity growth in the nonfarm business sector since World War II, and there’s no reason to expect that to end. The gradually shifting worker/retiree ratio does start to become a bigger problem if productivity gains are siphoned off to only accrue to the rich. Which, as it turns out, they increasingly do.

Look at Social Security, which is frequently pointed to as being in peril because of the aging population and decreasing birth rate. An op-ed in USA Today (8/21/25), advocating for “killing” Social Security, claimed that, “due to a collapse of the American birth rate, the program is expected to be unable to pay the full promised benefits to retirees within the decade.”

An CNBC article (5/30/25) told readers that “fewer births mean fewer future workers to support programs like Social Security and Medicare, which rely on a healthy worker-to-retiree ratio.” (That idea was supported with a quote from the director of the “Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies”—a right-wing think tank that recently launched a “Pronatalism Initiative.”)

But none other than the chief actuary at the Social Security Administration, Karen Glenn, testified to Congress (3/25/26) that birth rate has nothing to do with impending shortfalls in the program. Instead, one of the biggest factors imperiling Social Security is the problem of greater-than-expected income inequality.

Since 1980, when income inequality began to increase sharply, the amount of wage income that exceeds the cap for Social Security tax has doubled. The vast majority of us—those who make up to $184,500 a year—pay Social Security tax on all of our income; those who make more pay nothing above that cap. Simply removing the cap would eliminate three-quarters of the Social Security fund’s long-term projected shortfall.

Economic value judgments

ProPublica (6/8/21) revealed the shockingly low tax rates paid by the super-wealthy—suggesting another way besides immigration that social programs can be maintained in the face of declining birth rates.

And, of course, there are all the other ways the rich avoid paying their fair share in our economy, whether it’s through low capital gains rates, or simply through the fancy accounting that lets the super-rich—including those who own the news outlets reporting on such things—pay next to nothing in federal taxes. Jeff Bezos, for instance, owner of the Washington Post, paid an effective income tax rate of under 1% on the over $4 billion he amassed from 2014–18 (ProPublica, 6/8/21).

So when the New York Times (3/26/26) tells you in its reporting on US population change that “the country needs a population of young workers and taxpayers large enough to finance infrastructure like schools, hospitals and healthcare for older residents,” understand that they’re making a value judgement about taxation. The more objective statement would be that the country needs an economic output large enough to finance these things, which is certainly true.

There are important policy conversations to be had about supporting people in having the size family they want to have. Many Americans have fewer children than they want because of financial limitations—like lack of affordable childcare or housing—or concerns about the state of the world or the environment. News outlets can and should be addressing these issues.

But reporting that covers birth rate decline without the critical contexts of immigration policy, gender norms and economic inequality mask the regressive ideologies behind the purported solutions.