The New York Times story (6/16/26) reported that the Senatobia Police Department said it ” encountered two people and a child ‘fleeing from the store into a vehicle.'” The one-year-old was “fleeing”?

“One-Year-Old Boy Killed After Officer Fires at Vehicle in Mississippi,” said the New York Times headline (6/16/26). So, a “one-year-old boy”—what most people would call a baby—was “killed after” a police officer fired at a vehicle, but there’s no verb you could use to connect those two things?

The Times subhed continued that pacifying work:

It is not entirely clear what led up to the shooting, but the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation said that police officers were responding to a shoplifting call.

“Ohh, shoplifting…!” we’re evidently supposed to say, before turning the page; that might make the baby murder make sense. I don’t need to say that baby was Black.

There will be more coverage of this heartbreaking, infuriating news about cops in Senatobia, Mississippi, called to the five-alarm crisis of someone purportedly shoplifting diapers, opening fire into a car whose driver “allegedly drove toward them.”

But in the meantime, please think hard about reporting that tells you to calm down, that suggests that, just maybe, nothing wrong happened at all. As ABC News (6/18/26) put it in a piece on how the “officer involved in shooting outside Walmart that killed 1-year-old boy” has been placed on leave: “One-year-old Kohen Wiley was killed, according to the family’s attorney.”

So maybe he’s not dead? Or he died from something other than the gun of the “involved officer”? Caution in reporting is valuable, but when it’s mainly deployed to protect the inflicters of state violence (FAIR.org, 7/11/16), you have to ask if it’s really a principle at all.

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

CEPR (6/15/26)

This week on CounterSpin: The way we hear about the stock market is quite different from the vision many people still hold: that businesses strive to serve people’s real needs or desires, and investors are rewarded by that metric—not by convincing people that they might make a lot of money in the future, or by conspiring with powerful entities to ensure that shareholders profit, by whatever means.

This longstanding confusion and conflict are being showcased right now in the unasked-for push of artificial intelligence into so many aspects of our lives, and the aggressive build-out of energy-gobbling data centers to serve it—whether communities want them or not.

Now, questions are arising around whether the promises of endless growth of the AI industry actually make any sense. Is there an AI bubble? How would we know? And what happens, and to whom, when it bursts?

A new project engages questions, not just about price-to-earnings ratios, and historical comparisons, but about the predictable impacts—on, for example, workers’ retirement accounts—when the AI exuberance falls to earth.

Dean Baker is co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the force behind their new project, called the AI Bubble Monitor. He joins us this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look at some recent press coverage of the 2026 congressional primaries.

The New York Times‘ original headline was “These Are the Voters Who Can Keep Democrats From Going Off the Rails.” The revised headline (6/16/26)—evoking a 1970s-era British domestic drama—casts  Black voters in the role of servants.

Ten years ago, New York Times political thinker Thomas Edsall (6/1/16; FAIR.org, 6/5/16) was blaming Trumpism on

the refusal of Democrats and the American left to hear—or to grant some legitimacy to—the grievances of white America as it loses power and stature to ascendant minorities and to waves of immigrants from across the globe.

Now, though, Edsall (New York Times, 6/16/26) says that “the racial and ideological split in the Democratic Party has been flipped on its head.” Now the voters he wants Democrats to listen to are no longer white:

White, well-educated liberals are the leading proponents of cultural and identity policies that often alienate swing middle-class voters. Black and other minority Democrats are a strong force for moderation.

These are the voters, as the piece’s original headline put it, who “can keep Democrats from going off the rails.”

As evidence for this, Edsall cites polling suggesting that Black (and “other minority”) voters are more concerned about “the situation at the border,” more likely to believe that gender “is determined by sex assigned at birth,” and less likely to support “cutting some funding from police departments in your community and shifting it to social services.”

As it happens, these issues—immigration, gender identity, policing—are the same issues the New York Times has long pushed to warn readers away from the left (FAIR.org, 5/24/21, 5/6/21, 4/24/23). But do such issues have an impact on real-world elections?

Edsall offers Richard Kahlenberg of the Progressive Policy Institute, a “centrist Democratic think tank,” to assure us that they do:

In the 2020 Democratic primary in South Carolina, Black Americans famously supported Joe Biden over socialist Bernie Sanders. In 2025, New York City’s Black voters supported Andrew Cuomo over socialist Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary. And in the 2026 Democratic primary for mayor in DC, socialist candidate Janeese Lewis George leads among white voters by 25 points, while the mainstream Democrat Kenyan R. McDuffie leads among Black voters by five points.

So Black voters lean to the right, and therefore can be counted on as a bulwark against socialist politicians? That’s good news for the Progressive Policy Institute—a deceptively named ideology mill bankrolled by ExxonMobil, PhRMA, AT&T and the like—as well as for Edsall, a staunch opponent of appealing to working-class voters’ economic interests (FAIR.org, 6/23/17, 3/30/18).

The Cato Institute (9/26/19) found that African Americans had the most positive views of socialism and most negative views of capitalism out of four demographic groups.

But wait—if we want to know what Black voters think about socialism, why don’t we ask them? That’s what the Cato Institute (9/26/19), the libertarian think tank, did; it found that 62% of Black respondents viewed socialism favorably, as opposed to 36% of white respondents.

The same survey found that 64% of Democrats as a whole had a positive view of socialism–making it unlikely that white Democrats have a substantially more favorable take on socialism than their Black counterparts.

Yet Edsall quotes another representative from the Progressive Policy Institute, founder Will Marshall, declaring:

The nonwhite working class has emerged as a force for moderation in US politics…. They aren’t agitating for the replacement of a market economy with democratic socialism.

But, laments Edsall:

The problem for Marshall and others who would like to shift power within the Democratic Party from liberal white elites to more moderate constituencies is that the white elites hold power and won’t give it up without a fight.

It’s a nice trick: portraying proponents of policies that benefit the working class as “white elites.” Meanwhile, actual white elites are paying the Progressive Policy Institute to dress up the defense of their wealth in blackface.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

Free Press (6/5/26)

Janine Jackson: Many ideas are being tested right now in the US; what the First Amendment actually means and does is one of them.

There is a horror show happening at—but not only at—Delaney Hall, a prison labeled “detention center” in New Jersey, where, as CounterSpin listeners likely know, hundreds of people have been on hunger strike to protest the conditions they’re subjected to, as they presumably await adjudication, and where reporters and protesters seeking to shed light on the situation have been met, not with legal arguments or explanation, but with pepper spray and rubber bullets.

The story isn’t about the failure of journalism itself; it’s more about the actual nature and meaning of the job, and why it needed a constitutional amendment to protect it.

Vanessa Maria Graber is the senior director of journalism and media education at the group Free Press. She joins us now by phone from Philadelphia. Welcome to CounterSpin, Vanessa Maria Graber.

Vanessa Maria Graber: Thank you so much for having me here.

JJ: I really just wanted to ask you to tell us about what you’ve been seeing at Delaney Hall that’s important about reporting and organizing, and that relationship. What can we be taking away from this absolute nightmare about the role of frontline journalism?

Free Press (1/26/26)

VMG: So at Free Press, because we care very much about defending First Amendment rights, and press freedom of journalists, we’ve had our eye on places like Delaney Hall, and Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and many of the protests that are happening outside detention centers across the US. And, unfortunately, we’ve had to pay close attention, because many journalists and protesters’ First Amendment rights are being violated.

Protesters have a right to assemble in public places—peacefully, nonviolently, which they have been doing—and they have been met with violence, and not allowed to protest. Their right to draw attention to some of the abuses that are happening in these detention centers has been violated.

The press also has a right to cover these issues, to cover these stories, to find out where detainees are being taken, and what’s happening inside the center. And they’ve also been met with violence and arrest.

And so we’ve been incredibly concerned about what has been happening at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. We have been working in New Jersey for more than 10 years, trying to get more access to the media, but especially for communities that don’t have a lot of access to information, like immigrant communities and Spanish-speaking communities.

And so what we’ve been seeing in the course of more than a year is immigrant journalists really be on the front lines of the story, not just reporting on these protests, but really trying to amplify the larger story of the human rights abuses happening inside Delaney Hall. So drawing attention to the medical neglect; for detainees being forced to work for a dollar a day; being inside there under overcrowded, unsanitary conditions; being forced to eat rotten food.

New Jersey Monitor (5/22/26)

They have been being arrested, they’ve been put under curfew, they’ve been put in a “protest zone,” in a public area where they’re allowed to protest, and journalists who have been clearly identified, some of whom are with major media networks, not that should make any difference, but they’ve also been brutally attacked by the New Jersey State Police and by ICE agents, and some of them were detained under the same brutal conditions that many immigrants are facing.

And so once they got detained, that’s finally when they were able to get access, and see what it’s like for the many immigrant families that are inside detention centers like that. And so it is incredibly concerning to see those protesters, legal observers and journalists be hit with rubber bullets, tear gas, smoke grenades, pepper-sprayed. And some of the pictures and video and reports that we’re seeing are very, very alarming.

JJ: It’s beyond alarming. And then I guess, you know, some of the reporters who are trying to shed light there are from major media organizations, but I would say, this is a four-alarm fire that you would hope that any media organization would be talking about, would be screaming about, would be fighting for things to change.

What we’re seeing, instead—and this is part of the story—is folks who are saying, “Well, I didn’t think I was a journalist, but it turns out I am, because I’m trying to shed light on this. ” And so we’re kind of seeing a defining of what it means to commit acts of journalism, and it turns out it doesn’t mean that you have to come from a well-funded legacy organization. You just have to have a particular kind of job in mind.

Vanessa Maria Graber: “To provide the critical information that’s necessary to keep people safe, organizers and citizen journalists have assumed the role of journalists.”

VMG: Yeah. What people need to understand, especially in immigrant communities, Spanish-speaking communities, is that these corporate media outlets do not serve them. Their messages do not reach these communities.

And so in order to fill the gaps, in order to provide the critical information that’s necessary to keep people safe, organizers and citizen journalists have assumed the role of journalists, to be able to bring that information to these communities that are not being served.

And so that’s why you see so many people affiliated with organizing groups or immigrants rights organizations be doing these livestreams, and using social media and using apps like WhatsApp, in order to tell people what’s happening, and to be able to try to bring news about family members that are inside that detention center.

And, really, they’ve been raising the alarm about these conditions way before corporate media got a hold of the story. Violence had to break out at Delaney Hall before that story rose to the national level. But for many, many months before that, this was a crisis point among immigrants across New Jersey, who not only were trying to advocate on behalf of the families, by raising awareness about this, but also trying to provide information to keep people out of there, as the ICE raids continue across states like New Jersey.

These folks are not just covering the protests outside there, but they’re also having to give people information about how to know their rights, how to exert their rights, how to stay safe in their communities and how to access legal resources. And that’s a job that mainstream corporate media have never done.

Radio Jornalera NJ

JJ: Let me ask you, finally, these folks need help. They need public support, they need more eyes, they need more people paying attention. How can people plug in to the work that’s happening? I know there’s a call from organizers to say, “Hey, help us do this work that we’re doing.” What can folks do?

VMG: I think the biggest thing they can do is repost, reshare some of these livestreams and photographs and videos that are being reported. I think it’s fine to repost “legitimate journalists,” although they’re under some real editorial constraints. So I think it’s even more important to amplify the truthtellers, many of whom are immigrants’ rights organizers and people from other social justice groups who are livestreaming daily.

Radio CATA

And there’s actually a network of immigrants rights groups working together to share livestreams in order to reach the most people. So groups like El Pueblo Unido de Atlantic City, CATA, Cosecha, Radio Jornalera, South Jersey Solidarity Collective—they’re all working really hard to let people know what’s going on, and urging people to contact the governor. Certainly, if you don’t have social media, and you’re listening to the radio right now, tune in to their radio station; CATA has a low-power FM station. And certainly you can volunteer, you can give money and you can make your voice heard through the legislators who are responsible with oversight for places like these.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Vanessa Maria Graber. You can find her piece, “First on the Scene at Delaney Hall,” at PressingIssues.org. Vanessa Maria Graber, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

VMG: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks, Janine.

Janine Jackson interviewed Detention Watch Network’s Silky Shah about ICE detention protests for the June 12, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Truthout (6/15/26)

Janine Jackson: You may have heard about the New Jersey detention center Delaney Hall, where people inside are on a hunger strike in protest of their conditions, and people outside are demanding access and accountability. What’s happening inside and outside of Delaney Hall is absolutely a story, but it’s also a way into a much bigger, broader story that did not start a month or a year or even five years ago.

Joining us now to add context to our current and fully appropriate outrage is Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Silky Shah.

Silky Shah: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here with you.

JJ: Well, if I just go to your start page, I see:

Many people are shocked to learn that the US government systematically deprives the liberty of immigrants, refugees and people seeking asylum, creating a system of immigration detention, the largest detention system in the world.

I feel like that already has a thousand stories within it. The shock that people might feel, the systemic nature of the injury, and then just the fact that what we’re told is a legal system in fact operates unjustly and inhumanely.

It’s June 11, 2026. What do you want people to see, to understand and to do, in the face of this crisis around detention?

Brennan Center (2/24/26)

SS: It’s a really hard time. In my 20-plus years of organizing against immigration detention, I couldn’t have imagined it getting as bad as we’re seeing now, in terms of both the scale of how big it’s gotten, and also the violence that’s taking place inside.

And the conditions have always been bad in immigration detention. That is just always the case when you put people in these types of settings. And, again, there’s so much inhumanity to the way immigrants are treated in ICE custody, in detention generally. But in this context, where you have the federal government saying that this is not a place where we’re going to have any oversight, this is a place where there’s less ability to monitor and understand what’s going on, that means it’s just getting that much more severe.

So we’ve gotten to this last year, more than 60,000 or 70,000 people detained at any given time, more than half a million people going through the system, people spending longer times in detention.

And with the hunger strikes happening right now, honestly, it was just a matter of time. I mean, this is a very common thing that happens in immigration detention. In previous iterations, for many, many years, we’ve seen this be a way for people in detention to exercise their agency and say, “No, we shouldn’t be treated like this, and also we should be released.” And so I think, from my perspective, seeing what’s happened at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, or Adelanto in California, or a number of other detention centers around the country this last few weeks, I think it’s a culmination of this last year and a half, of how much more violent and massive the system has gotten.

JJ: I think there’s a confusion around the very concept of detention, because I think people think, at least based on big media stories, “Well, these people are in prison. I’m sorry if they don’t like the food.”

But detention isn’t supposed to be prison. These are not people who have been even accused or convicted of any crime. It’s this liminal, in-between space that has been taken over by a carceral mindset and understanding.

But I think for folks reading in the paper, they think, “Oh, well, this is part of the legal process.” And once they prove that they’re legal, somehow this will erase this experience. It’s a kind of weird netherworld that I don’t feel that is very well understood.

Silky Shah: “The narrative has become about immigration being a public safety issue or a national security issue, when in fact immigration is about family relationships…. And it’s about seeking refuge.”

SS: Yeah. I do think it’s very confusing to people. I think part of it is because detention is a place where people have so few rights, it’s become a testing ground for the authoritarianism of this administration, which we’ve seen with the detention of international students last year, and their protests around solidarity with Palestine, or offshoring of detention we’ve seen in El Salvador and other places.

The thing I’ll say about the immigration detention system, as it relates to the larger prison industrial complex we have, is that it exists because of that. And so the US is a country, as you said, it has the largest detention system in the world. It also has the largest prison systems in the world, and it’s a place that’s really deeply committed to punishment, and these carceral infrastructures, and the immigration enforcement apparatus that we have today really grew out of that. It’s about policing, it’s about incarceration, and fascism operates through law enforcement in these sort of tools.

And so the reality is people in detention are not there serving a sentence for a crime, they’re there waiting a hearing on their deportation case or immigration case, or appeal on their case, or they’re awaiting deportation. But all detention centers, pretty much the vast majority are either former state or federal prisons or existing county jails. So they are carceral infrastructure.

And even then, on this question of whether people deserve it or not, based on their relationship to the criminal legal system, I think we have to really have a reckoning, and as we did five, six years ago, during the summer of 2020 and beyond, with the scale of incarceration in this country, and how many more people are funneled into the system, more and more, with harsher laws, higher bails, all those things.

The same thing is happening with immigration detention, and this sort of narrative for years, where we just accepted that some people were deserving of this. So under the Obama years, it was very much like, there are good immigrants and there are bad immigrants, and we’re going to go after the bad immigrants, and that’s going to help us make the case for the good ones. That just fueled the far right to target more and more immigrants overall.

Guardian (6/10/26)

And similarly, under Biden, there were a lot of questions about people newly arriving at the border, and it became the old immigrant versus the new immigrant. And, again, because the Democrats didn’t really fight back against these narratives, that again fueled the right, and fueled this push towards enforcement, and that’s what’s got us to this place. I think we have to fight for everyone, regardless of why they are inside.

JJ: And have that bigger vision.

SS: Absolutely.

JJ: We hear about, “Well, if you did it the right way,” OK, but then you also hear this administration wants to, and is, simply stripping citizenship from people who did it the “right way.” So, in other words, it’s not a matter of filing the right papers, because if it’s decided that this administration doesn’t want you, that legal, that paper-pushing, that processing—it turns out that is not actually the deciding factor. This whole idea of just “do it right and you’ll be safe,” that’s exploded.

SS: What’s so hard about those conversations is that they’re happening in a vacuum, when we have to really understand that immigration is connected to so much more than just this very specific process. I think one of the big challenges is that so much of the narrative has become about immigration being a public safety issue or a national security issue, when in fact immigration is about family relationships. In so many ways, that’s the real question of how these decisions around immigration are decided.

And it’s about seeking refuge. And so there can be this perspective of this very process that is actually not something that actually allows people to seek safety, or seek opportunity, or the other things that people might want by migrating to the US, and it ignores the foreign policy implications, the root causes of migration, that have created the conditions where people are seeking safety in the US.

FAIR.org (5/24/21)

JJ: The very framing of immigration as a problem, or the “border” as a “crisis,” this is already a framing that sets people up to hear things in a certain way, which, I don’t know if folks remember, this wasn’t the way we talked about people coming to the United States as recently as 15 years ago. So folks are being sold a particular storyline about where their problems come from, and it has a lot to do with news media, I think. It has a lot to do with the story that politicians, amplified by the media, are selling folks.

And I wonder, how do you think we can reframe that? Certainly we see pushback, certainly we see resistance to this idea. But what deeper do you think needs to happen?

SS: The reality is that politicians generally use immigrants as scapegoats, to see [them as] this place to put all the country’s problems on, when actually a lot of it is a failure to meet the needs of everyday Americans in so many ways. Especially leading up to the 2024 election, so many of the narratives were around the lack of social safety nets, what people needed, especially in the post-pandemic environment, and then immigrants arriving. And so immigrants became this really, really easy scapegoat for the right. And again, I do think that the Democrats failed to put forward a pro-immigrant message, and understand that immigrants are part of the fabric of the US in every single way.

NPR (6/10/26)

I would say that part of this is really tackling those questions about where we choose to put our resources. So just this week, Congress passed the new reconciliation money for immigration enforcement, for ICE, at $70 billion. Last summer, we also saw $170 billion go to immigration enforcement, which means more infrastructure, expansion of detention; They’re trying to have these large, thousand-bed warehouses in parts of the country to hold people in detention. They’ve expanded ICE agents to more than 20,000 agents; it’s essentially Trump’s occupying army at this point.

And that’s where the money is going. And often there’s a scarcity mindset, that we can’t have the resources to have Medicare for All or SNAP or all the other benefits that people deserve in education, nutrition, etc. And in so many ways, when you’re looking at how much money is going to these systems of control, these systems of violence, and being stripped from these other parts of society that are really needing it, I think that’s where we can start to tackle this question of, let’s stop scapegoating immigrants, let’s make sure to really talk about what the needs are. And I think people are starting to make those connections.

JJ: Let me just follow up on that, finally, because I do see hope. I feel very sad and angry and scared, but I see hope in people getting out of bed, and going to Delaney Hall, and raising their voices and protesting, and they’re putting themselves in harm’s way. And I just think, the support for those people who are connecting those dots, even if you’re sitting at home, is part of what you can do. How do you talk to people who say, “I want to help. I want to plug in. I just don’t know what to do”?

Truthout (1/22/26)

SS: There’s so many things people can do. I think, again, supporting people who are hunger-striking inside. Detention is across the country; there’s likely a detention center near you. Finding the community that’s working to support people inside to help get them released; the big goal right now with the hunger strikes is get people out.

We have to do the work to protect our communities now. So the incredible work that happened in Minneapolis, for instance, and all these other places around, ICE Watch campaigns, making sure people don’t end up in the system in the first place, being really attuned to what’s happening in your community and your neighborhood.

And then more broadly, unfortunately, we just lost on this vote around the $70 billion, but I do think, generally, there’s so much that Congress plays a role in, in terms of resourcing the system, and also these longer-term questions about how do we change the system. And so calling your members of Congress, things like the MELT ICE Act, and other efforts to shift the system, eventually.

I think, locally, a lot of work is happening to stop detention expansion. We have a lot of resources on our website at DetentionWatchNetwork.org, and a lot of work at state legislatures. New York just passed a bill against immigration detention. It is a time where the levers of power are limited, but there is some opportunity, especially at the state and local level.

So finding your community, what you can do there, and then just staying attuned. I think one challenge of these moments is it becomes so overwhelming, but I do think, at some point, we’re going to have an opening to really shift things. So I want us to be as ready as possible for that moment, and bring more people in.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Silky Shah. She’s executive director at Detention Watch Network. They’re online, DetentionWatchNetwork.org. Silky Shah, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SS: Thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

Former high-ranking Biden administration officials should arguably be facing charges at the International Criminal Court for complicity in the Gaza genocide. Instead, they’re embraced by polite society and enjoy influential posts in corporate media, academia and Washington think tanks.

Their concealment of Biden’s declining mental faculties helped precipitate 2024’s disastrous electoral results.

Democratic leaders in Congress, ostensibly in an oppositional role, continue to respond to Trump’s militaristic authoritarianism, both at home and abroad, with characteristic fecklessness and even tacit support.

And ten years into America’s MAGA nightmare, Democratic leadership is no closer to offering voters a vision of the future that will pull the rug out from under Trump’s faux populism.

All of these issues are cause for introspection and accountability—two instincts we know establishment Democrats lack. It is no wonder, then, that their allies in corporate media—who share the same character flaws—are helping them slander one of the left’s most prominent critics of their joint inadequacies: Hasan Piker.

Advocating for Palestinian dignity

CNN‘s Dana Bash (4/8/26): “A Democratic candidate is forging a controversial alliance with a left-wing streamer who has defended Hamas terrorists.”

The wildly popular leftist streamer (he has over 3 million followers on the Bezos-owned Twitch streaming platform) is a unicorn in the overwhelmingly right-leaning digital media environment. His appeal to young men is exactly what Democrats lamented they were lacking following their walloping in 2024.

But his massive popularity poses a serious challenge to Israel’s supporters in the US. Piker is an outspoken anti-Zionist and advocate for Palestinian dignity and freedom. His increasing prominence has also made him a sought-after surrogate for progressive candidates. Last year, he campaigned for Zohran Mamdani in the hotly contested New York mayoral primary. This March, Piker campaigned with Michigan Senate primary candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

All of this led to a torrent of condemnations from centrist Democrats (and Republicans), who have launched bad-faith accusations of antisemitism. Corporate media outlets like CNN and the Atlantic have since jumped on the dogpile.

Jumping on the dogpile

CNN (4/8/26) quoted Hasan Piker’s stream (4/8/26) without noting that his comments were in the context of his urging his audience not to dismiss firsthand accounts by former Israeli captives of sexual violence. 

The first of these was about Hamas’ conduct in its October 7 attack on Israel. Bash displayed Piker’s words on the screen and read them aloud:

It doesn’t matter if f***ing rapes happened on October 7. Like, that doesn’t change the dynamic for me…. The Palestinian resistance is not perfect.

Bash claimed this was evidence of Piker “excusing sexual violence by Hamas terrorists.”

But she lifted the lines out of context in a way that completely distorted their meaning. In that stream, Piker argued against viewers who denied that Hamas committed any sexual violence or rapes on or after October 7. He countered that there is “real evidence…from hostages…that [sexual violence] did happen, and that is very important,” and further stated: “I’ve never discounted the likelihood that sexual violence did occur on October 7 and after.”

He continued, leading into the excerpt Bash quoted:

None of [this] justifies Israel’s actions. So it doesn’t even matter. None of this justifies that—Palestinians have a right to dignity, a right to emancipation, a right to live fucking free lives—free from this occupation. It doesn’t matter.

It’s a brash statement, but Piker is clearly not “excusing sexual violence”; he’s saying sexual violence doesn’t excuse genocide.

Bash was one of the key spreaders of the unsupported assertion that Hamas perpetrated widespread and systematic sexual violence that day—one of the chief claims that the US and Israel used to manufacture consent for the Gaza genocide—and one which she has never retracted.

By contrast, Bash and the US corporate media, with few exceptions, regularly fail to elevate the documented evidence of widespread, systematic sexual violence by Israel against Palestinians (FAIR.org, 10/7/24).

Bash, who is complicit in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, feels entitled to condemn Hasan Piker for insensitive comments aimed at debunking the harmful lies spread by Bash and her ilk. The fact that Bash is placed in the position of judging Piker illustrates the inverted moral standards of the genocide-supporting US corporate media.

‘Messing around for 60 years’

Hasan Piker on Pod Save America (4/12/26): “I’m anti-civilian murder. I’m anti-civilian death…. I don’t want random people to die. I don’t even want people to go out and die in the process of trying to kill people.”

Bash then criticized another of Piker’s comments:

He also claims Hamas is, quote, “a thousand times better than Israel.” Hamas is a designated terror organization, not just by the US, but by the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

Terrorist designations are political, not objective, as any good journalist surely knows; that Israel is not a designated terror organization, according to those countries, says more about its political alliances than about the legality or ethics of its actions. In just the first two months of the Gaza genocide, Israel killed more Palestinians than the sum total of Israeli deaths by any Palestinian acts of violence or armed conflict since its creation in 1948.

Another of Piker’s previous comments shared by Bash was his previously retracted claim that “America deserved 9/11,” which Piker himself recently addressed on Pod Save America (4/12/26):

That was me responding to Daniel Crenshaw, ironically enough, on the Joe Rogan Experience, where he was making this ridiculous argument that, like, we have to go out and fight these people all the time because they hate us, because they ain’t us. I was like, “That’s insane. That’s not the reason.”

[My claim] was actually echoed by Robert Kagan, one of the godfathers of neoconservatism, just last week, where he came out and was like, “Yes, actually, we have been messing around in the Middle East for, you know, upwards of 60 years, and that’s precisely the reason why 9/11 happened.”

These statements, however tactless or provocative they might be, demonstrate Piker’s engagement in the work of challenging dominant narratives—championed by corporate media—that advance imperialist aims.

‘Fringe folks trying to weasel in’

Semafor‘s Shelby Talcott assured CNN viewers (4/8/26) that “one of the reasons that Democrats lost in the last election was because the American people felt like they were too far to the left”—ignoring findings that a main factor in the Democrats’ loss was that they “offered little to activists with concerns about Gaza, racial and economic justice, and immigration.”

Bash also highlighted Piker calling Zionism “a racist ideology.” “Now, just a little bit of factchecking here,” Bash retorted that Zionism is

an ideology supporting the notion of a Jewish state, the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. He just called that a racist ideology, the right for Jews to have self-determination.

Bash’s “factcheck” overlooked the reality that the creation and maintenance of a “Jewish state” necessarily means the denial of “self-determination” for non-Jews, and is therefore a racist project.

It is a matter of historical record that the creation of the state of Israel—known to Palestinians as the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe” in English—resulted in the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from land they had inhabited for millennia. That the belief in a “Jewish state” requires non-Jews to receive unequal citizenship rights was affirmed by the Knesset, Israel’s legislature, in 2018.

When Bash brought in a three-journalist panel to discuss Piker’s comments, Semafor White House correspondent Shelby Talcott said, “I think everyone can agree [they] are unacceptable.” She compared Piker to right-wing extremists: “You have the same issue in the Republican Party, where you have fringe folks sort of trying to weasel their way into this quote-unquote mainstream orbit.” No one on the panel dissented.

‘Losing the Democratic Party’

The Atlantic‘s Jonathan Chait (4/16/26) scorned Hasan Piker for “liken[ing] the leaders of Hezbollah, a terrorist arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to Nelson Mandela”—who headed the ANC’s military wing, which was on the United States’ “terrorism” watch list from 1988 until 2008.

The first of these articles was headlined, “Israel Moderates Are Losing the Democratic Party,” in which Jonathan Chait complained that the growing influence of progressive characters like Piker in the Democratic Party might drown out supposedly sensible centrist ideologies.

Chait began by parsing some of the same past comments of Piker’s that Dana Bash did. As Chait accused Piker of laundering Hamas’s actions, Chait himself laundered Israel’s October 7 atrocity propaganda:

Although he allowed, after October 7, 2023, that “the Palestinian resistance is not perfect”—who hasn’t raped, kidnapped and massacred 1,200 civilians from time to time?—he defends Hamas as “a thousand times better than the fascist settler-colonial apartheid state.”

Of course, the myth of systemic sexual violence on October 7 remains false, whether its spread by Chait or Bash. And while Hamas clearly kidnapped and massacred Israeli civilians, Chait felt the need to juice the numbers: even the Israeli government only claims that 800 of the 1,200 individuals who were killed that day were civilians, with the rest being mostly security forces. (Even 800 may be high, given that it’s acknowledged that some of the Israeli civilian victims on October 7 were killed by friendly fire.)

‘The views they want to mainstream’

For the Atlantic (10/22/24), Kamala Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney was not at attempt to convert Democrats to neo-conservatism, but to persuade Republicans ” to make a decision that might feel like a betrayal but is in fact an act of loyalty to country above all.”

Chait took El-Sayed’s choice to associate with the supposed terrorist-sympathizing Piker as evidence that El-Sayed must share all of these views himself:

If El-Sayed doesn’t think that people should discuss his rally with Piker, why would he hold a rally with Piker? The answer, of course, is that he believes Democrats should discuss Piker, but only to agree with him.

This sort of deflection is a common move for political activists when their ally has done something too embarrassing for them to openly defend, but that they do not wish to condemn. They are recognizing the unpopularity of the views they want to mainstream.

Putting aside the falsities, the idea that El-Sayed was attempting to mainstream views held by Piker, as opposed to seeing an opportunity to attract votes from Piker’s audience, is based on a standard that neither Chait nor centrist corporate media as a whole would typically apply to establishment Democrats’ embrace of right-wing figures. Kamala Harris, for example, was not assumed to hold all the same views as neocon Republican Liz Cheney when they joined forces during Harris’ 2024 presidential bid.

Chait also seemingly overestimated the “unpopularity” of Piker’s views, despite the fact that his argument rests on a warning that Piker’s influence over the Democratic Party is growing. Since the manufactured scandal over Piker’s appearance with El-Sayed, the candidate has nevertheless risen to first place in the polls.

‘Invisibility baked into the system’

On a New York Times podcast (4/22/26), Hasan Piker advanced a shocking moral claim: “If someone needs the food, they should absolutely steal it.”

The corporate media assault on Hasan Piker isn’t only about policing criticism of Israel. The Atlantic’s other hit pieces on Piker show it is about maintaining corporate influence in politics as well.

The Atlantic ran not one but two articles ginning up outrage over offhand comments made by Piker during a recent appearance on the New York Times “Opinions” podcast (4/22/26).

During the podcast, Piker and the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino adopted some irreverent positions while decrying the hypocritical moral standards in our hypercapitalist society.

The host, Nadja Spiegelman, prompted the discussion by introducing Piker and Tolentino to what she called “microlooting,” an internet trend she says involves stealing things from massive companies in protest of corporate wage theft. During the interview, both guests said they see no moral harm in stealing items from a grocery chain like Whole Foods, internet piracy or destruction of property as forms of protest, but were skeptical about the effectiveness of “microlooting” as a protest tactic. Americans “lack the capacity, unfortunately, to engage in some kind of organized disruption that would be infinitely more effective,” Piker said.

They also both eschewed what they see as hypocritical outrage in discussions about theft and violent crime. Piker noted that these discourses fixate on policing the underclass rather than on systemic exploitation and violence:

The rules are already designed in a way where if you steal from the poor, you become rich; if you steal from the wealthy, you go to prison. So there’s only one direction where you can do unlimited theft and erode the social contract for the 99%. There’s an invisibility baked into the system that allows the wealthy to engage in this behavior, because—it’s a cliche at this point—but wage theft is the most consequential amount of theft that takes place in the United States of America.

“A similar invisibility exists in structural violence, as opposed to individual acts of violence, as well,” Piker pointed out.

‘A very silly conversation’

The Atlantic‘s high dudgeon (4/23/26) illustrates Piker’s actual point: “Harm committed by the individual, strangely, continually draws more ire than the same harm being committed by a structure.”

Piker and Tolentino’s comments were helpful translations for how many Americans contend with ethical life given the vast disparities of wealth and power in this country. But the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood and Thomas Chatterton Williams don’t seem to care.

Instead, Wood—the man who prompted outrage two years ago when he defended Israel’s genocide in Gaza on the grounds that “it is possible to kill children legally” (Atlantic, 5/17/24)—framed their comments as distressing in his article (4/24/26), richly titled “Something Is Happening to America’s Moral Code.” “Piker’s romantic view of crime is, shall we say, not shared by the Chinese Communist Party,” Wood scolds.

Similarly, Williams (4/23/26) lambasted the two podcast guests for supposedly contributing to America’s moral decay:

And so a very silly conversation leads to a series of positions that are far from frivolous. Its overarching premise is that the law loses its legitimacy when political and economic elites violate—or are merely perceived to violate—the social contract. In such a world, ordinary people become entitled to ignore rules as they see fit. Neither Piker nor Tolentino explicitly endorses violence. But it is a short conceptual bridge from where they sit behind microphones to political murder.

Never mind that Wood and Williams are working from a total caricature of Piker and Tolentino’s actual beliefs; it is patently absurd for the Atlantic to dedicate this much ink reacting to offhand comments made on a podcast while at the same time regularly defending the greatest moral catastrophe in modern US history—support for an ongoing genocide.

Hasan Piker’s growing popularity has everything to do with the bankrupt moral character of establishment Democrats and their allies in the media. The elitist pearl-clutching on display in the ongoing false controversy over Piker only shows that his critique will continue to be sorely needed.

FAIR was founded with the help of a “grant” from the LAPD (Extra!, 1–2/06).

For 40 years now, FAIR has raised hell about corporate media bias, censorship, and persistent exclusion of peace and justice voices. I left FAIR’s paid staff in the year 2000, but 26 years later, I still often receive totally undeserved thanks and compliments for FAIR’s excellent output that I had absolutely nothing to do with.

I came up with the idea for FAIR in the mid-1980s, when corporate news outlets were on bended knee for a reactionary, declining, war-mongering president—and when Reaganism was ushering in an era of dangerous media mergers. Thankfully, FAIR is still around to challenge today’s even worse media conglomeration—including the sinister, step-by-step power grab by Trumpite billionaire Larry Ellison of Oracle. And Paramount/Skydance. And TikTok. And perhaps Warner Bros. Discovery.

In the early years of FAIR, I would sometimes hear from journalists in corporate media who genuinely welcomed our presence—as a media watch group that cherished journalism, unlike media-bashing right-wing groups—but who thought we were putting far too much emphasis on media concentration as a villain. In the era of Ellison, FAIR is widely understood to have been correct, even prophetic.

In These Times‘ repost (3/8/16) of Adam Johnson’s FAIR piece (3/8/16).

FAIR’s staff today is not much bigger than in our early years, but its reach is immeasurably larger, thanks heavily to the Internet. It warms my heart when I’m reading one of my favorite news sites—whether Common Dreams or Truthout or Salon or whichever—and see they’ve reposted one of FAIR’s insightful articles. My heart was especially warmed ten years ago when I saw Bernie Sanders at a presidential campaign rally holding aloft a printout of a FAIR article that had gone viral: “Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours.”

Sanders was the first member of Congress to approach FAIR about working together to challenge corporate media bias. But he was not the first presidential candidate whose biased coverage prompted FAIR to speak out. That honor belongs to Jesse Jackson, whose 1988 campaign was subjected to persistently biased and patronizing coverage.

Advances in communication technology played a significant role in growing FAIR’s abilities. At our founding, our “dialogue” with offending news outlets took place in slow motion. Once we had a fax machine (and fax numbers sometimes provided by sympathetic insiders), FAIR could get under their skin instantaneously. We once faxed a complaint to the office of anchor Tom Brokaw about bias in that evening’s NBC Nightly News while he was still on the air; as soon as the program ended, Brokaw faxed us back an angry response. Victory! Our criticism was heard.

A FAIR study (3/18/03) found that in two weeks of TV news coverage before the Iraq invasion, only one out of 267 US sources represented an antiwar group.

In the pre-internet era, FAIR was one of the first progressive nonprofits to pay for the expensive Nexis database (and happily shared our resource with independent journalists). Nexis allowed FAIR to do serious studies of corporate media bias and censorship in a few days or weeks, rather than months. To give just one example, FAIR documented the TV networks’ near-total exclusion of antiwar voices in the run-up to the Iraq invasion (3 out of 393 on-camera sources), a study that Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman has cited year after year in her critique of establishment media.

Then came the internet, which put the organization in orbit through enhanced research and dissemination, such that candidates like Sanders could cite FAIR’s research on the campaign trail. FAIR has achieved global reach and a sterling global reputation, as I’ve learned over the years when traveling in Latin America and Europe.

Forty years on, what has been accomplished? We knew from day one that, given the corporate and commercial structures, a different media can only come as part of the broader battle for a more just society. But our main goals were always 1) to inform people why they should be skeptical of corporate media content; 2) to encourage activism against media bias and corporatization; and 3) to urge support for non-conglomerated, independent journalism.

FAIR was somewhat alone 40 years ago in disseminating an informed critique of corporate news and in spurring media activism. Today, I see a torrent of intelligent media criticism pouring out of independent outlets, social media, Substack, podcasts—and reaching millions of active citizens. It’s a roar. When I talk to these hugely successful progressive journalists and “influencers,” much younger than I, it’s rare that they don’t bring up how FAIR inspired them to do what they do.

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

AP/PBS (6/6/26)

This week on CounterSpin: PBS News told its audience “What to Know About the Protests and Arrests Outside a New Jersey Detention Center.” What to know, evidently, is that protesters “say they are showing up in solidarity with detainees inside over accusations of poor living conditions.”

Maybe they aren’t showing up in solidarity; that’s just what they say. And poor “living” conditions?—because it’s their home now?—that’s also just an “accusation.” Why can’t we see what’s true? Oh, because reporters who try to see what’s happening are being kept from doing so with rubber bullets and tear gas. But for PBS News, that means: We just can’t know!

“Delaney Hall detainees say they are being given moldy and expired food,” the article (from AP) reads. But you know what? “President Donald Trump and his deputies have defended the center’s operations and denied there is any hunger strike, abuse or poor conditions inside.” We hear from Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin: “The fact is, we’re giving them the calories they want.” And we get a quote from Tom Homan, described as “Trump’s border czar,” saying he got to visit, and “the spaghetti was good.”

PBS News tells readers that Attorney General Todd Blanche “shared images of bloody wounds and bruises” sustained by ICE officers. There is not a single quote from a protester, an immigrant rights advocate, or even a journalist who says that people should be able to see what is being carried out in their name. But PBS News assures: That’s “What to Know”!

We’ll have a different conversation about what’s happening at Delaney Hall, and the bigger systems and structures in back of it, with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network.

Jersey Vindicator (6/5/26)

And: Yes, times like these make you wish for brave reporters who go to where the darkness is and shine a light. And we have them. They just aren’t at the traditional media you may have learned to look to. We’ll talk about the crucial role of frontline reporting with Vanessa Maria Graber, senior director of journalism and media education at the group Free Press.

After entering Lebanon with an invading army, the New York Times‘ Isabel Kershner (10/13/24) reported the shocking news that residents had stockpiled the kinds of weapons one might use to repel an invading army.

In October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and attendant assault on Lebanon, the Israeli army did a thing. It invited journalists from major Western corporate media outlets on an incursion into Lebanon’s ravaged south, accompanied by Israeli military personnel who would interpret the wreckage in Israel’s favor—not that the Western media have ever required much assistance in this regard.

Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Fox News and a handful of other special guests signed up for the cross-border sortie. It was, as Habib Battah and Christina Cavalcanti note in an investigation for the Public Source (8/27/25), an “awkward hybrid between a traditional embed and the kind of all-expense-paid publicity trip that journalists refer to as junkets, freebies and dog-and-pony shows.”

Never mind that it is entirely illegal for journalists or anyone else to enter Lebanon from Israel—what’s one more illegal invasion from a country that has been invading Lebanon pretty much since its founding? As Battah and Cavalcanti emphasize, these media professionals were also embedding themselves “within a national project of extraordinary transnational violence,” hosted by an “extrajudicial occupying military power—a critical point that all of them would fail to mention in their coverage.”

The Israelis certainly hit the jackpot with the coverage, as reporters excitedly discovered boots and helmets allegedly belonging to Hezbollah—clear proof that the group had been plotting a nefarious attack on Israel. New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner, an old pro at conducting preemptive journalistic strikes on Lebanon, did not disappoint with her dispatch (10/13/24), “Just Over the Border From Israel, a Hezbollah Cache of Explosives and Mines.”

And in report after embedded report, Israel’s chosen journalists faithfully transmitted the tiresome and counter-logical notion that Hezbollah was somehow the aggressor in the arrangement—as opposed to the army that was busily slaughtering thousands of people in Lebanon while implementing a scorched-earth strategy.

‘Urgent evacuation warnings’

The Public Source (8/27/25) asks: “Can embedding with an illegal invading force—one that routinely targets and kills journalists—ever be a ‘fair method‘ of newsgathering, or an ethical journalistic practice?”

While the October 2024 embed was one of the more preposterous embodiments of Western corporate media’s special relationship with Israel, outlets continue to do a fine job of sanitizing Israeli brutality even when their reporters are not physically viewing the region from inside an Israeli armored vehicle. Since March of this year, Israel has killed at least 3,613 people in Lebanon and displaced 1.2 million, obliterating entire villages and otherwise expanding the ecocidal policy honed in the Gaza Strip.

There has been no remotely comparable destruction on the Israeli side, and a recent Reuters article (5/31/26) that had attempted to suggest some symmetry now comes with the preface: “This May 31 story has been corrected to remove a reference to tens of thousands of Israelis being displaced by Hezbollah fire, in paragraph 3.”

Like in Gaza, where genocide proceeds apace in spite of a declared ceasefire (FAIR.org, 10/21/25), the media tend to report “ceasefires” in Lebanon without caring to highlight the fact that it’s not a ceasefire when Israel is still pummeling the country and massacring people, all the while setting the stage for a massive land grab with its creeping so-called “evacuation orders.” These “evacuations” have been focused on the Shiite demographic, with Israel warning Christian and Druze communities not to allow Shiite neighbors to take refuge in their towns (New York Times, 4/1/26).

Lebanese journalist Habib Battah, co-author of the aforementioned Public Source investigation, suggested to me that such orders might be more accurately termed “ethnic cleansing directives.” But that, of course, would be way too much for corporate media outlets to handle—and so it is that we learn about Israel’s “urgent evacuation warnings” and “large-scale evacuation orders,” as though it’s some sort of public service announcement, fire drill or other fundamentally legitimate Israeli undertaking, rather than entirely illegal in addition to downright psychopathic. From a legal and moral perspective, after all, you can’t just go around ordering people in other countries out of their homes, oftentimes only to bomb them when they comply.

Then there’s the matter of the “Yellow Line” or “security zone”—more terminology borrowed from Gaza (FAIR.org, 5/19/26)—which denotes the portion of south Lebanon that Israel is currently illegally occupying. But Israel has never been very good at staying within the lines, and its latest “evacuation orders” spanned no less than one-fifth of the entire country, far beyond its own unilaterally appointed Yellow Line.

As Battah remarked to me, the media’s acceptance and deployment of such arbitrary vocabulary creates “artificial structures” and a sense of orderliness, when in reality “there’s no yellow lines, there’s no yellow, there’s no colors—these are just illegal invasions.” And because media are committed to sanitizing Israel’s behavior rather than questioning it, “colonization becomes normalized.”

‘A warning to residents’

Reuters‘ headline (6/4/26) puts the onus on Hezbollah for not agreeing to a ceasefire with Israel—despite the fact that Israel has carried out 3,500 airstrikes on Lebanon since the last ceasefire was announced.

The eagerness of journalists to do Israel’s bidding is all the more confounding given that Israel is currently the No. 1 killer of journalists in the world. A recent Associated Press article (5/29/26), for example, reduced the pulverization of Lebanon to simply “ongoing fighting in southern Lebanon between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters.”

A June 4 Reuters writeup blamed Hezbollah for having “rejected” the latest US-mediated “ceasefire” plan—which, mind you, would basically have given Israel the green light to seize south Lebanon outright. Reuters refrained from referencing the thousands of Lebanese casualties since March, but did allow Israel the usual space to defend its depredations: “The Israeli military, in a warning to residents of the south, said it was continuing to target Hezbollah facilities.”

This is not to say that corporate media do not report on the destruction, displacement and killing in Lebanon; they do—and sometimes even sympathetically. But the refusal to paint a consistent and properly contextualized picture of what is actually going on in the country means that they mostly just end up legitimizing Israel’s war crimes.

Imagine for a moment that Hezbollah had just killed thousands of Israelis in three months and occupied northern Israel. In doing so, it laid waste to 5,000-year-old cities, and bombed the fuck out of everything from homes to ambulances to World Heritage sites to university students to environmental activists who protect sea turtles. Suffice it to say we’d be hearing a lot more about the utter barbarity of it all—and that Hezbollah wouldn’t be allowed to claim ad nauseam that it was targeting “military facilities.”

Almost three years into a genocide that has officially killed nearly 73,000 Palestinians and given Israel every opportunity to blind the world with its true colors, it is no short of an abomination that Israeli officials are still permitted to insist—with little to no media pushback—that they only target “terrorists” and “terrorist infrastructure.” If Israeli officials were to claim that two plus two equals eight, or that Elvis Presley was living in a cave in Madagascar, would the corporate media also report such information with a straight face?

By taking Israel’s word for it, journalists wind up essentially validating mass killing and occupation—as in the corrected May 31 Reuters piece that straight up makes the case for Israel’s seizure of a 900-year-old castle that lies nowhere near the imaginary colored line:

The advance into Beaufort Castle has granted Israeli troops a vantage point ​over much of southern Lebanon and northern ​Israel, from which attacks have been launched ⁠towards Israeli residential areas.

‘Iranian proxy on its borders’

CNN (3/13/26) reported that “Israel believes it needs to establish a strong military defense to protect civilians from the Iranian proxy on its borders.” CNN‘s readers would have no way of knowing that Israel has killed 100 times more civilians than Hezbollah in their conflict since 2023.

Of course, willful media decontextualization and omission of relevant history facilitates the conversion of Israeli propaganda into “news.” One handy trick is to always, always, always remind audiences that Hezbollah is a “powerful Shia group supported by Iran,” as the BBC (5/28/26) puts it.

On March 13, CNN ran an analysis datelined Tel Aviv that bore the headline: “The War That Never Ended: Israel Seizes Moment to Finish Fight Against Hezbollah, Iran’s Proxy in Lebanon.” The analyst proceeded to justify Israel’s belief that “it needs to establish a strong military defense to protect civilians from the Iranian proxy on its borders.”

But while invoking Hezbollah’s support by Iran is practically a requirement for Western media reports, it is never deemed necessary to qualify Israel’s own orientation in any way—like, I dunno, “The war that never ended: Genocidal psychostate backed to the hilt by global superpower seizes moment to finish fight against Hezbollah.”

As for why this fight started in the first place, the media can somehow never summon the energy to explain that Hezbollah owes its very existence to Israel’s apocalyptic 1982 invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, prompting the group’s formation. Indeed, Israel’s lengthy history of invading Lebanon—not to mention its 22-year occupation of the south of the country, which ended in its ignominious eviction by the Hezbollah-led Lebanese resistance—would seem to be pretty crucial context in terms of understanding the current war. But those journalists who do bother to provide a bit of background do so in as ambiguous and cursory a fashion as possible, as in the New York Times’ explanation (6/3/26) that “Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia group, has been in conflict with Israel, on and off, for decades.”

A May 13 NBC News intervention headlined “Amid Ceasefire, Israeli Forces Ramp Up Destruction of Homes in Southern Lebanon” offers a roundabout summary of Hezbollah’s origins: “The group, formed in the early 1980s as a civil war consumed Lebanon, was created with support from Iran and sought to expel Israeli forces from Lebanese territory.” The piece went on to discuss some details of the present destruction in south Lebanon, including footage from a video posted to X on April 24 in which

two excavators can be seen destroying solar panels in the Christian border town of Debel, where a photo last month showed a soldier taking what appeared to be an axe to a statue of Jesus.

In a statement to NBC News that can be safely filed under the can’t-make-this-shit-up category, the Israeli army “said…that the damage to the solar panels was not in line with its values, and that disciplinary measures had been taken.” Here’s praying that corporate journalists might someday have the balls to take Israel to task on more existential matters.

In a home video, New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren jokingly introduces the ADL’s Abe Foxman (right) as “my personal defamation protector” (Mondoweiss, 8/7/14).

More than a decade ago, a video (Mondoweiss, 8/7/14) showed Jodi Rudoren, then the New York Times‘ Jerusalem bureau chief, having a casual and friendly meeting with Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League. The cozy relationship in the video was telling enough, but when the video captured Foxman complaining that the “Arabs” had taken over a famous New York City hotel, and Rudoren shrugging it off, many skeptics viewed this as a window into the Times’ pro-Israel bias.

The recently deceased Foxman (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 5/12/26), famous for promoting the pro-Israel viewpoint and insinuating that critics of Israel were antisemitic, wasn’t Rudoren’s source in this video; they were pals.

Emmaia Gelman’s new book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, is a history of the group, framing it not as a racial justice organization but as a deputy sheriff for the US empire. Gelman shows how the ADL crafts a narrative for the public that pushes Western imperialism rather than equality. In recent years, the ADL’s main focus has been smearing criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian human rights as Jew hatred. As the group (4/4/23) says, “anti-Zionism is indeed antisemitism.”

The book is loosely part of the #DropTheADL campaign, which encourages both progressives and schools to stop citing the group as a source on political extremism, because of its “racist and right-wing” track record. The movement has had limited success: The delegates of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, voted to sever ties with the ADL, a move that was overruled by the union’s governing board (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 7/21/25).

When major newspapers write about the definition or prevalence of antisemitism, they frequently look to the ADL (New York Times, 2/27/28, 12/10/23, 10/6/24; Washington Post, 10/27/21; Wall Street Journal, 5/6/26; USA Today, 4/22/25, 5/6/26). In the Times obituary for Foxman (5/10/26), the paper wrote:

One reason Mr. Foxman was consulted by journalists and academics was that he made sure his organization could back up its claims with facts and statistics.

Gelman’s research challenges that record, arguing that ADL documentation of antisemitic incidents lacks context, allowing the group to “conflate small ambiguous acts like some kid writing a swastika on their desk with burning a synagogue,” Gelman told FAIR. That’s where their research “got fudgy” and “showed spikes” in antisemitism, leading to reporting filled with “stark terms without context.”

Bulwark of the West

The ADL Bulletin (9/7/80) presented right-wing Republican Irving Kristol and right-wing Democrat Martin Peretz as “different ends of the political pole.”

Why is the ADL so influential? In Gelman’s telling, the ADL worked hard in the early days of the Cold War as a news source for Washington, DC, officials. It blanketed congressional offices and newsrooms with briefings, newsletters and press releases, making it a go-to source for civil rights information. Its stances neatly aligned with pro-US Cold War policy, unlike other other civil rights organizations, which anti-Communists tended to view with political suspicion.

The book documents much of this history, including how the ADL produced influential media of its own:

One measure of the ADL’s reach into political culture was the ADL Bulletin, a glossy, often chatty magazine of news features and insider tidbits on domestic and international civil rights issues. The Bulletin started the decade with a paid circulation of 150,000—already a major publication, matching about 11% of the concurrent circulation of the New York Times. By 1967 it had grown to nearly 169,000 subscribers.

In particular, she cites the organization’s role in changing US perception of Israel after the 1967 war, establishing the Israeli side as the West’s bulwark against a Soviet-aligned Arab alliance. The group’s

reporting heralded a new project of blanketing US media with articles about Israelis as salt-of-the-earth Westerners, mixing human interest with political argument, and flatly denying Palestinian dispossession.

In the 1970s, the ADL created the radio series Dateline Israel, which “was distributed at no cost to thousands of radio stations and reportedly aired on 500 stations,” where “episodes presented Israel as bustling, hopeful, modern.” Gelman adds:

Dozens of 15-minute radio segments highlighted Jewish ingenuity, character and desire for peace. They highlighted an ostensible pluralism alongside grateful and supportive Arabs who welcomed colonization.

‘A bit of selection bias’

The New York Times (8/9/25) challenged ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on his group’s equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and on its call for Students for Justice in Palestine to be “investigated for materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization, which can carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.”

Gelman wants to see news organizations stop using the ADL as a go-to source, not just because of what she sees as dubious reporting methods, but because the group tends to conflate right-wing racial extremism with pro-Palestine speech and activity.

It’s a long road ahead, she said. “We have progressive media moving away from the ADL,” she said. “What’s left is the legacy media and the big-reach media. The only way I can see that shifting is if journalists themselves begin to revolt.”

Part of the problem is that over the decades the ADL has established itself as a one-stop research depot for media when it comes to antisemitism. Last year, for example, when FAIR asked the Southern Poverty Law Center about a rise in antisemitic and white supremacist content on social media networks like Facebook, a media handler suggested FAIR send its request to the ADL.

There are small signs of change. In a long interview with ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt, New York Times writer Lulu Garcia-Navarro (8/9/25) asked the leader about “young Jews who might self-describe as anti-Zionist or have problems with the state of Israel at the moment.” Greenblatt dismissed them, comparing them to “Hispanic people who support President Trump’s policies at the border.” “There are Blacks for Trump,” he added.

When the writer continued to press this issue, he bit back:

What polls are you seeing? I understand anecdotally you may have heard it from some people. I believe there may be a bit of a selection bias there. Have you gone to any of the mainstream synagogues in New York City, the ones with the largest membership, and asked them? I would encourage you to go to 92nd Street Y. Go to the West Side JCC. Go to Central, Park Avenue, Rodeph Sholom, go to KJ. Go to all these large Jewish synagogues and ask where their young people are.

Later that year, the Forward (11/21/25) reported that “younger Jews are more than twice as likely to identify as anti-Zionist than the overall population.” A Washington Post poll (10/6/25) taken in September 2025 found only 36% of Jewish Americans aged 18 to 34 saying they were emotionally attached to Israel, while 50% of Jews in that age group said that Israel has committed genocide.

A 2026 poll by the Jewish Voter Resource Center found 44% of Jewish Americans under 35 supported a democratic, binational government in Israel/Palestine elected by both Jews and Palestinians—”even as most major Jewish organizations classify calls for a single state as an expression of antisemitism,” the Forward (5/27/26) reported.

But in his interview with the Times, Greenblatt redefined which Jewish opinions mattered to him: not just pro-Israel opinions, but those of monied religious congregations in upper Manhattan, an elite that towers above Jewish communities elsewhere. The exchange makes the leader seem woefully out of touch.

He and his group still enjoy a kind of media access the rest of society can only dream about. But the pushback from the Times reporter is a small signal that some outlets are beginning to look at this group more critically.