You did not have to be anti-Catholic to protest sexual abuse cover-ups outside Catholic churches (National Catholic Reporter, 8/26/18.) (These particular protests were successful; Pope Francis accepted Cardinal Donald Wuerl’s resignation two months later.)

As revelations about the Catholic Church abuse scandals emerged in the early 2000s, protests at churches grew. In Los Angeles, protesters “defiantly entered” a “church with a wooden cross covered with photographs of abuse victims,” according to the LA Times (6/2/03). An AP report (9/23/02) covered what was then “the largest protest” in response to the sex abuse scandal at “the cathedral, the seat of the Archdiocese of Boston, in months.”

The protests continued for years; in 2018, the National Catholic Reporter (8/26/18) recounted, about “30 protesters, including survivors of clergy sex abuse, stood outside the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, DC,” to call for an “end to cover-ups.”

The widespread molestation of children by priests who had the protection of the church hierarchy angered Catholics and non-Catholics alike. And at no point did any reasonable observer misinterpret these protests as attempts to intimidate Catholic mass goers or spread anti-Catholicism.

Fanning misconceptions

Intercept (5/11/26): “The ‘Great Israeli Real Estate Event’…is co-sponsored by several real estate companies with ties to Israel…advertising land sales in Kfar Eldad, Karnei Shomron and other Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.”

Today in New York City, the press is focusing on a series of protests against real estate events that promote “properties for sale in the occupied Palestinian territories” (Intercept, 5/11/26), settlements that are widely recognized as illegal under international law (Amnesty International, 1/30/19). Several such events have taken place at synagogues; the first protest against these illegal land sales, at the Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in November 2025, sparked so much outcry it inspired a new law giving police authority to restrict demonstrations near houses of worship (Politico, 4/24/26).

The local media have fanned the misconception that these are anti-Jewish protests, meant to intimidate Jewish worshippers attending synagogue, when in fact they are pro-Palestine protests against illegal land sales that are strategically held inside a house of worship.

In the Catholic sex scandal case, it was easy for most people to see that the protests were not about religion or bigotry, but about an injustice committed within a religious order. In the occupied land sales case, the press entertained the notion that any condemnation of Israel that happens within earshot of a synagogue must be rooted in anti-Jewish sentiment.

‘An expression of a religious desire’

The New York Times‘ subhead (5/15/26) reads: “The protesters’ tactics have disturbed some New Yorkers.” The New Yorkers disturbed by the sale of stolen land didn’t make the headline.

The New York Times (5/15/26) wrote:

The protests have also unnerved many New Yorkers and aggravated the uneasy relationship between Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has vocally opposed the real estate events, and some Jewish residents. They are dismayed by the raucous scenes outside synagogues at a time of rising antisemitism, and want the mayor to speak out more forcefully when protesters cross into menacing territory.

The Times‘ Liam Stack went on:

Mark Treyger, the chief executive of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, a nonprofit umbrella group, said Jewish residents he had spoken to in recent weeks were experiencing “a chilling effect from these numerous ongoing protests that really are spilling into intimidation, hate and harassment.” He added that he wanted Mr. Mamdani to more assertively speak out against demonstrations that cross into darker territory.

The paper reported that, while “some legal experts” agree with critics’ view that synagogues shouldn’t host the fairs “because they promote the acquisition of occupied land in violation of international law,” Treyger said that “supporters of the fairs view them as an expression of a religious desire to reconnect with Israel,” and that “the right to hold such events is protected by the First Amendment.”

The piece concluded by quoting an attendee: “I visited a few contested areas. But to me, it’s not contested, because to me it’s part of our home.”

Presumably the Times would not offer such a “both sides” framework to people who claimed a “religious desire” for racial segregation, or for executing LGBTQ people. It’s not clear why people who claim God told them to steal land from other ethnic groups should be treated differently.

Pal-AWDA’s protest flyers are not aimed at Jews, Judaism or synagogues—but at the sale of stolen Palestinian land.

The Palestinian Assembly for Liberation–Awda, the group organizing these protests, is protesting land sale events, not Shabbos services. A spokesperson for the group pointed out to FAIR:

Reports like the Times that characterize these protests using a narrative of conflict between Palestine supporters and Jews fail to cite the presence of Jewish contingents, including Neturei Karta rabbis, that make up a key part of our protests, and who agree that houses of worship should not be used for the illegal sale of stolen Palestinian land.

Such coverage creates the idea that if someone perceives a protest to be against a certain religion, even when it’s about a certain political activity, that justifies rethinking the First Amendment right to assemble.

‘Violent thugs with keffiyeh rags’

When Mayor Zohran Mamdani says we need to ensure that “all protesters are able to exercise their First Amendment rights,” the New York Post (5/5/26) says that means he’s “ignorant of US law.”

The right-wing media are predictably running wild with the story. In its trademark racist style, the New York Post (5/5/26) called the demonstrators “a hateful mob of keffiyeh-clad anti-Israel protesters.” The Post editorial board (5/6/26) went further:

Don’t let them call it a “protest”: It was a riot outside Park East Synagogue on Tuesday night, as a hundred violent thugs with keffiyeh rags tied around their faces battled with the NYPD for hours.  They claimed to be protesting a meeting to promote the sale of West Bank land to Jews; in reality it was purely about moving to Israel—with [a] few brochures that had photos of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Protesters in fact don’t claim to be objecting to “the sale of West Bank land to Jews”; the emphasis in their material is that the land is stolen, and that selling it is illegal. But the Post‘s preferred formulation is absurd: It wasn’t about settlements…except, well, maybe a little bit.

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

Texas Tribune (5/20/26)

This week on CounterSpin: You may have seen videos of college commencement speakers telling students who’ve spent time and money learning how to read, write and think critically that that was dumb, cuz AI is going to be doing that from now on, so just get on the train or else—wait, why are you booing? That’s far from the only disconnect between students and teachers who think higher education means engagement with a range of perspectives, and right-wing politicians and their administrative acolytes saying “not so fast.” We’ll hear from Karma Chávez, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, at the center of this assault on academic freedoms.

CEPR (3/10/26)

Also on the show: There is a US State Department memo that calls for “a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

Thing is: That memo is from 1960. So while Trump is making everything old, new—and ugly and violent—again, he isn’t inventing it all. We try not to do media criticism by counterfactual, but consider: What if another country were cutting off resources to the US, in an explicit effort to cause us misery, in hopes that would make us overthrow our government? We’ll talk about what sounds reasonable as long as it’s about Cuba with Alex Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Janine Jackson interviewed author Jules Boykoff about the World Cup and sportswashing for the May 15, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

The Nation (12/5/25)

Janine Jackson: With FIFA, the governing body of association football, concocting a FIFA Peace Prize—described as “recognizing individuals for exceptional contributions to peace and unity”—in order to award it to Donald Trump; along with revelations of 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 so much as fans. Though, certainly, there are still plenty of fans, a great number of whom will be arriving here in my area in a few weeks time.

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.

Jules Boykoff has been following the relationships of sport and society for years now. He’s a former professional soccer player himself, and a critic and writer now teaching political science at Pacific University. He is author of a number of books, including What Are the Olympics For? from Bristol University Press. He’s here to discuss his latest, Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing and the FIFA Greed Machine. It’s out now from OR Books. He joins us now by phone from Sarajevo. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jules Boykoff.

Jules Boykoff: Thanks, Janine. It’s great to be with you.

Fortune (2/10/26)

JJ: Well, if we could start with a little bit of deep history. You will still see reporting—think Colin Kaepernick—that presents politics as a distraction from sports, or an interference in it. But not only is that not true now, the idea of sports being bound up with power and nationalism goes way, way back, doesn’t it?

JB: Absolutely. Sports are politics by other means, and soccer certainly is that. It’s the world’s biggest sport. And there’s loads of money that is flowing through the football, or soccer, system. Anybody who tells you that sports aren’t political, or that soccer isn’t political, may well be making money off of the sport. I mean, that’s kind of how it works.

If you take the shorthand from a fellow political scientist named Harold Lasswell, he said that politics are who gets what, where and when. And that’s definitely one way of thinking through the World Cup here that’s coming up. Who’s getting what, who’s getting where, and when are they getting it?

Athletic (2/20/26)

And it seems to me that FIFA, the world’s governing body for soccer, is making off like a bandit in this tournament. They’re talking about making $11 billion from this tournament alone. That’s more than any other sporting event in world history, and they’re teaming up with Donald Trump to do it.

Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, has embraced politics at every step of the way, in this sort of BFF romance that he has with President Trump, as you mentioned, giving him the FIFA Peace Prize. He showed up at Melania’s opening screening in Washington, DC, of her film. And he’s been there every step of the way to really give President Trump pretty much whatever he wants, and that’s political.

He even showed up recently at the so-called Board of Peace meeting, wearing a MAGA-style cap, a red cap that had 45 and 47, and giving the thumbs up. If that’s not political, I don’t really know what is.

JJ: Yeah, it’s wild. But I want to put a pin in the fact that if you go back to the New York Times in 1936, you will see, with reference to the Berlin Olympics, the headline “Olympics Leave Glow of Pride in the Reich.” So there’s a deep-seated history of the use of sport for political and propagandistic ends, which you talk about. But then you add in commercialization, then you add in truckloads of money, and it becomes this particular new phenomenon that is the core of this book’s conversation. So I would ask you to explain, what is “sportswashing”?

New York Times (8/16/1936)

JB: Absolutely. So “sportswashing” is when political leaders use sports to deflect attention from chronic social problems and human rights woes at home, to try to make themselves look important or legitimate on the world stage, to try to burnish their own individual reputation or the country’s reputation, while also setting up opportunities for political and economic gain.

And elements of it go way back in history. If you think about Berlin Olympics, 1936 and Hitler, now they’re called “Hitler’s Olympics,” he put aside his Nazi paraphernalia just for the Olympic Games itself, and then brought it right back out after the Olympics. And it kind of worked, in the sense that numerous journalists who showed up in Berlin, who knew full well that there was a whole campaign against Jewish people, against Roma folks and others, and they looked around and didn’t see that happening, and they gave glowing coverage of the events.

And so media have long played a really important role in elements of deflecting attention from your problems.

And it’s not just that it sets up opportunity for money-making, it also sets the stage for war. If you shimmy forward in history, and you look at a really good example of sportswashing from the 21st century, and you look at Vladimir Putin, who hosted both the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and then the 2018 Men’s World Cup, you can see that he used those events to gain enormous popularity domestically inside of Russia, and he didn’t waste any time using that power. In fact, between the Olympics that he hosted in 2014 and the Paralympics that he hosted, that’s when he invaded Crimea, when his popularity was sky high.

ESPN (7/14/15)

And so politicians throughout history have used sports to increase their popularity at home, and definitely Donald Trump has plans to do that.

So now if we look at the 2026 Men’s World Cup, and you think about how important sports have always been to Trump, I mean, he owned a football team, back decades ago, and he’s talked about how this World Cup, as well as the upcoming Olympics in Los Angeles, are really important to his presidency and his legacy. He has ever more incentive now to cling to sports as a sort of political life raft while his ratings go down with the general public, while this ongoing Iran War, alongside Israel, is giving him grief, and people don’t like it. And so he has ever more incentive to cling to sports, and I think that’s what we’re going to see here over the next month.

JJ: And the term “sportswashing,” I think it’s important to understand that it’s not just somebody like Mussolini, or even somebody like Trump, trying to use sports to deflect. There are other players involved. It doesn’t work if there’s not kind of a system there, right?

Guardian (11/16/22)

JB: Absolutely. And one thing I think is really important to point out is that journalists, as well as academics, have often used the term “sportswashing” just to sort of waggle a finger at those “other people” from Russia, from Qatar, from Saudi Arabia. But the truth of the matter is that it can happen in the United States, it can happen in London, it can happen pretty much anywhere. And I think that’s one of those sort of ethnocentric labels that’s been applied, and that really we need to get away from.

So I’d be really interested to see during this World Cup, and then in the lead up to the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, whether journalists wake up to that reality, and start using “sportswashing” to describe what we’re seeing with Trump.

JJ: Let’s get a little bit into what the different elements of it are, because I think folks will hear, “Oh, there’s big money trading hands, and there’s a thing that little people are outside of.” But the point is that it’s much bigger, that it includes political and environmental and economic impacts that go well beyond just one event at one time. There’s a lot of stuff that happens here that folks should be concerned about.

JB: Absolutely. These are mega events. They’re called mega events for a reason, and when one of these sports mega events like the World Cup rolls into your town, they roll over the toes of lots of existing activist efforts. The World Cup brings with it gentrification, it brings with it displacement, it brings with it greenwashing.

NBC (5/13/26)

I’m really glad that you brought up greenwashing, because that’s one of the reasons why a lot of fans around the world, soccer fans, have essentially been watching this World Cup through their fingers. Obviously this event, the upcoming World Cup, has been stained by controversy, like the eye-watering ticket prices that we’ve been reading about in the newspaper, the question of Iran’s participation while the president of the United States, one of the host countries, threatens war crimes against it; or the role that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement may or may not play in policing the event.

But lost in that political pyrotechnics is a fiasco that carries as much long-term peril as any, and that’s the tournament’s staggering contribution to runaway climate change. FIFA is one of the biggest purveyors of greenwashing, talking a big sustainability game, but then actually not following through.

The 2026 World Cup is going to be the most polluting World Cup ever. They made it bigger, from 32 teams to 48 teams, and the geographical expanse of the United States, Canada and Mexico means that people are going to be flying everywhere. And it’s got a huge amount of emissions when it comes to airfare that just dwarfs previous tournaments. And so greenwashing is another spectacle that we’re seeing in action here with this 2026 World Cup.

JJ: I would ask you also to talk about the labor impact, the worker mistreatment that can often accompany these mega events.

Le Monde (11/15/22)

JB: Worker mistreatment is a huge element of these events. I think a lot of your listeners will have heard of the 2022 Qatar World Cup, where thousands of migrant workers were brought to Qatar to build the stadiums and other venues, hotels, for that World Cup. Thousands of them died, thousands of them died. I mean, that should be staggering. There were also numerous deaths getting ready for the Russia World Cup.

And in the United States, we’re not seeing that, because there’s not as much stadium construction. In fact, there’s no stadium construction for this event, but what we are seeing is workers rising up and asking big questions about whether ICE will be present at the stadiums.

For example, you look at UNITE HERE Local 11 in Los Angeles, and they’ve been very outspoken on behalf of their members, but they do not want ICE to be there. FIFA gathers all sorts of information and data about workers in all of these venues. FIFA says that it’s about security, but in reality, they’re not promising that they won’t hand over that data to groups like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or the US federal government and President Donald Trump. And so there’s actually the threat of a strike right now at one of the stadiums in Los Angeles, where around 2,000 of these workers are a member of that local. And so I’m glad to say that this is also a place for fightback. This is a chance, when the whole world is watching, to make gains.

Real News (8/15/24)

To give another example, 2024, and this is the Olympics and not the World Cup, but I was in Paris with the great sports writer Dave Zirin, and we interviewed a train driver there who explained to us how his union threatened to go on strike, and he got an incredible boost in his wages; he’s going to get to retire earlier. Essentially every self-respecting union in Paris threatened to go on strike during the game.

So the labor issue has two sides, at least in places where it’s legal to organize. It is an opportunity to make some gains ahead of the event. So the thing is, Janine, it takes organization, and I’m pleased to see that we’re seeing groups organizing, unions organizing, especially in Los Angeles, to fight against the injustices that are all too often bricked into these sports mega events.

JJ: You talk about how, in basic terms, the World Cup and these mega events induce a state of exception, and that’s what we’re looking out for. It’s like all other rules go by the wayside, and suddenly we’re supposed to not care about them, and that’s the important thing to focus on.

So I would ask you, specifically looking at the World Cup 2026, which I’ve already been told that I should try to work from home because my office is near Penn Station, and they’re going to be rerouting trains and lots of things are going to be disrupted, but what should we be looking for in terms of the coverage, in terms of questions asked or unasked, as we go into this latest mega event?

NOlympics LA

JB: There’s no question about it that sports mega events like the World Cup do bring this state of exception, where the normal rules of politics don’t apply. And while it creates enormous amounts of inconvenience and enormous amounts of profits for groups like FIFA, and their corporate sponsors there for the World Cup, it does present opportunities for people to push back against it.

And that’s what we’re seeing in cities around the United States right now. Los Angeles is a good example, not just the union, but a group called NOlympics LA has been organizing against the World Cup. They’ve been active since 2017, and they continue to be active today.

And so I guess the thing about the World Cup, it is the most popular sport in the world, soccer, and I feel like we need to just slow down and say, we shouldn’t let FIFA be able to steal this from us; this is the people’s game, and they are turning it into the plutocrats’ game.

And, yes, they’re walking off with profits, but they shouldn’t get to steal all the joy from us, and they’re doing their darnedest to make this a joyless World Cup.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t come together with our friends, and celebrate these incredible worker athletes who are going to be toiling under incredibly difficult conditions. Let’s not forget they’re hosting this event in the hottest months of the summer, and where they’re going to do these water breaks, which for FIFA just means another opportunity to show commercials.

Josimar (4/9/26)

And so there are moments where we can come together as people, and push back against these real injustices in the sport. And I guess that’s what I’m going to try to do this summer, is come together with friends, get organized and try to push back.

JJ: While we’re talking about this corruption of FIFA, and all of the many interferences in sports, I just wanted to ask you, OK, now we insert gambling! That’s got to not be a great mix to add. How do you think that sports betting, and the legalization of sports betting—that’s obviously another piece of this.

JB: Sports gambling and sports betting is an absolute scourge on sports, and it’s really ruining lives, and it’s also ruining the experience of watching sports. FIFA, it will not surprise anybody, has pulled up and teamed up with a new, extremely shady gambling outfit, very shady group of people, that’s not even registered in most places.

So FIFA is definitely getting in on the gambling industry as well, and again, this is another one of those pushback points. There’s a really important soccer magazine called Josimar, which has come out with numerous studies about how FIFA, but also other groups out in the football world, have embraced sports gambling, to the detriment of the sport and to the detriment of humanity. So I highly recommend this alternative soccer magazine, based in Norway, called Josimar, if you want to learn all about the scourge that’s all over sport, but especially soccer right now.

Jules Boykoff: “The FIFA World Cup provides us with a chance to actually come together for real, and defend our communities against an invading force that is FIFA.”

JJ: Absolutely. I’ll just say finally, existentially, sports has been a savior for many outside-of-power people around the world, as is what you’re saying. So I just want to end, underscoring: It’s not that the thing is awful, it’s that almost every beautiful thing we have, some people will try to exploit, and that doesn’t mean that we have to abandon what we love, but we might have to work to reclaim it.

JB: Yeah. We need not devote ourselves to the death of complexity. We can appreciate the athletic brilliance on the field of play this summer at the World Cup, but that definitely doesn’t mean we have to sit idly by while the government carries out raids against people who might be just wanting to attend a match. So I think that the FIFA World Cup provides us with a chance to actually come together for real, and defend our communities against an invading force that is FIFA.

JJ: We’re going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Jules Boykoff. The book is Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing and the FIFA Greed Machine. It’s out now from OR Books, and I want to thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin, Jules Boykoff.

JB: Thanks, Janine.

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.

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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).

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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.