FAIR celebrated its 40th anniversary last week with a party at Littlefield’s in Brooklyn. There were alumni there from every era of FAIR, longtime writers whom I had never met in person before, and supporters who went back to the very first issue of Extra!.

We also got many testimonials from people who couldn’t be there—and some from people who were there, and wanted to write down their thoughts anyway. All the messages really brought home to us the importance of the project that we work on. I wanted to share just a few of them—some of them written, and some on video.

Jon Schwarz

FAIR changed my life. There’s been scattershot media criticism through US history, from Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, I.F. Stone, Noam Chomsky, etc. But no one before FAIR ever did what the world truly needed—for someone to institutionalize this kind of rational, careful, detailed critique of the corporate press. Without institutions, everything eventually falls apart. With institutions, you can—by showing up every day at work for decades—change people’s minds and hearts. They sure did this for me; I could never have understood the world we live in without them. Some days I quietly curse them for this, because look at the world. But most days I’m extremely happy about it, and I will always be grateful to them.

—Jon Schwarz
Writer, former Intercept contributor

One testament to FAIR’s decades-long run of brilliance is seeing how so many of its critiques of the media have become conventional wisdom. It is hard to fathom now, but at one point many journalists scoffed at the idea that corporate ownership of the media landscape made much of a difference to their ability to do their jobs. Whatever the issue—from climate change to the bogus justifications for war to workers’ rights or Social Security—FAIR was right, early and often.

—Peter Hart
Communications director, CEPR; former activism director, FAIR

FAIR’s steadfast and values-based approach has only become more necessary in the years since its founding. Our movements are incredibly fortunate to have FAIR and CounterSpin’s rigorous media analysis as we tackle the crises of our times.

—Silky Shah
Executive director, Detention Watch Network

Original FAIR staffers: Extra! editor Martin A. Lee, executive director Jeff Cohen, associate director Andy Breslau

When Bob McChesney and I started our work, we recognized that the most vital first steps had already been taken by FAIR. As we started to talk about what a media reform movement might look like, it was abundantly clear that Americans understood the need for reform because Jeff Cohen and Martin Lee, Norman Solomon, Janine Jackson, Jim Naureckas and everyone associated with FAIR had so skillfully, and so thoroughly, identified the crisis. Like Paul Revere and the signal watchers of 250 years ago, they sounded the alarm—and made everything else possible.

—Jon Nichols
Executive editor, The Nation

I first encountered FAIR’s courageous truth-telling more than 25 years ago as I devoured Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon’s books, which inspired me to focus on media reform activism. Since then, I’ve depended on FAIR for its unwavering and incisive media criticism, always reminding us what journalism could and should be. Given today’s corporate media oligarchy and accelerating authoritarianism, FAIR’s invaluable work is needed more than ever.

—Victor Pickard
Professor at UPenn’s Annenberg School for Communication

Voices of CounterSpin: Laura Flanders and Janine Jackson

FAIR has been steadfast in the fight for independent and representative media. As the media oligarchy becomes increasingly centralized, there has never been a more important time to support work exposing corporate bias. From exposing decades of media bias in Palestine to Cuba, from criticizing the police state to protecting our planet’s climate, FAIR serves the public interest as an essential pillar of watchdog journalism.

—Priyanka Bansal
Journalist; former FAIR intern

Congratulations to FAIR on 40 years of pathbreaking, exemplary work. FAIR is an anchor institution. I constantly turn to FAIR’s analysis to help navigate our treacherous media landscape, hear voices that the establishment media have marginalized or ignored, and better understand the stakes of the key political questions of our time. This is critical, indispensable work we all should support and sustain.

—Anthony Arnove
Co-founder of Haymarket Books

I’m teaching English to high schoolers right now at a private education company, and I added FAIR on my recommended reading list for all my students! Hoping that these teens can start their media literacy early and engage in their reading with intention.

—Kat Sewon Oh
Educator, former FAIR intern

FAIR alumni: development director Hollie Ainbinder, administrative/activist director Renu Nahata and office manager Nancy Graham

The climate crisis is in some ways a media crisis—the effort to get action on this greatest of human problems has always been hampered by the inability of our media to cope with the problem. Thank heaven that FAIR has been there to prod and goad and expose and provoke!

—Bill McKibben
Environmental studies scholar at Middlebury College; co-founder of 350.org

Ever since I first read Extra! in the late 1980s, FAIR has been my go-to source for media criticism. Over the years, FAIR has been a lifeline for me, an essential source of seriously illuminating media analysis. I’ve been fortunate to work with FAIR and to learn from their research and reporting, and most of all, from the amazing staff who keep FAIR thriving, decade after decade. Thank you!

—Bill Hoynes
Professor of sociology at Vassar College;  FAIR board member

When working at FAIR I had a task where I archived many of the Extra! magazines. Reading their articles from before I was born, it was remarkable how similar they were to the editorial line FAIR follows today, showing, through evidence, the bias in national media. I think consistency and commitment to a vision for a fact-based ethical media that holds power accountable is what sets FAIR apart in a media landscape that is dominated by corporate interests.

—Silas Guaghran-Bedell
Researcher; former FAIR intern

FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and former Extra! publisher Deborah Thomas

FAIR is the OG. FAIR has been with us through all of it. The 2000 election coup, during which FAIR’s commenters were the only ones with the sense to say what we could all see with our own eyes: that Republican operatives, with the collusion of an already-compromised Supreme Court, had succeeded in stealing the election—an undeniable fact that the New York Times shamefully decided to downplay and gaslight all of us about. I was a cub reporter back then, and felt like I was going out of my mind. I still remember reading FAIR’s clear, accurate, truth-telling analysis and thinking: We all saw this happening, so why are these guys the only ones saying it? Decades later, I still find myself thinking the same thing. Thanks to all of you for always telling the truth!

—A FAIR Reader
Anonymous

FAIR’s groundbreaking work launched an explosion of media monitoring and awareness of the corporate media’s collusion with corporate interests. The staff, tech people, interns and supporters of FAIR all contribute to this amazing organization. The uncontested analysis and criticism published by FAIR needs to be told each and every day—and it is, by the most committed group of media activists anywhere in the world.

—Deborah Thomas
Former publisher of Extra! and Grand Street

For 40 years FAIR has been calling out the bias in media coverage. With the media moving ever further to the right, their work is more valuable than ever.

—Dean Baker
Economist; co-founder, CEPR

FAIR’s current staff: Editor Jim Naureckas, program director Janine Jackson, senior analyst Julie Hollar and administrative/fundraising director Olivia Riggio

FAIR has been extremely important to me for many years. I teach critical media literacy at UCLA and have used FAIR’s articles and podcasts as an invaluable resources for almost 20 years. The excellent analyses and documentation of media manipulation, misrepresentations, corporate bias, and the cooptation of journalistic integrity has been exceptional. FAIR has consistently produced powerful examples with critiques that uncover the problems of corporate media and explain the complexity.

—Jeff Share
Professor of critical media literacy at UCLA

FAIR is entering its fifth decade of peerless work as an organization that documents and challenges media bias. What passes for journalism in corporate media routinely serves the interests of the powerful, and what passes for media criticism in corporate media rarely exposes the pivotal power dynamics operating below the surface. FAIR is a tireless and unique force for actual journalism that truly strives for fairness and accuracy in reporting.

—Norman Solomon
Journalist, media critic, activist; FAIR associate

Affiliations for identification purposes only.

Gothamist (5/29/09) noted the widespread negative responses to Bloomberg’s insult, including the New York Times (5/28/09) saying it “seemed to reach new heights of peevishness.”

In 2008, Michael Bloomberg had gotten what he wanted: a change to city law that allowed him to run for a third term as New York City mayor (Reuters, 10/24/08). The next year, he won the election—outspending his rival 14 to 1. Detractors saw this move by the city’s richest resident as the sign of an entitlement complex, or even a drift toward urban autocracy.

In the midst of this, Bloomberg—who relished his daily question-and-answer sessions with the press—was overheard calling Azi Paybarah, then a reporter for the New York Observer, a “disgrace” for questioning the wisdom of his pursuit of a third term. Bloomberg was pilloried in the press for this transgression (WABC, 5/28/09; Politico, 5/28/09; New York Times, 5/28/09), and he eventually apologized (Gothamist, 5/29/09). Such an insult, deployed with imperious spirit in the midst of what looked like a power grab, was the talk of the local press corps for weeks.

It’s quaint to think there was a time when this would be considered a scandal. In his second term, Trump barred the AP from pressers because the agency would not call the Gulf of Mexico by its new Trumpian name (FAIR.org, 2/18/25), while Congress abolished the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (FAIR.org, 10/1/25). Trump has launched a flurry of defamation lawsuits against news outlets since his reelection (FAIR.org, 12/16/24). And the Department of Defense—sorry, we mean the “Department of War”—enacted rules harshly curtailing the press corps’ access to the Pentagon (FAIR.org, 10/24/25), and fired top staff of Stars and Stripes (CNN, 8/28/26), the in-house but historically editorially vibrant military outlet (FAIR.org, 9/18/26).

‘Trafficking in verifiable falsehoods’

The New York Times (9/23/26) reported that media outlets hit Trump where it hurts: “The so-called TV pool…suspended its immersive coverage of Mr. Trump, and some news outlets temporarily withheld publication of photos of Mr. Trump’s events.”

Now, in his latest outrage against press freedom, President Donald Trump has banned MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the White House (NPR, 9/19/26). After the outlets sued, a (Trump-appointed) judge issued a temporary restraining order requiring Trump to lift the ban (CNBC, 9/24/26), saying that the outlets had shown they were likely to prevail in their lawsuit. After some delay, the administration complied, but the war between Trump and the free press continues.

Politico, which has dominated Beltway reporting for some time, is owned by the German media giant Axel Springer (FAIR.org, 11/5/21), whose commitment to center-right values like free-market capitalism and European integration clash with the autarkic protectionism of the far-right MAGA movement (Le Monde, 4/1/25). Meanwhile, CNN and MS NOW exist in right-wing mythology as evidence that American broadcast media caters only to coastal liberals, while the poor underserved conservative audience has to subsist on Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, Sinclair, AM radio and Bari Weiss’s takeover of CBS News.

Trump’s rationale, if you can call it that, was laid out in a court filing in response to the banned outlets’ lawsuit, where his lawyers claimed these three outlets were “trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security and other issues, and publishing sensitive or classified information.” From the New York Times (9/23/26):

The government filing Tuesday night included copies of letters sent earlier in the day to each banned news outlet. In addition to accusing the organizations of failing to meet standards of conduct, the letters identified specific stories that allegedly either spread falsehoods or threatened national security. The letter to CNN, for example, cited a January 2026 story that “disclosed ‘top-secret’ construction details related to the East Wing bunker,” the letter reads.

One of MS NOW’s alleged infractions, according to a White House letter, was a June 2026 story claiming “a source said that President Trump ‘underestimated the willingness of Iran to resume conflict.’” Politico is accused of publishing a “document detailing funding for the White House ballroom containing intricate descriptions of how the Secret Service would invest in security improvements.”

The circular reasoning here is that outlets lose their free press “privileges” (as opposed to a constitutional right) when they say things that aren’t true, leaving the president to be the sole arbiter of what is true and false. Now we’re in Enver Hoxha–land.

‘Take a break from getting lied to’

Donald Trump (Truth Social, 9/21/26) draws a distinction between the “Free Press”—i.e., outlets that support him—and “FAKE NEWS,” which means journalism he disagrees with.

Trump’s motive is creating a world where only Republican-aligned networks follow his narrative, and other legacy news outlets are replaced by a furious storm of sycophantic accounts on social media networks controlled by oligarchs like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, all following the lead of Trump’s Truth Social account. In Orwellian language in a Truth Social post (9/21/26), the president said he was not against “Free Press,” but was “instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS”—in other words, any news that isn’t subservient to his office.

The press corps needs to invoke a trade union spirit, even with the outlets’ recent win in court. CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang bravely confronted the president when he made a racist comment against her during the Covid crisis from her coveted spot in the White House press corps (Guardian, 5/12/20). She didn’t do anything very extreme; she simply put the president on the hot seat and didn’t back down. But now it’s not just her being attacked. It’s the entire press.

Every reporter should be making this an issue in the press room until Trump caves, if these people are serious about saving their profession and its role in democracy. Let him call you “nasty” or “fake.” Let him spend what little ammo he has, and keep pressing this crisis. The president—sleepy, aging and mind adrift—is only a titanic figure if people don’t stand up to him.

Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement (9/18/26):

The press must continue to fight back to protect their rights, not only to access the White House but to access the public records and whistleblowers this administration so desperately wants to keep from them. In the meantime, though, they can take a break from getting lied to and insulted at the White House. There are plenty of places to find news, and reporters will continue to do just that no matter how many tantrums Trump throws on Truth Social. Just like he can’t keep his name on the Kennedy Center, he can’t keep it out of the headlines.

Withholding their attention

Part of the trade union spirit might also be withholding your journalistic labor, a powerful tool against the self-adoring Trump. The good news is that this is starting to happen. “Major television networks suspended their pooled coverage of President Trump” in response to the ban, the New York Times (9/21/26) reported, identifying the outlets as “ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC.”

It’s a rare moment of courage for corporate outlets that fear nothing more than being perceived as taking a side. But if reporters want to convince the world that they are necessary to combat the rise of authoritarianism in places like the United States, now is the time to abandon business as usual and fight back—not to take one side in a partisan battle, but to protect the very institution of journalism.

Because the way things are going, they might not have opportunities to act in the future.

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

Verso Books (2022)

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media sell a lot of messages, but perhaps the overarching one is: This is how it is. You can be mad about it; we’ll give you a personal profile, maybe. But, hey, this is just how it is, and how it is: There were 34.5 million people living in poverty ​in 2025, according to the Census Bureau. The United States has the second-highest poverty rate among major developed nations in the OECD.

Wait, you aren’t happy with that? Well, welcome to corporate media’s echo chamber—where you are naive at best.

When people try to fight for something better, we get a lot of noise about how that can’t work, won’t work, and you know who else wanted social change? Communists! Socialists! The idea is that we will be frightened off from wanting healthcare because, you know what? Russia!

The good news is that ever-increasing numbers of people just aren’t buying what elite media are selling—which is the same old, top-down, racist, “why would you even speak up?” blather that we’ve been listening to for decades. And then the narrating of the nightmare that we’re living through.

It’s not that DSA—Democratic Socialists of America—are the answer. But ask yourself: Why won’t corporate media engage the questions they pose?

We’ll hear from Raina Lipsitz, author of The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics, from Verso Books—and author of a range of pieces, including some on socialism, for FAIR.org.

Featured image: Photo by Janine Jackson of anti-Mamdani graffiti in Manhattan’s Chelsea.

American Economic Liberties Project’s Alvaro Bedoya (AP, 9/21/26): “Today, billionaires have yet again bribed, censored and bullied their way to the top.” 

Paramount’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, which faced legal action and concern that Paramount boss David Ellison may be consolidating too much media power, is now going forward. A dozen states brought litigation that tied the merger up in court, but they announced a settlement this week. According to California Attorney General Rob Bonta (AP, 9/21/26), Paramount has “pledged to increase film production in the US, commit millions of dollars to a fund to support workers displaced by the merger,” and establish “new monitoring of the editorial independence of the company’s news operations.”

This merger will further shrink news ownership, as the deal allows Paramount, which already controls CBS News, to acquire CNN, the third largest US news site. What’s more, Ellison is the son of—and is bankrolled by—one of the richest Americans, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who is friendly with President Donald Trump (All Things Considered, 10/6/25) and an ardent supporter of the Israeli military (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 11/5/17).

David Ellison’s changes at CBS News don’t bode well for CNN‘s independence. Bari Weiss, the infamous conservative pundit whom he installed as CBS News editor-in-chief, put the brakes on a 60 Minutes report about Trump administration deportations (AP, 12/22/25) and allegedly tried to manipulate reporting on the Minneapolis anti-ICE protests to fit the administration’s narrative (Guardian, 6/8/26). Weiss oversaw the firing of veteran 60 Minutes staff like Scott Pelley (New York Times, 6/7/26), replacing them with conservative voices like former Times columnist Ross Douthat (New York Times, 7/28/26).

‘Editorial Independence Board’

“Connecticut wanted and demanded full divestiture of CNN and CBS News,” said Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (Hollywood Reporter, 9/21/26). “We wanted to save ethical and independent journalism and news.”

While Bonta was apparently mollified by the promise of “editorial independence,” no reasonable person should get too excited about the “monitoring” that will supposedly ensure it. According to the settlement (Hollywood Reporter, 9/21/26):

The Editorial Independence Board shall be made up of five (5) established journalists (active or retired), each of whom shall have practiced journalism for a minimum of ten (10) years (including with credentials for at least three (3) years)…. No more than two (2) Editorial Independence Board Members may be affiliated with the same political party.

This monitoring board’s members will be appointed by Paramount’s board of directors—an immediate first problem in terms of potential bias, and in terms of true independence. The agreement does not define what “credentials” will be required, either; there is, thankfully, no standard process in the United States for accrediting journalists.

The political affiliation requirement for these “Editorial Independence Board Members” is particularly concerning. Journalists do not generally consider themselves to be “affiliated” with political parties, but the corporate media system has a stubborn attachment to the two-party system, in which inclusion of Democrats and Republicans is believed to guarantee balance. (The limit of two per party suggests a vision of two journalists from each, with a fifth “neutral” member to break ties.)

But in 2026, a journalist who registers as a Republican is identifying with a party that is increasingly a cult of personality: The 2020 GOP platform, after all, boiled down to “whatever Trump says.” And what Trump says is that journalists are the enemies of the people; when they criticize his government, they’re committing treason. Having people on a journalistic independence panel who accept this view of journalism is not a guarantee of balance but of subservience.

A political shift

Semafor (9/23/26): “The possibility of [Musk] having even partial ownership in CNN and CBS would likely raise alarm bells in Washington.”

give the board oversight over who runs the respective news entities, something that has been an issue as CEO David Ellison tapped Bari Weiss to lead CBS News after Skydance’s purchase of Paramount last year.

In other words, the settlement sounds an awful lot like the public is losing another national media outlet to Trump’s anti-press war.

As if things couldn’t get bleaker, Semafor (9/23/26) reported that Ellison and other company honchos “discussed asking Elon Musk to become part of a syndicate of equity investors into Paramount.” The New York Post (9/23/26) said this move “could fuel the burgeoning panic among CNN staffers.”

Bringing Musk in on the deal clearly suggests a political shift, as Musk’s ownership of X, formerly Twitter, has turned the social network to the right (Conversation, 3/20/23; Bloomberg, 6/12/24). Musk has also moved to invest “$100 million to $120 million” to support Republicans this November (New York Times, 7/30/26).

This is also a sign of the incestuous investment nature of these top tech oligarchs when it comes to consolidating media. Semafor said Ellison’s father has “personally guaranteed more than $40 billion of the equity financing for Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros.” Larry Ellison also “invested $1 billion in Musk’s 2022 deal to take X,” Semafor said, while Oracle became a major stakeholder in TikTok after the US government forced its sale from its Chinese owner (Democracy Now!, 6/23/26). The joke that America is just three corporations in a trenchcoat is starting to look real.

‘Enforcing real editorial standards’

A board that “will apparently act as a sort of ombudsman that will arbitrate disputes between employees and management…could make life miserable for editors,” writes the Wall Street Journal editors (9/21/26). Or, given that the board will be entirely appointed by management, it could be a PR exercise to ratify corporate policy.

Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, always eager to see another regime-adjacent oligarch consolidating American media, praised the deal in an editorial (9/21/26):

Mr. Ellison installed Bari Weiss as head of CBS News to grease the wheels for Trump Administration approval. But his courtship of the White House magnified Democratic opposition. Saving CNN from Mr. Ellison became the real motivation for Mr. Bonta and the AGs. Irony alert: Mr. Ellison in 2024 gave a Democratic Super PAC backing the Biden-Harris campaign nearly $1 million.

Mr. Ellison placated the AGs by agreeing to establish an “editorial independence board” to ensure “accuracy, independence, fairness and journalistic integrity” at CNN and CBS News. Isn’t this what news editors are supposed to do?

The Journal presented David Ellison’s past contributions to Democratic causes as evidence of some kind of evenhandedness on his part, or possibly hypocrisy on Bonta’s part. But Ellison’s administration of CBS News is evidence enough that the public should be worried about right-wing partisan manipulation of the news.

“Isn’t this what news editors are supposed to do?” Yes, but the people doing their jobs at 60 Minutes got replaced by Douthat, whose “baby bust obsession is clearly grounded in xenophobia and white nationalist anxieties” (FAIR.org, 7/31/26).

The editorial board of the California Post (9/22/26), the new LA-based extension of Murdoch’s New York Post, had an even more pathetic take, saying “Bari Weiss—a liberal who left the New York Times for being too ‘woke’—took over CBS News and began enforcing real editorial standards.” The West Coast Post gloated that “the same could happen at CNN, which has been laughably left-wing in recent years.”

It’s little surprise that Weiss’ heavy-handed pro-Trump interventions at CBS would pass for “enforcing real editorial standards” at the right-wing Post. As for CNN, you can judge for yourself how “laughably left-wing” it has been in recent years.

‘Tell it straight down the middle’

“Journalists haven’t always helped their case by refusing to engage with critiques,” says Paramount CEO David Ellison (New York Times, 8/4/26) as he fails to explain how putting propagandist Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News squares with his promise that “great news organizations…are here to tell it straight down the middle.”

It’s easy to imagine these editorialists snickering as they type such fairy tales, and David Ellison himself attempted to convince audiences he wouldn’t interfere with CNN’s independence in a New York Times op-ed (8/4/26):

I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans; and when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.

Great news organizations like CNN and CBS News are here to tell it straight down the middle. That requires newsrooms that reflect the whole world, not one side of it. And it requires independence. Our journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve—not to any party or cause. These were founding principles for both CNN and CBS News, for legends like Ted Turner and Edward R. Murrow, and it is exactly that kind of independence that has always fueled the greatness of 60 Minutes.

The problem is that news organizations absolutely should not “tell it straight down the middle” when that middle lies between the pro-corporate status quo and a white nationalist fever dream. And Ellison’s administration of CBS News, and especially 60 Minutes, has resulted in the firing of seasoned staff in exchange for regime-friendly hacks, allowing Weiss to shift the editorial view closer to that of the Republican administration. Regardless of the settlement terms, there’s simply no reason to trust that this won’t happen with CNN.

Janine Jackson interviewed Russell Mokhiber, of Capitol Hill Citizen and Corporate Crime Reporter, about covering corporate crime for the September 18, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: In some ways, modern media criticism is corporate crime reporting. Major news media are fundamentally corporations; that used to be a controversial thing to say. And some of the things they do in mis- and disinforming us about the world, and ourselves and our political possibilities, constitute, minimally, moral crimes.

It’s very hard to learn about the harmful actions of other corporations—fossil fuels, insurance—without news media that are able and willing to shine that light. And, of course, you can’t get a full understanding of why corporations can do what they do without understanding government’s role.

Our guest’s work has brought those things together for years now. Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, DC–based Corporate Crime Reporter, and editor and writer at the Capitol Hill Citizen. He joins us now by phone from West Virginia. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Russell Mokhiber.

Russell Mokhiber: Thank you for having me, Janine.

Capitol Hill Citizen (8–9/26)

JJ: Let’s talk first about Capitol Hill Citizen. You can find it online, but it is, importantly, a print paper, and there are reasons for that. Tell us a bit about this project and what it’s trying to do.

RM: The paper was started a couple years ago by Ralph Nader. We publish four times a year now, but we want to go to a monthly and then a weekly, and eventually bring back the idea of a daily paper covering Congress and corporate politics inside the Beltway.

Unlike most newspapers, we don’t take any advertisements. We don’t take corporate advertisements—sometimes we run ads for books that our authors write.

But the idea is to get people off the phones, off the internet, and have people spend a few moments sitting, holding a newspaper, reading a newspaper. And reading a newspaper unlike any other in the United States, unlike any other magazine in the United States, unlike any other printed paper in the United States. And that’s because our point of view is that we have a corrupt corporate duopoly controlling our lives in the country. And both parties are beholden to the corporate powers; we’re very critical of both parties.

There are a couple newspapers that cover Capitol Hill—Politico, The Hill, Roll Call—but they are all heavily influenced by corporate powers. A number of them—and this includes, of course, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, which have congressional correspondents on the Hill—have run seminars on Capitol Hill for members of Congress, for the business community, that are sponsored by these same corporations that control the parties, and that control the political discourse. So Capitol Citizen is different in that respect.

It’s also different in the respect that our readership really likes the paper. We call newsprint “the new underground,” because as people move away from the phone and the internet—and we’re all addicted to it; my wife will tell you I’m the most addicted to it—but people are really showing signs of rebellion.

If Anyone Builds It

One is the popular movement against data centers.That’s not just because people don’t want data centers in their backyards. It’s because people understand that the whole artificial intelligence movement is a threat to humanity. And increasingly, this is blowing up in the mainstream press, but something we covered early on in our history at Capitol Citizen a number of years ago, we profiled a book by Soares and Yudkowsky titled “If They Build It, We Will All Die,” or something like that. I don’t know the exact title of the book, but basically these were two insiders who say that it’s a runaway technology that threatens humanity.

And we’re not accepting of the corporate Democrats and Republicans talking about inside-the-Beltway regulation. We want to stop this kind of technology, because it does threaten us all.

And unlike some of even the left media who are very pro–Democratic Party, we are not. We call out the Democrats as much as we call out the Republicans. That’s one way we’re different.

The other is, we believe in print. We believe that it’s going to be the new underground. And a lot of younger people are coming around to this, that we’re going to be able to get our information again from the newspaper, as the internet moves more and more towards this threatening technology.

JJ: Right, right. And there’s something different about the slower way you absorb print. And I’m not a Luddite, but there is something mental that happens when you read 57 different stories from 57 different sources in the space of 20 minutes, rather than slowing down with one particular story and thinking about it. It’s just different. And it’s not what was promised, but it’s where we’re at. So I understand that.

RM: And the term “doomscrolling” is real. You get on the internet, and you just flip from one item to another. It sucks you in. It’s very addictive and enticing. It just sucks you in, and you laugh at some things and you cry at others. And then you realize, when you put your phone down, that it’s somehow really dirty. And it’s dirty in a fundamental way, and we believe the newsprint is a lot cleaner that way.

Capitol Hill Citizen (8/19/26)

JJ: You’re talking about things that happen behind the scenes, and who sponsors what, and it might seem like a departure, but it’s not: The National Press Club probably sounds kind of musty to a lot of folks, but it still actually is an institution that has a role to play. And I know that you had a run in with the Press Club recently, and briefly, of course, please tell us what happened, and also, why do you think it should matter to somebody who wasn’t there?

RM: I had heard that Public Citizen, which is a group founded by Ralph Nader, one of the strong public interest groups inside the Beltway, was hosting a press conference on what they called “combating corruption.”

And as a reporter for Corporate Crime Reporter for 40 years, corruption’s been my beat. But I sort of smelled a rat. I said, “combating corruption, Public Citizen…” And I had heard that the Senate Democrats had put out a report on Trump’s corruption, and they were eyeing it for the midterm election, and they wanted publicity on it. So I suspected that’s what it was about.

And so I wrote to them and I said, “Hey, what’s this about?” And they sent me the details, and they were going to basically turn over Public Citizen’s name, and Public Citizen’s going to rent a room at the Press Club and do a press conference.

They printed up these really beautiful signs that said “Combating Corruption.” They put them around the room. Then they brought in three Democratic senators, led by the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, senator from New York, also known as the senator from Wall Street, who was instrumental in the funding of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

So I wrote to the press person, I said, “Hey, it’s going to be a press conference, right?” She goes, “Well, actually, no, we’ve canceled the Q&A session for Schumer.” “Oh, wow. That’s interesting. Why don’t they want….”

Of course, I knew why they don’t want questions for Schumer, because the question’s going to come up in a press conference on combating corruption: How could you have arguably the most corrupt senator in the US Senate, taking money from AIPAC and the Israeli lobby to fund a genocide, taking money from Wall Street to deregulate Wall Street?

CounterPunch (9/23/26)

So, you know, I wrote my buddies, and Sam Husseini and I were right there in the front row when the press conference started. Schumer started to speak, and Sam stood up and he held up a letter from, I think it was the Center for Constitutional Rights, which was sent to every member of Congress, warning them that if they fund a genocide, they too will be liable for criminal prosecution at the International Criminal Court. If you fund a genocide, you’ll be liable for that. It was sent to them two years ago. So they were on notice that if they funded a genocide, they would be liable for funding a genocide. Sam just stood up and confronted Schumer on this, and security came and dragged him off.

I sat there and I tried to ask these senators questions, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island, who’s also taken AIPAC money. I asked Schumer, and he just walked away. I asked Whitehouse, and he just walked away. And Senator Padilla, from California, I asked him, “How can you support the most corrupt senator in the Senate to be your leader?” And he just said, “He is our leader. Next question.”

JJ: Wow.

RM: And then I tried to get Lisa Gilbert—Lisa Gilbert is co-president of Public Citizen—afterwards to answer why she would allow these senators taking AIPAC money to lead this press conference on combating corruption. And she basically said that it’s “not connected”: We support his bill on corruption, and what you’re talking about is not connected.

I believe it is connected. I believe it’s the same dynamic. You take money from Wall Street, you deregulate Wall Street. You take money from AIPAC, you fund a genocide.

JJ: It feels like an old definition, because people are connecting those things. So to say, “We’re smarter and we recognize they’re not connected,” is just a disassociation.

Guardian (9/18/26)

RM: Well, there’s this recent poll that I think 70% of Democrats want Jeffries and Schumer out as the leadership of the Democrats in the Congress. So it’s not just me and you, Janine, it’s 70% of Democrats, for exactly that reason.

So it wasn’t a pretty situation, and Sam was banned from the Press Club. He’s appealing that. I’m a member of the Press Club, I’ve been on and off a member for 40 years, and I was stripped of my privileges. I appealed that, and it was like a two-week suspension, but now they say they’re going to keep it on my record, so I’m appealing that. It reminded me—I don’t know if you saw the news on Macklemore this morning.

JJ: Absolutely.

RM: Where Robert Kraft said, “You can’t play in our stadium.” I think that’s the message the Press Club was sending. It was like, “If you’re going to challenge genocide, don’t do it at the Press Club. Do it someplace else.” And of course it’s the Press Club, which should be about reporters’ freedom to ask tough questions of those in power. That’s what the whole thing should be about. The fact that they’re sending a message, “No, don’t do that in the confines of the Press Club, which is a private club,” is pretty outrageous.

Remarkably, I found out in doing the research for this article in the Capitol Hill Citizen—by the way, if people want a print copy of the Capitol Hill Citizen, you can just go on and for a donation of $5 or more, we’ll send you a copy, at CapitolHillCitizen.com—but what I found out at this event, the room that Public Citizen rented was in the Holeman Lounge. It’s named after Frank Holeman, and he was a reporter for the Daily News, and then he went on to work for the tire industry, for some front group called the Tire Industry Safety Council or something.

There was a Press Club historian who interviewed Frank Holeman, and he said, “Yeah, after I quit the Daily News, Ralph Nader had an office in the press building, and they wanted to hire someone to counter his effort. So if it wasn’t for Ralph Nader, I wouldn’t have a job.” So the place was founded on that kind of corporate power.

JJ: I think it’s such an interesting story, because people often say, “Why don’t people stand up? Why don’t people say something?” And then you have an example of people standing up and saying something, but then once it becomes a particular incident, people can say, “Oh, well, Sam didn’t do it right. Sam Husseini”—who is a former FAIR employee, I should say—“and Russell Mokhiber, they didn’t do it right. They should have done it differently.”

And there’s a disconnect there, between people thinking, abstractly, we should speak truth to power, but then when people speak truth to power, that becomes an incident, and it’s uncomfortable, and people don’t want to be uncomfortable, yeah?

RM: Yeah. And instead of saying, “Why is the senator who funded a genocide being allowed to hold this press conference here,” they turn it on us: “Why are you questioning this?” And it’s also not just about us, obviously; it’s sending a message to other reporters: “Don’t you dare, in these confines, ask these kinds of questions, and don’t you dare ask them in that way, or you’ll be gone.”

Capitol Hill Citizen

JJ: I want to say finally, first of all, I love—by which I mean I hate—the subhead “Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight,” which is from Capitol Hill Citizen. I appreciate it, and it makes me sad.

But I want to bring us back, finally, to: I came to media criticism through an interest in corporate crime. It’s been just a focus of mine since I was a teenager. It’s a keystone issue for me, as obviously for you. And I wonder, in our last couple minutes, could you talk about what drew you to this work, why you’re still invested in it, and I know it has something to do with where you grew up.

RM: Yeah. I grew up in Niagara Falls, New York, home to one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the beautiful falls and the beautiful gorge there. And my dad died young. My mom was an immigrant from Lebanon. So when my dad died, we were 10, 11, 12, myself and my sisters, and she moved us to Lebanon to get us out of Niagara Falls.

We had a wonderful family there, my dad’s family, in Niagara Falls, a wonderful family. I just got back from the Falls. I was there for a couple days for a little bit of a family gathering.

But the reason she moved us out was because she realized that the chemical companies for which my dad worked, Union Carbide, Carborundum, some of the other big—Hooker Chemical there—were destroying the place.

We had the indications. My Aunt Katie’s two kids, age four and six, died of leukemia. They were my age, my sisters’ age also. My cousin Billy, who was star quarterback on Niagara Falls’ high school football team, died in his early 30s. My dad died at 52. So people dying young from cancers and rare illnesses.

Corporate Crime Reporter (9/9/26)

And then last week I interviewed a woman named Christen Civiletto, who’s just out with a book from Princeton University Press called Thundering Waters: The Toxic Legacy of Niagara Falls. I interviewed her, the summary of the interview’s up at CorporateCrimeReporter.com.

Janine, I’ve interviewed like 48 people a year for 40 years for Corporate Crime Reporter, and we run a Q&A format. I had never broken down and cried during an interview, but I did during this. Because she said she grew up in Niagara Falls, went away to law school, worked at a big corporate law firm in Atlanta, and while in Atlanta, her coworkers are telling her, “Why are you always talking about people dying young?” Because she would come home to her 10th high school reunion, and people were dying from cancer and so forth, people were dead from cancer.

And she ended up going back to Niagara Falls for family reasons, and she started litigating these cases and writing about this, and she documents the whole history of how the chemical companies turned it into one huge cancer center. It’s a great book, and it’s a great history of Niagara Falls.

But, yeah, that’s how I got involved, because I said to myself, “What the hell’s going on?” I actually, in preparing for the interview, sent her a picture from the Chicago Tribune with me, 40 years ago, challenging Armand Hammer.

Armand Hammer was the CEO of Occidental Petroleum, which owned Hooker Chemical. President Nixon at the time—revealing my age here—had appointed Armand Hammer to head the President’s Cancer Panel to find a cure for cancer!

I was outraged by this. A guy who had caused cancer in my community, killed off members of my family, friends, people in the community, was head of the President’s Cancer Panel? I stood up and challenged him, and got thrown out. I didn’t know about this photo in the Chicago Tribune until years later, when someone sent it to me.

But yeah, there’s a history of resistance to this kind of corporate crime. What she points out in her book was, in 1901, the first chemical factory was shut down and bankrupted by a group of mothers living in the neighborhood. The first chemical factory was polluting the neighborhood. They basically—unlike us today, us activists today, we litigate, we ask for compromise, we engage in civil settlements—they actually shut the place down; and they did get settlements to their lawsuits.

There was something called the Free Niagara Movement, where Frederick Law Olmsted and a whole bunch of prominent people tried to make Niagara Falls basically like a Yosemite, where the whole place would be protected, and they would put the nascent chemical industry out of business. But they only got to create Niagara Falls State Park, which is just around the falls of the gorge, and the industry flourished around that. There was an opportunity to save it, and unfortunately we didn’t get it done back then, that movement didn’t get it done.

Russell Mokhiber: “We sat around as a message to the future: not to close your eyes, to keep your eyes open, and if you see something, say something and take action.”

So, yeah, that’s how I got started, because I grew up right in the middle of it. I actually returned to the Falls because my cousin Paul, who’s now in his 80s, wanted a roundtable among Mokhiber activists, and it was at my cousin Craig’s house. It was Craig Mokhiber; my cousin Albert, who was with ADC; his daughter Laila; and me and Paul, and we sat around as a message to the future: not to close your eyes, to keep your eyes open, and if you see something, say something and take action. That’s why I was in Niagara Falls. I was in Niagara Falls for that, and to hang out with the family a little bit.

But yeah, it was an eye-opener growing up in the Falls. We didn’t put two and two together. We were young kids. I left there when I was 11, but it always came back, and reading this book really haunted me.

JJ: It’s the same conflicts, and it’s the same questions of “what can I do about it” that folks are facing today. I think your message of, just keep your eyes open and see where you can do something, that’s where we’re at, and that’s powerful.

RM: Well, yeah, I would say, I love this newspaper. I love the Capitol Citizen, and I think your listeners will too. So if you’re listening to this program, go to CapitolHillCitizen.com, make a donation of $5 or more, and we’ll send you the current issue, and spread the word, because we really like it. We think it can be the future underground. Turn off the phone for a few minutes every day, sit with the paper and enjoy it.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter, and editor and writer at the Capitol Hill Citizen, where you can learn how to get a print copy. Thank you so much, Russell Mokhiber, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RM: Thank you, Janine.

CNN (8/15/26) describes billions in Afghanistan assets seized by the US before the Taliban reestablished a government as “frozen by the US and its allies over the Taliban’s rights record.”

Last month marked five years since the US withdrew its military forces from Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power. The US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and the resultant war, directly killed more than 176,000 Afghan people, including more than 46,000 civilians. Yet major US media outlets have covered the anniversary by muddying the US’s role in the country’s hardships—writing as though Afghanistan’s history began in August 2021.

A CNN article (8/15/26) by Kara Fox offered an egregious bit of historical revisionism:

In the five years since the chaotic US withdrawal from Kabul and the Taliban’s return to power, Afghanistan has become home to one of the world’s worst human rights and humanitarian emergencies.

Afghanistan hasn’t “become” a human rights and humanitarian emergency “since” the US troop withdrawal. It was a disaster during—and in no small part because of—the US war and occupation.

For instance, in November 2019, towards the end of the US occupation, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimated that approximately 2.44 million Afghan were in an “emergency situation” in terms of food insecurity. The next year, Amnesty International noted that four million Afghans were internally displaced and facing widespread problems of “inadequate housing, food insecurity [and] insufficient access to sanitation.”

Both years, the International Rescue Committee put Afghanistan in its top 10 “crises the world should be watching.” Evidently such conditions don’t meet CNN’s threshold for a “humanitarian emergency.”

In terms of rights, a 2019 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report documented Afghan strike forces that were “recruited, trained, equipped and overseen by the CIA” committing

serious abuses between late 2017 and mid-2019. They are illustrative of a larger pattern of serious laws-of-war violations—some amounting to war crimes—that extends to all provinces in Afghanistan where these paramilitary forces operate with impunity.

In 2020, HRW would go on to criticize the US-installed Afghan government for “fail[ing] to prosecute senior officials responsible for sexual assault, torture and killing civilians.” One can debate what constitutes a human rights “emergency,” but it’s clear that rights violations were a defining feature of the US occupation.

Refusal to be charitable enough

“Economic opportunities are nearly nonexistent” in Afghanistan,” the New York Times (8/15/26) reported—in a piece that never mentions US efforts to strangle the Afghan economy.

Corporate media likewise obscure how the US continues to co-author Afghanistan’s travails post-withdrawal. In the New York Times (8/15/26), Elian Peltier repeatedly referenced Afghanistan’s economic problems, noting that the country faces “mass unemployment,” and that “economic opportunities are nearly nonexistent.”

Peltier didn’t mention that the economic crisis was driven in large part by the economic warfare that the US has waged against Afghanistan since withdrawing its troops (Guardian, 2/6/22). Under Biden, the US not only imposed sanctions and cut aid, it unlawfully seized $7 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank assets that were held in New York banks, causing a liquidity crisis that spiraled into rampant unemployment (FAIR.org, 2/15/22).

According to development expert Sara Moussavi (New Humanitarian, 1/20/26), these sanctions have “restrict[ed] financial transactions, access to aid and the process of payments due to the asset freeze and exclusion from the global financial market.” Such measures, she pointed out, have “led to a strangling of Afghanistan’s economy that has exacerbated one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.”

The Times‘ Peltier went on to write that “extreme hunger has been spreading fast from one [Afghan] province to another after aid cuts last year plunged millions into deeper food insecurity.” But it’s not just aid cuts from “last year” that are causing Afghans to go hungry; it’s also the sanctions, which are a form of war and have been in place for five years.

Peltier also declined to mention that sanctions and the asset freeze have helped drive the country’s food crisis. His wording implies that the US’s failure is limited to a recent refusal to be charitable enough to Afghans, but what the US state has done is worse than that: It has stolen Afghanistan’s money and sabotaged its economy for the last half decade.

‘Tax dollars feeding terrorists’

“Afghans Are Starving,” a Washington Post headline (8/6/26) acknowledges—and Post editors want to make sure that adult male Afghans don’t get to eat.

A Washington Post editorial (8/6/26) likewise admitted that the US aid cuts have contributed to Afghanistan’s humanitarian disaster, but didn’t mention the much larger economic war against Afghanistan. Instead, the paper wrote that Afghanistan’s hunger crisis is “mostly…due to the inept and barbaric Taliban government’s mismanagement, worsened by severe drought.”

The editors, moreover, wrote that

Americans don’t want their tax dollars feeding terrorists. Careful controls must be imposed to ensure that food aid goes to women and children, not military-age males. But Americans are generous, and the crisis calls for compassion.

Continuing to starve people who happen to be men of military age because of the racist view that they are all potential “terrorists” may be the most twisted definition of “compassion” ever put forth.

The Post framed Afghan hunger in terms of American generosity rather than vindictiveness, yet the World Food Programme USA is clear that

Afghanistan’s economy has shrunk significantly since 2021 due to instability and sanctions. With 69% of the population below the poverty line and reduced humanitarian aid, millions are food insecure.

Thus, the US’s implicitly non-“barbaric” policies are a major reason most Afghans don’t have enough to eat. Sanctions devastated the economy, and people became poorer and less able to afford food, but Peltier and the Post left out this part of the story.

‘One of the main bargaining chips’

The LA Times (8/15/26) decries “child malnutrition” in Afghanistan without noting that the US has stolen billions of dollars from the country.

Similarly, the Los Angeles Times (8/15/26) reported the UN World Food Program’s warning that “child malnutrition has reached critical levels in a third of Afghanistan’s provinces and is expected to worsen due to funding shortfalls.” However, the piece did not refer to the US and EU sanctions, or to the asset freeze.

In her CNN piece, Kara Fox (8/15/26) discussed malnourishment among Afghan children and the lack of healthcare available to them, without bringing sanctions into the conversation. Fox did write that

billions in central bank reserves remain frozen by the US and its allies over the Taliban’s rights record. Unfreezing these assets is one of the main bargaining chips in talks with Western governments, with the ban on girls’ education a key sticking point—meaning the very money that once funded that schooling is now being withheld to try to restore it.

Fox didn’t question the right of the US to freeze Afghanistan’s assets. And at no point did she ask the obvious question: Why, if the US and its allies are truly concerned about girls’ education and rights, are they using an economic weapon that starves those same girls (along with their mothers, fathers and brothers)?

‘Wars collapse economies’

All of these articles overlooked another important factor in Afghanistan’s economic problems that scholar Brehanu Borji Ayalew highlighted in an academic article (Discover Sustainability, 5/20/26). “The broader financial toll of two decades of conflict,” he wrote, is “staggering: The United States spent $2.3 trillion on military operations, reconstruction and aid, yet these flows built a hollow, aid-dependent economy.” Ayalew noted, “Evidence from Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria shows that wars collapse economies, displace millions and destroy social foundations.”

In the same vein, the International Monetary Fund pointed out that

Afghanistan has endured decades of war and political turmoil, leading to repeated waves of refugees. Since the 1970s, the country has faced numerous conflicts, including the Soviet invasion, civil war, the rise of the Taliban, and the aftermath of the 2001 U.S.-led intervention. These conflicts have resulted in political instability, security risks, and severe humanitarian and economic hardship.

Yet CNN, the New York Times,  LA Times and Washington Post all wrote as if 20 years of US-led war and occupation didn’t shape Afghanistan’s economy. It’s not difficult to see that the function of corporate media coverage of Afghanistan post-occupation is to separate the US’s disastrous war from its ongoing effects, to downplay the damage done by that invasion to help legitimize present and future US aggression.

Telling readers over and over that conditions in Afghanistan have been dreadful since the US troop withdrawal, without mentioning the US’s starring role in past and ongoing misery in Afghanistan, is imperial stenography. It  erroneously and dangerously suggests that nations are better off under US occupation than when they are independent.

Washington Post (8/17/26): “Hegseth will take a US-funded military aircraft to Iowa,” due to what the Pentagon calls “the continuous need for secure communications.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth keeps popping up on the campaign trail, fueling speculation he may run for president in 2028. His travel last month to Iowa, “a presidential campaign proving ground, fits that pattern,” the Washington Post (8/17/26) reported, citing an official familiar with Hegseth’s thinking.

Like so much about Hegseth’s tenure as self-styled “secretary of war,” this isn’t normal. “It is highly unusual for a current defense secretary to campaign for candidates,” noted CBS News (8/17/26). “Previous secretaries rarely if ever attended events for candidates while defense secretary.”

Hegseth’s stumping for fellow Republicans has alarmed at least three of his predecessors, who spoke with NBC News (8/28/26). “My God, we’re at war,” said former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. “What are you doing going to Iowa and campaigning when you should be paying attention to your job?”

It’s this very war, with Iran, that may waylay Hegseth’s White House dreams. Unable to change the realities on the ground, Hegseth is taking the next-best approach by trying to change the way the war is reported.

‘Right out of central casting’

Jeet Heer (The Nation, 8/31/26): “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that taxpayer money allocated to the Pentagon was used by the executive branch to influence a congressional election, a direct attack on the principle of keeping the military out of domestic politics.”

Hegseth (like Donald Trump) is living proof that a strong TV persona can compensate for a lack of competence. Understanding this is key to making sense of Hegseth’s otherwise inexplicable tenure as defense secretary.

Amid his years reportedly spent abusing women and alcohol (New Yorker, 12/1/24), Hegseth still managed to appear bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as a co-host on Fox News, where he voiced full-throated support for Trump, as well as for US soldiers accused of war crimes (New Yorker, 11/22/24). Watching the telegenic Hegseth hold forth on his favorite channel, Trump was impressed. (“Right out of central casting,” he later said.)

And now Hegseth—whose thin resume includes being forced to resign from the two veterans organizations he led (New Yorker, 12/1/24)—has failed his way up to defense secretary, with his sights set on the Oval Office. To get there, Hegseth will have to paper over his rocky tenure in office.

Things began on a positive note, with Hegseth successfully installing a TV makeup studio in the Pentagon (CBS, 4/23/25). But when it comes to actual warfighting, Hegseth has proved less capable, accidentally texting a reporter top-secret war plans to bomb Yemen last year (Atlantic, 3/24/25), and suffering a humiliating defeat in Iran this year (New York Times, 8/28/26).

“Losing a war with Iran would tarnish Hegseth politically, but he has developed a simple solution,” wrote Jeet Heer in the Nation (8/31/26):

using the resources of the Pentagon to create a troll army of social-media influencers who could create an alternate reality where all his actions were brilliant victories.

‘Pentagon troll army’

Will Sommer (Bulwark, 8/27/26): “Secretly employing a shadowy, rabidly online personality for the apparent purpose of going after your enemies is a remarkable illustration of the kind of steps Hegseth appears willing to take to fight internecine political wars.”

While foreign enemies have posed a challenge, Hegseth has had better luck with domestic ones, purging many of his own generals (New York Times, 8/25/26), and nearly all of the Pentagon press corps (FAIR.org, 9/23/25).

Hegseth’s replacement press corps—who dutifully signed his loyalty oath that binds them to report only information “authorized” by the government—hailed from right-wing propaganda outlets like One America News, Gateway Pundit and LindellTV, which is “MyPillow Guy” Mike Lindell’s pet project.

Among the newbies was Jennica Pounds, a Utah influencer known as DataRepublican, who three months after receiving her press pass would transition from covering the Pentagon to working for it—while still posting regularly. “What Pounds didn’t reveal as she grew her social media presence was that she was secretly working at the Department of Defense,” Will Sommer reported for the Bulwark (8/27/26):

Pounds’ secret work for the Pentagon calls into question the motivations of several of her posts, such as when she took a jab at then–Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a Hegseth nemesis. It also raises serious questions about Secretary Pete Hegseth’s cozy relationship with outspoken conservative social media influencers, and whether it breaches serious ethical norms.

The Bulwark story—headlined “Pete Hegseth Is Building a Pentagon Troll Army”—noted that “Pounds appears to be just one of several people enlisted in such a task.”

Secret influencers

One member of Hegseth’s influencer squad argued that such “special government employees” are often “prohibited from revealing their status because of the sensitive nature of their work” (Washington Post, 8/30/26).

Three days later, the Washington Post (8/30/26) followed up with a story that began:

The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration.

One of those secret hires was Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel and Townhall columnist who has over 600,000 social media followers. Above a video of Hegseth, Schlichter posted on X, “We are lucky to have @PeteHegseth.”

Such sentiments are less common among those who don’t work for Hegseth. “The Pentagon is using your tax dollars to hire influencers on X to put out partisan talking points,” Adam Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran and former Republican congressmember, posted in a video (X, 8/26/26). “In any other administration, this would be the biggest scandal of the century,” Kinzinger said, questioning how many other influencers the Trump administration is secretly paying to push its agenda.

Wyatt Reed (Grayzone, 9/16/26): “This incredibly unusual arrangement saw a Trump advocate being given credentials to cover Pentagon affairs up close as a nominally independent reporter, before being brought on board to defend US military conduct as an official government employee just one month later.”

There could be a lot. The US military budget, all in, is at least $1.5 trillion—a number Trump wants to increase by $500 billion, despite the Pentagon never having passed an audit (POGO, 6/9/26). So much money, accompanied by so little oversight, can buy a lot of influencers.

“The revelations about paid Pentagon propaganda posters come as the US military pursues a flurry of murky partnerships with prominent conservative influencers,” reported Grayzone’s Wyatt Reed (9/16/26). Among those is proud bigot Laura Loomer,

who is producing de facto press releases for self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, enjoying Pentagon press credentials, and earning references as an “informal advisor to the Department of War.”

The Pentagon’s secret propaganda operation, Reed noted,

appears to be in breach of two federal laws, the Hatch Act and the Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibit government employees from engaging in political activities while on the clock, and forbid them from directing their propaganda efforts at the US population, respectively.

‘The soldiers’ newspaper’

This Stars & Stripes report (8/21/26) about military families forced to evacuate from Bahrain illustrates the paper’s grunt’s-eye view of military conflict.

Hegseth’s media manipulation doesn’t stop there; other recent reports revealed his efforts to kneecap Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon-sponsored military newspaper. Stars and Stripes has a long track record of independent journalism, despite a third or more of its funding coming from the Department of Defense.

During World War II, famed Gen. George Patton sought to ban Stars and Stripes, and even threatened to jail cartoonist Bill Mauldin for mocking him (Wall Street Journal, 4/5/26; FAIR.org, 4/9/26). But Gen. Dwight Eisenhower told Patton to stand down (Pulitzer Center, 2/6/26), saying: “Stars and Stripes is the soldiers’ newspaper. We will not interfere.”

In the intervening decades, Stars and Stripes, which reaches 1.4 million daily users, has investigated (as Poynter notes—8/26/26)

the horrific conditions endured by Iraq and Afghanistan casualties at Walter Reed Medical Center, the crappy M16 rifles that jammed in Vietnam and the families caught in a bureaucratic hell after a chaotic evacuation from a naval base in Bahrain.

The Bahrain evacuation story (Stars and Stripes, 8/21/26), published just last month, exposed the hollowness of Hegseth’s flowery talk about the Iran War when it came to military families. It began:

Nearly six months after the US Navy evacuated 1,300 family members from Bahrain at the start of the Iran War…. Some evacuees say they have spent tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket for basic living expenses. Others are sleeping on the floors of temporary housing.

The repeated displacements have caused trauma for children, a spouse told Stars and Stripes. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s bumbling response to the pleas of soldiers and families included inadvertently directing them to the National Bank of Canada for relief assistance, according to a spouse.

‘Smells like censorship’

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.) (Washington Post, 8/27/26): “This shameless censorship will only continue to erode veteran and servicemember credibility and trust in the newspaper, whose independence is essential.”

It’s one thing for Hegseth’s dirty laundry to be aired by what he calls the “fake news.” It’s quite another for it to be aired by the Pentagon’s own newspaper. Especially when Hegseth is desperate to craft a flattering—even presidential—narrative for himself.

The very day the Stars and Stripes story was published, the bylined reporter, Lara Korte, was fired for “insubordination,” she wrote on X (8/21/26).

To be clear, Korte was already on the chopping block, having publicly aired her concerns over the Pentagon’s push to exercise control over her newspaper the month before (Guardian, 8/27/26). “I’m working for Stars and Stripes,” Korte defiantly told CBS News (7/5/26) in July, “not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker. I’m here to cover the military community.”

Five weeks after the CBS interview—and the day after another damning Stars and Stripes expose (8/11/26), this one about the deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which quoted a spouse as saying her sailor husband “hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow”—Pentagon official Andrew Brey “ordered” Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer to fire Korte, as well as editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, who also spoke with CBS, according to a lawsuit.

The suit against the Pentagon was filed by Korte and Slavin, as well as Lederer, who refused the order to fire the duo, and promptly was fired alongside them (Washington Post, 8/27/26).

Also suing the Pentagon is Stars and Stripes’ former ombud, who was fired in April, despite her position being congressionally mandated (Washington Post, 6/25/26). In her final column (4/8/26) before getting axed, Jacqueline Smith highlighted readers’ overwhelming opposition to Hegseth’s overhaul of the newspaper, including a retired Navy veteran, who wrote that it “smells like censorship.”

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

Corporate Crime Reporter (8/3/26)

This week on CounterSpin: FAIR, the nonprofit collective that produces CounterSpin, had a T-shirt early on that called for the “separation of press and state.” That’s still meaningful, of course, but it feels a little odd now to talk about media bias without using the word “corporation.” Interrogating the role of profit-driven corporations in today’s journalism is crucial, but it’s important to see it as another part of a deep-going questioning of corporations’ power over our lives in general.

We talk this week with a veteran of that work. Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.–based Corporate Crime Reporter, and editor and writer at Capitol Hill Citizen. He joins us this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of “Alligator Alcatraz.”

The Boston Globe (9/13/26) reports that there is “significantly less tension and fear over speech controversies” at Harvard—which is not the same thing as more free speech.

The Boston Globe (9/13/26) ran an article contrasting two Boston-area universities’ approaches to campus free speech. Penned by higher education reporter Mike Damiano, the piece reads like an installment of Highlights for Children‘s didactic “Goofus and Gallant” feature, with one school clearly doing it right while the other is letting down the cause of free speech.

Northeastern University plays the role of the loathsome Goofus, with critics remarking that the “school’s leaders have taken a hands-off approach to speech issues since cracking down on a pro-Palestinian protest encampment more than two years ago.”

Meanwhile Harvard, in Gallant fashion,

undertook a multi-year experiment in remaking campus speech norms with top-down reforms, resulting in what students and professors describe as a kind of thaw on a campus where tensions over politics, ideology and speech had thrust it into an acrimonious national debate.

That certainly makes it sound better than Northeastern’s “hands-off approach.” But you have to ask: What did Harvard’s leadership actually do for speech when they put their hands on it?

Well, for one thing, “they have nudged teaching fellows and professors to keep their personal politics out of the classroom.” Huh—telling faculty not to talk about their politics does not actually sound like promoting free speech.

During the Gaza encampment, Harvard locked the gates of Harvard Yard for six weeks—and it locks them again whenever the danger of political speech rears its ugly head. (Boston Globe photo by Andrew Burke-Stevenson.)

Also, “they have pushed for rules for campus events and classrooms requiring participants to promise not to disclose after the fact who said what.” Likewise, muzzling students who want to discuss each other’s speech is not a free speech policy.

Another rule that’s praised is “Harvard’s policy of institutional neutrality, which discourages university leaders from taking public positions on contentious issues.” In this case, it’s a mandate for self-censorship that’s presented as protection of free speech.

The university, the Globe reports approvingly, “is now recruiting professors representing viewpoints that are scarce at Harvard.” As this is all under the shadow of “the second Trump administration’s bitter fights against schools it deems intolerant to all but leftist ideology,” you can rest assured that those “scarce” viewpoints are on the right—the kind that will demonstrate “tolerance” to the White House.

Needless to say, hiring staff based on their acceptability to your country’s ruling party—which necessarily means not hiring other people because their politics are not so acceptable—is not a project for free expression.

How can it be that this series of speech restrictions is hailed by the Globe as “efforts to improve the climate for speech”? It has to do with the way the problem is framed: “How to get students and professors to speak freely when they have reason to fear the consequences?” It’s clear from context that the kind of consequences the Globe is talking about involve not being invited to parties or to join clubs, and the like.

The Boston Globe (9/13/26) noted that in the latest rankings from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Freedom, “Harvard leapt into a respectable 71st out of 261 schools.” The paper didn’t note that this resulted from FIRE changing Harvard’s rating from an F to a D. 

If you view as the big danger to free speech the fact that speech may have such social consequences, it follows that protecting people from those consequences is imperative. Social consequences often take the form of speech; the article cites concerns about being “shamed on social media,” or being called “weird” or “conservative.” Thus is born the impulse to suppress free speech in order to save it (FAIR.org, 3/4/25, 10/3/25).

The thing is, speech is supposed to have social consequences. If you say, “Adolf Hitler is my hero,” that should change the way people talk about you, right? Many people believe that if you say you support a nation that is currently engaged in genocide, or a president who is actively trying to dismantle democracy, that should affect the conversation about you as well.

Efforts to police the speech-based consequences of speech in the name of free speech are a fool’s errand. There are other, more serious kinds of consequences for speech, though—like when Harvard suspended five students and put more than 20 others on probation over their participation in an encampment against the genocide in Gaza; 12 seniors weren’t allowed to get their diplomas with their class (Harvard Crimson, 5/17/24).

Harvard has a non-discrimination policy that incorporates the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which means that Harvard students can be sanctioned for saying that the formation of Israel was a racist project, or comparing Israeli genocide to the tactics of the Third Reich.

These are consequences for speech that Harvard could do something about directly—by not imposing them. But the Globe notes that the university’s rules governing student protests, which “some consider affronts to speech rights,” remain in force. That this doesn’t keep the paper from treating Harvard as the school doing the right thing on free expression just shows how low the media’s bar on campus free speech has gotten.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Samer Araabi about dissent as “terrorism” for the September 4, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

FAIR.org (9/11/21)

Janine Jackson: The upcoming remembrance of September 11, 2001, will pull a lot of strings. For New Yorkers, it’s a memory of a nightmarish day full of sirens and empty streets, followed by months of foul-smelling air, posters on lampposts asking about missing loved ones, solidarity around folks who went to work, and the workers who risked and gave their lives to save them.

And for media watchers, it’s the ominous introduction of the term “war on terror,” which we knew, knew, would turn on its head the statement that we saw posted everywhere here: “Our grief is not a cry for war.”

How can a country wage war on a concept? Why isn’t this a crime, for which perpetrators can be found and engaged? But it was clear that the “war on terror”—which, for a minute, reporters kept in quotation marks—would morph into an all-encompassing explanation and excuse that, as Lyndon Johnson said approvingly of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, was like “grandma’s night shirt” because it “covered everything.”

So here we are. For those just waking up, today’s troubles seem new, and in some ways they are. But understanding the roots of what we’re seeing now is part of fighting the branches, if you will, growing into every aspect of our lives.

Samer Araabi is the associate director of political education and research at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He’s author of the recent piece on CCR’s blog titled “Trump Is Turning Counter-Terrorism Into an International Campaign Against the Left.” He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Samer Araabi.

Samer Araabi: Thank you. Great to be here.

CCR (7/30/26)

JJ: Your piece is focused on the recently unveiled document labeled “United States Counter-Terrorism Strategy.” I want to ask you, briefly, before we get into it: How real is this? We know not to overlook plans; Project 2025 should teach us that. But we also know that people will say, “Well, this is a wish list. It isn’t law and it isn’t legal, so worry about something else.” What is the state of reality, if that’s not too weird a question, of this document?

SA: I don’t think that’s too weird of a question at all. I mean, “What is the state of reality?” is probably the thing all of us have been asking ourselves for a few years now.

And I think the comparison to Project 2025 is very apt, where I think when it was first published, there was an attempt to minimize the possibility of what this could mean. We sort of, I think, have a predisposition towards assuming that things will kind of go along at the status quo. And that turned out not to be the case, and that’s certainly not the case here.

ProPublica (5/14/26)

This latest counter-terrorism strategy document by the Trump administration is only one of many, and a number have come down the pipe just in the past year, all of which have really drastically expanded who the United States government perceives as the “enemy,” and what they feel entitled to be able to do.

It’s not for nothing that Trump himself, in the forward to the counter-terrorism strategy document, closes it by saying, “We will find you and we will kill you,” referring to people that the Trump administration considers to be, in their words, “anti-American, radically pro-transgender or anarchist.” These are labels that could mean absolutely anything and could apply to anybody. I think we should be really, really concerned about what that means for all of us.

JJ: Right. And so here’s my big question, because listeners to CounterSpin, because they listen to CounterSpin, might have an ideology that could be called “anti-American.” So what is it calling for, and why does the language matter so much?

SA: Sure. And this is actually a point that we made in that blog post as well, that anyone who’s reading the blog at the Center for Constitutional Rights is themselves probably within this extremely broad remit. And I think that just goes to show that this is really a campaign, not against advocates of political violence, or people trying to overthrow the existing system, but rather the entire left, and the left as perceived from people that are situated on the far, far right.

And frankly, I don’t think it’s even limited to the left. It’s a broad attack against anyone who questions the authority of this very small group of people. The thing that undergirds that is this idea that the existing system is threatened by an amorphous and terrifying “other,” this “other” that can’t really be defined, that can’t be whittled down to a particular group of people espousing one particular ideology, or any particular strategy or plan, but rather it’s everywhere. It’s omnipresent. It’s everyone and it’s no one. It’s everywhere and it’s nowhere.

FAIR.org (7/22/26)

As a result of that, the government can do anything. It doesn’t need due process. It doesn’t need warrants. It doesn’t need permission to spy on people, to surveil them, to follow their every movement, to detain them, to question them, to access their personal documents, to deport them. And we’ve been seeing that happening, and we’ve been seeing, both for US citizens and non-US citizens, the ways in which this continues to expand outwards to encompass an ever-growing set of violent activities from the United States government against these people–the overwhelming, overwhelming, we’re talking 99.999% of whom have done absolutely nothing, literally nothing at all.

And the ones who have been accused of things, including this Prairieland case in Texas just a couple months ago, where a protester was charged with terrorism for moving a box of magazines from one area to another, shows you, I think, how far this has gone.

And one of the things that we try to highlight in this piece is that it’s easy to point the finger at the Trump administration as being the aberration that’s going to do things like this. But what is really happening is he’s following in a long line of, as you said, a set of parameters and a set of operating procedures that were put in place after 9/11. And this is something that George W. Bush expanded, that Obama expanded after him, that Trump expanded after him, that Biden expanded after Trump I, and now Trump is metastasizing this into a whole new level.

JJ: Let me ask you first: The vagueness, the amorphousness of who the target is and could be, that part’s very murky. What they say they can do about those people is real explicit, and is real violent. That’s the other piece of it that we need to understand. What are they saying is acceptable to do, once they have labeled someone a terrorist?

SA: Yeah. I think even that is somewhat vague, because it does encompass a lot of powers that aren’t necessarily specifically delineated, but rather just opened up for the opportunity for people to do. But nevertheless, I think it basically situates people outside of the law. And I think that’s the thing that is the most scary, that we have built this whole system, however flawed—and obviously the system is deeply flawed as it is, with or without terrorism designations—but a whole system where there are rights to due process, right to a trial by a jury of your peers, right to your privacy, right to freedom of expression and freedom of religion.

These terrorism designations—and this is something, again, we talk about in the piece, and in this broader campaign that CCR is currently conducting in–we say “dismantle” this entire counter-terrorism framework, because we believe it really can’t be reformed or fixed—but what this counter-terrorism framework does is it situates people outside of those protections, and outside of those rights.

And this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, right? It was specifically designed to do this. The idea here is that, “Oh, we can’t use traditional safeguards, and we can’t respect traditional human rights, because these people are so dangerous.” But that danger is never defined, right? “Those people” are never defined.

As a result, the danger actually comes from, and the great irony here, the very people who are saying, “We need to take these rights away so that we can keep you safe,” are the ones who have made us all less safe. No one is safer now as a result of the “national security state.” No one is safer as a result of these broad counter-terrorism systems.

On the contrary, if anything, people are more radicalized, they’re more upset with the way that the government is conducting itself, and the government has lost legitimacy and the capability that it would need to actually build a functioning social contract.

And so we end up in a situation where everyone is worse off, with the exception of a very small group of very powerful people who are controlling the levers of the authoritarian system.

JJ: The response to the question of what can they do is, they can do anything, because they have left the door open and…

SA: Exactly.

JJ: …you can get the vibe from Trump’s quote, “We will find you and we will kill you.” I can’t say it clearer than that.

Well, this feels a little redundant, but there was a sort of ’70s mantra: “Don’t seek beauty, find beauty.” I was thinking of that lately because the Trump administration isn’t seeking “terrorists,” if by that we generously mean people who have actual plans to cause harm to innocent people in service of a cause that could and should be pursued through nonviolent means. They’re redefining terms in order to generate people that fit that category, and it wouldn’t work if the category had not been manufactured and then accepted.

And that brings us back to September 11, 2001, where, like I said, journalists used to say “war on terror” in quotes, because they knew that it didn’t mean anything in particular. That’s long been taken out of quotation marks, as though it has some concrete, specific meaning, and that was a loss.

Samer Araabi: “With every passing administration, it just grows and grows. And that’s because, with this undefined threat, you can expand it however you want.”

SA: Yeah, a devastating loss. Even, I would say, when the Obama administration came in, there was an understanding that the “war on terror” was this kind of monstrosity, but instead of dismantling these unconstitutional powers, what they did instead was they renamed it, right? It became “global overseas contingency operations” or whatever. Guantánamo stayed open, the extraordinary power stayed in place, and as a result, instead of this being a singular moment tied to the George W. Bush presidency, it became a hallmark of the executive branch and its ability to operate in this unconstrained way.

And it continues to unravel. With every passing administration, it just grows and grows. And that’s because, with this undefined threat, you can expand it however you want.

Again, we’re seeing the Trump quote of, “We will find you and we will kill you,” is a terrifying one, and we should remember that it was Obama that was drone-striking US citizens overseas, with absolutely no permission to do something like that. And so this door has been progressively opened further and further, and we really deeply believe that if we can’t stop it, and we can’t wind it back, it will continue to do so, regardless of who’s in office in 2028.

JJ: It’s so important to understand the history, and to understand that not every bad thing started with Trump. We can’t fix things if we believe that way, because when Trump leaves office—I’m just going to pause around that—everything’s not going to go away. It’s not going to disappear with this one man. And I think that’s important for us to understand. But I wish media would underscore that by having a longer timeline when they talk about this set of issues.

SA: Absolutely, yeah. A lot of the issues that CCR confronts are structural and systemic, and it’s our work to make sure that people have the conditions that they need in order to live with respect and dignity, regardless of who is in office. I think there’s a crassness to the Trump administration, obviously, and maybe a certain extension of a lot of these violations of human rights and the international order. But he’s not alone in that, and there are broad structural systemic things that need to be addressed, and CCR is really trying to stand at the forefront of doing that.

USA Today (8/21/26)

JJ: I’ll ask you finally, I found exactly one major media story, and I may have missed some, certainly, but I found one story on Laura Berlin. USA Today reported that a woman, who the headline made clear was a “mom,” runs a website. She built an interactive map showing which companies, where, are profiting from ICE contracts, who’s flying the rounded-up people to prison in El Salvador, who’s running the detention centers where people are being hidden away and disappeared, and which politicians are getting money from those ICE contractors. It led some, like Citizens Bank, to break off some contractual relationships, and she was using publicly available data.

This led Homeland Security to label her website a “domestic terrorism threat,” and I’m guessing a “far-left terrorist”—we were talking about language, FLT, by the way, if you’re making T-shirts, “far-left terrorist” is a new term—but she’s using publicly available data to call attention to harms inflicted by the state, and that seems to be what makes it “terrorism.”

And my question is, how do reporters not see that that puts all of them in the crosshairs if they’re doing their job? So finally, your thoughts about news media, what they could be doing, what they should be doing, what they aren’t doing around this set of issues.

SA: Sure. I think you’re pointing to a really critical issue in terms of safeguarding our democracy, which is, of course, the concentration of ownership of media and the continued consolidation of traditional media sources under fewer and fewer hands, and the way that has, itself, become really tied to the state. It’s CBS, Paramount, all of the connections to the Trump administration at this point is not lost on anyone, I think.

LA Times (9/1/26)

And we’re now seeing those things work together in tandem, where just this past week, I think, there were accusations that Mark Ruffalo is both antisemitic and a supporter of terrorism, basically still using that label, because he questioned a media merger. It was about the Paramount acquisition.

Again, I think you’re seeing that exact same thing being used, and at the end of the day, if the media is accountable to the state and not to the citizens of that state, we’re seeing a mirror of what these underlying terrorism laws are doing too, which is, it’s no longer about a threat to everyday US citizens or people who reside in this country, it’s a threat to the national security apparatus that is considered to be the thing that needs to be attacked and prosecuted.

And so it’s a real danger to us all, and I think it really speaks to the need for independent media, and for folks to get information sources outside of things that are so highly corporately consolidated. Which is hard, but important.

JJ: Thank you very much for that. We’ve been speaking with Samer Araabi. He’s associate director of political education and research at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and you can find the piece that we’ve been talking about on their site, CCRJustice.org. Samer Araabi, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SA: Thank you. It was such a pleasure.