The New York Times‘ Robert Jimison and Olivia Diaz (11/4/26) attributed the Democrats’ November 3 victory to “moderates” who can be “trusted to govern” and offered a “practical alternative.”

Up and down the ballot, across the country, and according to every major news outlet, Democratic candidates won big on Tuesday night. True to form, immediately before and after this sweeping victory—which was largely expected, though its scale and scope were not—centrist Democratic consultants and the corporate press were out in force, warning voters to curb their enthusiasm and stay in the moderate lane.

The New York Times (11/4/26) acknowledged that it was “progressives who helped energize the party’s base,” while suggesting without evidence that progressive policies are favored, not by the rank-and-file voters who turned the country blue, but by ideologically driven lawmakers.

According to the Times, “the path to Democrats’ sweeping victory…was paved overwhelmingly by moderates,” and the new Democratic majorities in Congress were “built around lawmakers who campaigned not as left-wing heroes but as pragmatic populists.” These so-called populists “promised to lower costs, improve healthcare and restore trust in government, not necessarily to deliver…sweeping transformations.”

This is a bold claim to make without explaining what and who “pragmatic populists” are, or how they differ from “left-wing heroes.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made three main policies the centerpiece of his mayoral campaign: fast, free buses; universal childcare; and a rent freeze. He has delivered a rent freeze, has begun fulfilling his commitment on childcare, and has made progress on the “fast” part of his promise for buses, without getting to “free.” He talks often about restoring faith in government.

Does that make him a “pragmatic populist” who “promised to lower costs” and “restore trust in government,” a “left-wing hero,” or, as the Times (6/16/25) labeled him in a 2025 editorial, “a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance”?

Progressives in Texas?

Senator-elect James Talarico (BBC, 11/4/26): “We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas.”

The victories of Democrats across the ideological spectrum, including the moderates the New York Times singled out for praise, were fueled by anger at President Trump and voters desperate for change. Yet regardless of whether candidates described themselves as progressives, socialists, populists or moderates, many ran and won by championing policies favored by large majorities of Americans, from Medicare for All and other forms of healthcare expansion to withdrawing US support for genocide, taxing the rich and paid family leave.

Take Texas: Ken Paxton was Texas’s attorney general for 12 years. On Tuesday, state legislator James Talarico beat him by more than 12 points. Talarico is the first Democrat to win a US Senate seat in Texas since 1988.

Biographically, Talarico may not have much in common with Zohran Mamdani, but he ran on taxing the rich, banning corporate PACs, raising the federal minimum wage, expanding workers’ rights, passing paid family leave and restricting aid to Israel. His Republican opponents labeled him a Communist.

Texans also elected state legislator Gina Hinojosa their first Democratic governor in more than 30 years. Hinojosa served as the vice chair of the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus; during her gubernatorial campaign, she portrayed herself as an economic populist rather than a progressive or a centrist. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott still accused her of putting “Chinese Communists” above “Texas families.” She beat Abbott, a 12-year incumbent, by more than 7 points.

‘Fool’s gold of midterms success’

Ruy Teixeira (Washington Post, 10/29/26) dismisses Democratic proposals like “universal child care…Medicare-for-All… taxing the rich and raising the minimum wage” as “suspiciously similar to the laundry list of progressive economic priorities that defined the Biden administration,” which “didn’t work.” One problem with this analysis: The Biden administration didn’t implement any of these policies.

The results call into question the knowledge and expertise of the corporate press, and some of their favorite political scientists and think tank experts. While conceding in its post-election analysis that “Democrats won in a lot of red states,” NPR (11/4/26) then issued a muddled warning to Democrats regarding 2028:

To have a real chance at expanding the presidential map, they need to figure out how to appeal to red-state and rural voters. They showed in this election they can do that, but they won’t have Trump as their rocket fuel in this next presidential election.

So Democrats did indeed show that they can appeal to red-state and rural voters—but they’ll have to do it again in 2028. This is true, if not exactly a revelation.

In a Washington Post op-ed (10/29/26) published days before the election, “How a ‘Blue Wave’ Ultimately Could Cripple the Democratic Party,” political scientist and pundit Ruy Teixeira expressed a similar view as part of his prediction that Democrats might do so well they’d overlook their defects:

The better [Democrats] do in 2026, the more likely they are to ignore their party’s weaknesses with working-class and rural voters. Those weaknesses led to Trump winning the 2024 election, but they are likely to fade from the party’s memory as Democrats, buoyed by the fool’s gold of midterms success, attempt to placate an energized left.

Teixeira offered little insight into how Democrats might meaningfully address these “weaknesses,” other than by “unit[ing] behind a plausible centrist economic program.”

He acknowledged that Democrats were likely to win the pending elections, while warning—or, depending on your perspective, reassuring—readers that Democrats could still blow it by failing to deliver on policy. Teixeira conceded that Democratic candidates’ focus on affordability and economic populism was “a successful formula for this cycle,” but added that it “could have diminishing returns” post-election.

How so? The problem, according to Teixeira, is that Democratic candidates have proposed “a confusing smorgasbord of measures on affordability,” including “regulations that may or may not be successful,” and social policies that are “expensive and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to implement in today’s fiscal climate.” Why even try? After all, these policies are “suspiciously similar to the laundry list of progressive economic priorities that defined the Biden administration,” which “didn’t work.”

Regardless of whether or not these policies worked, or why exactly they didn’t, Americans of all stripes seem to want them: Two-thirds of US adults favor Medicare for All, three-quarters want national paid family and medical leave, more than six-in-ten US adults say tax rates on large businesses and corporations should be raised, about six-in-ten say taxes on household income over $400,000 should be increased, and more than half of U.S. adults want to increase federal spending on childcare.

Since Teixeira is primarily concerned with Democrats’ economic proposals, and his main argument is that voters perceive the Democratic Party as too far left, it’s important to note that, in fact, most Americans support these policies by wide margins.

Demands from die-hards

The Washington Post‘s Nancy Cook
and Katherine Doyle (11/4/26) counterpoised “action on the economy” with “demands…to prosecute Trump”—implying that taking economic action meant absolving Trump.

After the election, the Washington Post (11/4/26) portrayed without evidence Democratic voters’ demands as too contradictory and divisive for party leaders to satisfy:

Wednesday marked a new chapter, too, for Democrats, who will have to decide how to balance voters’ desire for action on the economy with demands from their die-hard supporters to prosecute Trump and other administration officials.

This assertion contradicts available evidence. Die-hard Democratic supporters are not the only Americans calling for investigations of the Trump administration. According to an October AP-NORC poll, 61% of adults surveyed said investigating the Trump administration was either a priority or their highest priority, as opposed to 38% who said it was not a priority.

Other outlets were quick to note what they saw as the lessons Democrats should learn from their triumphs. To the New York Times (11/4/26), the results “showed that the party was still divided: between progressives and moderates, over Israel, over the best path forward.”

The Times’ insistence that Democrats remain “divided” over Israel might still be true of the party leadership, but it is at odds with polls of voters, which indicate that a large majority of rank-and-file Democrats oppose aid to Israel (New York Times, 11/2/26). News outlets report that a “worrying drop in support” for Israel (BBC, 11/4/26), coupled with American Jews’ steadfast majority support for Democrats (Forward, 11/5/26), helped fuel the blue wave. “The Midterms Were a Thumping Rebuke of the US/Israel Relationship,” as a Guardian headline (11/4/26) put it.

‘A toxic position’

The New York Times‘ Lisa Lerer (11/4/26) contrasted “the ‘resistance’ ethos that characterized [Democrats’] response to Mr. Trump’s first term” with candidates who “argu[ed] that the president and his Republican allies were enriching themselves while ordinary Americans struggled.”

“This is just the beginning of what is going to be a decades-long rebuilding process. The worst thing Democrats could do is think all our problems are solved,” Smith said. She added, “The problem with a good election night is it can conceal a lot of weaknesses.”

Some of those “weaknesses” were spelled out in an interview Smith did with Politico (11/2/26). “‘We were also seen as being dismissive of people’s concerns,’ she said of 2024 Democrats. ‘Too many people are coming over the border, we’d say that’s Fox News propaganda.'”

She told Politico Kansas’s “Adam Hamilton is a great example” in 2026 of “the types of Democrats we are going to need,” in part because “he is someone who says Biden’s policies on the border were a disaster.”

Abolishing ICE, Smith says,

if you are in upper Manhattan in a, you know, gentrifying district like Darializa [Avila Chevalier] is, fine. That’s a fine position to take. But my Lord is that a toxic position in almost all of the states and districts that the House and Senate are going to come down to.

ICE is an agency that among Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents nationwide—not just in “upper Manhattan”—has an 84% unfavorable rating. In the CBS exit poll (11/5/26), 58% of 2026 voters said Trump’s immigration enforcement has gone too far—roughly the same as the 55% of the national vote Democrats received. It seems more likely that defending ICE and Trump’s border policies is the “toxic position.”

Democrats won big on Tuesday, but few would argue that Americans have a favorable view of either major political party. And many would say that a primary weakness of the Democratic Party is its overreliance on self-serving consultants who offer quick fixes for the major structural problems that fuel and reinforce political alienation.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misidentified Adam Hamilton’s state.

Janine Jackson interviewed Panamerican Dispatch‘s Brian Mier about the 2026 Brazilian election for the October 30, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CNBC (10/27/26)

Janine Jackson: “We don’t want dictatorship. We don’t want hatred. We don’t want guns. We want a country of love.” So said Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on the night before his electoral victory over Flavio Bolsonaro, who has subsequently fled the country and been granted asylum immediately in the US, because of course.

I found that quote in the New Republic and the Guardian, but most of US corporate media ignored it in favor of hand-wringing, like CNBC‘s “Lula’s Election Win Leaves Brazil Facing a Fiscal Tightrope.” That included the note that his victory “wiped out a rally in Brazilian assets that followed Flavio Bolsonaro, seen as the more market-friendly and fiscally disciplined of the candidates.” And it added a familiar warning, “Lula has promised expensive measures that appeal to his grassroots base.”

We can expect more of this going forward, but US media certainly won’t be the only headwind that Lula will face. Still, his victory has brought relief, and maybe even a little hope, to millions of people in Brazil and around the world.

Brian Mier is an editor at Panamerican Dispatch and Brazil correspondent for TeleSur English. He joins us now by phone from Recife. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Brian Mier.

Brian Mier: Thanks for having me.

JJ: Listeners will know that the race was tight down to the wire, and that Bolsonaro had won the first round and, evidently, the runner-up winning the second round hasn’t happened for decades. And I just want to ask you, first, where were you when the results were announced, and what was that energy like?

BM: I was so stressed out about the election that I sat in a restaurant, with a buddy of mine, that didn’t have a TV. But we were just checking our phones sporadically, and we started hearing screams from the streets. And then when the tally got up to about 80%, it was pretty much guaranteed that Lula had it, and people were just running around screaming.

So we got on the subway and headed up to Paulista Avenue. The subway itself was like a carnival ride, full of hundreds of people in red, singing and chanting for Lula. And we arrived on Paulista Avenue, where an estimated crowd of 1 million came out for the victory celebration. And it was pretty intense. It was pretty big. It was a lot bigger than 2022.

JJ: I’m reading that the difference between the first round and the decisive round had to do with young voters in particular, but also in just increased turnout.

De-Linking Brazil (10/5/26)

BM: Yeah. Well, I wrote an article called “Glimmers of Hope From Brazil’s 2026 Election” like two days after the first round. It wasn’t as bad as people were portraying it. Basically there was a two-point margin of error, and polls had them pretty close to tying, and Bolsonaro won by like 1.8%. But the PT, Workers’ Party, analysis was that they would have a much better chance targeting people who didn’t vote in the first round than trying to change the minds of Bolsonaro fanatics.

And so that’s what they focused on, and they focused on it in two different ways. At the grassroots level, the way they always do, the old-fashioned way, because it’s a party founded by labor union organizers, which is knocking on doors, talking to people at bus stops, handing out pamphlets on the street, talking to your relatives, getting older relatives to come out and vote, because voting is optional for people over 70.

So a big untold story is just the massive amount of senior citizens who remember the dictatorship, who didn’t go out and vote in the first round because they thought Lula was going to win anyway, who put on red, got in their wheelchairs, got wheeled to the polling stations. Some people in their 90s, with their canes coming out to vote for Lula.

So in the end, 14 million more people voted in the second round than the first round. Of those 14 million, 10.3 million voted for Lula and 3.7 voted for Bolsonaro. So it was a good strategy, and it worked.

JJ: I saw that AP said that the victory depended on “younger, older and working class voters.”   And I thought, well, who else is there?

BM: Nazis.

JJ: Exactly. I don’t want to underestimate the difficulties that Lula faces now, besides these financial pressures and congressional hostility, but what would you say are the biggest kind of obstacles within Brazil itself, and the region? We’ll get to the US in a second, but what is he confronting out of the gate?

BM: You see the way the Western media is portraying him as being fiscally irresponsible, as all leftists are, according to their 19th century liberal doctrine of fiscal responsibility, a la Margaret Thatcher. But the fact is there’s massive climate change–related weather disasters that have to be prepared for, and the risks have to be mitigated, and this costs money.

In terms of fiscal responsibility, when Lula took office the first time, Brazil only had $50 billion in foreign reserves. When Dilma Rousseff was impeached, the Workers Party had amassed $360 billion in foreign reserves. So they’re not a fiscally irresponsible party, and the amount of debt that Brazil is in is much lower as percentage of GDP than the United States, for example.

The economic issues are not the real problem. The problems facing Brazil, I think, are climate-related. They’re related to the wave of conservatism spreading across Latin America, animosity from neighboring Argentina that’s working very closely with Trump, future animosity from the Trump administration or the US government, and just being able to govern with a very right-wing Congress.

A lot of people are exaggerating how hard that’s going to be, because they don’t know the history of how Congress works in Brazil. But even at the height of Lula’s popularity, in the 2000s, the Workers Party never had more than 22% of the seats in Congress. Currently, after the last election, it has about 19%, 18%.

Lula has never governed in a situation in which Congress wasn’t dominated by right-wing political parties. And he’s been pretty good at stitching together workable coalitions that enabled him to push things through, like the constitutional amendment that he just pushed through, he spent four years working on, that reduced Brazil’s work week from five and a half days a week to five days a week, which was a historic victory that people have been working towards for decades.

But that being said, there are challenges in that. For example, it’s funny, you see people like Glenn Greenwald, people who read Glenn Greenwald and listen to Glenn Greenwald, and a series of New York Times articles trying to portray Brazil as this country that’s dangerously veering towards authoritarianism.

But the fact of the matter is Jair Bolsonaro’s wife was just elected to Senate. Jair Bolsonaro’s third son, Carlos, was just elected to Senate. The man who oversaw the kangaroo court procedure that culminated in Lula’s arbitrary imprisonment, with no crime committed, in 2018 was just elected governor of Parana state.

So he is going to have some headaches from these people, from Bolsonaro’s allies. Some of them are going to switch over to Lula’s coalition, but some of them are going to continue to give headaches to the government.

New Republic (10/25/26)

JJ: Well, Trump, of course, was out in front crying “corruption,” that’s no surprise. And then inventing new asylum rules that would allow Flavio Bolsonaro to just slide right in. And then I’m reading in the New Republic about behind-the-scenes State Department meddling, asking diplomats in Brazil to do everything possible to undermine Lula. What can we expect in terms of Brazil/US relations, and how much does or should that matter?

BM: It should definitely matter, because the US has a long history of intervening and propping up neo-fascist dictatorships and far-right-wing authoritarian leaders in all of Latin America. And traditionally, as laid out by Philip Agee in the CIA Diary, which is a great book from the 1970s, the State Department will first hope that their candidate can win in Latin America in a free and fair election. If that doesn’t look like it’s going to work, they start interfering in the election to prop up their candidate, which is what we just had happen in Brazil.

If that doesn’t work, historically, the next step would be to try and foment some kind of coup d’etat. And we saw this happen in Brazil in 2014, when the Democratic Party was gunning for Aecio Neves, an extremely corrupt neoliberal who used tax money to build a private airport on his uncle’s ranch. And he’s involved in all kinds of corruption scandals that they look the other way for.

When he lost the election against Dilma Rousseff, he immediately refused to recognize the results of the election. He called for an audit of the votes, which happened and confirmed Dilma’s victory. And then they paralyzed Congress, so that Dilma Rousseff could get nothing done.

The fact of the matter is that Lula is a more savvy politician than Dilma Rousseff. I don’t think he’s going to have that problem.

FAIR.org (3/8/21)

But that’s when they started the whole anti-corruption witch hunt called Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, which was a collaboration between the US Department of Justice, the FBI and this Curitiba public prosecutor’s office, in a case overseen by this judge who was just elected to be governor of Parana. And the New York Times gave that entire investigation glowing coverage, and it contributed to Dilma Rousseff’s illegitimate impeachment. So that’s the most recent time that the US has stepped in to overthrow Brazil when it wasn’t happy with the election result.

In this case, I think it’s going to be a little bit different, because it looks like Trump is already backing off in his support for Flavio Bolsonaro. I think in Trump’s mind, he’s got this mental list in his head, in that tiny brain of his, in which he categorizes people in binary fashion. They’re either winners or losers, and he doesn’t want to be around losers. And I think in his mind, Flavio Bolsonaro is now a loser. So even though Marco Rubio and other people in the Trump administration might be trying to help Flavio Bolsonaro, I don’t think Trump is on board with it.

And I think that if the Democrats win the majority in Congress, it’s going to create a bunch of headaches for Trump’s plans in Brazil as well, because the Bolsonaros made the very foolish move of completely siding with one political party in the United States.

At first, the Biden administration seemed happy to work with Jair Bolsonaro, but then a very good group of Democratic lawmakers—about 30 of them at the time, led by Hank Johnson from Georgia—managed to convince the rest of the party that, really, the closeness between Bolsonaro and Trump was bad for the Democratic Party. And so when Bolsonaro started trying to set up the coup, apparently, from what I know from Brazilian media sources, he sent an emissary to ask for help holding a coup to the Biden administration. And the Biden administration said no.

And so I think now, because of so much public association between Bolsonaro and Trump, if the Democrats take control of Congress, they’re going to look the other way at some of Lula’s annoyingly effective social policies, which the corporate Democrats seem to hate, like increasing funding for the free universal public health system, and free university tuition. And they’re going to at least try to cause some problems for Trump’s imperialist “Donroe Doctrine” ambitions for Brazil.

FAIR.org (12/20/23)

JJ: And I want to tell folks that you wrote about what you described as the “long coup,” and US media’s involvement in that, meaning that time between the 2014 Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and then 2019. And folks can look at FAIR.org for your 2023 piece on that. But what I want to lift up from that is your quote:

For over half a century, intervening against democratically elected governments has been only half the story. The second half involves justifying, minimizing or denying US involvement.

And I think that’s where news media come in, right?

BM: Not just denying, but gaslighting journalists who try to talk about it. There’s an industry of denying the coup, but they don’t just stop at denying the coup. They try and destroy the careers of journalists that talk about it. Look at what happened to Gary Webb. They go after journalists for talking about US involvement in regime change.

Paul Krugman (10/26/26)

JJ: Well, we hear now from Paul Krugman that Meta, unsurprisingly, frankly, was doing some meddling, hobbling Lula’s account and promoting Bolsonaro’s. That’s kind of par for the course. But I understand that social media also played a positive role, such that people are asking, can they dress up for Halloween as Cyber Lula?

BM: This was really interesting, because the ex-girlfriend of Fernando Cerimedo, whose a kind of cyber-bag man for the international far right in Latin America—he was involved in generating thousands of deep fake AI images in the Colombian election based out of Argentina, friends with Milei—he was arrested for attempting to murder his girlfriend, a lawyer in Bolivia, and she survived and went on Mexican television, Channel 14. Nadia Beller is her name.

She went on Channel 14 and gave an interview saying that Fernando had told her that he and Eduardo Bolsonaro, Flavio’s brother, had gone to Meta headquarters in California and negotiated a deal for supporting the Flavio Bolsonaro campaign by boosting its algorithm and damaging the Lula campaign. And that seemed to be what was actually happening, as the two candidates had pretty much equal reach until about 12 hours before the first-round election. And then suddenly Lula’s reach remained the same, and Flavio suddenly had five or six times more reach than Lula, even though he had less followers.

Panamerican Dispatch (10/14/26)

And so then a bunch of Brazilian journalists did some really good work, and people started testing Meta AI, and Meta AI was refusing to design campaign logos for Lula, but designing them for Flavio.

And so the Supreme Court ordered Meta to provide equal reach for both candidates. Amnesty International and Eko both tested its system of monitoring, and proved that it was very easy to take out illegal campaign ads from outside of Brazil, that’s a crime in Brazil, and also to use them to present disinformation that made it past Meta‘s content moderation. So the Supreme Court ordered Meta to stop allowing that to happen and to provide equal reach, no pushing for either candidate’s reach.

And Meta initially ignored the court order, then protests started happening, then it started reaching the international media. Protests happened in London, in front of Meta‘s headquarters in Ireland and Sao Paulo. And it looks like by the end, the final week before the election, Meta made some kind of decision that it was too damaging to their reputation to continue favoring Flavio Bolsonaro in reach. And the Lula campaign ended up surpassing Flavio’s reach by like 400%.

And part of this is because of a really great congressman named André Janones. I say great, I mean, he’s just really smart, he’s from the working class. And he came up with this idea to bypass Meta‘s algorithms by creating this WhatsApp group and asking everybody to get everyone they knew to sign up to it. And by a couple days before the election, he had 10 million followers, in a group that was only a few weeks old.

And every day he’s just coming on, every hour, just yelling at the camera, sending these videos out where he’s yelling like, “Nobody sleeps. Nobody eats. We can’t do anything until the danger of return to dictatorship is permanently vanquished from our country.” And people are just sharing this stuff around. He’s like, “Go to this site. Use this hashtag. If you have a friend who doesn’t know who to vote for, send him this article.” Every hour he’s coming out with instructions like that, and it worked. It’s pretty incredible. And now leftist political parties around the world are asking him for help.

JJ: As well they should.

I wish we had more time, but I just want to say, I did notice some US press with an unsurprising emphasis, even within some ostensibly respectful coverage, but an emphasis on, “Lula has overpromised, like leftists do, but he won’t be able to deliver.” And it sounds like a threat, frankly. But I just wonder what you would have listeners take away, in terms of what you’re going to see in US news media about Lula, and what antidote should you take with that?

Carbon Brief (9/28/26)

BM: Yeah, it’s funny. This criticism of Lula has seeped into a lot of leftist commentary as well, that he didn’t really do anything for the last four years.

He ended hunger; he took Brazil back off of the the UN’s World Hunger Map. Annual above–inflation rate minimum salary raises. He lowered the work week, with no pay reduction for anyone, through a constitutional amendment. He ended a genocide that was underway against the Yanomami people in the Amazon, committed by illegal gold miners that had been encouraged by Bolsonaro to move into the area. He reduced Amazon rainforest destruction by like 79%, tripled money on renewable energies, and rebuilt the public university system and built new universities. But they don’t report on any of this.

So he’ll keep keeping his campaign promises, and the Northern media will just pretend he’s not doing anything, because a lot of the policies are too complicated to explain in soundbites anyway.

But it’s frustrating, because I’ve seen people, even on a Facebook page of a frequent FAIR contributor, I saw some guy arguing that Lula hadn’t done anything in the last four years. And well, first of all, it’s the government, right? If you’re a leftist, you shouldn’t individualize a leftist movement. That’s what capitalists do. But the fact of the matter is, just do some research and find out what they’re actually doing. And you’d be surprised. I mean, he promised to make online gambling illegal if he were elected, and then he just went ahead and did it anyway before the election.

He’s done a very good job, in three different presidential terms, of working around a right-wing Congress, and managing to make structural adjustments that have significantly increased the quality of life for Brazil’s large working class.

When he first took office, only 4% of the students in Brazil’s public university system—which is still tuition-free, even though Bolsonaro tried to start charging tuition for it—only 4% of the students were Afro-Brazilians from the working class. The PT, the Worker’s Party, set up an improvement over the US affirmative action system that’s locked into social class. So a requirement is that you have to have studied in public schools and come from a family that makes less than two times the minimum wage.

Today, 52% of the university population of the student body in a nationwide public university system is Afro-Brazilian and working class. And these were the young people who came out in massive numbers on the streets for Lula to protect the rights that they have earned, that they’ve won in the last 25 years, that the Bolsonaros, the US international imperialist class, want to remove.

Flavio Bolsonaro was promising to defund the public university system. Because it can’t end the affirmative action; that would be electorally impossible. So he was promising a backdoor strategy, transferring the public university system out of the Ministry of Education into the jurisprudence of the Ministry of Science and Technology. And that would have removed it from the constitutional requirement of funding from a certain percentage of income tax money every year, would have resulted in massive defunding for the entire system.

So since it’s politically impossible for them to end affirmative action, their plan was to destroy the system, and then say, you have to start charging for tuition, so that it transformed into another thing for only elites. Only the elites in Brazil would be able to afford it, which is what it was like until Lula first took office in 2003. And that’s just one example.

JJ: Yeah. And I will just say, the idea that folks will pay attention to Brazil and learn something from it—I understand why some people are afraid of that.

So, just finally, we understand the hope and the fear that is coming out of this victory, yeah?

Brian Mier: “I don’t know to what depths the United States government will go this time around to try and destroy Lula, which they’ve been working on for decades.”

BM: Yes. But I think that if you look at both the hope and the fear, the hope has definitely beaten the fear. And, if anything, people are going to remain vigilant to protect their rights and their government, more than ever right now, from US incursion. I don’t know to what depths the United States government will go this time around to try and destroy Lula, which they’ve been working on for decades. But I feel like he’s in a stronger position now than he has been for the last four years. I mean, it was a massive victory. If it weren’t for Meta, he would have won by 10 million votes.

JJ: Exactly. And what I mean is, I think that some people will be afraid that the involvement in Brazil means that, “Oh, maybe people will get an idea that people can fight for people, and we don’t want that.” So I think we can expect from media a kind of dampening down, because heaven forbid people take a lesson that you can have a bottom-up victory the way that we had in Brazil.

BM: It’s true. And they would much rather have someone like Gabriel Boric in Chile, who just was a lifestyle leftist who didn’t do anything economically, than have someone who might say inappropriate things now and again, and might not be very modern, but does a lot of transformative policies to improve the life of the working class at the expense of big business, redistribution and things like that.

JJ: All right. Well, we will end it there, but we’re going to have future conversations.

We’ve been speaking with Brian Mier. He’s an editor at Panamerican Dispatch and Brazil correspondent for TeleSur English. Thank you so much, Brian Mier, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

BM: Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.

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

New York Times (11/5/26)

Many people, including “liberals,” have accepted that there is no such thing as hypocrisy when it comes to US actions in other countries. What we call “universal” principles just apply differently to different people! And “we’re good, they’re bad” is a legitimate overarching idea for foreign policy—that thinking people must accept and internalize and propagate.

The midterm elections, and all the years of work leading up to them—because this wasn’t a flash in the pan—tell us that many people are thinking past simplistic headlines, and are thinking about the human beings living in the places on the map we’re being told it’s OK to blow apart.

We’ll talk about Iran with Sina Toossi, senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy.

Campaign Legal Center’s Kedric Payne (Guardian, 6/17/25): “President Trump’s financial stakes in the crypto industry at the same time that he is determining how the government will regulate the industry is unprecedented in modern history.”

Particularly since the Citizens United ruling, US politics has been awash in corporate and billionaire money, with both parties taking gobs of cash from corporations that have direct interests in government policies. But President Donald Trump has taken corruption to new and breathtakingly bold levels.

“I have never seen such open corruption in any modern government anywhere,” said Harvard professor of government Steven Levitsky (Guardian, 6/17/25).

So, it’s probably not surprising to hear CNN (10/21/26) report that voters are increasingly “concerned about corruption,” ranking it only after the economy and the cost of living as a top concern. In a Gallup poll (9/2/26), a record-high 89% of respondents said they believe corruption is “widespread throughout the government in this country.”

But what might be surprising is that, according to a recent NBC poll (10/18/26), a majority (56%) say corruption “is equally a problem among elected officials in both parties.” (Among those who find it worse in one party or the other, 25% point to Republicans and 17% point to Democrats.)

Why would a majority of the public believe that Republicans and Democrats are equally corrupt? A FAIR study suggests that media play no small role: The US media system has given more coverage to the most prominent allegations of corruption under Biden than to those under Trump.

‘The most corrupt administration in history’

Wall Street Journal (7/30/26): “Trump has been demanding large checks from companies for a range of political and legacy projects…. Some of the corporate donors have later been the beneficiaries of regulatory changes.”

During his first term, Trump refused to divest from his business interests, raking in millions through them from foreign governments and people with interests before his administration. His solicitation of Ukrainian intervention in the 2020 presidential campaign led to his first impeachment trial.

After the GOP-controlled Senate (with Mitt Romney as the sole Republican exception) voted to acquit him—and after the Supreme Court ruling granting the president impunity for virtually anything done in office—Trump unsurprisingly entered his second term with far greater boldness. He essentially operated a pay-to-play administration that engages in regular shakedowns of major corporations and offers pardons to those with political or financial ties to him.

There have been repeated accusations of insider trading under his administration. Trump made $1.4 billion from the cryptocurrency industry in 2025 alone, including $635 million from his $TRUMP memecoin, which was gobbled up by not only true believers but also those seeking political favors. (While Trump profited from fees on trade activity, investors have lost a total of $3.8 billion because of the memecoin’s unsurprising collapse.) In perhaps the most brazen incident of corruption, Trump accepted a Boeing luxury jet worth an estimated $400 million from the Qatari government to use—after spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on security upgrades—as his presidential plane.

Craig Holman of Public Citizen told FAIR:

The second Trump administration is far more corrupt than Trump’s first administration, and stands out as the most corrupt administration in history. Trump has made no qualms about the fact that he is going to exploit his position as president for self-enrichment. In fact, he has said that he was a fool in his first term for overlooking the opportunities for self-enrichment, given the president’s exemption from the conflict of interest law (18 USC 208).

The corruption is led by Trump, but it’s been enabled by his party since their first impeachment acquittal. In Trump’s second term, the Republican-controlled Congress has refused to investigate any of the corruption scandals, implement stronger ethical standards, or include safeguards in cryptocurrency regulation to prevent Trump (and other political officials) from profiting off it.

Unequal allegations

PolitiFact (5/16/23): “Claims that the Oversight Committee implicated President Biden in a bribery or corruption scandal overstate what is supported by evidence.”

During Joe Biden’s election campaigns and presidency, the GOP attempted to paint the former vice president as the pinnacle of corruption. When they took control in 2023, House Republicans launched an oversight committee investigation into the Biden family’s foreign business dealings during his vice presidency. They found that relatives and associates took in a total of $10 million from foreign companies during his tenure, but despite months of investigation, involving interviews and thousands of documents, the committee provided no evidence of Biden’s knowledge or influence. (It did lead to an unsuccessful impeachment inquiry.)

As perhaps the most memorable story in the right’s campaign to make the Biden family known as the “Biden Crime Family,” readers will be familiar with Hunter Biden’s famous laptop, which purportedly contained evidence of corruption on the part of his father. First published by the New York Post (10/14/20) just weeks before the 2020 election, the laptop story was pushed by the right for years and even continues to this day, despite its failure to show any actual evidence of corruption.

So on the one hand we have unsubstantiated stories of Biden family corruption, totaling $10 million in alleged graft, and on the other, we have stories of Trump corruption that total in the billions, some of which will be hard to legally prove Trump’s direct involvement (insider trading) and others in which Trump isn’t even trying to hide his self-enrichment (most of the rest, including the Qatari jet).

If the US had a media ecosystem in which those stories received attention relative to their importance, it wouldn’t even be close: Trump corruption coverage would overwhelm that of Biden.

The laptop and the ‘crime family’

In the distorted media ecosystem we are subjected to, reality is reversed. FAIR searched Media Cloud’s US–National dataset, which indexes 246 online outlets including all major corporate outlets, as well as right-wing sources like Daily Caller and left-wing sources like the Intercept, to compare attention to the two prominent Biden stories and two of the most prominent Trump stories.

When the New York Post (10/14/20) “broke” the Hunter Biden laptop story, it prompted a huge spike of attention that has never fully gone away. Coverage increased in spring of 2022, when outlets like the New York Times (3/16/22) and Washington Post (3/30/22) published pieces that helped revive it; coverage became particularly intense the next year, which saw the GOP inquiry and the Justice Department criminal investigation.

FAIR’s search found a total of 12,161 stories that mentioned “Hunter Biden” and “laptop” from the Post story’s publication through Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race (10/14/20-7/21/24). Right-wing outlets led the way, but MediaCloud showed even centrist outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Newsweek in the top 20 outlets in terms of volume of coverage.

Coverage of the GOP investigation into Biden’s alleged “crime family,” which began in January 2023 and was led by House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R–Ky.), drew similarly high averages and peaks of coverage, and also largely petered out after Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race (1/1/23–7/21/24). In that year and a half, MediaCloud recorded 4,887 stories mentioning “Comer” and “Biden” and “family.”

Not all of these stories necessarily accused Biden of corruption; some centrist reports did work to debunk the false right-wing claims. But those big centrist outlets published enough prominent stories with murky headlines like “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies” (New York Times, 5/1/19), or explaining that the Hunter Biden case throws a “new wrench” in “the 2024 election” because “Democrats will have a harder time highlighting Trump’s indictments,” to muddy the narrative and legitimize the GOP accusations (see, e.g., CJR, 10/29/19; Press Watch, 8/14/23).

The Qatari jet and insider trading

Compare the quantity of these Biden corruption stories to coverage of the Qatari jet, a story that broke on May 11, 2025, and continued as Trump poured taxpayer dollars into its security upgrades. In the nearly year and a half from the story launch through the end of October 2026, the media produced 3,364 stories on the jet. That means that in approximately the same amount of time, media covered the investigation into Biden family corruption almost 1.5 times more than the Qatari jet. (Note that like the Biden stories, FAIR did not filter out jet stories that did not accuse Trump of corruption.)

Accusations of insider trading in Trump’s second term began in April 2025, when large call options were placed on the market shortly before Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, sending the market soaring. They continued as more such suspicious and lucrative trades happened just before major Trump announcements on Venezuela and Iran, including within Trump’s personal holdings.

Coverage of Trump and insider trading from the first accusations (4/10/25) until the end of October 2026—a month longer than the Qatari jet coverage—has totaled 2,614 stories. The Biden family inquiry, at 4,887, got 1.9 times that amount.

Hunter Biden’s laptop, which dominated news headlines for longer, overwhelmed the Trump stories by far more. It got 4.7 times the coverage of insider trading under Trump and 3.6 times the coverage of Trump’s Qatari jet.

Even measuring them in terms of percentage of all news stories during their respective time periods, the Biden stories got far more coverage, with the family corruption story and the laptop story each averaging .10% of all content, while the Qatar jet averaged .06% and insider trading averaged .04%.

‘So vast as to be a new phenomenon’

New York Times (1/20/26): “All told, Mr. Trump has profited from his return to the presidency by an
amount of money equal to 16,822 times
the median U.S. household income.” 

This isn’t to say there’s no coverage of Trump’s corruption that attempts to put it into proper perspective. The New York Times editorial board (1/20/26) ran a lengthy editorial in January that tried to put a dollar amount to Trump’s self-enrichment just in the first year of his second term: $1,408,500,000.

The New Yorker (8/11/25), looking a bit more broadly and including his first term, came up with a conservative total of $4 billion.

Times columnist Jamelle Bouie (4/22/26) wrote:

To say that President Trump is corrupt is to somehow understate the size, scope and magnitude of his corruption.

It is as if you were to describe a modern thermonuclear device as a “bomb.” That is true enough, but it is not quite the truth. It does not capture the nature of the thing in full.

So it goes for Trump’s corruption, which is so vast as to be a new phenomenon in American politics.

Yet, just as media factchecking falters under the sheer number of Trump’s lies, these isolated efforts at contextualization fall increasingly short as Trump’s corruption balloons to nearly unimaginable proportions. That’s especially true as most right-wing media outlets’ interest in corruption would appear to apply only to Democrats.

One of the most important jobs of any media outlet in a democracy is to hold those in power accountable. Democracy doesn’t work if the public doesn’t know or understand what’s happening in their government. As polling shows, people clearly care a great deal about government corruption, but if they have little sense of its mechanics, scale or worst perpetrators, they can’t easily address it. With the midterm elections suggesting a mandate for rooting it out, there’s no more critical time for journalists to step up and shine the line—brightly and consistently—on what our elected and unelected officials are doing to us.

In posting this AP story, PBS (10/12/26) did exactly what the Trump administration wanted, putting “Ilhan Omar” and “criminal” in the same headline. 

With the midterm elections shaping up to be a stinging rebuke of his gold-plated presidency, the tempo of Donald Trump’s political prosecutions—a hallmark of his second term—has increased. Headlines and story-framing lead paragraphs, however, routinely fail to highlight the authoritarian nature of these persecutions.

A typical story from the Washington Post (10/12/26)—headlined “Federal Agents Search Rep. Ilhan Omar’s DC Home”—waits until the seventh paragraph to clearly inform readers that the 6 a.m. raid on the vocal Trump critic may have been politically motivated. And even then, it’s up to Omar to make the case herself, despite Trump as usual having already said the quiet part out loud.

Omar is “garbage” and “should be thrown the hell out of our country,” Trump ranted in back-to-back days in December (NBC News, 12/3/25). The following month, Trump’s years-long fixation with Omar led to his privately calling on Minnesota US Attorney Daniel Rosen to “prosecute Ilhan Omar” (New York Times, 10/28/26). Rosen’s office is overseeing the investigation of Omar.

Asked about the raid, Trump made little effort to hide his hand. “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DoJ,” Trump said unconvincingly from the White House. “I have nothing to do with it.”

Yet this political hit job produced credulous headlines like “AP Report: Federal Agents Search Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Home as Part of a Criminal Investigation” (PBS, 10/12/26).

Documenting the poop

When the Trump administration finds a pretext to go after a political enemy, you can count on the New York Times (10/29/26) to take the pretext as seriously as possible.

In an in-depth follow-up, the New York Times (10/29/26) examined whether Omar committed marriage fraud nearly two decades ago to help a man obtain his green card.

The Times, rather than highlight how Trump’s prosecution of Omar is straight out of the strongman’s playbook, instead left it to the congresswoman and her fellow Democrats to make the case. (Even still, the Times failed to quote former president Barack Obama, whose eloquent defense of Omar began: “It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say”—X, 10/18/26).

The Times took a similarly authoritarian-curious approach regarding Trump’s ongoing efforts to overturn Alaska’s crucial Senate race should the Democrat prevail. “The New York Times put its investigative efforts, not into Trump’s threat to democracy, but into attempting to document that he might have a point,” wrote Ari Paul for FAIR (10/30/26).

“Imagine that a mob boss puts out a hit on his neighbor because he thinks the neighbor’s dog pooped on his lawn,” FAIR editor Jim Naureckas wrote on Facebook (10/30/26). “The New York Times would publish an investigative report documenting that the dog probably did poop on the lawn.”

‘Abandoned any pretense’

The Washington Post piece (10/12/26) on the Trump raid on Ilhan Omar’s house has an ominous quote from border czar Tom Homan (“it needs to be looked at”)—the same Tom Homan who the Trump administration declined to prosecute after he was caught on tape taking a $50,000 bribe from undercover FBI agents.

Some outlets brought up concerns about Trump’s selective prosecutions further down in stories, which is too little too late. Most readers don’t make it past the headline, which in the Washington Post’s case offered a business-as-usual impression that the good guys were investigating a suspected baddy.

A quote from Trump’s border czar Tom Homan reinforced that narrative—but only because of a glaring omission that kept the naked politicization of Trump’s DoJ hidden from readers. Homan had himself been the subject of a federal investigation, only it was shuttered when Trump returned to office. Homan was caught on tape accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives looking for government contracts (MS NOW, 9/20/25).

Trump’s willingness to turn a blind eye to Homan’s shady dealings is far from a one-off. “The Trump administration,” ProPublica noted (10/20/26) in its recent investigation into congressional corruption, “has abandoned any pretense of prosecuting public corruption.”

Even as Trump and his cronies get a free pass, the president’s critics continue to be targeted like clockwork—if not more rapidly in the closing days before the midterms.

“The blitz comes as Justice Department leadership is under pressure to show progress before the election on Trump’s priorities,” the Wall Street Journal (10/28/26) reported. “Even if the cases fail, as several prior ones have, they have generated the kinds of headlines that Trump praises.”

‘An unusual twist’

The headline of this New York Times article (10/26/26) treats talking to the New York Times as a crime. 

With gas prices near record highs and Trump’s popularity near record lows—thanks to his war of choice with Iran, something he promised to avoid—it’s not hard to see why Trump wants to change the narrative.

Fortunately for Trump, his former personal attorney Todd Blanche is now his eager-to-please attorney general. And Blanche has jumped into action, unleashing his powerful office on his boss’s enemies, despite the DoJ typically staying quiet in the two months prior to an election. (Blanche has also offered more direct assistance by hitting the campaign trail himself, a partisan move with little precedent—Wall Street Journal, 10/28/26.)

Blanche’s October surprises continued late into the month, with the DoJ bringing federal charges for now the third time against former FBI director James Comey, only this time without first getting a sign-off from a grand jury or judge. (“Turns out ham sandwiches are harder to indict,” quipped the presiding judge.) The timing of the charges against the Trump critic raised further questions, not only because of their proximity to the election. “In an unusual twist,” the New York Times (10/26/26) reported,

the new charges were unsealed hours after a federal judge in New York ruled that the Trump administration had unlawfully fired Mr. Comey’s daughter, Maurene Comey, from her job as a prosecutor in that city.

The Times’ story is headlined only “Justice Department Brings More Charges Against Comey, Accusing Him of Leaks.” A more accurate headline might read, “Ahead of Midterms, Trump Targets a Familiar Foe.”

‘Cases in which evidence is lacking’

The day after the charges against Comey were unsealed, a DC grand jury declined to bring charges against Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide in Trump’s first term. Trump’s DoJ targeted Hutchinson over her testimony before Congress, which tied Trump to the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

“It was once rare for grand jurors to rebuff prosecutors and turn down a request for an indictment,” the New York Times (10/27/26) noted:

But such failures have become more common for the department under Mr. Trump, who has pushed prosecutors to seek indictments even in cases in which evidence is lacking.

It’s time for journalists and headline writers to show the same level of skepticism as grand jurors, and challenge Trump’s authoritarian prosecutions in their leads and headlines.

Featured Image: Washington Post depiction (10/12/26) of Homeland Security carrying off Ilhan Omar’s property.

Janine Jackson interviewed Citations Needed‘s Adam Johnson about his book How to Sell a Genocide for the October 23, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Pluto Press (2026)

Janine Jackson: Winston Churchill did not, evidently, say “history is written by the victors,” but we’re given to understand that Hermann Goring did say, “The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused.” I went looking for a concept to anchor our understanding of the existential importance of how things are reported and recorded and described, with particular reference to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, acknowledged as genocide—the intentional, systematic destruction of a people—by numerous international institutions whose job it is to study and define such things.

I went looking for it because, if there’s anything core to the work of media critics, it’s to counteract the idea that might makes right when it comes to knowledge, that our understanding of the world, and other people and political possibilities, should be utterly shaped by the people with the megaphone, just because they have the megaphone. That’s what we wake up every day and contest.

The book is called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, out from Pluto Press. The author is Adam Johnson, a media analyst and co-host with Nima Shirazi of the podcast Citations Needed. He joins us now by phone from Chicago. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Adam Johnson.

Adam Johnson: Thank you.

JJ: You can stick a pin in this book and spiral out and find the same coherent message, but it begins and ends, I think, with who we are told to see as human.

We’re influenced by news media. We can’t all have firsthand knowledge of everything. And as much as we may gird ourselves, and feel like we’re informing ourselves independently, you see a story in the paper, and you give it some meaning, you know?

But you literally can’t make sense of corporate news media’s conversation on Palestine and Israel unless you accept, at point of entry, that some lives just matter more than other lives. And that shows up in language, it shows up in what’s offered as acceptable ideas about what’s happened, and what can happen now. But that seems core, that notion of humanity, yeah?

AJ: Yeah. In theory, you would have these universalist liberal principles, and stick to them consistently. And what my book shows, I think with pretty definitive quantitative data—and indeed, the book’s critics haven’t been able to dispute the data itself, and they’ve tried—is that there is simply a tier of humanity, and that tier is evident, and most importantly necessary to the geopolitical interest of the US ruling class and Zionism. And without that tiered moral standing, the whole system falls apart.

And this has been a feature of liberal imperialism since liberal imperialism was invented, mostly by the British in the 18th century. You have to have these high-minded, supposedly universalist humanist ideals that exist in the same system as oppression, violence, dispossession and, in this case, obviously, mass killing.

So how do you do that? Well, that’s where the media comes in. That’s where liberal media in particular, with the lowercase L, comes in, and that’s why that’s the focus of the book.

FAIR.org (10/20/23)

JJ: Yeah. It’s so important to say that we’re not talking about Fox News, necessarily. We’re not talking about Donald Trump, necessarily. We’re talking about folks who feel like they’re trying to do the right thing, trying to understand what’s happening in the world, and how those people can be massaged into an acceptance of genocide.

So in the book, there are a lot of examples, but listeners will understand that October 7, 2023, and the beheaded babies, this is what we’re given to understand was the start of the conflict. This is what changed everything. This is what changed us from saying, this is some kind of liberal project—no, no, no; now it’s a fight about “civilization.” October 7 and those beheaded babies seem to be in the back of every kind of news report that we’re reading now in 2026.

AJ: Yeah, that was one of the first big lies. I mean, unlike the Iraq War, which obviously was foundational to me, being a Millennial, there wasn’t one big WMD lie. There were dozens of what I call mini-WMDs, kind of mini lies. By the time you debunked them, we had just moved on to another mini-WMD. And indeed, in some days you would get several at once.

And one of the early ones was this idea that there were 40 beheaded babies, this kind of biblical round number, that anyone who knew anything about Hamas knew would make no sense. It had no precedent. But the goal, of course, was to ISIS-ify Hamas, so it could be put into this “war on terror” turnkey framework to justify a campaign of mass vengeance and revenge.

And I think to some extent, the Israelis who promoted it, and their confederates here in the United States knew it was not true, very much knew it was not true. They’re not stupid. They know Hamas’s MO, but they needed to promote atrocity propaganda to justify what was inevitably going to be a mass slaughter event of Palestinians.

New Republic (10/9/23)

To the extent that that mass slaughter, I think, was still up in the air, certainly that was the emergent consensus within hours of the attack. If one recalls, Tony Blinken called for a ceasefire on October 8 because that was pro forma, and then immediately deleted the tweet. So clearly there was some decision made that this was not going to be the normal kind of “mowing the lawns,” which is what Israel calls the bombing of Gaza, the killing of Gaza, to discipline the civilian population, as they had in 2018, 2021, 2014, 2012, 2009. This was going to be something much more horrific, expansive and deadly, which of course it was. And then on October 13, Tony Blinken issues a memo banning the word “ceasefire” from the Biden White House and the State Department.

So to maintain that level of raw carnage—which, again, if people recall, was 300, 400 people a day were being killed. Indeed, some days had 600 or 700, and one day in late October had 1,000 killed. And that level of just raw brutality and violence and mass killing needed to have a correspondingly horrific atrocity propaganda to justify.

And obviously you had 250 or so captives that were taken by Hamas, most of whom were released in the first few weeks when they had the initial exchanges, but that kind of ran out of gas, or was going to run out of gas, in terms of its moral justification. So you needed these stories about beheaded babies. And then by the time it’s debunked, three or four days later, and Biden falsely says he had seen pictures of it, and so reporters, somewhat politely, were like, “Well, OK, well where are the pictures?” Well, there are none, but it had already served its purpose.

Newsweek (10/25/23)

And of course, you get atrocity propaganda with respect to these claims about Hamas having a policy of mass rape, to peel off female critics of Israel’s so-called military response. And the New York Times lowers its editorial standards to publish that story in December of 2023, which really does provide the real propellant, the real accelerant of genocide, regardless of whether or not one believes it, if that’s its manifest effect, or believes the most maximum claims, because the claims somewhat vary.

And that kind of ISIS-ification was necessary to justify 20,000 children who were killed, because that’s what happened. I mean, 20,000 worlds, 20,000 universes, again, 500 times more than were killed on October 7. And that level of brutality in murder needs to, like any good screenplay, it has to raise the stakes. And to the extent to which journalists pushed back on it, or tried to complicate it and provide context, they were swiftly and severely disciplined, and accused of Hamas apologia or downplaying atrocities, or some other such manipulative extortion that’s leveled against people for doing the basic job of reporting.

You’re not allowed to provide context, you’re not allowed to humanize, you’re not allowed to provide any kind of secular political reasons why any of this would happen. It just has to be mindless jihadist barbarism and one-note and antisemitism.

Adam Johnson: “The New York Times used ‘massacre’ 124 times. They used ‘slaughter’ 53 times. They used neither words to describe the killing of Palestinians.”

And so these kinds of pathologizing, Islamo-pathologizing, is pretty much what you’ve got. You got a lot of “they hate us for our freedoms” claptrap, a lot of orientalist claptrap about civilized worlds. My book mentions 150-plus mentions of the word “civilized” or “civilization”; and “barbarity” and “savage” are used too, which are clearly meant to appeal to a certain orientalist worldview.

The emotive words I document, for example: On CNN and MSNBC, CNN used the word “savage” 13 times, “barbaric” 56 times. MSNBC used the word “savage” 23 times and “barbaric” 46 times. These words were never once used for Israel. The words “slaughter” and “massacre” were reserved exclusively for Palestinians killing Israelis.

The New York Times used “massacre” 124 times. They used “slaughter” 53 times. They used neither words to describe the killing of Palestinians. How the New York Times can assess that Israel managed to kill 21,000-plus children and somehow never once committed a “massacre” or “slaughter,” I submit it to the listener that it’s not mathematically possible, how you can commit such widescale death and carnage and killing, and not once commit a massacre or slaughter, or behave barbarically or savagely.

These are obviously loaded terms meant to, by implication, humanize the victims of Palestinian violence while dehumanizing victims of Israeli violence, the description of which is always kind of anhedonic and medical and detached.

JJ: We see them trying to find a comfortable liberal stance for people who want to be on the right side of things, and news media kind of helped them do that by saying, “Yeah, things are horrible, but….” And that’s part of the media critique, is not just the one-sidedness—and I would encourage folks to understand how data-driven this book is—but it’s also this conversation where, yeah, you feel bad about it, but you don’t need to feel that bad about it.

AJ: Yeah. So this was done through what I call in the book “modes of rationalization.” Very early on, in the first weeks especially, lowercase L liberals, institutions, media, of course the White House, President Biden, didn’t really even defend the carnage on first principles. What you usually saw was an excuse-making, a deflection regime.

So what they would do is they would acknowledge, yes, it’s bad. Yes, Israel is overdoing it, right? They love this line, “Too many Palestinians have died,” which would logically follow up with, how many Palestinians do you think should die?

Washington Post (11/14/23)

And that’s where you get all these elaborate interventions by liberal media. The first, and I think probably most impactful one, is this idea of human shields. So this is the Jake Tapper, New York Times, Washington Post editorial board line that, yes, the carnage is bad. Yes, you can see it on TikTok and YouTube and Twitter, because obviously you can’t deny the carnage. There’s videos going viral every day of the most horrific thing you’ve ever seen in your life. So you do the next best thing, you can’t deny that there’s a murder, so you do what any good defense lawyer does. You try to plea down to manslaughter, or some other minor infraction, which in this case is, yes, Israel’s perhaps being overzealous in their “military campaign,” but: Hamas uses human shields.

Now, what’s important to understand is that absolutely no human rights group on Earth—even human rights groups that have been very critical of Hamas, like Human Rights Watch—have ever endorsed this definition of human shielding. That is not what the word “human shield” means. It doesn’t mean a military actor in proximity to civilians. And international humanitarian law, there’s a very specific definition with respect to, on pain of violence, either by gunpoint or strapping a bomb to someone, you make them defend you from enemy fire in active combat, or go disarm booby traps from a room or something. And we know Israel actually does use human shields, by the way. This was reported on in the Washington Post briefly.

So this definition is a purely media concoction. It’s an ad hoc media invention. It is by Zionist propaganda groups like Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which are of course the front groups of AIPAC. They just invented this kind of pseudoacademic, pseudo–human rights framework of human shielding. And it became conventional wisdom, despite the fact that, again, it’s not endorsed by any objective, neutral third party at all. Certainly no international legal organization and no human rights group has ever endorsed this definition.

Citations Needed (2/7/24)

And it’s a definition that has its antecedents in other US imperial conquests. It was very popular, of course, during Vietnam. Whenever a village would be bombed, US officials would repeatedly say, “Well, the Vietnamese Communists are using human shields.”

The first time it was used in earnest was during the US occupation in the Philippines in 1898 and ’99 and 1900. They would repeatedly accuse the insurgents of using human shields.

Because what else are you going to say when you decide to indiscriminately bomb civilians? You’re not going to say, “We are attempting to extract concessions from a military actor by disciplining the civilian population,” which of course is what they’re doing, and in British imperialism was called the moral effect. It’s the same principle. Because that sounds bad. So you say, “Oh, well, they’re keeping human shields.”

So it becomes this kind of what I call liberal SSRI. It sedates you into kind of going, “OK, well, I guess they have no choice, human shields.” And then you flip channels to watch The Masked Singer or whatever. It’s a way to sort of avoid the issue.

JJ: And it feeds into the idea that they are so craven that they are…. It takes me back to Golda Meir saying, “We wish they would love their children enough to stop”—the idea that these people are so craven that they’re offering up their children to be murdered because they hate us so much.

AJ: Yeah, inexplicably. And of course you can’t maintain—Hamas maintains roughly 40, 50% support in Gaza. It varies depending on how the poll asks the question, but that’s roughly their support. They have a base of support, obviously. You can’t maintain that level of popular support when you use a hospital over a command and control center. It’s obviously absurd. But it doesn’t matter if it makes any sense, because it’s premised on a bunch of glib racist assumptions about them having a kind of Arab brain disease where they just love to die.

Jewish Chronicle (11/13/24)

And then you have, of course, the second mode I detail, which is this idea that Biden was helpless. Or, correspondingly, that he was working hard on getting a ceasefire. And this goes in conjunction with the fake ceasefire talks, which begin in March of 2024, which were always a complete fiction. And they’re completely belied by the fact that the Israel ambassador to the US at the time, Michael Herzog, later told Israeli media in April of 2025 that Biden “never asked for a ceasefire, not once.” And they were largely there to get pressure off the White House.

And we know that, because the most powerful country in the world can unilaterally tell Israel to stop whenever it wishes, more or less. They could probably function for a few more weeks, but not really. And this was confirmed by the Israeli ambassador later, but anyone with two brain cells could see that Biden was not sincere about ending the bombing, because he repeatedly said he would not use the one tool in his arsenal that would’ve actually ended it, which was a genuine arms embargo, or the credible threat thereof.

And so the media completely, hook, line and sinker went along, and I mean the media in the most general sense; there’s not really any exceptions at all on mainstream media here. It goes along with this fiction that there are ceasefire talks, despite the fact that they’re premised on a completely nonsensical contradiction.

And indeed, they redefine the word ceasefire; in 5,000 years of human warfare, it means both sides cease firing, but then roughly on March 2 of 2024, it’s redefined to mean, actually, Hamas surrenders.

So you would get these Orwellian statements where Biden and Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and Kamala Harris would say these Orwellian phrasings like, “Well, we need a ceasefire in Gaza to rebuild it without Hamas in power.”

Well, wait a second, you just skipped a step. What, is Hamas going to magically surrender? What does that even mean? Clearly any post-war Gaza would have to involve Hamas and the other militant groups, whether it be PIJ or PFLP or others, because that’s how ceasefires work. You don’t just say, “I’m going to cease firing when the other side completely capitulates and surrenders.”

Al Jazeera (7/23/25)

JJ: It’s interesting that media actually scurry to try to make an argument, because at the same time, we’re seeing a total shutdown on criticism of the genocide. It’s crazy, it’s wild, the way that people are being told, “No, no, no, no. Don’t even say. The. Word. You will be kicked off campus if you say genocide. You will lose your job if you say genocide.”

We’re pretending we’re having a conversation about it. We’re pretending that politicians are fighting something, or trying to have a conversation about something. And at the same time, people are being literally silenced from expressing one point of what we could consider to be an argument about this.

AJ: Well, yeah, because liberal imperialism is too big to fail. Obviously, there’s efforts to accountability. I’m hoping to work on one called “Drop the Genocide 20,” which you can check out.

But fundamentally, I think the extent to which people think there was some accountability for Iraq has been way over-indexed. That is not actually what happened. Of course, it’s primary promoters of conspiracy theories like Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic, who of course, was one of the main promoters of the Gaza genocide. He promoted the idea that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, and now he has probably the single most important job in liberal media.

So I think everyone who promoted genocidal propaganda is going to be promoted. They already are promoted. They’re going to move up the ranks. Because of course, as you know, you’re not promoted and moved up the ranks in media by being truthful or accurate or adversarial to power; you’re there to sell whatever power decides to skeptical liberals. That high-leverage intervention is really where you make your bones, make your money.

And that’s what we’re seeing now, is that there’s no accountability, because this was bipartisan, this was supported by liberal institutions. And the extent to which they’re going to try to wriggle off the hook is going to be A) to blame Netanyahu, make Netanyahu the kind of omnipotent force that compelled every liberal to get behind this, with this manipulated Biden narrative. I mean, he’s not a scapegoat in the classic sense that he is, of course, very much responsible for the genocide. He’s chiefly responsible, but he’s not the only person involved.

And, of course, Biden wasn’t forced to do anything. He wasn’t manipulated. He knew what he was doing, and he never called for a ceasefire. So they’re hoping [Netanyahu] can lose the election so they can pin it on him and put it in a neat little box with a bow on it, and we can all move on and act like it was some fundamentally justified, but ultimately excessive overcorrection or overreaction, I think is the go-to narrative now, because the people who supported it are too big to fail.

JJ: Where do we go?

Drop the Genocide 20

AJ: There’s obviously much one can do. I think you get involved in your local BDS organizing and other such interventions, but I personally am working on this Drop the Genocide 20 campaign that’s been organized by DSA and Track AIPAC and Just Foreign Policy, and supported by others. It’s been signed on by Rashida Tlaib and Chris Rabb. And that is basically a pledge to drop the Genocide 20, the 20 most influential people, most responsible people, in the Biden White House.

Obviously, the list is much longer, but it’s a place to start, and making a bare minimum pledge to not work with them, promote them or otherwise boost them. But it’s been pulling teeth getting so-called progressives like Ro Khanna and AOC to agree with it.

So I think what we’re doing is we’re trying to heighten those contradictions by beginning a campaign to lobby Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Chris van Hollen, these people who I think are running for president in 2028, and who are very much going to run on Gaza, as it were, and saying, “Will you commit to, at the very least, not hire the administration officials who had a hand in the role to lie, propagandize and otherwise cover up internal State Department reports showing genocide?”

That’s a good place to start, because a lot of people are going to want to be “good on Gaza” without really committing to anything. And one of the ideological leaps that actually, if you pay attention to what a lot of these progressives have said on this issue, whether it be Ro Khanna or AOC or Van Hollen or others, is that, unlike Rashida Tlaib, they have actually not made the ideological leap from genocide to blaming Biden for genocide. They have said it’s a genocide, but if you actually read carefully what they say, they’ve never actually formally blamed the Biden White House or any Democrats for their support for it.

And I think that’s actually a really important distinction, because blaming Israel for genocide is obviously going to give you a lot of flack, but it’s fundamentally easy to do, right? It doesn’t actually create any contradictions or cognitive dissidence or tensions within one’s own party, especially because they all told people to vote for Biden, right?

So I think that we need to get people who are supposedly good on this issue to be firm and clear about what the implications of the word “genocide” mean. Because, again, they’ve all used the word. (Chris Van Hollen uses “ethnic cleansing,” but even still.) The word “genocide” has implications and obligations. It’s not just a buzzword. It’s not just meant to convey maximum outrage. It actually compels the speaker to do something about it. And thus far, many of the people who have used that word, and I think are kind of trafficking in the goodwill and the political capital of that word, have not actually followed through on what it means.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Adam Johnson. The book is called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. It’s out now from Pluto Press.

Adam Johnson has written for a number of respectable places, and also at FAIR.org. Thank you, Adam Johnson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AJ: Thank you so much.

“It’s never our intention to improperly interfere with elections or the state confirmation process or certification process,” said Attorney General Todd Blanche (ABC News, 10/23/26), in a statement that cried out to be scrutinized by reporters.

We don’t know if there was a second gunman involved in the JFK assassination in Dallas. We do know that there is a second Dan Sullivan running for US Senate in Alaska.

Can you believe it? Two Dan Sullivans? In Alaska? The New York Times is on it.

Dan S. Sullivan is a Republican representing Alaska in the US Senate, facing a strong challenge from former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola. Her viability in the race is worrying the GOP about the midterms generally—while also, as a pro-oil Democrat, encouraging those in her party who fear it’s moving too far to the left (Politico, 10/28/26).

People outside the snowy state learned about the existence of another Republican on the ballot named Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr.—the state has a multi-candidate ranked-choice system—when President Donald Trump ordered the Department of Justice, as ABC News (10/23/26) reported,

to preemptively file a lawsuit to try to block the certification of the crucial Alaska Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, citing name confusion among the candidates.

This struck many as a sign, as Time (10/28/26) put it, “that the midterm elections could face unprecedented interference by federal authorities.” The last time Trump won a major election, he instigated an insurrection to try to block certification of his opponent’s victory. His threat to annul the voting result in Alaska suggested that he was going to similarly reject the results of the 2026 midterms.

But the New York Times put its investigative efforts, not into Trump’s threat to democracy, but into attempting to document that he might have a point.

‘To coax other would-be spoilers’

The New York Times investigation (10/28/26) notes in passing that “the Justice Department…filed a lawsuit in federal court at President Trump’s behest last week seeking to block certification of the election results if votes for the other Mr. Sullivan cost Senator Sullivan the win”—as if that were the normal operation of politics and not a shocking trampling of democratic norms.

The New York Times produced an in-depth report (10/28/26) headlined “Inside Democrats’ Secret Effort to Stack Alaska’s Ballot.” The subhead: “Operatives aligned with Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee for Senate, spent months recruiting candidates to peel votes from Senator Dan Sullivan, the Republican.”

The meat of the piece, by Times political reporter Kellen Browning, was this:

The Peltola campaign has repeatedly denied any involvement in [Daniel J. Sullivan’s] candidacy. But the Times has found, based on interviews and text messages, along with documents prepared for a potential lawsuit against the campaign, that not only did Ms. Peltola’s team work with people trying to recruit Mr. Sullivan to run for Senate, but the effort was much broader. The group worked to coax other would-be spoilers into the race, to dilute the incumbent’s support and help catapult the Democrat to victory.

Anyone who follows US elections closely knows that spoilers are a part of politics. Sometimes campaigns will quietly help third-party candidates from the opposite end of the political spectrum in hopes that they’ll siphon votes from their major rival (Fortune, 9/2/24). And other times they recruit candidates with a look-alike name in hopes that some voters will check the box next to the wrong candidate.

According to Ballotpedia, “28 states had at least one 2026 race between candidates that share the same last name.” In 1998, who did Georgia Republicans find to challenge civil rights hero and then–Democratic Rep. John Lewis? Another guy named John Lewis.

The Brookings Institution (10/28/26) recalled when John F. Kennedy first ran for Congress:

One of Kennedy’s opponents was an Italian-American Boston city councilor named Joe Russo. Kennedy’s father, Joe, set about to confuse voters by allegedly paying another Joe Russo, a janitor with no political experience, to run on the primary ballot as well—in hopes of splitting the Italian vote. As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary to get the other Joe Russo into the race—Kennedy won the primary by a large margin.

‘Common in politics’

While not a particularly honorable campaign tactic, recruiting a candidate with a confusing name is not a crime. In fact, the New York Times admits:

Ballot-stacking tactics are common in politics and generally considered legal—and have been employed by both parties in Alaska. But this operation, which has not been reported before, reveals the lengths to which Democrats went to seek advantage in a Senate race that could determine control of the chamber.

So these tactics are “common,” and “legal,” but also reveal “the lengths” Democrats are willing to go to win a historic midterm election? Common, legal lengths?

The paper also said that “Alaska’s voting system makes it especially easy to add spoilers to the ballot,” which “allowed Mr. Sullivan of Petersburg, a longtime supporter of Ms. Peltola and other Democrats, to land a spot on” the ballot. It continued, “Republicans have also taken advantage of this system,” noting that when Peltola “ran for re-election to the House two years ago, the state Republican Party backed an effort to help a Democrat—an inmate who ran his campaign from a New York prison—stay on the ballot.”

While the article does lay out the drama of how Democrats seized an opportunity to make the election messier for the incumbent, the Times doesn’t ever make a case that Democrats broke the law.

‘Liberal shrieks fading now’

Trump used the New York Times report as a pretext to call for the jailing of another political opponent (New York Post, 10/28/26). Which raises the question: Should you report on politics differently when you know you have a president who is trying to use the Department of Justice to jail his political opponents?

You know what is a crime? Annulling an election so that the candidate who wins the most votes can’t take office. Though Trump administration officials had already announced an intent to commit that crime, the New York Times report seemed tailor-made to abet their efforts.

Predictably, Republicans seized on the Times investigation to lend legitimacy to Trump’s election-threatening efforts. Trump himself called for Peltola “to drop out of the race and be criminally prosecuted,” the New York Post (10/28/26) reported; it quoted the president, “They said they didn’t do it, and they did do it, and they got caught.” The tabloid explained:

Top aides of Peltola were behind the recruitment effort, the New York Times reported. She had originally denied any involvement, but Wednesday’s shock report revealed she was “definitely aware” of the scheme.

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kimberley Strassel (10/28/26) explicitly cited the Times report as an after-the-fact justification for Trump’s election-nullification plan:

When the Justice Department sued Alaska over its manipulated Senate ballot, liberal shrieks could initially be heard up to the Arctic. They’re fading now, after the New York Times on Wednesday published evidence that Democrats rigged Alaska’s ranked-choice ballot with a decoy candidate who threatens to deny Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan re-election.

The National Review‘s Michael A. Fragoso (10/28/26) also relied on the “bombshell New York Times report” to bolster his argument that the recruiting a same-named candidate was “different from lawful trickery.” The second Sullivan, Fragoso argued, is “designed to take voters who intend to vote for the incumbent and trick them into not doing so even though they want to.”

Tell that to Florida Democratic voters who were deceived into voting for Pat Buchanan for president with maldesigned ballots in 2000, an incident that helped usher George W. Bush into the White House without a popular mandate (American Political Science Review, 12/01).

‘Disturbing new evidence’

Nowhere does this AP report (via PBS, 10/29/26) acknowledge that a president and governor threatening a opposition politician with prison over her campaign tactics is a dangerous development.

The New York Times investigation prompted state officials as well as the feds to target Peltola (AP, 10/29/26). Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, announced that he had ordered an investigation into whether Peltola should face civil or criminal penalties, saying that the Times report

reveals disturbing new evidence of an organized effort to manipulate Alaska’s elections by recruiting candidates—including one with the same name as an incumbent US senator—to deliberately confuse voters and misdirect their votes.

Times editors had to have known that this article would be a gift to an administration that claims Democratic wins are not legitimate, and that the very notion of Republican losses can only be explained by complicated election rigging rather than not getting enough votes (New York Times, 8/20/26, 10/17/26, 10/25/26, 10/27/26, 10/27/26).

If the Times had found potential wrongdoing by Alaska Democrats, that would have been a necessary story for readers. This, however, is a long-read about the usual shenanigans of US electoral politics. It doesn’t add to our understanding of politics, nor is it especially damning in the bigger context.

It is mildly entertaining, for sure, but the biggest impact this investigation will have is providing more justification for an authoritarian administration that already has plans in place to shut down democratic outcomes.

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

New York Times (10/25/26)

This week on CounterSpin: You can smell what US corporate press are cooking with the New York Times headline that the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was “a blow to Brazil’s right.” Would you feel differently if the New York Times in its headline called Lula’s victory a win for Brazil’s poor, and elderly, and working people? Based on their record, the Times imagines and expects that you would.

We talk about Lula’s win—and why your corporate news outlet might tell you to fear it—with Brian Mier. He’s an editor at Panamerican Dispatch and Brazil correspondent for TeleSur English. He didn’t parachute in; he’s lived in Brazil for decades. We hear from him this week on CounterSpin.

Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers tells CNN‘s Dana Bash (10/18/26) that his opponent Abdul El-Sayed ” did not disavow the Muslim Brotherhood”—minutes after Bash played him tape of El-Sayed answering “yes, absolutely” to the question, “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?”

Mike Rogers, the former Michigan congressmember and Republican candidate for Senate, is a liar. Aren’t all politicians liars? Rogers stands out not just for the audacity of his false statements, but the racism underpinning them.

In an exchange with CNN’s Dana Bash (10/18/26), Rogers said his Democratic opponent Abdul El-Sayed would not disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist social movement that briefly took power in Egypt after the Arab Spring (BBC, 6/17/19; Council on Foreign Relations, 8/15/19). El-Sayed is Egyptian American, and the right has falsely tried to tie him to the group, whose Egyptian branch was recently designated as a terrorist group by the US Treasury Department (1/13/26) because of its alleged “material support” for Hamas.

In fact, during a town hall event in the Thumb of the Michigan mitten, El-Sayed responded affirmatively to a man asking if he would denounce the Muslim Brotherhood (Bridge Michigan, 10/19/26), an answer that took over the news cycle  (CNN, 10/17/26; CBS News, 10/19/26; Wall Street Journal, 10/19/26). Bash responded to Rogers citing the incident, pointing out that El-Sayed “did say—he said, ‘Sure, yes,’” that he condemned the Brotherhood. Rogers responded, “No, that’s not true.”

But the widely viewed video of the exchange clearly shows Sayed saying “Sure, yeah, absolutely.” Rogers kept at it, again trying to tie El-Sayed to the Brotherhood on NBC’s Meet the Press (10/25/26). “He has denied and denounced the Muslim Brotherhood,” responded the show’s host, Kristen Welker, to which the Republican flailed, “Listen, I get you guys want to defend this guy.”

‘He saw bin Laden’s body’

Metro Times (10/21/26): “A Metro Times analysis of congressional votes, public statements, and independent fact checks found repeated falsehoods about the Democrat alongside glaring omissions about Rogers’ own record.”

For the Metro Times (10/21/26), Detroit’s main free alternative newspaper, these incidents led into Rogers’ tendency to advance myths about his own life as well—namely, his exaggeration of his record as an army officer and FBI agent. The paper said:

Rogers has also exaggerated his own role in the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. He claimed he helped plan the raid, said he was “there at the bin Laden raid,” and told donors he saw bin Laden’s body with his own eyes.

A previous Metro Times investigation found that Rogers was at home in Washington during the operation. He learned the outcome in a phone call from then-CIA Director Leon Panetta. What he later saw was a photograph of bin Laden’s body.

When Metro Times asked about those claims for its October 8 report, Rogers’ campaign declined to answer specific questions. It instead defended his record and repeated an unfounded allegation that El-Sayed received money from terrorist organizations.

So the Metro Times (10/21/26) made an announcement: “For this reason, we are no longer reaching out to Rogers’ campaign for comment to avoid spreading falsehoods and bigoted attacks on El-Sayed’s Muslim faith.”

‘Views differ on shape of planet’

It’s good to see the New York Times (10/24/26) being more forthright about factchecking Donald Trump’s falsehoods—but if the Times doesn’t call out those falsehoods in real time when it publishes them on its front page, Trump will still be able to rely on them.

Coming from an alternative paper in a liberal-leaning urban area, this decision might not have the biggest impact on the race. But it is an important lesson for American journalism in an age of media distortion, misinformation and the anti-Islamic demagoguery of the contemporary Republican Party.

The conventional wisdom holds that “fair” and “balanced” journalism gives equal time to both major-party candidates in an election, allowing them the opportunity to say their piece without distortion and let the voters decide. But this approach of a news outlet being a neutral, restrained medium for partisan agendas comes at a cost when politicians exploit that restraint to promote outright falsehoods.

An old joke by former Times columnist Paul Krugman demonstrates the problem. If a candidate says that the Earth is flat, the New York Times will run the headline “Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point” (New York Times, 1/8/11).

The point is, neutrality isn’t adequate in such a situation. Establishment corporate media have to have the courage to say that the Earth is round, the sky is blue and the Earth rotates around the Sun. They also have to say that anyone, especially someone who is holding or seeking political power, who says the contrary is just plain wrong.

Bash and Welker challenged Rogers. That’s good. And the New York Times has come a long way from the days when its White House correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller (Extra!, 1–2/05) articulated the paper’s standard as “You can’t just say the president is lying.”  A Times factcheck (10/24/26) this week on Donald Trump’s electoral disinformation began, “In his second term, President Trump has seldom let a day go by without repeating lies about election results or casting doubt on the country’s voting system.”

But FAIR has long argued (e.g., 3/1/17, 11/16/17, 10/2/20) that the media must do more to be an aggressive referee in a time when false information clouds elections: They should refuse to give a free microphone to those spewing falsehoods. They have to say, “If you want to have a back and forth with your opponent on our airwaves and pages, you have to stick to the truth.” The Metro Times is doing that, and editors and producers around the country would do well to take notice.

‘Actively threatening rights’

In its endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed, the Detroit Free Press (9/27/26; cited in Deadline Detroit, 9/27/26) called Mike Rogers an “election denier who’s willing to deprive Michiganders of essential rights.”

The Metro Times knows that even right-wing Republicans need oxygen in media outside the far-right channels. This paper is setting a standard that says: If you want a platform, you have to agree to some semblance of common decency.

There’s still some days before voting closes for this election, but polling (Lansing State Journal, 10/26/26; WDIV, 10/27/26) shows El-Sayed ahead of Rogers. In its endorsement of El-Sayed, the Detroit Free Press editorial board (10/19/26) said, “Rogers is a vocal supporter of an administration that is actively threatening the rights of Michiganders,” including those of racial, gender and sexual minorities. It said, “Rogers’ own politics are discouraging, and we find no indication that he would check Trump’s romp through the rule of law.”

The Michigan race has the chance to lead a reckoning for the media on how to deal not just with political lying, but a massive campaign of hate toward a marginalized population, the kind of campaign that led Jews to the gas chambers and Armenians into the death marches.

It is a rare bit of optimism that a scrappy alt-weekly is setting a new model for how the media can handle the current moment. The question now is: Will corporate media be watching?

The October 16, 2026, episode of CounterSpin included archival interviews with Slate reporter Dahlia Lithwick (5/9/14) and Intercept reporter Liliana Segura (12/4/20) on the death penalty. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Christa Pike didn’t die, but her execution wasn’t the first indication of the messy horrors of this clinical state action. We spoke with journalist Dahlia Lithwick about a different case in 2014.

***

Slate (4/30/14)

JJ: Clayton Lockett, an Oklahoma man convicted of murder, was administered a mix of drugs meant to anesthetize and kill him on April 29, but he didn’t die immediately. He writhed and spoke and a curtain was pulled to hide the sight of his drawn out death from most observers.

Some suggest that while the story is nightmarish, a focus on particulars of how the state goes about killing people implies an unacceptable concession that killing is something the state has a right to do. That’s one debate, but there’s more to the case of Clayton Lockett than the state doing slowly what it intended to do quickly. And what went on before April 29 is as important as the events of that day.

Dahlia Lithwick writes about courts and the law for Slate. She joins us now by phone from Virginia. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dahlia Lithwick.

Dahlia Lithwick: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: Some people may say, while it’s not to be wished for, it’s not a bad thing to disabuse people of the idea that execution can ever be clinical or tidy or painless. But the death penalty is the law in Oklahoma as elsewhere. And in most places, the clinical-sounding lethal injection is how it’s done. What has been changing in the lethal injection field, if you will, that’s meaningful here?

Dahlia Lithwick: “We used to hang people in the town square. It used to be that it wasn’t meant to be clinical. It was meant to be a gruesome public spectacle.”

DL: I think you nailed exactly the paradox, which is we used to hang people in the town square. It used to be that it wasn’t meant to be clinical. It was meant to be a gruesome public spectacle. I think in a deep way, when we went from executing people at noon to executing people at midnight, I think that’s quite symbolic of all the ways that we’ve tried to make it look like it’s really just a medical procedure, but we have a couple of problems.

One is a lot of these procedures preclude doctors and other medical professionals from being involved, because the Hippocratic oath doesn’t allow doctors and people who promise to save lives and protect lives to be involved. So frequently, you have these lethal injection protocols administered by correction officers, not doctors. So that’s one piece of the problem. You’re doing what looks like an operation, but it’s not necessarily being done by physicians.

But the much more profound problem has been that since 2011, the states who use the three drug so-called cocktail, lethal injection cocktail, have been unable to get some of their drugs. First of all, American manufacturers stopped making them. And then, much more urgently for the states, European manufacturers really said, “We’re not going to supply these drugs to you if they’re going to be used to kill people.” So quite literally the supply dried up, and after 2011, a lot of the states that still have capital punishment turned to a whole bunch of other ways and tactics to get these drugs. And that has proven extremely problematic.

JJ: And as a result of how problematic it has been, there’s been a veil of secrecy drawn around just how and where those drugs come from.

DL: Well, that’s almost the most important part of the story. One gets caught up in the Clayton Lockett piece of it, and how awful it was. But the truth is that several states–Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas–have quite literally dropped a veil of almost perfect secrecy over their lethal injection protocols.

Verdict (3/15/24)

In fact, the court in Georgia will even protect their protocols from the judicial branch. They won’t even let the judges scrutinize it.

And so what you have is, overwhelmingly, where they go are these lightly regulated laboratories that are called compounding pharmacies. Batches differ from one to another. The pharmacies are often unregulated or underregulated. So the lawyers for folks who are about to be subject to lethal injection, not entirely unreasonably, say, “Where are these drugs coming from? What are you using? You’re using new combinations of new drugs that we’ve never heard of.”

They’ve often never been tried. The protocol that was tried on Clayton Lockett had never been attempted in Oklahoma.

And so what the lawyers are saying is, “Look, certainly lethal injection and capital punishment are the law,” as you said, but it’s also the law that the Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. And when you’re in effect experimenting on people on the night of their execution, that can’t be right. And what happened in Oklahoma really bore that out.

***

JJ: While it’s understandable, there’s something weird about the concerns that the state is “getting executions wrong.” We discussed the bigger picture with reporter Liliana Segura in 2020.

***

Gallup (6/23/20)

JJ: As with a lot of things, it feels like we’re moving in two different directions. More people, if still not a majority, say the death penalty is morally unacceptable. The data has sunk in that its application, anyway, is unfair and racist, and not a deterrent to crime.

But then, when individual cases come up, it becomes a different category of story, if you will, and statistics matter less than “What if it were your sister?” You’ve been doing, as I say, this reporting since before Donald Trump and Bill Barr. I just wonder how you’ve approached the terrain of this issue, and what you’re making of the present moment?

Liliana Segura: It’s been a very surreal time to be covering these executions. As you highlighted, I’ve written about the death penalty a lot, for many, many years. And actually, one of the bizarre aspects of my work in recent years has been that since I moved to Nashville, about five years ago, the state of Tennessee has actually carried out a large number of executions. And the last several of those were carried out using the electric chair. Although I haven’t witnessed those executions, a number of my local friends and colleagues in the media have.

Liliana Segura: “I don’t think Americans quite realize just how much we’ve tolerated a system that continues to use things like the electric chair.”

Outside of our local bubble, and I think more broadly, I don’t think Americans quite realize just how much we’ve tolerated a system that continues to use things like the electric chair, which, when it was announced that the Trump administration was looking to bring back the electric chair and firing squads, it really generated a fair amount of revulsion among a lot of people who seemed unaware, or maybe haven’t thought about these issues in a long time.

So I think we run the risk a little bit of putting these federal executions in the context of this horrifying, violent Trump era, which has broken so many norms that we’re accustomed to. And yet, when you look at different states, when you look at what’s been happening in Tennessee, we’ve been pretty violent in the past several years, and tolerating quite a bit as Americans when it comes to these more mundane executions, from day to day and year to year.

So part of my project, when William Barr announced that they were looking to restart federal executions after more than 15 years, my task was to remind myself of the history that underpins this federal system. We hadn’t seen a federal execution since 2003.

So the first piece that I wrote was actually going back and reexamining how we got here. And so much of that story really is about the Democrats, frankly, and is about the era of the 1994 crime bill, and the vast expansion of federal prosecutions, federal death sentences, as a result of that crime bill.

JJ: The death penalty has a finality, an irreversibility, that for many people set it apart. But we should be wary, shouldn’t we, of imagining that an equally certain but slower death in solitary confinement without possibility of parole is somehow a feel-good alternative. We can’t just have a piece of this conversation about the continuum of cruelty that’s reflected in our criminal system.

And I know your concerns are expansive in that way; it’s important to contextualize the death penalty. It’s not like it’s the one bad thing the system does.

Slate (1/22/20)

LS: Yeah, that’s exactly right, and thank you for bringing that up. That’s something that, fortunately, I think, we’ve started to see a little bit of change in the broader landscape around the way people see what I call “permanent sentencing.”

I was struck, during the primaries, when everything was so heated, that Elizabeth Warren, I believe, got into a little bit of trouble at one point where she kind of said—and I don’t remember the precise context—but essentially, gave support for the idea that life without parole is an appropriate sentence, I believe, as an alternative to the death penalty.

And at least on Twitter and social media, a lot of people jumped all over this comment, to say that this was almost as bad, it’s a form of torture, that we shouldn’t support life without parole. And I gotta say, as somebody who’s been covering life without parole and the death penalty for years and years, that is different. It was not people’s knee-jerk response to the notion that “LWOP,” as we call it, is an appropriate alternative.

The anti–death penalty movement for many years has pushed life without parole—in my mind, erroneously—as the default, acceptable alternative to state-sanctioned murder. And those issues have generated a fair amount of debate and tension. But I think that the broader culture, at least in the context of the primaries, has kind of come around on questioning that as well, and I think solitary confinement and that form of torture is a big part of that.