The Media Buy-In
Institutions are caving to Trump with gusto: Part 2
If I were to think about my significant political influences, I’d probably point to a steady viewing of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. They were irreverent and incisive, and the humor also helped. At their best, they exposed our corrupt campaign financing and provided a stinging media critique that was sorely needed.
Which is to say, I have no love loss when it comes to our corporate dominated media. The advent of the 24/7 cable news cycle has been a demonstrable loser for the nation’s attention span and literacy. Aside from the wealthy benefactors that fund (and hoard) our news industry, the most visible “journalists” are well paid, far removed from typical societal happenings, and promoted for those same reasons.
It should then come as no surprise that a country that has cultivated this type of lapdog of the powerful is not only unable to afflict the comfortable, but has begun to transition towards fealty under our current administration.
Let’s get into it:
News Media
Attacking the media is not a new phenomenon for the right-wing or Trump. If you’re political observer that’s a little long in the tooth, you might remember when the phrase “the liberal media” invaded your mind’s lexicon right around the same time you found out who Rush Limbaugh was.
What is new is that Trump is not only “working the refs” like the right has done in the past, he’s extracting material concessions with the use of legal threats.
Take the best recent example with ABC News. In case you’re not familiar, ABC anchor, George Stephanopoulos, had stated during an interview last year that Trump was found liable for rape. In reality, Trump had only been found liable for defaming and sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. Under New York law, there is a distinction between “sexual abuse” and “rape,” which spurred Trump to sue ABC News for defamation.
In a normal circumstance, ABC News would have done an on-air correction and would have moved on. Instead, they opted to settle with Trump, for a sum total of $16 million ($15 million towards Trump’s presidential library and $1 million for his legal fees). ABC could have challenged Trump’s lawsuit, but chose the path of least resistance, which supporters of Trump quickly picked up on as a both a material and symbolic victory for him.
In essence, Trump threw around his power and authority to try and force a media company to comply - and stay in his good graces - and instead of challenging him, they rolled over on their belly.
This shouldn’t come as surprise; this is a man who has said for years he wanted to open up “libel” laws against the press. And aside from ABC News, he has targeted The Des Moines Register for an unfavorable poll, Simon & Schuster and its work in publishing a book by Bob Woodward, CNN’s use of the term “the big lie,” and CBS for their editing of a Kamala Harris interview during the 2024 campaign.
In the case of CBS, despite initially seeking the case to be dismissed, recent reporting suggests its parent company, Paramount, is looking more fondly towards capitulation.
Why? They are seeking approval from the FCC for another media company to acquire CBS’ parent company.
What better way to clinch the deal than to disregard your news company’s integrity.
Why does this matter?
Aside from the subservience our media institutions are offering Trump, they are also teaching him something; his legal threats are working.
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, offered this outlook:
“Each settlement weakens the democratic freedoms on which these media organizations depend”
He goes onto say that these attack will set precedents - albeit not legal ones - that will impact how judges and the public view press freedom.
Speaking of Columbia - which we will cover more closely next time - the Columbia Political Review has been asked to take down articles and halt publication of articles due to the legal and nonlegal concerns from students. Student newspapers are removing bylines, blurring identifiable pictures, and losing staff writers due to the threat Trump poses, most notably seen in the arrests of students who have written or taken part in pro-Palestinian activities.
The purpose of this is to chill certain speech.
As we can see, the success is demonstrable. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong stopped their editorial board from endorsing in the 2024 election. Congressional Republicans and the FCC are going after public funding of PBS and NPR. The Associated Press has been barred from events in the Oval Office and Air Force One.
All of this is occurring when US press freedom is collapsing, local news has next to no presence in US counties, and trust in the media continues to drop.
Ultimately, we can’t expect legacy media outlets to lead us out this circumstances we face. They appear ill-equipped, compromised by their owners, and reluctant to do so.
The need for an independent and adversarial press has never been more needed.
World Slop
“Forgive me, Mother… this is the path I chose to help people. The army has arrived.”
These were some of the last words spoken by Palestinian paramedic, Rifaat Radwan. He and 14 of his colleagues were executed by the Israeli army in Gaza and thrown into a mass grave. The scandal has shown that initial Israeli narrative on the event to be a complete fabrication, unaware that there was both an audio and video recording recovered when the Palestinian Red Crescent Society retrieved the bodies.
Here is a timeline of what happened:
From The Guardian and The New York Times
March 23: A Red Crescent ambulance goes to tend to people injured by an airstrike in Rafah. They come under Israeli fire. Two paramedics are killed. Hours later, ambulances, a fire truck, health ministry vehicles and a UN car are sent to recover the bodies of the two paramedics. They also come under Israeli gunfire; two health ministry vehicles drive away, but contact is lost with the rest of the convoy. Two ambulances sent from Rafah disappear.
March 24: Gaza’s civil defense agency says it has not heard from the missing people. Access to the site is blocked by the Israel Defense Forces.
March 26: A convoy of vehicles carrying officials from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) tries and fails to access the site. The team also sees a woman being shot, the bullet hitting her in the back of the head, and a man who is trying to retrieve her also being shot. The woman’s body is recovered and put into a UN vehicle.
March 27: The OCHA team is able to reach the site and find the ambulances, the UN vehicle and the fire truck crushed and partially buried. The body of a civil defense worker is recovered from under the fire truck, but the recovery mission has to withdraw as the situation becomes unsafe.
March 28: The civil defense agency says it has accessed the site and found the body of its team leader there, as well as an ambulance and the Red Crescent’s fire truck, which it says has been “reduced to a pile of scrap metal”.
March 30: OCHA officials and Red Crescent workers return to the site and find the bodies of eight Red Crescent workers, the five other civil defesce responders and one UN staff member buried in a mass grave. A ninth Red Crescent worker remains unaccounted for.
March 31: The head of OCHA, Tom Fletcher, says the dead were found buried by their wrecked and well-marked vehicles. “They were killed by Israeli forces while trying to save lives,” Fletcher says. “We demand answers and justice.”
The IDF claims its soldiers opened fire on the vehicles because they were “advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals” and alleges, without providing evidence, that Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants were among those killed. None were reported to be in the mass grave.
The head of OCHA, Jonathan Whittall, also states the dead were shot “one by one.”
April 1: Two witnesses tell The Guardian that some of the bodies recovered from the grave had had their hands or feet tied, suggesting they were shot after being detained. A Red Crescent official says Israeli soldiers could be heard – over a phone line that was open to one of the paramedics at the time of the convoy shooting – ordering restraints to detain apparent survivors from the convoy.
April 2: A forensics consultant who examined five of the bodies says there is evidence of execution-style killing in some cases based on the “specific and intentional” location of shots taken at close range.
April 3: The Israeli military says it is investigating the killings. It maintains that “terrorists” were advancing in the ambulances.
April 5: The New York Times obtains video of the aid workers killed under Israeli fire, contradicting the entirety of claims made by Israel.
The IDF updates their statement after the publication of the story and video to say they are investigating the incident.
The takeaway:
What is described above is a war crime; paramedics tending to the wounded and dead were deliberately targeted and killed. Without the witnesses and most importantly the video, Israel’s initial claims would likely remain their final version of what occurred. In any other case, this would spur other countries to call for immediate actions and consequences for a state that not only committed this act, but then tried to cover it up. To this point, the US government has not done nothing in that direction or acknowledged the crime.
Ex-Biden State Department official says even the Israeli military expected the US to only let them bomb Gaza for weeks, rather than unconditionally for a year and a half - The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
An American surgeon describes volunteering in Gaza, and how he operates on more children in one night, than in the US for an entire year - +972 Magazine
The Israelis are intent on destroying Gaza - The Economist
Palestinian-American boy killed by Israeli forces in West Bank - BBC
Majority of the US views Israel unfavorably - Pew Research Center
Canadian travel to the U.S. has plummeted. One reason why: fear - CBC News
US Slop
For commentary on the ongoing tariff situation, I recommend keeping an eye on Bloomberg’s Jon Weisenthal, who’s been covering this very closely.
Here’s his outlook:
Trump blinked and scaled back his tariff plan for the most part. This was due to the yield on the 10-year Treasury soaring, causing panic.
Trump’s comments and actions are directly contradicting that of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
If their plan now is to economically damage and isolate China, there’s an incoherency to this idea when they are still slapping a universal floor tariff against their partners at 10%. Trump is insulting these countries and threatening Canada and Greenland. With apparently 90-day pause and negotiations that are meant to happen during this time, the tact may prove difficult to have other countries choose you over China, when you’ve given little reason to for them to trust you.
In addition to the European countries, are countries like Vietnam and Cambodia going to side against their rapidly growing neighbor?
As mentioned before, for all the talk of bringing back a manufacturing to the states, these latest actions show that this is an attempt to crush the Chinese economy.
Market conditions are still strained and the tariffs are still very high. This uncertainty shows no signs of calming anytime soon given all the factors described here.
Friday morning, China has retaliated against the 145% US tariff against them, with a 125% tariff in response, to take place starting Saturday.
Pressed for evidence against Mahmoud Khalil, government cites its power to deport people for beliefs; decision for his release set for Friday - Associated Press
Trump Administration Wants to Install Federal Oversight of Columbia University - The Wall Street Journal
US student journalists go dark fearing Trump crusade against pro-Palestinian speech - The Guardian
The New McCarthyism Was Started by Liberals - The Nation
Trump’s Approval Rating Quickly Plummets Among Young People - New Republic
ICE Threatens to Stop ‘Ideas’ at the Border - Intelligencer
Trump’s EPA Plans to Stop Collecting Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data From Most Polluters - ProPublica
Scott Bessent Is Doing a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Job - The Nation
Elon Musk lowers DOGE's estimated savings — again - Business Insider
First Columbia, Now Harvard: Middle East Studies Under Pressure - Inside Higher Ed
ICE director envisions Amazon-like mass deportation system - Michigan Advance
Excellent scary slop.