#will bunch

Peter Birkenhead

The Weiss-washing of the news is a crisis not nearly as amenable to popular protest as the Trump-ing of democracy, and requires a response that is more Jiu-Jitsu than frontal assault. Boycotts only work when the product being boycotted is supposed to make a profit. News outlets owned by single billionaires are loss-leaders, tools to repress criticism and shape public opinion.

Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong don’t need CBS News, the Washington Post or the LA Times to make a profit. They need them to make making a profit from other products easier. They need them to disappear coverage of the environmental havoc their other products cause, boost public support for politicians who will kill regulations, criticize anti-trust laws and embarrass competitors.

Buying these outlets is a way of cutting out the middle man. Why hire a team of PR consultants to try and get favorable coverage from the Washington Post when you can just buy the Washington Post? Nobody expects their PR department to earn a profit. They expect its work to help the larger enterprise earn a profit.

The more effective response to this phenomenon is already happening, in the form of the nurturing and growing of independant journalism, the sustaining of a journalistic version of a shadow government, parallel news “industry” that does the work that legacy outlets used to.

This includes, of course, the vital contributions made by citizen journalists, which in so many cases recently have far outpaced the work of big media outlets. But as each of the former news titans falls, it becomes ever more important for people to invest their time, trust and money in independent outlets and voices, all of which are much more vulnerable to suppression and interference by corporate interests and government than the old guard was.

Anyway, here’s the amazing Will Bunch on the Weiss-washing of Renee Good’s murder:

“It wasn’t the most clever joke ever told on U.S. primetime television — not even close — when comedian Nikki Glaser took a swing at CBS News while hosting Hollywood’s Golden Globe Awards, which were seen live by an estimated 8.7 million viewers and clipped on social media by millions more. But the blow still landed hard, especially since the awards aired on CBS.

“The award for most editing goes to CBS News,” Glaser quipped, in a seeming reference to the recent flap over a critical report on the Donald Trump regime’s use of a Salvadoran torture prison was spiked by 60 Minutes. “Yes. CBS News: America’s newest place to ‘see B.S.’ news.”

three days later, Glaser’s joke about CBS News and its new, right-leaning management became a painful reality for a nation still reeling from the shock of an ICE agent fatally gunning down a 37-year-old mom behind the wheel of her family SUV on a Minneapolis street.

Last Wednesday, the network rushed out a report — sourced only to two unnamed “U.S. officials” — that the ICE agent who fired the shot, Jonathan Ross, “suffered internal bleeding to the torso” in his Jan. 7 deadly encounter with the driver who was pulling away from the scene, Renee Nicole Good.

What that report from what was once the most trusted TV newsroom in America seemed to imply — even though it did not explicitly state — was that Good’s Honda Pilot must have struck Ross in the encounter that touched off days of protests in Minneapolis and around the nation. If that did happen, it would radically alter the debate about the shooting and the violent nature of ICE’s deportation raids — creating an argument that the use of deadly force was justified.

I want to be careful here because the CBS story was so vague that it’s as hard to disprove as it is to prove. Medical experts immediately noted the report could have been misleading — at best — since “internal bleeding” could mean a bruise, which might have been caused in the chaotic situation by something besides Good’s vehicle. But two reports just hours after the CBS bulletin suggested something far worse — a whiff of the utter baloney that Glaser had just joked about.

First, the New York Times released an in-depth frame-by-frame analysis of the multiple videos of the shooting captured both by citizen observers and by Ross himself as he fired his gun. The Times concluded from the analysis that “the currently available visual evidence still shows no indication agent Jonathan Ross got run over” and published a photo showing significant daylight between the SUV and the agent as he fired.

Second, a Minneapolis Police Department report on the shooting was released, stating that Ross — who was shown on video walking around in the aftermath without any overt sign of an injury — was not taken to a hospital, as Trump had told the nation in a Truth Social post on the day of the killing. The police said Ross was driven to a government building.

Or, a different way of looking at the CBS “internal bleeding” report is in the context of Sherlock Holmes’ famous crime-solving line about the dog that did not bark. An entire pack of hounds stayed silent on this one. The facts that most editors would demand before airing such an explosive claim about the biggest story in America — a medical report, or a quote from Ross’ doctor, or even a family member or an ICE colleague — weren’t published. Just the unsupported words of two officials from an authoritarian U.S. regime with a growing record for lying.

Indeed, it didn’t take long for the dismay from actual professional journalists — the ones who still work at CBS after its late 2025 takeover by a media conglomerate owned by pro-Trump billionaires — to pour out in leaks.

Most of the journalists’ consternation centered on the actions of Bari Weiss, the conservative public intellectual who has been installed as the editor-in-chief of CBS News — despite possessing almost no previous breaking news experience.

“There was big internal dissension about the ‘internal bleeding’ report here last night,” a CBS News staffer who was granted anonymity told The Guardian. “It was viewed as a thinly veiled, anonymous leak by [the Trump administration] to someone who’d carry it online.”

A second insider told the news organization that it “felt to many here like we were carrying water for [the administration’s ] justifying of the shooting to keep our access to our sources.” The Guardian’s sources said Weiss had personally pushed to get the piece published quickly online.

So far all the factual, on-the-ground journalism from Minneapolis suggests that CBS News, which has stood atop the pyramid of mainstream American media for decades, has just committed one of the worst acts of bad journalism in U.S. history.

The worst? That’s a high bar, considering other historic missteps like Judith Miller’s later debunked New York Times reporting on alleged Iraqi chemical weapons that bolstered the dishonest case for war, and which was also rooted in boosting government fictions.

But with approval for ICE, Trump’s immigration policies and the president himself reeling after Good’s killing, and a flood of viral videos showing violent actions by government agents in Minnesota, any aid for a White House campaign to rewrite history is appalling. It could be used by the Trump regime to bolster a case for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending troops to Minnesota, which would cause the simmering crisis of American democracy to boil over.

A CBS News spokesperson told The Independent that the network “went through its rigorous editorial process and decided it was reportable based on the reporting, the reporters, and the sourcing.” It should be noted that ABC News ran a nearly identical story shortly after the CBS report. The parent companies of both CBS and ABC reached multi-million dollar settlements of questionable lawsuits by Trump at the start of his presidency rather than fight them in court.

The CBS report did not happen in a vacuum. There was a reason, after all, that Hollywood’s elites guffawed when Glaser told her “see B.S.” joke. And it went even deeper than the recent bruhaha over Weiss’ last-minute postponement of the 60 Minutes report on the mistreatment of U.S. deportees in the Salvadoran prison, supposedly because she believed it needed more reporting and more input from the Trump regime.

Critics noted the slow-motion impeding of that story that was so damaging to the White House was the polar opposite of the rushed Minneapolis “internal bleeding” story that was desired by the regime. It’s also come out that a second in-the-works 60 Minutes piece that could make Trump’s government look bad — about its preference for white South African refugees — has also been delayed by intense edits.

This is exactly what many feared last year when the Trump regime greenlighted the sale of CBS’-then-parent Paramount to Skydance Media owned by David Ellison, son of Trump-supporting Silicon Valley billionaire Larry Ellison, and when the new owner brought in Weiss, a former New York Times opinion journalist whose right-leaning site Free Press — also bought by Ellison — is popular with the super-wealthy.

It became almost a cliché to point out how the new team has threatened the storied legacy of CBS News and the iconic moments its star journalists had questioned authority, including Edward R. Murrow’s 1954 takedown of red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy or Walter Cronkite’s 1968 call for a Vietnam withdrawal that infuriated Lyndon Johnson’s White House.

But already the new reality of CBS News as a kind of a state media for the Trump era has been worse than anyone could have feared, now creating “fake news” in the term’s original clear-eyed meaning and not its bastardization by Trump’s MAGA movement.

Weiss’ handpicked anchor, Tony Dokoupil, set the tone when he declared the new CBS News wanted to listen to everyday Americans and not put so much stock in experts — presumably like the doctors who could have told them the “internal bleeding” story didn’t make sense. In the immediate aftermath of Good’s killing, Dokoupil delivered a mush-mouthed “both sides” monologue that surely set Cronkite and Murrow spinning in their graves.

That was almost as embarrassing as Dokoupil’s 13-minute interview with Trump in which the president said the quiet part about the new slant at CBS News out loud, telling the anchor that if Kamala Harris had won in 2024 instead of Trump, “You wouldn’t have this job, certainly whatever the hell they’re paying you.”

That was not edited out of the interview when it aired on CBS Evening News — perhaps because, it later came out, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Dokoupil and his crew that the president demanded all 13 minutes must be broadcast without changes or “we’ll sue your asses off.”

CBS clearly complied. Of course it did. In a matter of weeks, the storied CBS eye logo has become a knowing wink to an autocratic U.S. government. The changes at CBS, and their implications for American democracy, have somewhat been lost in the recent tsunami of unthinkable headlines like the unrest in Minnesota, the bombing and regime change in Venezuela, and Trump’s once-unthinkable threats against Greenland.

But we can’t ignore this. The 4 million or so Americans who watch Dokoupil and the CBS Evening News every weeknight might be a huge drop from Cronkite’s era when three TV networks dominated the landscape, but many of those folks — older, less politically obsessed, often swing voters — are vital to the future of democracy.

The success of Trump’s strongman project — just like the prior century of dictatorships that have paved the way for this — depends on creating alternative realities for the true believers and a cloud of uncertainty for the rest of us. The goal is to convince the mass of people that truth is fungible — except for what is dictated by the leader.

Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer on Donald Trump's Latrobe rally (10.20.2024)

In Philadelphia, PENNSYLVANIA.

So...are we to assume Kamala is intent on picking PA Governor Josh Shapiro? Seems like it by announcing it in Philadelphia. I don't know why else she would announce not in someone's home state.

But picking Shapiro just proves how bad Kamala's political thinking and instincts are.

And also her timing.

— Student protests and Gaza. No issue has divided the Democratic coalition like the war in the Middle East. Shapiro’s strong support for Israel is arguably in line with other top Dems, but critics cite his reluctance to call for a cease-fire in Gaza and in particular his strong stance against pro-Palestinian student demonstrators, using his platform to urge Penn to shut down its protest encampment and even seeming to compare pro-Palestinian activists to “white supremacists” in interviews. But Shapiro has also spoken out against Palestinian civilian casualties, and his supporters say activists’ focus on the one VP finalist who is Jewish smacks of antisemitism. — Handling of sexual harassment. The Shapiro administration last year agreed to pay $295,000 to a former female aide who accused a long-time political associate of the governor — Mike Vereb, his legislative secretary, a cabinet post — of making unwanted sexual advances and frequent lewd talk. Female lawmakers in both parties have criticized the administration — which cites a non-disclosure agreement for not talking about the case — for an alleged lack of transparency. The Democratic candidate for state treasurer — political outsider Erin McClelland — sent shock waves through the veepstakes when she tweeted that she wanted a VP “who doesn’t sweep sexual harassment under the rug.”

This is a hopeful moment for the whole left-liberal coalition. The vibes, for once, are good. Almost every leftist I know is excited about Harris and thinks Trump is beatable. With a newly united party behind her, there are only so many ways Harris can screw it up, but one seems all too plausible: She could select Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate. On paper, it’s understandable why Shapiro is among the leading candidates reportedly being vetted by Harris. Like nearly all of the veep contenders, he’s a white male governor with a centrist reputation. At 51, he’s even younger than Harris and a fresh face, having only held his current job for 18 months. He has already shown himself to be a more than capable administrator, generating a lot of good publicity for repairing a damaged section of Interstate 95 within two weeks. Most importantly, Pennsylvania is the most valuable swing state in play, worth 19 electoral votes, and Shapiro is very popular there. Unfortunately, Shapiro also stands out among the current field of potential running mates as being egregiously bad on Palestine. It’s not just that he, like many Democrats, is an outspoken supporter of Israel—though he certainly is, having championed Israel’s war against Hamas consistently and without any apparent concern for Palestinian civilians. Shapiro has, moreover, done far more than most Democrats to attack pro-Palestine antiwar demonstrators, in ways that call into question his basic commitment to First Amendment rights. In his previous role as Pennsylvania attorney general, Shapiro championed the state’s constitutionally dubious anti-BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) law against Ben & Jerry’s after the ice cream maker refused to license its product for sale in Israeli settlements. “BDS is rooted in antisemitism,” Shapiro wrote in a statement in 2021, as he condemned a company named for its two Jewish American founders. “The stated goal of this amorphous movement is the removal of Jewish citizens from the region and I strongly oppose their efforts.”

[...] CNN’s John King has already flagged that antisemitism might make the selection of a Jewish vice presidential candidate risky; likewise, calls from the left to oppose Shapiro risk being branded as antisemitic. Shapiro is not, however, the only Jew who has been suggested as a possible running mate for Harris. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has also garnered attention, and he has taken a very different approach to this issue. Asked by the Illinois state politics site Capitol Fax whether he agreed with Jewish organizations calling for the resignation of Northwestern University’s president over a pro-Palestine encampment, Pritzker replied, “I support the Jewish organizations. I’m not about calling for people to step down.” He also drew a distinction between antiwar, pro-Palestinian demonstrators and “some bad actors” engaged in antisemitism, and affirmed the need to protect free speech along with student safety. Most other candidates floated for the V.P. spot have also taken a far less provocative approach to student protests than Shapiro (one partial exception is Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, who endorsed some GOP smears of campus protesters in an interview, though he hasn’t shown Shapiro’s same level of fixation). North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper actually drew criticism for making no public statement about an encampment at the University of North Carolina. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers said that encampments at the University of Wisconsin were “in good faith,” even as he acknowledged they would eventually need to end. Neither Kentucky’s Andy Beshear nor Minnesota’s Tim Walz made any public statements about similar demonstrations in their states. [...]

Still, his particular hostility toward pro-Palestine activists threatens to blunt the enthusiasm among young progressive voters that Harris has managed to generate in the past few days. It could also undermine the Democratic ticket in Michigan, where Arab American activists have cheered the news of Biden’s withdrawal and are adopting a wait-and-see posture toward Harris. Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib, the lone Palestinian American in Congress, is currently holding off on endorsing Harris but has expressed interest in engaging with her on ending the war in Gaza. Beyond Arab and Muslim Americans, Harris will need to mobilize thousands of young people across the country not only to vote for her but to knock doors, phone bank, and do all the other kinds of grassroots volunteering that translates into a successful presidential campaign. Younger Americans disproportionately sympathize with Palestinians, which is one reason Biden’s approval numbers have suffered badly over the past year. As long as U.S.-made bombs keep falling on Gaza, this issue won’t go away—protests will haunt the Democratic convention in Chicago next month and the beginning of the fall term on college campuses in September, and the anniversary of the attacks on October 7 will fall 29 days before Election Day.

And what happened recently? Oh, Israel decided to assassinate someone on Iranian territory, pretty close to the new Iranian president.

And we can all tell that a bigger war is coming in the Middle East because the airlines are starting to cancel flights.

So... when is the next attack going to happen? Wouldn't surprise me if it happens next week after Kamala announces her VP pick.

That would be just her luck.

Because let's not forget that Israel is trying to drag the US military directly into this. They can't fight Hezbollah on their own.

OPINION

Our democracy is much more frail than Biden

by Will Bunch | Columnist

Published July 2, 2024, 12:04 p.m. ET

Do newspaper columnists know that democracy’s closer to death than Biden?

One of the first things they teach doctors in medical school is the imperfect but necessary art of triage, the technique used on a battlefield or during some other mass-casualty event to determine who is most gravely wounded and who needs immediate attention during a crisis when the system is overwhelmed, and clear-headed thinking will save lives.

Clearly, this is not something that is taught in journalism school.

Over the course of a remarkable weekend, I saw the best minds of my boomer generation destroyed by madness — newspaper columnists and other big shots convinced they were cosplayers in a real-world episode of The West Wing, saving America by giving chief of staff Leo McGarry the best words to convince an ailing President Bartlet that it’s time to step down.

The soft clacking of these keyboard commandos turned into a stampede as the nation’s pundits, its editorial-page poobahs, mega-rich but anonymous donors, and Democratic horse whisperers competed to outdo each other on The Daily Rip or in “the paper of record,” or wherever they thought the actual frail president, Joe Biden, might be paying attention.

Dropping names — Whitmer! Shapiro! Warnock! — like a groupie backstage at a heavy-metal concert, floating wildly implausible scenarios, stretching so hard for historical analogies that several probably blew out a hamstring, America’s pundit class managed to achieve a level of groupthink that surpassed the brainwashers of The Manchurian Candidate. All argued that for the good of the country he loves, Biden — hoarse, barely audible, and visibly confused a few times during Thursday’s Atlanta presidential debate — must immediately end his candidacy.

Meanwhile, in the actual America that less resembles The West Wing than the disaster flick Don’t Look Up, two comets simultaneously bore down on America in the hours leading up to its 248th — and possibly last — birthday as a democratic republic.

First, there is Donald Trump — desperate to avoid his sentencing for his 34 felony convictions, firing off racist insults about “Black jobs” and “bad Palestinians,” and carrying around a 900-page blueprint for American dictatorship called Project 2025 — streaking into the cosmic void of our troubled republic.

Meanwhile, don’t look up but a thoroughly corrupt and compromised Supreme Court is blazing a second trail toward American autocracy. In a flurry of body punches over the last several days, the nation’s highest court gutted the federal government’s ability to regulate fat-cat corporate polluters or stock swindlers, but said poor folks who sleep outside because there’s nowhere else to go can be arrested. Then, with a fierce right hook, it issued a 6-3 partisan ruling that will help Trump — who appointed three of them — evade justice while placing all future presidents above the law.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three liberal naysayers, read her blistering minority opinion from the bench Monday morning, arguing that the court’s finding that a president performing official acts can be immune from criminal prosecution “effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding.” She ended with the words, “with fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

I wish Justice Sotomayor had the bandwidth and the energy to work a second shift as editorial page editor at one of our major newspapers.

At Time magazine (yes, it still exists), the cover of its new issue contained just one word, “Panic” — not at the prospect of an American dictator with the seeming power to have the military assassinate his enemies, but at Biden’s health. At the New York Times (yes, it still exists), an editorial board that considered it pointless, or whatever, to call for Trump to leave the race after those 34 felony convictions — as well as the civil rape and financial fraud verdicts and the two impeachments and three other pending indictments — made its grand pronouncement that it’s Biden who must go. Other papers jumped on the bandwagon, including the swing state Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which in the 1950s and ‘60s won Pulitzers for its courage in taking on Southern racists before deciding instead to appeal to their grandchildren.

And look, I’m not going to argue that Biden’s health is not an issue. His debate performance was troubling, but I also think those of us determined not to see Donald Trump become president again should take a deep breath — even if that’s not the clickbait headline that many are eager to write. Biden needs to do more to assure the public about his energy level, and we also need to see the polls. Any decision should be based on the paramount thing — the thing that should be getting 72-point headlines: stopping dictatorship. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote Monday in her dissent, this is a “five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance.”

The power of Monday’s dissents by Jackson and Sotomayor form quite the contrast with the speculative flights of fancy about a brokered convention in Chicago, which, it’s worth noting, have largely come from white male boomer types. Many Black and brown and female voices, on the other hand, are urging Biden to stay as the only realistic hope — warts and all — of beating Trump in November. Maybe people who in one way or another know the horror of being treated as a second-class citizen understand the risk of dictatorship in a way that white dudes who’ve always been OK do not.

Most journalists want to be seen as savvy (or not naïve, essentially the same thing) and influential. Many editorial writers and columnists are still hurting from the fact that Trump was elected in 2016 with zero major print endorsements. They think calling for Trump to drop out would make them look foolish now that the Republican Party has devolved into a dangerous cult. But a demand for Biden to drop out might actually happen — so that’s savvy, right?

Except maybe the dangerous cult is the more important crisis, especially when it carries a printed guide to dictatorship and holds six justices in its back pocket. To focus on the actual threat we are facing, I wish America’s top pundits would spend less time watching reruns of The West Wing and maybe pick up a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Via Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer, posted 30 Apr 2020:

In the days and weeks immediately afterward, America erupted in chaos and more violence. The largest student strike in American history shut down most campuses for what was left of the 1969-70 school year.

As critics have noted, government repression was heaviest not at the most elite schools but against working-class and nonwhite students; at Jackson State University, an HBCU in Mississippi, white police officers fired more than 460 rounds into a crowd of black demonstrators on May 15, 1970, killing two of them and wounding 12.

But the violent backlash wasn’t confined to the police. On May 8, 1970, an antiwar protest in lower Manhattan was broken up with the fists and clubs of blue-collar construction workers, many (in one of those great historical ironies) building the rising World Trade Center. A few Wall Streeters joined in the hippie punching. A few weeks later, President Nixon — who’d called student protesters “bums” right before the Kent State shooting — welcomed the leaders of their unions to the White House.

Nixon wasn’t the only politician who looked to gain from tapping what he called “the silent majority;“ many “Middle Americans” did vehemently oppose the student protests, and some people even openly celebrated the killings. In fact, Canfora and another shooting victim were among 24 students and one professor who were actually indicted for rioting, although none were convicted and most charges were tossed.

Eight National Guardsmen were also indicted but a federal judge dismissed those charges before there was even a trial. That hasn’t stopped a 50-year, unsuccessful quest for justice by survivors and family members.

In 1971, alarm over college unrest was a chief driver of the pro-business community “Powell Memo” drafted by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell which declared that “the American economic system is under broad attack” and proposed fighting back with conservative think tanks and media. It was the idea that eventually animated talk radio, the Fox News Channel, and what would become daily attacks against “those liberal snowflakes” on campus.

Another prominent far-right thinker — the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan — argued that low or sometimes free university tuition encouraged protest.

Increasingly conservative governors and lawmakers — under budget pressure during the stagflationary 1970s anyway — took this to heart, slashing taxpayer money for public universities and sending tuition to unheard-of levels. Ronald Reagan — who became California’s governor in 1966 by ridiculing long-haired campus protesters — ended (California’s) free tuition on his way to the White House and a new American conservative hegemony.

The flicker of subsequent movements like South Africa divestiture in the 1970s or the 1980s nuclear freeze eventually rekindled the 2010s’ Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street or The Women’s March.

Yet it seems to me — a late-term Baby Boomer who arrived at college in the fall of 1977 — that these were candles in a wind of right-wing repression. Over time, the fear that you might get shot for protesting faded, but most young people these days are working 2 or 3 jobs to pay tuition, accumulating massive student debt, or shut out of college and thus the good-job market altogether — too beaten down to protest the system even as that system gets worse.

Today, the coronavirus crisis has exposed what America has given away since the echoes of 1970 and Kent State faded — a nation of millions living paycheck-to-paycheck, one pandemic away from losing their health insurance, waiting for hours at a food bank, the social safety net all but destroyed by Reagan-inspired conservatism. “The American economic system” was saved without those pesky kids protesting — but at what cost to American democracy?