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However, one critic lamented that corporate media "continues to act like starvation is the unfortunate byproduct of 'war.'"
As more and more Palestinians, mostly children, starve to death due to Israel's 657-day obliteration and siege of Gaza, reliably pro-Israel U.S. corporate media outlets in recent days have centered the starvation crisis—which began in October 2023—while critics have decried passive language and anti-Palestinian tropes used in some reporting.
The Washington Post published at least two articles on the subject in as many days, including an Associated Press story by Wafaa Shurafa, Sarah El Deeb, and Lee Keath titled "Dozens of Kids and Adults in Gaza Have Starved to Death in July as Hunger Surges" and an internal piece by Louisa Loveluck, Heba Farouk Mahfouz, Siham Shamalakh, Miriam Berger, and Abbie Cheeseman with the headline "Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza as Deaths Rise From Hunger." The authors of the latter article noted that "Israel has severely limited the amount of food entering Gaza, where society is on the brink of collapse."
The New York Times on Friday published a morning newsletter article by Lauren Jackson titled "The Starvation Spreading in Gaza," which stressed that "hunger in Gaza is not new" amid an Israeli blockade that has choked the strip "for nearly two decades." Jackson's piece followed a Thursday front-page story by Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Isabel Kershner, and Abu Bakr Bashir, with images by Palestinian photographer Saher Alghorra, headlined "Gazans Are Dying of Starvation."
Palestinian peace activist Ihab Hassan, who heads the Agora Initiative's Human Rights for Gaza project, said on the social media site X, "Starvation in Gaza made it to the front page of The New York Times—a horror so vast, it could no longer be ignored."
Carnegie Middle East Center senior editor Michael Young wrote on X, "Don't underestimate that a mainstream media outlet in the U.S. is finally stating the obvious, that Gazans are dying of starvation."
"But it's not as if they're just dying, for no reason; they are being denied adequate amounts of food by Israel, therefore are being killed," Young added. "Nonetheless, that the NYT presents the story in so blunt a way, under a heartbreaking photograph, must qualify as a turning point of sorts given how reluctant U.S. media outlets are to say anything bad about Israel."
Assal Rad, a fellow at the Arab Center Washington D.C. and frequent media critic, offered a more accurate headline for the Times story—"ISRAEL IS STARVING PALESTINIANS TO DEATH."
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting's Counterspin blog took aim at the Post's "Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza" headline, noting that "it's actual human beings stalking Gaza, who could right now choose to act differently."
Still, there have recently been remarkable discussions about Gaza in U.S. corporate media outlets that would have been all but unimaginable during past Israeli attacks on Palestine.
CNN's "NewsNight" with Abby Phillip on Thursday aired a panel discussion titled, "Why Is the U.S. Silent About the Starvation in Gaza?" The segment featured journalist Peter Beinart, who highighted the International Criminal Court's issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including forced starvation, U.S. support for Israel's ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and the Israeli government's ban on foreign journalists entering the strip.
"To say the United States is silent, it's much worse than that," Beinart said. "We are profoundly complicit and deeply responsible. It is our weapons that enforce this starvation. It is our diplomatic efforts that prevent international justice from being done."
"The blood is on our hands!" he stressed.
The CNN segment also featured a video clip of United Nations World Food Program Director Cindy McCain, whose warnings of a looming starvation emergency in Gaza began in October 2023.
Asked by Phillip if the images of starving Gazans making headlines around the world marked "an inflection point," Beinart replied, "Why did it take this long?"
Meanwhile, Israel's oldest newspaper, Haaretz, ran an editorial Thursday titled "Israel Is Starving Gaza."
"Gaza is starving, and Israel is responsible," the Haaretz editors wrote. "According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 111 people have died from malnutrition since the war began, most of them children. Alarmingly, 43 of those deaths occurred just in the past week."
"The famine that has been created is another facet of Israel's cruel inhumanity towards the people of Gaza," the editors added. "It constitutes a war crime and a crime against humanity and is a clear violation of the orders issued a year and a half ago by the International Court of Justice in The Hague."
The New York Times on Friday published a morning newsletter article by Lauren Jackson titled "The Starvation Spreading in Gaza," which stressed that "hunger in Gaza is not new" amid an Israeli blockade that has choked the strip "for nearly two decades." Jackson's piece followed a Thursday front-page story by Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Isabel Kershner, and Abu Bakr Bashir, with images by Palestinian photographer Saher Alghorra, headlined "Gazans Are Dying of Starvation."
Palestinian peace activist Ihab Hassan, who heads the Agora Initiative's Human Rights for Gaza project, said on the social media site X, "Starvation in Gaza made it to the front page of The New York Times—a horror so vast, it could no longer be ignored."
Carnegie Middle East Center senior editor Michael Young wrote on X, "Don't underestimate that a mainstream media outlet in the U.S. is finally stating the obvious, that Gazans are dying of starvation."
"But it's not as if they're just dying, for no reason; they are being denied adequate amounts of food by Israel, therefore are being killed," Young added. "Nonetheless, that the NYT presents the story in so blunt a way, under a heartbreaking photograph, must qualify as a turning point of sorts given how reluctant U.S. media outlets are to say anything bad about Israel."
Assal Rad, a fellow at the Arab Center Washington D.C. and frequent media critic, offered a more accurate headline for the Times story—"ISRAEL IS STARVING PALESTINIANS TO DEATH."
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting's Counterspin blog took aim at the Post's "Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza" headline, noting that "it's actual human beings stalking Gaza, who could right now choose to act differently."
Still, there have recently been remarkable discussions about Gaza in U.S. corporate media outlets that would have been all but unimaginable during past Israeli attacks on Palestine.
CNN's "NewsNight" with Abby Phillip on Thursday aired a panel discussion titled, "Why Is the U.S. Silent About the Starvation in Gaza?" The segment featured journalist Peter Beinart, who highighted the International Criminal Court's issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including forced starvation, U.S. support for Israel's ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and the Israeli government's ban on foreign journalists entering the strip.
"To say the United States is silent, it's much worse than that," Beinart said. "We are profoundly complicit and deeply responsible. It is our weapons that enforce this starvation. It is our diplomatic efforts that prevent international justice from being done."
"The blood is on our hands!" he stressed.
The CNN segment also featured a video clip of United Nations World Food Program Director Cindy McCain, whose warnings of a looming starvation emergency in Gaza began in October 2023.
Asked by Phillip if the images of starving Gazans making headlines around the world marked "an inflection point," Beinart replied, "Why did it take this long?"
Meanwhile, Israel's oldest newspaper, Haaretz, ran an editorial Thursday titled "Israel Is Starving Gaza."
"Gaza is starving, and Israel is responsible," the Haaretz editors wrote. "According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 111 people have died from malnutrition since the war began, most of them children. Alarmingly, 43 of those deaths occurred just in the past week."
"The famine that has been created is another facet of Israel's cruel inhumanity towards the people of Gaza," the editors added. "It constitutes a war crime and a crime against humanity and is a clear violation of the orders issued a year and a half ago by the International Court of Justice in The Hague."
"Definitely never seen this type of response to a FOIA request," quipped one journalist.
When CNN put in a Freedom of Information Act request with the Office of Personnel Management for information related to security clearances for billionaire Elon Musk and other personnel at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency who have been allowed access to sensitive or classified government networks, the outlet got an unexpected response.
"Good luck with that, they just fired the whole privacy team," an OPM email address wrote back, according to Tuesday reporting from CNN. An OPM official told the outlet that the federal government's human resources agency did not layoff the entire privacy team, but did not comment further on the matter.
"Definitely never seen this type of response to a FOIA request," quipped CBS News journalist Jim LaPorta reacting to the news on X.
According to CNN, OPM's privacy team "is tasked with ensuring the agency's data privacy practices meet legal requirements and protect the trust of the public." Members of the agency's communications staff and employees who handle FOIA requests were also terminated, per CNN, which cited two unnamed sources.
Federal agencies are required to furnish information requested via FOIA unless the information falls within an exemption.
These firings at OPM, which is the chief human resources agency of the federal government, constitute "a move that limits outside access to government records related to the security clearances granted to Elon Musk and his associates," according to CNN, citing unnamed sources "familiar with the matter."
OPM was one of the first federal agencies to be infiltrated by Musk's associates at the Department of Government Efficiency and has been at the forefront of the Trump administration's purge of federal workers.
Last month, OPM sent out the now infamous "Fork in the Road" memo, which offered a widely decried deferred resignation program for nearly all federal employees. The message resembled—including the verbatim wording of the subject line—an email that Musk sent Twitter employees in 2022, when he took over the social media platform now known as X.
CNN's coverage also noted that the move to fire members of OPM's privacy and communication teams echoes Musk's decision to fire the media relations department at Twitter.
On X, Washington Post video journalist Jorge Ribas wrote the word "'transparency'" in response to CNN's reporting about the FOIA request, in an apparent nod to Musk's assertion that DOGE is attempting to be transparent in carrying out its operations.
It's a mistake to dismiss the workers of this nation. And yet the elites within the Democratic Party have shown their disdain over and over and over again.
While some prominent Democrats are calling on party to reconnect with the working class by embracing economic populism, Fareed Zakaria, the host of a CNN news show and a Washington Post columnist, argues in a recent op-ed that it’s lost cause:
“[The Democrats] have a solid base of college-educated professionals, women and minorities. Many of the swing voters who have helped them win the popular vote in seven of the past nine presidential elections are registered independents and suburbanites. Perhaps they should lean into their new base and shape a policy agenda around them, rather than pining for the working-class Whites whom they lost decades ago.”
It's eerily reminiscent of what Senator Chuck Schumer infamously said eight years ago just before Hillary Clinton lost to Trump:
“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
Zakaria, however, claims that Biden didn’t follow Schumer’s advice and instead enacted massive infrastructure investments that were intended to please the entire working class. Biden, he writes, “presided over the creation of almost 17 million jobs with inflation nearing the Fed’s 2 percent target….wage inequality is down…and wage growth is outpacing inflation.”
To counter the blooming oligarchy which appears to have planted itself firmly in both parties, working people need a new political home, one of their own making.
But despite all this economic assistance, the working class increased its vote for Trump. For Zakaria, the Democrats’ electoral failure illustrates the futility of pandering to the working class.
We might better understand working-class alienation if we look at how Zakaria cherry picked his facts and ignored those that didn’t fit his story.
Zakaria loads the dice because he is sure that the White working-class cares more about race, immigration, gender, and sexual preference than it does about its own economic well-being. Hillary Clinton in 2016 ungracefully called half of the Trump voters “deplorables.” Zakaria means much the same when he writes that the Democratic Party “has been slowly losing the votes of the White working class, largely on issues related to race, identity and culture.”
The data from long-term voter surveys tell a different story. The White working-class has become more liberal, not more deplorable, on these issues. While researching my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, I identified 23 controversial questions put to tens of thousands of White working-class voters over the last several decades. In no case did the White working-class become more illiberal. On thirteen of those controversial questions workers became more liberal. Here are five examples:
Zakaria’s laments the Democrats leftward shift, but the Democrats have not in recent years put forth a strong populist agenda. (See “Are You Still Wondering Why Workers Voted for Trump?”)
Zakaria, nevertheless, has no trouble pushing these alienated workers into the MAGA movement. No big loss. But such abandonment is a loss for members of the working class. The MAGA oligarchs did not become billionaires by protecting the economic needs and interests of working people.
To counter the blooming oligarchy which appears to have planted itself firmly in both parties, working people need a new political home, one of their own making. Although the process is extremely difficult in our two-party system, working people and labor unions may have no choice but to build a new political formation of and by working people, just like the Populists did at the end of the 19th century to battle the robber barons of that era.
Their party’s name is as appropriate today as it was then: The People’s Party.