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Book on Media Complicity in Gaza Genocide Pulled From 'Lily-Livered Library' in Australia
"Is the idea that nothing critical of Israel can ever stand?" asked one critic. "Because the lobby groups keep telling us there’s a difference between prejudice and criticism, but they keep acting like there’s not."
Aug 18, 2026
A public library in metropolitan Sydney, Australia confirmed Tuesday that it removed a book critically examining Western media coverage of Israel’s annihilation of Gaza from its shelves, reportedly after a complaint that its prominent display was distressing to a survivor of last year’s mass shooting targeting a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi Beach.
How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, by US journalist and media critic Adam Johnson, was pulled from Waverley Library in Bondi Junction and placed under review. JWire reported last week that the Waverley Council removed the book after a Bondi massacre survivor saw it displayed on the library's “New Release/Hot Item” shelf.
However, Johnson said Tuesday on X that "British-Australia media keep buying this line that my book was pulled from the library after a 'complaint from a Bondi attack survivor.' We have no evidence this is true. This is simply the story they’re telling. Has anyone independently verified this chain of events?"
Johnson also noted that the Bondi massacre, in which two gunmen fatally shot 15 victims, "had nothing to do with Palestinians or Gaza."
"There is ZERO link between the two, and it’s false [to] keep implying there was," he added.
Johnson's book, published in April by Pluto Press, argues that US corporate media have helped enable Israel’s devastation of Gaza through sanitizing Israeli actions, obscuring US responsibility, and dehumanizing Palestinians as Israeli forces killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of them in what United Nations experts, human rights groups, a South Africa-led case currently before the International Court of Justice, and many others call a genocide.
Johnson told The Guardian that critics "seem to be objecting largely based on the title using the word ‘genocide.'"
“But ‘genocide’ is not my word, or my finding," he stressed. "The fact of genocide in Gaza is the overwhelming consensus of the human rights world, and it is a wholly mainstream opinion among those tasked with studying and determining such matters."
“That it makes some people upset is unfortunate, but reality is often upsetting," he said. "This particular reality is especially upsetting... to the parents of the over 20,000 children killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023."
"Do Sydney officials plan on removing pro-Israel books from their libraries because it potentially upsets these community members?” Johnson added.
The Sydney dispute is hardly an isolated case of the silencing of pro-Palestine speech or criticism of Israel's well-documented crimes against humanity and war crimes, for which alleged perpetrator Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
In March, Adelaide University canceled a venue booking for a literary event featuring Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. Organizers accused the university of bowing to political pressure.
In the United States, college campuses were the epicenter of suppression. New York University withheld a graduating student's diploma after he condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza during his commencement speech. New York authorities also violently cracked down on NYU's anti-genocide protests, and the school adopted a definition of antisemitism conflating anti-Zionism and hatred of Jews.
Seven miles uptown, Columbia University suspended its chapters of the nonviolent groups Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.
George Washington University in Washington, DC banned a graduate from campus after she criticized the university’s ties to Israel, while earlier this year the University of Southern Maine withdrew its support for a Palestine conference because it was slated to include remote participation by Albanese. USM officials cited the dubious sanctions imposed on Albanese and her family by the Trump administration.
There has also been widespread censorship and suppression of pro-Palestine speech in countries including Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
These incidents are indicative of a wider pattern documented by Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, who in 2024 reported that courses, lectures, and panels on Palestine have been canceled and that institutions in Western Europe and North America have restricted books, art, scholarship, and speech concerning Israel and Palestine.
While some Jewish leaders and groups welcomed the removal of Johnson's book from Waverley Library, others decried the censorship.
“Public libraries belong to all of us, and should host a range of views and topics, be they books about queer families or Israel’s widely condemned war crimes," Bart Shteinman, an executive member of the progressive Jewish Council of Australia, told The Guardian. He also called the decision to pull the book "deeply alarming."
One Palestinian account on Bluesky posted: "Is the idea that nothing critical of Israel can ever stand? Because the lobby groups keep telling us there’s a difference between prejudice and criticism, but they keep acting like there’s not."
Another social media user, this one on X, lambasted what she called the "lily-livered library" for "pandering to the vile zealots who protect Israel, despite the evidence before our eyes."
Rhonda Garad, a researcher at Monash University in Melbourne, bluntly said on X that "we've reached the book-burning stage of the fascist takeover."
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Independent Interviewers Expose How Mainstream Media Lets Politicians Off the Hook
Two recent podcasts demonstrated what happens when establishment politicians, whose prepared talking points never stray from what serves as the conventional wisdom about Israel-Palestine, run up against interviewers unwilling to give them a pass.
Aug 18, 2026
Two July podcasts hosted by progressive media stars and featuring leading Democratic lawmakers brought home the deep disconnect that exists between the way establishment politicians and media operate and the way both come to speak about the Middle East and the realities that exist in that region.
Late last month, Mehdi Hasan hosted Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) on his podcast “Mehdi Unfiltered,“ while Congressman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) joined Krystal Ball on her program “Breaking Points.” Because Warner is the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Intelligence Committee and Smith is the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, one might have expected more from them. The conversations were respectful, but neither of the lawmakers was prepared for the grilling they received from their respective hosts.
Both programs demonstrated what happens when establishment politicians, whose prepared talking points never stray from what serves as the conventional wisdom about Israel-Palestine, run up against interviewers unwilling to give them a pass. Two observations must be made: one is about the relationship that has come to exist between establishment politics and mainstream media; the other is how Israel-Palestine is playing out in the US.
One can see the incestuous relationship between political and media elites in full bloom at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. President Donald Trump has painted the media as “the enemy” and purveyors of “fake news,” establishing an adversarial relationship with the mainstream media. He can afford to do so because for the last 30 years far-right Republicans have set up their own multi-platform alternative media. They have their own TV networks, newspapers, social media sites (including Trump’s own “Truth Social”).
The lesson that comes through so clearly in both interviews is the important role being played by new independent progressive media.
In Washington, most politicians (liberal Democrats and centrist Republicans alike) and the mainstream media figures who report on them work and live in close proximity to one another. Their homes are in the same neighborhoods; they send their children to the same schools, attend the same houses of worship, and socialize together. There’s also a “revolving door” factor, as some former government officials leave their posts to become highly paid TV hosts or commentators, and some journalists leave their positions to accept government appointments.
At the White House correspondents’ dinner, “celebrities” from both of these worlds mingle. They throw polite jabs at one another, but their respective jobs require them to use the occasion to be seen and make contacts. This fraternization causes some in the media to temper their coverage—especially as, in the competitive world of today’s media, if a journalist aggressively crosses the wrong officials or breaks from conventional wisdom on a controversial issue of some importance, they may end up losing access to the officials they cover or even losing their positions.
This problem is most pronounced when it comes to media coverage of the Middle East. There’s no doubt that public opinion regarding Israel-Palestine has changed, but this isn’t the case when it comes to the media and political elites. For evidence one can point to polling data, votes in Congress, the number of elections in which critics of Israel have won, and the hundreds of millions of dollars that pro-Israel groups have poured into both defeating what they call “anti-Israel radicals” and attempting to influence the public discourse. But these two shows revealed the impact of the changes in other ways.
For example, when senior political figures from either party appear on major network TV shows to discuss the Middle East, the conversations are usually constrained by the uninformed conventional wisdom shared by both politicians and their interviewers. This is the case for two reasons. First, almost no major network media figures know the history, culture, or politics of the Middle East. For most reporters, that region’s history began the day they got the assignment. Even those who have spent years reporting on the Middle East tend to view it through the conflicts they’ve been assigned to cover or briefings they’ve received from policymakers, who in turn generally have no direct knowledge of the people impacted by their policies. And the stable of experts the networks regularly invite as commentators are largely former government officials who have failed in the past, learned no lessons from their mistakes, and therefore continue to propagate the same views that have defined their sad careers.
It’s much the same when we look at the way lawmakers approach the Middle East. Most are either ignorant about the region or its history or have “willed ignorance”—not wanting to know because the cliches of the conventional wisdom have served them well. Why make things complicated? “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East,” “Israel is an ally that protects US interests,” or a variation on “Israel wants peace, but the Arabs only want to destroy Israel.”
Regardless of what other Middle East-related issues elected officials are discussing, cliches like these form the backdrop to their thinking. Accepted wisdom shared by politicians and media alike. So when Rep. Smith and Sen. Warner sat down with interviews with Ball and Hasan, they were clearly unprepared to be grilled on: how the US can continue to provide advanced military support to Israel when it uses this aid in violation of international law; whether millions of dollars from pro-Israel super-PACs are negatively impacting our elections; or whether Palestinians should be guaranteed equal rights in Israel-Palestine.
For example, when Krystal Ball pressed Rep. Smith on why he would support a provision that would provide for Israel to co-produce weapons with the US military, he immediately fell back on the very tired cliche that since 1948 Arabs have been trying to destroy Israel. She reminded him of the expulsion of Palestinians and asked if he believed in equal rights and whether that applied to Palestinians’ right to return, he felt compelled to answer in the negative. He did so arguing that if Palestinians had equal rights, then Arabs might become the majority, and Israel would no longer be an ethno-national state.
Smith might have gotten away with these answers on a major network news program, but Krystal Ball was unwilling to accept the false historical narrative that has become the conventional wisdom. As she challenged him, it became clear that Smith was uneasy. He was no longer given a pass allowing him to remain in his comfort zone.
Much the same occurred between Mehdi Hasan and Sen. Warner. When Hasan asked Warner whether he would agree that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, he awkwardly sidestepped the question with a non sequitur saying that he wouldn’t use that term because he was concerned that it only served to fuel those who want to eliminate Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea!” Mehdi would have none of this nonsense and continued pressing the senator. Equally confounding were the senator’s convoluted evasions when he was asked whether he felt that campaign contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee played a negative role in US politics.
Some evidence of the changing public mood on Israel did come through in both interviews since both lawmakers indicated that they were feeling enough public pressure forcing them to oppose some of the proposed Israeli military aid packages included in the new budget, but then displayed their lack of understanding by falling back on the “new conventional wisdom” of saying that they were doing so only because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the problem and they didn’t want to reward him.
The lesson that comes through so clearly in both interviews is the important role being played by new independent progressive media. They know the issues they cover, their questions aren’t scripted, and they are not afraid to challenge elites.
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Establishment Media: Narrow Wisconsin Loss for Hong Is Massive Defeat for the Left
Her defeat was welcomed by conventional media and pundits impatiently awaiting some sign that a wave of progressive victories was finally being halted by sensibly moderate Midwestern voters. But is this accurate?
Aug 17, 2026
Mainstream media voices reflexively advising “moderate” politics for the Democrats have unveiled a comfortably reassuring explanation of the razor-thin 3,796-vote defeat of democratic socialist Francesca Hong in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary.
Her defeat was welcomed by conventional media and pundits impatiently awaiting some sign that a wave of progressive victories—especially by democratic socialists—was finally being halted by sensibly moderate Midwestern voters. Apparently, Beltway observers had no problem discounting left-wing progressives in places including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, and most recently with Senate primary winner Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota on August 11.
Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary provided the opportunity to serve up a pre-baked narrative favored by many journalists. Following democratic socialist Francesca Hong’s narrow defeat by just 3,796 votes, “The socialists met their match,” The New York Times concluded smugly. Axios similarly declared, “Hong's loss blunts progressives' recent momentum and hands moderate Democrats a chance to prove their electability.“ For other outlets, too, the central narrative was depicted as a decisive repudiation of progressive politics in a swing state.
This theme was rapidly spread across conventional media despite Francesca Hong’s notable inroads for a combative and visionary brand of fighting for economic and social justice.
But the fact remains—much to the discomfort of establishment media and centrist Democratic leaders—that Francesca Hong got over 311,000 votes, just shy of victory.
But in Wisconsin with Hong’s defeat, mainstream media sources found an opportunity to stretch the real picture to fit their established frame. Rather than a major setback for the spreading success of progressive and democratic socialist candidates across the nation, Hong convincingly demonstrated that Wisconsin has a large and powerful base for innovative progressive policies.
Hong, 37, is a former chef and restauranteur and was first elected to the State Assembly in 2020. A diminutive and soft-spoken Korean American making her first run for statewide office, Hong supplied the vision and energy to build a massive statewide campaign machine while running as an unabashed democratic socialist. She was rightly perceived as reviving the traditions of Wisconsin’s much-revered anti-corporate populist governor “Fighting Bob” LaFollette and Milwaukee’s “sewer socialist” movement that ruled the city for much of the 20th century.
But the fact remains—much to the discomfort of establishment media and centrist Democratic leaders—that Francesca Hong got over 311,000 votes, just shy of victory. This outcome was hardly the momentous repudiation of progressive politics in a key swing state that was frequently portrayed.
Hong demonstrated the broad hunger for policies like taxing the super rich, calling for the termination of school privatization, substantially raising revenues for public schools and urban areas, marijuana legalization, and universal healthcare, proposals that far exceeded what "moderate" Dems in Wisconsin have been offering.
Second, she also showed the power of grassroots organizing as a potent political strategy. She amassed an army of 7,000 volunteers, mostly young people. This youthful infusion of energy seems certain to be a major force in Wisconsin politics to be reckoned with in the future.
Third, where Axios headlined Crowley’s victory as the win of a “moderate,” Crowley explicitly labeled himself as a "progressive" in his TV ads, stressing his pro-labor credentials and his support for “guardrails” on highly unpopular data centers.
(However, while Crowley campaigned as a “progressive,” many progressives are troubled by his opposition to the elimination of education privatization via “school choice,” which transfers funding away from public education.)
Fourth, Hong compiled 311,00 votes in her run for governor and brought in more votes—excepting of course the winner Crowley—than any previous Democrat running in a contested gubernatorial primary.
The excitement ignited by Hong’s bold campaign helped in part to produce a huge Democratic turnout. The Democratic gubernatorial candidates raked in a record 792.009 votes, a level normally attained only in presidential campaigns. Meanwhile, the Republican primary winner Tom Tiffany and a marginal candidate pulled in just 490,819 votes.
While The New York Times and other media have dwelled on the meltdown of her big polling lead on election day, Hong’s strong final results show that her democratic socialist politics were not somehow disqualifying for hundreds of thousands of Democratic voters. The campaign showed an enormous base for policies like taxing the super rich, a $20-an-hour minimum wage, a state-owned bank as in North Dakota, paid family leave, an end to school privatization, and universal healthcare that far exceeded what "moderate" Dems have been offering in the state.
With the pressure of Hong’s ambitious program and substantial lead in polling, Crowley felt compelled to label himself as a "progressive" in his TV ads, stressing his pro-labor positions and criticism of data centers.
Crowley is a Black man who overcame a childhood that included homelessness to rise to become the largest county’s top elected official. After entering the primary, Crowley, becoming discouraged by low poll numbers, temporarily dropped out of the race. But the state’s establishment Democrats pulled him back into the race with promises of all-out support, and they delivered. Top Dems like Gov. Tony Evers almost instantaneously uncapped a gusher of funds fueling a flood of Crowley TV ads in the closing days of the primary.
In her first statewide campaign, Hong found herself hammered in the closing two weeks by a relentless media spotlight on her old social media posts. Carelessly left online by her campaign, these posts—calling for “defunding the police” and criticizing traditional holidays like Thanksgiving—do not reflect her current perspective. But they generated derisive headlines and overwhelmingly unfavorable discussion. With the terrifying specter of the Republican nominee hard-line MAGA acolyte and election denier US Rep. Tom Tiffany eagerly poised to feast on her old social posts and aspirational and ambitious program, even some of Hong’s loyal following seemingly trickled away. This late-arriving erosion was likely enough to tip the final outcome away from her to David Crowley.
Still, Francesca Hong came within 0.5% of access with an aspirational program and an innovative grassroots campaign strategy. Yet the dominant media frame for Hong’s narrow defeat—as supposed proof that serious progressive politics are a fatal formula outside the coasts—has been simmering in recent months. Centrists among leading media voices and top Democrats have uneasily watched a parade of left-wing successes in Democratic primaries across the nation, in states as diverse as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, and in Minnesota with the election of Peggy Flanagan.
Although Hong fell just short of winning the primary, she powerfully demonstrated the growing demand for a bolder vision by voters.
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Legal Challenge Promised After GOP-Controlled FCC Lifts TV Ownership Limits, Allowing Trump Allies to 'Swallow Up Stations'
"Media consolidation and deal approvals are now explicitly a way for President Trump to further consolidate his dictatorial power," said a filing by Free Press, which is suing the FCC.
Aug 06, 2026
A press freedom group says it plans to take the GOP-controlled Federal Communications Commission to court after it voted along party lines on Thursday to enact a rule that could allow a small number of media conglomerates to consolidate even more control over local news stations.
In a 2-1 vote, the FCC eliminated a 22-year-old rule that prohibited a single company from owning stations that reach more than 39% of American households, replacing it with a rule allowing the FCC to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.
FCC chair Brendan Carr said the move was necessary to "restore balance to the broadcast airwaves" and "allow local broadcasters to remain competitive with national ones."
The FCC's lone Democrat and dissenting vote, Anna Gomez, argued that the move would not benefit local broadcasters so much as it would benefit the national conglomerates seeking to buy them up.
“The large station groups positioned to grow even larger under this decision are not local broadcasters; they are national companies that own local stations and increasingly dictate what airs on them," Gomez said. "Trading a squeeze from Big Tech for a squeeze from Big Media does nothing to protect the communities this cap was designed to serve.”
In a statement after the ruling, Reporters Without Borders said the FCC had "just abandoned one of the last significant safeguards against excessive concentration of media ownership."
The change is a big win for media conglomerates like Nexstar Media Group, which is seeking a merger with rival TV company Tegna to reach about 80% of households nationwide. The merger was approved earlier this year by the FCC, but blocked by a federal judge.
It would also allow the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conglomerate known for forcing "must-run" segments with right-wing talking points into local news coverage from its corporate headquarters, the ability to continue gobbling up local news stations around the country.
Free Press, a media and technology watchdog, said it planned to appeal the FCC's decision in court, arguing that Carr had exceeded his power by overriding the 39% threshold, which was enshrined in federal law by the 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act.
"His goal is to spur more media consolidation involving companies Donald Trump views as ideological allies and corporate cronies," said Matt Wood, the group's vice president of policy and general counsel.
Carr, a Trump appointee, has previously sought to use the FCC to crack down on the use of the airwaves by Trump's ideological enemies and consolidate control for his allies.
He has threatened the broadcast licenses of networks that criticize Trump, most infamously pressuring ABC to briefly pull late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air last year. He's also used the FCC's approval of the Paramount-Skydance merger to enforce ideological conformity at CBS News, which has dramatically altered its coverage and personnel to be more favorable to the administration.
Carr has argued that the FCC has the power to alter the consolidation cap because Congress technically directed the FCC to modify its own regulations to enact the 39% limit.
Gomez has disputed this, noting that when the FCC previously tried to move the cap, Congress "stepped in within months... and made clear the FCC did not have the authority to change it."
"Changing this limit requires congressional action, but Carr doesn’t care," Wood said. "He’ll do whatever it takes to clear the way for Trump-aligned billionaires to swallow up stations wherever and whenever they please."
John Bergmayer, legal director at the public interest group Public Knowledge, argued that removing the cap was not only illegal but "also bad policy."
"Consolidation does not serve local broadcast audiences or give them more local news and information," Bergmayer said. "It gives distant corporate headquarters more control of what is aired, and it creates pressure to cut local reporters and air the same programming across many markets."
Free Press' filing argues that Carr is not just violating the law but seeking to help Trump "use the commission’s licensing authority to exert total control over the media.”
"Media consolidation and deal approvals," the filing continues, "are now explicitly a way for President Trump to further consolidate his dictatorial power, through explicit loyalty tests and pledges to use the public airwaves as a propaganda tool against the American public."
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Nicaragua Banned US-Backed Coup Leaders From Elections, and Corporate Media Lost It
In his national address on July 19, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega stated that when the country’s next elections take place, none who promoted a violent anti-government insurrection in 2018 will be allowed to stand for office. Western media outlets reported this as a total ban on voting.
Aug 01, 2026
July 19 is a key date in Nicaragua’s calendar—the anniversary of the victory of its Sandinista revolution in 1979 and the overthrow of the vicious US-backed Somoza dictatorship that terrorized Nicaraguans for 43 years prior. Every year, huge crowds gather in celebrations across the country, culminating in a nationally broadcast speech by President Daniel Ortega. In recent years, Ortega has used the moment to discuss the country’s successes in the year prior, and lay out the agenda for the following year, while lauding not just the Sandinista Revolution’s triumph in 1979 but also the country’s resistance to the 2018 coup attempt—and lamenting the death and destruction it caused before peace was restored.
This July 19, while discussing that violence, Ortega proposed a blanket electoral ban on candidates who participated in fomenting the riots which plagued Nicaragua for months in a violent, US government-sponsored coup attempt that left hundreds dead:
There will be no elections like that again here—no more elections through which they can try cheating their way to government or cheat their way to taking power. We need to create laws that will put up a wall, a barrier, against the coup-plotters, against those who are traitors to their country. And no matter how much money the Yankees give them, they won’t succeed!
Even for casual observers, it was clear that the head of the Nicaraguan government was proposing restrictions on candidates funded and directed by a hostile foreign power situated in the US. But in corporate newsrooms across the country, editors pounced on the phrase “there will be no elections.”
Only days before Ortega’s speech, Trump railed against foreign interference in US elections, promising measures to protect their integrity.
Quoting the president’s statement completely out of context, The New York Times shrieked that Daniel Ortega planned to abolish elections completely, strengthening his “authoritarian grip” on the country. A headline in business journal Bloomberg blared: “Nicaragua’s Dictatorship Should Be Marco Rubio’s Next Problem.” Right on cue, Rubio issued a statement accusing the Nicaraguan government of “thwarting the basic tenets of our democratic hemisphere.”
At US legacy media outlets, clarification was sought not from the government or its supporters, but from right-wing apparatchiks financed and directed by Washington. The Times went to Felix Maradiaga, leader of an opposition group which “operates in secret in Nicaragua,” who claimed that “Ortega buried Nicaraguan democracy a long time ago.” Unmentioned by the NY Times was that Maradiaga is aligned with the far-right Atlas Network and was a key actor in the 2018 coup attempt, for which he received copious US funding.
As Max Blumenthal revealed in The Grayzone in 2018, the Yale-trained Maradiaga’s Institute for Strategic Studies and Public Policy (IEEPP) had received at least $260,000 from the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy since 2014.
The BBC, falsely asserting that Nicaragua’s next elections were now “cancelled,” rolled out another opposition activist, Juan Sebastián Chamorro, who labelled Nicaragua “the North Korea of Latin America.” Chamorro and his oligarchic family have historically been the biggest recipients of US funding directed at regime change in Nicaragua and almost certainly still are.
During the 2018 coup, Juan Sebastián Chamorro promoted the strategy of erecting tranques, or roadblocks, where opposition hooligans kidnapped, brutalized, raped, and even killed common Nicaraguan citizens in a failed bid to strangle the country’s economy and ultimately take over its cities.
It’s no secret that Maradiaga and Chamorro are competing to be Washington’s favored candidate if regime change were to ever occur. Reuters described Maradiaga as a “presidential hopeful,” while Chamorro is joint author of a new Atlantic Council report calling for Washington to back his “transition plan” for Nicaragua. Opposition media put this pair at the top of a list of eight potential candidates.
Washington’s plans for regime change in Nicaragua are hardly a secret, either. The National Endowment for Democracy’s president, Damon Wilson, bragged to a House committee in February that his organization is funding media in Nicaragua with an eye to undermining its Sandinista government. Commenting on latest developments, he said: “The Ortega-Murillo regime may seek to abolish elections, but it cannot abolish the Nicaraguan people’s desire for democracy. We will stand with them until that right is restored.”
The NED, a CIA cutout, currently spends over $2 million annually on Nicaraguan opposition groups—its highest funding level for any country in the region. And of course, the NED is only one source of US regime-change support for political groups who failed to overthrow Nicaragua’s government in 2018 and intend to try again.
In Nicaragua itself, figures such as Maradiaga and Chamorro have little credibility. Opinion polls consistently show that the government has significant popular support. For example, its approval levels ranged from 40-60% in Argentina’s CB Global Data polls over the course of 2026. This is hardly surprising in a country which now has the most modern and extensive public health system in Central America, the region’s best highways, and is building over 7,000 homes each year for those on the lowest incomes, all the product of 19 years of Sandinista rule.
Most Nicaraguans are well aware of what a government headed by the likes of Maradiaga or Chamorro would entail. Not only do they recall the violence and destruction of the coup attempt, but many remember that the last US regime-change operation—a heavily manipulated election in 1990—resulted in 16 years of neoliberal government which left the country with barely functioning schools, potholed highways, and only intermittent electricity supply. Ortega’s call for elections that bar the golpistas (coup mongers) from taking part was therefore met with cheers from the July 19 crowds.
Next-door Honduras provides a lesson of US electoral interference. Not only did President Donald Trump threaten Hondurans with aid cuts if they failed to vote as he wanted in last December’s poll, he also freed the convicted, narco-trafficking former president, Juan Orlando Hernández. To the horror of most Hondurans, he is returning to the country as I write this.
Now, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is being pushed by Florida Republicans such as Reps. María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Giménez to ensure that “after Cuba, Nicaragua is next.” Yet he must be aware the opposition has virtually no support in Nicaragua itself. This week, one of Ortega’s most prominent critics, Manuel Orozco of the Inter-American Dialogue, admitted to CNN, “Nobody is thinking about what it would mean for the United States to remove these people from power when there is no opposition, the public does not know who the leaders in exile are, and there is economic stability.”
While proclaiming “the statement by Daniel Ortega that under his family’s dictatorship Nicaragua will never again hold elections lays bare their true authoritarian nature,” Rubio threatened, “The Trump Administration and the international community will not stand by as the Murillo-Ortega dictatorship deepens repression at home and manufactures instability that threatens US national security.”
Nicaragua has already been included in a fresh round of US tariffs, and economic sanctions and attacks on its trade with the US will certainly continue. However, the political focus is likely to stay on electoral interference, now that Nicaragua’s National Assembly president has repeated earlier assurances that elections will indeed take place.
This brings us back to Daniel Ortega’s declaration during the celebrations in Managua. His government has the sovereign right to fight foreign interference in its electoral process. The US exercises the same right itself: Only days before Ortega’s speech, Trump railed against foreign interference in US elections, promising measures to protect their integrity.
Rubio’s statement supporting Trump’s address seems especially ironic in light of his escalation against Nicaragua. “Under @POTUS,” Rubio declared, “the Trump Administration will rout out foreign interference in our elections and safeguard our democracy. America’s future belongs to Americans.” Change the wording to refer to Nicaragua rather than the US, and you have a summary of what Daniel Ortega promised to Nicaraguans just two days afterward.
The original version of this piece appeared in The Grayzone.
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Corporate Media Failed to Report the Facts and the Stakes of the Prairieland Case
The extremely harsh sentences for Texas anti-ICE protesters did not set off any alarm bells among mainstream papers, and were underreported by national news outlets that should have covered their clearly national implications.
Jul 26, 2026
"Thirty-Year Sentence for Transporting Zines Is a Five-Alarm Fire for Free Speech,” an Intercept headline (6/26/26) shouted days after a federal court sentenced eight anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters to a combined 450 years in prison.
The case stemmed from a July 4, 2025, protest outside the ICE Prairieland detention center in Alvarado, Texas. People had gathered for a noise demonstration to show their solidarity with the detainees inside, and one protester discharged his rifle after a police officer pulled his weapon, resulting in a minor injury to the officer.
Charges were brought against a total of 22 people from the Dallas-Fort Worth area in November 2025, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring “antifa” a “terrorist organization,” and after the related National Security Presidential Memo 7 was issued declaring a wide swath of First Amendment-protected political views as “terrorist.”
Eight of the defendants were convicted in March and sentenced on June 23; another eight were sentenced in early July, four of whom became prosecution witnesses and received shorter sentences. This was the first successful government prosecution testing the claims of EO-18709 and NSPM-7 that previously protected views and protest activity are “terrorism.”
National reporting on the sentencing missed the actual story almost entirely: that a group of people opposed to the government’s ethnic cleansing policies were given decades-long prison terms for their political views and the exercise of their First Amendment right to protest.
One of the defendants, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, was not even at the protest. He was, as The Intercept’s headline correctly reported, sentenced to 30 years because he moved a box of zines. “Five-alarm fire” seems an accurate assessment.
No Alarm Bells
Yet the extremely harsh sentences for Sanchez Estrada and the others did not set off any alarm bells among corporate media, and were underreported by national news outlets that should have covered their clearly national implications. The New York Times (6/23/26) published an online piece that ran on page A14 in print—two days later. The Wall Street Journal (6/23/26) ran an article both online and in print, while The Washington Post (6/23/26) gave the story web-only treatment.
Meanwhile, national broadcast media largely sat this story out. CBS and ABC took a pass altogether. NBC (6/23/26) ran a version of The Associated Press’ reporting on its website, as did CNN (6/23/26), but no original reporting and nothing on their flagship evening news shows. PBS NewsHour (6/24/26) ran an analysis piece (I use that term lightly) the next day; and NPR’s Morning Edition (6/24/26) gave it two minutes.
By casually and inaccurately turning the protesters’ convictions into “terrorism” convictions, these outlets further reinforced the government’s narrative of violence and subversive threat.
The coverage of the Prairieland sentencing was similar, in both content and quantity, to the reporting on the case overall. The verdict in March garnered a single article from several national news outlets, but the trial itself was barely covered. An NPR Up First piece (2/17/26) reported on it when it started; The New York Times (2/24/26) ran a piece at the start of the second trial, after the mistrial; The Washington Post (3/5/26) reported on the trial once halfway through.
By comparison, The New York Times alone ran 153 pieces on Kyle Rittenhouse, the white supremacist who shot and killed two people during a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the month of his trial in November 2021, a Nexis search revealed. Given the enormous stakes in the Prairieland case—NPR (2/17/26) accurately said “it could have nationwide implications for how left-wing movements are prosecuted”—the relative lack of coverage itself may well have implications for how left-wing movements are prosecuted.
But corporate media’s disinterest in the case is just the beginning of the problems. (There’s so much to cover on this that we’re not gonna have time for the mistrial, but the National Lawyers Guild can catch you up on that.) This piece will focus on the coverage of the June 23 sentencing as representative of the overall national reporting. (It does not look at local coverage.) If anything, the draconian prison terms should have made that coverage more skeptical than the previous coverage, but it did not.
‘Taking Part in an Armed Assault’
With the exception of PBS, every other national outlet covering the June sentencing framed the central and salient nature of the protest on July 4, 2025, as violence. The New York Times lead (6/23/26) said a jury had found the protesters “guilty of supporting terrorism while taking part in an armed assault.” The Wall Street Journal lead (6/23/26) said protesters were “accused of carrying out an attack on a Texas ICE facility.”
The Washington Post headline (6/23/26) characterized the demonstration as a “violent ICE protest.” The AP story (6/23/26) framed the event as “immigration center shooting and protest” (note the order), while NPR’s headline (6/24/26) described it simply as an “immigration center shooting.”
No one mentioned that Kyle Rittenhouse—who actually killed two people—was acquitted on self-defense grounds. Song’s conviction on attempted murder charges would be laughable if it weren’t so horrible.
What actually happened that night was that protesters set off fireworks as planned for their noise demonstration, and the evening was peaceful at first. Some protesters then engaged in property damage, including graffiti and slashed tires. When a police officer drew his gun and pointed it at the protesters, one of them, Benjamin Song, fired “suppressive shots,” aiming his rifle at the ground, in what he claims was self-defense. The bullet that struck the police officer “showed signs of impact with a hard surface,” as In These Times (3/26/26) reported, suggesting that it ricocheted off the ground. None of the national news stories on the sentencing included this information.
In the wake of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Song’s fear certainly seems plausible, but the judge in the case had barred the defense from arguing a self-defense claim. That fact was mentioned in only one outlet, NPR (6/24/26), and without any context. And no one mentioned that Kyle Rittenhouse—who actually killed two people—was acquitted on self-defense grounds. Song’s conviction on attempted murder charges would be laughable if it weren’t so horrible.
To describe these events as “an armed assault” is at best a wild exaggeration, and at worst a deliberate mischaracterization. Between the uncritical adoption of the government’s framing of the protest as violent and the omission of so much evidence that contradicts that claim, national reporting on the sentencing missed the actual story almost entirely: that a group of people opposed to the government’s ethnic cleansing policies were given decades-long prison terms for their political views and the exercise of their First Amendment right to protest.
PBS (6/24/26) stands out as the only outlet to have framed the story this way, leading with the headline, “Anti-ICE Protesters Sentenced to Decades in Prison in Latest Crackdown on Dissent.” It interviewed George University Law Center professor Paul Butler, who said, “The concern is, when people are labeled terrorists based on their political views, that chills free speech”—an understatement.
Neither NPR nor The Wall Street Journal managed to even mention the First Amendment, and The Washington Post’s only mention of it (6/23/26) was in a quote from a federal prosecutor who said the protesters’ actions were “a far cry from a peaceful protest or First Amendment expression.”
‘Convicted on Terrorism Charges’
National news stories also failed to interrogate the central claim by the government that the protesters’ action amounted to terrorism, and none explained the charge of “material support for terrorism,” the central charge all but Sanchez Estrada were convicted on.
Several outlets simply conflated “terrorism” and “material support for terrorism,” though the two are legally and substantively distinct. New York Times (6/23/26): “Six of the defendants who were convicted of terrorism charges… which was the first time terrorism charges had been brought against purported members of antifa.” NPR (6/24/26): “The group faced terrorism charges.” AP (6/23/26): “All but one of the eight defendants sentenced Tuesday were convicted on terrorism charges.”
By casually and inaccurately turning the protesters’ convictions into “terrorism” convictions, these outlets further reinforced the government’s narrative of violence and subversive threat.
Has opposition to fascism really been defenestrated from the Overton Window?
The actual charge, material support, rests on that “support” being linked to an identified terrorist organization, and the novelty and grave danger of the Prairieland case was precisely in linking the defendants’ banal activities that allegedly prove their membership in “antifa”—wearing black, being part of a book club that reads anarchist books, having left-wing literature in their possession—to a made-up domestic terrorist organization called “antifa.”
Most of the national reports on the sentencing mention Trump’s executive order designating “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization,” and a few point out in a half sentence that there is no provision under US law for such a thing as a domestic terrorist organization (New York Times, 6/23/26; PBS, 6/24/26; AP, 6/23/26). But none spell out the alarming precedent being set here by a court legitimizing a legal category that literally does not exist in US law.
(The Brennan Center has an excellent primer on the executive order and NSPM-7 that presciently points out “extending the foreign material support for terrorism regime [to domestic organizations] would allow the government to formally assign the label to domestic groups with unpopular beliefs and prosecute anyone who supports them.”)
‘A Decentralized Movement’
All this brings us, of course, to “antifa.” All the news pieces found a way to counter the government’s fiction that antifa is an organization, variously describing it as “an umbrella term” (AP, 6/23/26), “a decentralized movement” (PBS, 6/24/26), an “ideology, not a centralized organization” (NPR, 6/24/26 ), “a loose network” (Wall Street Journal, 6/23/26), a “loosely knit movement” (Washington Post, 6/23/26), and a “movement [with] no central structure or formal membership” (New York Times, 6/23/26). A few reminded readers that “antifa” is short for anti-fascism.
But every single one of them also characterized it as “far left.” Has opposition to fascism really been defenestrated from the Overton Window? Or are corporate (and semi-corporate public) media contributing to the delegitimation of “antifa,” even as they recognize it is not exactly what Donald Trump declares it to be?
By leaving out the deliberate right-wing creation of “antifa,” while characterizing it as “far left,” media are contributing to the government narrative that “antifa” is a real and dangerous thing.
More fundamentally, “antifa” isn’t really any of those things the media say it is, either—a network, a movement, an ideology. It is a right-wing boogeyman constructed precisely for the purpose it is now being deployed to fulfill.
There are a handful of organizations in the US that explicitly identify as antifa, but the overwhelming majority of US leftists never used the term before the contemporary right, abetted by the media, put it on the map. At which point, most of us reacted with: “Antifa” isn’t a thing, but yes, I am proudly anti-fascist.
By leaving out the deliberate right-wing creation of “antifa,” while characterizing it as “far left,” media are contributing to the government narrative that “antifa” is a real and dangerous thing. This helps legitimize the legal fiction that is being used to criminalize dissent.
That a government with strong fascistic tendencies is going to smear its opponents as dangerous and violent is a given at this point. That a court will wholeheartedly follow them down the path of creating legal fictions in order to prosecute those opponents is an alarming development. But that a national press corps is so cowed by government cries of “terrorism!” that they fail to interrogate those legal fictions is a danger to the very freedoms they purport to embody.
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FCC Chair Ripped Over 'Unlawful' Plan to Hand 'Public Airwaves to Billionaire Buddies' of Trump
The lone Democrat on the FCC said Brendan Carr's plan would "destroy local newsrooms, silence community reporting, and drive-up costs for the American families."
Jul 15, 2026
Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr announced Wednesday that his agency will soon vote to repeal a decades-old rule aimed at limiting consolidation among television broadcasters, a move that press freedom organizations say would be disastrous for journalism and American democracy.
Carr, a loyalist of President Donald Trump, outlined his proposal in an op-ed for the far-right online publication Breitbart, claiming his plan would "restore balance to the broadcast airwaves." But Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic FCC commissioner, warned in a fiery statement that "this unlawful effort to hand control of the public airwaves to billionaire buddies of this administration will destroy local newsrooms, silence community reporting, and drive-up costs for the American families who depend on local stations for news and emergency alerts."
Carr said the FCC will vote on August 6 on his proposal to eliminate a rule barring any single TV broadcaster from reaching more than 39% of US households—a limit designed to constrain television conglomerates. The FCC, which has a two-to-one Republican majority, is likely to approve the plan.
But Gomez argued in her statement on Wednesday that Carr's proposal is illegal, noting that "Congress wrote that specific [39%] number into federal law in 2004, and it did so on purpose."
"This is not the first time the FCC has tried to move on this issue," said Gomez. "In 2003, the commission raised the cap to 45% under its own authority. Congress stepped in within months, rewrote the law to set the cap at 39%, and made clear the FCC did not have the authority to change it. An FCC vote to raise the cap now would be unlawful, as it would mean doing the exact thing Congress has already said the commission cannot do."
Politico noted that Carr's proposal "marks a likely victory for the National Association of Broadcasters and its members such as Nexstar and Sinclair, which would be freer to pursue mergers that would breach the cap."
Earlier this year, the FCC approved Nexstar's $6.2 billion acquisition of rival TV company Tegna. A federal judge blocked the merger deal in April pending resolution of a legal challenge. If the merger is finalized, the new media conglomerate would reach roughly 80% of US households, blowing past the statutory 39% limit that Carr is now working to remove.
"Just as the FCC had no power to waive a congressional statute to grease the skids for Nexstar’s merger with Tegna, it has no power now to completely obliterate the limit Congress set," Matt Wood, vice president of policy and general counsel at Free Press, said in a statement on Wednesday. "The national cap remains good policy. It promotes competition, localism, and diversity in broadcasting, incentivizing stations to preserve local newsrooms and local-journalism jobs instead of duplicating stories nationwide and passing that off as local news."
"But whatever the law’s merits may be," Wood added, "the key point is that Brendan Carr cannot undo the limit that Congress set just because he feels like it.”
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Defense of Nixon's Watergate Crimes Is JD Vance 'Telling on Himself,' Say Critics
"He’s insinuating that his own regime has so normalized corruption and lawlessness that past corruption and lawbreaking schemes now seem minor."
Jun 26, 2026
At an event for the Richard Nixon Foundation on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance suggested that if the 37th president's Watergate scandal had happened today, it would barely make the news, let alone destroy a presidency.
But his critics say that's only because President Donald Trump has totally "normalized" corruption.
During a speech at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, Vance celebrated that the "historical legacy" of Tricky Dick, whose name has functioned as a shorthand for presidential lawlessness since his resignation in 1974, "is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and, I think, deservedly so."
"If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story," Vance said. "The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy."
He said the way the "deep state took down Richard Nixon" was "not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration."
Vance also said he personally identified with Nixon: "Young senator, vice president, writes a bestselling book, is hated by the media. It kinda sounds like JD Vance," he said. "I've always liked Richard Nixon."
The vice president was correct that, as Trump adopts a similar philosophy of boundless executive authority, there is a concerted effort among Republicans to rehabilitate the image of Nixon—who infamously declared in a 1977 interview with David Frost that "if the president does it, that means it's not illegal."
Christopher Rufo, an intellectual architect of crusades by the so-called "New Right" against liberal cultural institutions, in 2023 cast Nixon's presidency as "a blueprint for counterrevolution—the last hope for restoring the American republic,” praising his efforts to use lawfare to destroy left-wing groups.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate who is now running for governor of Ohio, has called for a "revival of Nixonian realism" in foreign policy, citing his "unapologetic American nationalism" and hyperfocus on US interests at the expense of moral concerns.
During a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, Vance himself cited Nixon's declaration that "the professors are the enemy" to say that the next Republican president would need to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country."
Some critics described Vance's downplaying of Watergate's severity on Thursday as a sign of historical ignorance or willful deception.
"Let’s remember what Nixon actually did," said Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.). "Operatives tied to his reelection campaign broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to plant listening devices. Then Nixon personally orchestrated the cover-up. The 'smoking gun' tape caught him ordering the CIA to shut down the FBI’s investigation."
"Nixon weaponized the IRS and FBI against his political enemies, authorized burglaries of private citizens, and fired the special prosecutor investigating him in what is called the Saturday Night Massacre," continued Levin. "When the Supreme Court ordered him to release the tapes, the vote was unanimous. Even his most loyal defenders walked away once they heard his own words."
"JD Vance works for the most corrupt president in American history," Levin said. "So of course he wants you to believe Watergate was nothing."
Political scientist and author Michael McFaul suggested that Vance was not aware of how bad he sounded.
The fact that Watergate would probably be a mere blip, McFaul said, "is a tragic indictment of [Vance's] administration," and it's "amazing to me that’s not obvious to him."
Others saw it not as a feint from Vance, but as a boast about everything the Trump administration has gotten away with.
"'We do a Watergate twice a day' is a crazy way to confess your own corruption," said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) in response to Vance's comments.
Amid a litany of other scandals during his second term, Trump has openly used the presidency to make nearly $4 billion since returning to office, accepted lavish gifts from foreign countries while rewarding them politically, and attempted to appropriate taxpayer money to reward his allies. He's pardoned donors and supporters who committed crimes while pushing the Justice Department to target enemies. His administration has brazenly defied the law and the courts to carry out mass deportations of immigrants without due process. And he has carried out hundreds of extrajudicial assassinations and launched multiple illegal wars of aggression without congressional approval.
"Vance is telling on himself," said The Lever editor-in-chief, David Sirota. "He’s insinuating that his own regime has so normalized corruption and lawlessness that past corruption and lawbreaking schemes now seem minor."
John Culver, a retired CIA analyst, said that Vance is "right" that Watergate would no longer register with the public today, "but not for the reasons he thinks."
He blamed modern corporate-controlled media for numbing the public to outrageous political scandals that would have once enveloped a presidency.
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos "would have fired" Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the journalists who broke the Watergate scandal, "a year earlier," Culver said. "The [New York Times] journos would save it for their book."
He said, "Trump has a Watergate-scale scandal every month, and media billionaires distract, distract, distract.”
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Why the Mainstream Media Should Stop Using the ADL as Their Go-To Antisemitism Source
The group uses dubious reporting methods and tends to conflate right-wing racial extremism with pro-Palestine speech and activity.
Jun 14, 2026
More than a decade ago, a video (Mondoweiss, 8/7/14) showed Jodi Rudoren, then The New York Times‘ Jerusalem bureau chief, having a casual and friendly meeting with Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League. The cozy relationship in the video was telling enough, but when the video captured Foxman complaining that the “Arabs” had taken over a famous New York City hotel, and Rudoren shrugging it off, many skeptics viewed this as a window into the Times’ pro-Israel bias.
The recently deceased Foxman (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 5/12/26), famous for promoting the pro-Israel viewpoint and insinuating that critics of Israel were antisemitic, wasn’t Rudoren’s source in this video; they were pals.
Emmaia Gelman’s new book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, is a history of the group, framing it not as a racial justice organization but as a deputy sheriff for the US empire. Gelman shows how the ADL crafts a narrative for the public that pushes Western imperialism rather than equality. In recent years, the ADL’s main focus has been smearing criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian human rights as Jew hatred. As the group (4/4/23) says, “anti-Zionism is indeed antisemitism.”
The book is loosely part of the #DropTheADL campaign, which encourages both progressives and schools to stop citing the group as a source on political extremism, because of its “racist and right-wing” track record. The movement has had limited success: The delegates of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, voted to sever ties with the ADL, a move that was overruled by the union’s governing board (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 7/21/25).
Over the decades the ADL has established itself as a one-stop research depot for media when it comes to antisemitism.
When major newspapers write about the definition or prevalence of antisemitism, they frequently look to the ADL (New York Times, 2/27/28, 12/10/23, 10/6/24; Washington Post, 10/27/21; Wall Street Journal, 5/6/26; USA Today, 4/22/25, 5/6/26). In the Times obituary for Foxman (5/10/26), the paper wrote:
One reason Mr. Foxman was consulted by journalists and academics was that he made sure his organization could back up its claims with facts and statistics.
Gelman’s research challenges that record, arguing that ADL documentation of antisemitic incidents lacks context, allowing the group to “conflate small ambiguous acts like some kid writing a swastika on their desk with burning a synagogue,” Gelman told FAIR. That’s where their research “got fudgy” and “showed spikes” in antisemitism, leading to reporting filled with “stark terms without context.”
Bulwark of the West
Why is the ADL so influential? In Gelman’s telling, the ADL worked hard in the early days of the Cold War as a news source for Washington, DC officials. It blanketed congressional offices and newsrooms with briefings, newsletters, and press releases, making it a go-to source for civil rights information. Its stances neatly aligned with pro-US Cold War policy, unlike other other civil rights organizations, which anti-communists tended to view with political suspicion.
The book documents much of this history, including how the ADL produced influential media of its own:
One measure of the ADL’s reach into political culture was the ADL Bulletin, a glossy, often chatty magazine of news features and insider tidbits on domestic and international civil rights issues. The Bulletin started the decade with a paid circulation of 150,000—already a major publication, matching about 11% of the concurrent circulation of the New York Times. By 1967 it had grown to nearly 169,000 subscribers.
In particular, she cites the organization’s role in changing US perception of Israel after the 1967 war, establishing the Israeli side as the West’s bulwark against a Soviet-aligned Arab alliance. The group’s
reporting heralded a new project of blanketing US media with articles about Israelis as salt-of-the-earth Westerners, mixing human interest with political argument, and flatly denying Palestinian dispossession.
In the 1970s, the ADL created the radio series Dateline Israel, which “was distributed at no cost to thousands of radio stations and reportedly aired on 500 stations,” where “episodes presented Israel as bustling, hopeful, modern.” Gelman adds:
Dozens of 15-minute radio segments highlighted Jewish ingenuity, character, and desire for peace. They highlighted an ostensible pluralism alongside grateful and supportive Arabs who welcomed colonization.
‘A Bit of Selection Bias’
Gelman wants to see news organizations stop using the ADL as a go-to source, not just because of what she sees as dubious reporting methods, but because the group tends to conflate right-wing racial extremism with pro-Palestine speech and activity.
It’s a long road ahead, she said. “We have progressive media moving away from the ADL,” she said. “What’s left is the legacy media and the big-reach media. The only way I can see that shifting is if journalists themselves begin to revolt.”
Part of the problem is that over the decades the ADL has established itself as a one-stop research depot for media when it comes to antisemitism. Last year, for example, when FAIR asked the Southern Poverty Law Center about a rise in antisemitic and white supremacist content on social media networks like Facebook, a media handler suggested FAIR send its request to the ADL.
There are small signs of change. In a long interview with ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt, New York Times writer Lulu Garcia-Navarro (8/9/25) asked the leader about “young Jews who might self-describe as anti-Zionist or have problems with the state of Israel at the moment.” Greenblatt dismissed them, comparing them to “Hispanic people who support President Trump’s policies at the border.” “There are Blacks for Trump,” he added.
When the writer continued to press this issue, he bit back:
What polls are you seeing? I understand anecdotally you may have heard it from some people. I believe there may be a bit of a selection bias there. Have you gone to any of the mainstream synagogues in New York City, the ones with the largest membership, and asked them? I would encourage you to go to 92nd Street Y. Go to the West Side JCC. Go to Central, Park Avenue, Rodeph Sholom, go to KJ. Go to all these large Jewish synagogues and ask where their young people are.
Later that year, the Forward (11/21/25) reported that “younger Jews are more than twice as likely to identify as anti-Zionist than the overall population.” A Washington Post poll (10/6/25) taken in September 2025 found only 36% of Jewish Americans aged 18 to 34 saying they were emotionally attached to Israel, while 50% of Jews in that age group said that Israel has committed genocide.
A 2026 poll by the Jewish Voter Resource Center found 44% of Jewish Americans under 35 supported a democratic, binational government in Israel-Palestine elected by both Jews and Palestinians—”even as most major Jewish organizations classify calls for a single state as an expression of antisemitism,” the Forward (5/27/26) reported.
But in his interview with the Times, Greenblatt redefined which Jewish opinions mattered to him: not just pro-Israel opinions, but those of monied religious congregations in upper Manhattan, an elite that towers above Jewish communities elsewhere. The exchange makes the leader seem woefully out of touch.
He and his group still enjoy a kind of media access the rest of society can only dream about. But the pushback from the Times reporter is a small signal that some outlets are beginning to look at this group more critically.
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How Western Media Normalizes Israel's Ethnic Cleansing in Lebanon
Like in Gaza, where genocide proceeds apace in spite of a declared ceasefire, the media tend to report “ceasefires” in Lebanon without caring to highlight the fact that it’s not a ceasefire when Israel is still pummeling the country and massacring people.
Jun 12, 2026
In October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and attendant assault on Lebanon, the Israeli army did a thing. It invited journalists from major Western corporate media outlets on an incursion into Lebanon’s ravaged south, accompanied by Israeli military personnel who would interpret the wreckage in Israel’s favor—not that the Western media have ever required much assistance in this regard.
Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Fox News and a handful of other special guests signed up for the cross-border sortie. It was, as Habib Battah and Christina Cavalcanti note in an investigation for the Public Source (8/27/25), an “awkward hybrid between a traditional embed and the kind of all-expense-paid publicity trip that journalists refer to as junkets, freebies and dog-and-pony shows.”
Never mind that it is entirely illegal for journalists or anyone else to enter Lebanon from Israel—what’s one more illegal invasion from a country that has been invading Lebanon pretty much since its founding? As Battah and Cavalcanti emphasize, these media professionals were also embedding themselves “within a national project of extraordinary transnational violence,” hosted by an “extrajudicial occupying military power—a critical point that all of them would fail to mention in their coverage.”
The Israelis certainly hit the jackpot with the coverage, as reporters excitedly discovered boots and helmets allegedly belonging to Hezbollah—clear proof that the group had been plotting a nefarious attack on Israel. New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner, an old pro at conducting preemptive journalistic strikes on Lebanon, did not disappoint with her dispatch (10/13/24), “Just Over the Border From Israel, a Hezbollah Cache of Explosives and Mines.”
And in report after embedded report, Israel’s chosen journalists faithfully transmitted the tiresome and counter-logical notion that Hezbollah was somehow the aggressor in the arrangement—as opposed to the army that was busily slaughtering thousands of people in Lebanon while implementing a scorched-earth strategy.
‘Urgent evacuation warnings’
While the October 2024 embed was one of the more preposterous embodiments of Western corporate media’s special relationship with Israel, outlets continue to do a fine job of sanitizing Israeli brutality even when their reporters are not physically viewing the region from inside an Israeli armored vehicle. Since March of this year, Israel has killed at least 3,613 people in Lebanon and displaced 1.2 million, obliterating entire villages and otherwise expanding the ecocidal policy honed in the Gaza Strip.There has been no remotely comparable destruction on the Israeli side, and a recent Reuters article (5/31/26) that had attempted to suggest some symmetry now comes with the preface: “This May 31 story has been corrected to remove a reference to tens of thousands of Israelis being displaced by Hezbollah fire, in paragraph 3.”
Like in Gaza, where genocide proceeds apace in spite of a declared ceasefire (FAIR.org, 10/21/25), the media tend to report “ceasefires” in Lebanon without caring to highlight the fact that it’s not a ceasefire when Israel is still pummeling the country and massacring people, all the while setting the stage for a massive land grab with its creeping so-called “evacuation orders.” These “evacuations” have been focused on the Shiite demographic, with Israel warning Christian and Druze communities not to allow Shiite neighbors to take refuge in their towns (New York Times, 4/1/26).
Lebanese journalist Habib Battah, co-author of the aforementioned Public Source investigation, suggested to me that such orders might be more accurately termed “ethnic cleansing directives.” But that, of course, would be way too much for corporate media outlets to handle—and so it is that we learn about Israel’s “urgent evacuation warnings” and “large-scale evacuation orders,” as though it’s some sort of public service announcement, fire drill or other fundamentally legitimate Israeli undertaking, rather than entirely illegal in addition to downright psychopathic. From a legal and moral perspective, after all, you can’t just go around ordering people in other countries out of their homes, oftentimes only to bomb them when they comply.
Then there’s the matter of the “Yellow Line” or “security zone”—more terminology borrowed from Gaza (FAIR.org, 5/19/26)—which denotes the portion of south Lebanon that Israel is currently illegally occupying. But Israel has never been very good at staying within the lines, and its latest “evacuation orders” spanned no less than one-fifth of the entire country, far beyond its own unilaterally appointed Yellow Line.
As Battah remarked to me, the media’s acceptance and deployment of such arbitrary vocabulary creates “artificial structures” and a sense of orderliness, when in reality “there’s no yellow lines, there’s no yellow, there’s no colors—these are just illegal invasions.” And because media are committed to sanitizing Israel’s behavior rather than questioning it, “colonization becomes normalized.”
‘A warning to residents’
The eagerness of journalists to do Israel’s bidding is all the more confounding given that Israel is currently the No. 1 killer of journalists in the world. A recent Associated Press article (5/29/26), for example, reduced the pulverization of Lebanon to simply “ongoing fighting in southern Lebanon between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters.”
A June 4 Reuters writeup blamed Hezbollah for having “rejected” the latest US-mediated “ceasefire” plan—which, mind you, would basically have given Israel the green light to seize south Lebanon outright. Reuters refrained from referencing the thousands of Lebanese casualties since March, but did allow Israel the usual space to defend its depredations: “The Israeli military, in a warning to residents of the south, said it was continuing to target Hezbollah facilities.”
This is not to say that corporate media do not report on the destruction, displacement and killing in Lebanon; they do—and sometimes even sympathetically. But the refusal to paint a consistent and properly contextualized picture of what is actually going on in the country means that they mostly just end up legitimizing Israel’s war crimes.
Imagine for a moment that Hezbollah had just killed thousands of Israelis in three months and occupied northern Israel. In doing so, it laid waste to 5,000-year-old cities, and bombed the fuck out of everything from homes to ambulances to World Heritage sites to university students to environmental activists who protect sea turtles. Suffice it to say we’d be hearing a lot more about the utter barbarity of it all—and that Hezbollah wouldn’t be allowed to claim ad nauseam that it was targeting “military facilities.”
Almost three years into a genocide that has officially killed nearly 73,000 Palestinians and given Israel every opportunity to blind the world with its true colors, it is no short of an abomination that Israeli officials are still permitted to insist—with little to no media pushback—that they only target “terrorists” and “terrorist infrastructure.” If Israeli officials were to claim that two plus two equals eight, or that Elvis Presley was living in a cave in Madagascar, would the corporate media also report such information with a straight face?
By taking Israel’s word for it, journalists wind up essentially validating mass killing and occupation—as in the corrected May 31 Reuters piece that straight up makes the case for Israel’s seizure of a 900-year-old castle that lies nowhere near the imaginary colored line:
The advance into Beaufort Castle has granted Israeli troops a vantage point over much of southern Lebanon and northern Israel, from which attacks have been launched towards Israeli residential areas.
‘Iranian proxy on its borders’
Of course, willful media decontextualization and omission of relevant history facilitates the conversion of Israeli propaganda into “news.” One handy trick is to always, always, always remind audiences that Hezbollah is a “powerful Shia group supported by Iran,” as the BBC (5/28/26) puts it.
On March 13, CNN ran an analysis datelined Tel Aviv that bore the headline: “The War That Never Ended: Israel Seizes Moment to Finish Fight Against Hezbollah, Iran’s Proxy in Lebanon.” The analyst proceeded to justify Israel’s belief that “it needs to establish a strong military defense to protect civilians from the Iranian proxy on its borders.”
But while invoking Hezbollah’s support by Iran is practically a requirement for Western media reports, it is never deemed necessary to qualify Israel’s own orientation in any way—like, I dunno, “The war that never ended: Genocidal psychostate backed to the hilt by global superpower seizes moment to finish fight against Hezbollah.”
As for why this fight started in the first place, the media can somehow never summon the energy to explain that Hezbollah owes its very existence to Israel’s apocalyptic 1982 invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, prompting the group’s formation. Indeed, Israel’s lengthy history of invading Lebanon—not to mention its 22-year occupation of the south of the country, which ended in its ignominious eviction by the Hezbollah-led Lebanese resistance—would seem to be pretty crucial context in terms of understanding the current war. But those journalists who do bother to provide a bit of background do so in as ambiguous and cursory a fashion as possible, as in the New York Times’ explanation (6/3/26) that “Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia group, has been in conflict with Israel, on and off, for decades.”
A May 13 NBC News intervention headlined “Amid Ceasefire, Israeli Forces Ramp Up Destruction of Homes in Southern Lebanon” offers a roundabout summary of Hezbollah’s origins: “The group, formed in the early 1980s as a civil war consumed Lebanon, was created with support from Iran and sought to expel Israeli forces from Lebanese territory.” The piece went on to discuss some details of the present destruction in south Lebanon, including footage from a video posted to X on April 24 in which
two excavators can be seen destroying solar panels in the Christian border town of Debel, where a photo last month showed a soldier taking what appeared to be an axe to a statue of Jesus.
In a statement to NBC News that can be safely filed under the can’t-make-this-shit-up category, the Israeli army “said…that the damage to the solar panels was not in line with its values, and that disciplinary measures had been taken.” Here’s praying that corporate journalists might someday have the balls to take Israel to task on more existential matters.
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