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the new york times
Undaunted by Attacks, Online Educator Ms. Rachel Elevates Stories of Gaza's Children
"Ms. Rachel has freaked out the entire media class because she has shown how easy it is to humanize Palestinians and treat them with compassion while the mainstream media has spent 19 months doing precisely the opposite," said one observer.
May 22, 2025
Amid accusations that her social media posts about children in Gaza spread "pro-Hamas propaganda" and even that she is paid by the designated terrorist group—a claim that was amplified by The New York Times last week—the megapopular children's entertainer and educator known as Ms. Rachel is showing no signs that she plans to stop advocating for young Palestinians.
Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Griffin Accurso, featured a visit with a three-year-old Palestinian girl named Rahaf in her latest post Wednesday on Instagram, where her 3 million followers have seen numerous posts from her in recent months about children in Gaza.
"This is my friend, Rahaf, from Gaza. Meeting her and her wonderful mama Israa changed my life,"
wrote Accurso in the post's caption, explaining that the Palestine Children's Relief Fund facilitated the mother and child's medical evacuation to the U.S. after Rahaf lost both her legs in an Israeli airstrike.
The video post showed Accurso and Rahaf singing and dancing in matching pink headbands, but Accurso shared in the caption that the visit included a difficult moment when she spoke with Rahaf's brothers and their father, who are still in Gaza.
One minute I was pretending to be bunnies with Rahaf and the next minute I was video chatting with her two adorable, young brothers in Gaza, as her mom, Israa, held the phone up for me. I watched Israa look at them proudly, like I look at my son. It was a drastic snap back into reality. I imagined myself holding the phone in the U.S. with my daughter, now a double amputee from an airstrike, away from my son in Gaza, unable to help him. I felt like I was going to throw up and came back into the moment. "I hope to meet you one day!" I happily said, in my classic Ms. Rachel voice but with tears in my eyes.
Israa tells me that they no longer eat while video chatting with her sons. Her sons are so hungry and have so little food. They look about 5 and 7 years old. About my son's age.
[...]
I ask Israa what she did for work. She answers that she was a teacher and taught math. I think about how Israa and I are both teachers. We both love our children with all of our hearts. We want the same thing for them. But my son will have dinner tonight, a story and snuggle with me, school in the morning… and hers won't. If the situation was the other way around, what would I hope Israa would do for me?
The post was just the latest of many pleas for an end to Palestinian children's suffering by Accurso, a former music teacher who until recently was mostly known for her YouTube videos geared toward toddlers, featuring nursery rhymes and early language lessons.
In other posts she has shared photos of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl whose voice was heard in a phone call she made to emergency workers before she was killed, alone in a car, in an airstrike in Gaza in January 2024; reflections on the suffering of Israeli children taken hostage by Hamas in October 2023; and messages demanding an end to Israel's blockade on all humanitarian aid that began in March.
"When you hear about the thousands and thousands of children killed in Gaza, do you hear a statistic or think of individual children like precious Rahaf?" wrote Accurso last week after her first visit with Rahaf. "When you hear about the kids being blocked from aid do you think about sweet kids like Rahaf becoming malnourished? Trying to make it controversial to speak for these children and staying silent shows that you are saying some children's lives are more important than others—it's based in anti-Palestinian racism. It's not a crime to want the children of Gaza to have food, water, and medical care—keeping it from them is."
Her advocacy for Palestinian children has garnered the attention of the organization StopAntisemitism, which called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether Accurso is funded by Hamas.
A number of progressive journalists condemned the Times last week for asking her whether the accusation was true, with one saying the question was "dangerous journalistic malpractice."
"Ms. Rachel has freaked out the entire media class because she has shown how easy it is to humanize Palestinians and treat them with compassion while the mainstream media has spent 19 months doing precisely the opposite," said Alex Foley of the Accountability Archive, which collects records of public figures backing Israel's assault on Gaza. "She's not a political actor and that's what makes it so powerful. She's just a person who looked out and saw the common humanity in people who are suffering and said this is intolerable."
In an interview with Mehdi Hasan at Zeteo last week, Accurso said that while policymakers in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere have "tried to make it controversial" to speak out about Israel's impact on Palestinian children's lives, "I think it should be controversial to not say anything."
Writer Alon Mizrahi called Accurso "the biggest dissident in America" after she posted her latest video with Rahaf.
"American culture instructed her to hate Palestinian kids, to see them as nonhuman, to rejoice in their destruction, and to support it," said Mizrahi. "She said no; she chose to humanize them more, and she persisted and did not succumb to immense hate and pressure. She should have our admiration forever for this. She is a hero and an icon."
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Will Trump's Return Coincide With the Death of Progressive Media?
We all must support (and share with our friends) those outlets where we find useful news and information. If we fail to do so, America’s media landscape may soon mirror those of the autocratic nations the incoming president so admires.
Nov 24, 2024
Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?
Without the rightwing media juggernaut, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t be president next year and wouldn’t have won in 2016. That said, the progressive media landscape looks like it might be about to get a whole lot worse.
Comcast, which owns NBC and its subsidiaries CNBC and MSNBC (among other media outlets) announced this week that they’ll be spinning off MSNBC (among others) next year.
And the consequences are already showing up. It was reported this week that Rachel Maddow just took a substantial annual pay-cut because of the uncertain future of the network.
In part, this probably reflects a belt-tightening at Comcast, but is also an indication of how legacy media — which now includes cable properties — are taking a hit from newer digital media, from social media to podcasts to web-based networks and programs.
The principal analyst and VP of content for the market research company eMarketer, Paul Verna, told the AP that:
“The writing is on the wall that the cable TV business is a dwindling business,” and, the AP noted, is “predicting future consolidation of the networks or acquisitions through private equity.”
Private equity (like Bain Capital) and large media operation acquisitions have a long history of gutting media properties to increase their profitability; often this includes what a study by Stanford University researchers described as a trend to “substitute coverage of local politics for coverage of national politics, and use more conservative framing.”
Air America radio (for which I wrote the original business plan and which carried my program) was on the air in virtually every major market in the United States, having leased over 50 major, high-powered radio stations from Clear Channel.
My program regularly beat Rush Limbaugh in the ratings: When I was invited to the Obama White House following that election, one person associated with the campaign noted to me privately that they believed Air America had played a meaningful role in Obama’s 2008 election.
That same year, Mitt Romney’s private equity company, Bain Capital, acquired Clear Channel and, in 2009, began reclaiming their stations, replacing Air America content with mostly sports. By coincidence, around that same time it appears Romney decided he’d run against Obama in the next election.
As Air America lost station after station, its ability to earn revenue through selling advertising collapsed. By 2010, the entire network was bankrupt just in time for Romney to run for president.
Will the same thing happen to MSNBC? Stay tuned.
Similarly, Republicans in Congress are salivating over Elon Musk’s rhetorical war with NPR after the network stopped using Xitter when Musk labeled the news network as “state-affiliated” media.
As the headline on Fox Business notes:
“Elon Musk renews calls to defund NPR after clip of CEO resurfaces on X: 'Your tax dollars' are paying for this.’”
Musk, of course, will be in charge of identifying those parts of government or institutions funded by government which can be cut to help pay for Trump’s planned $4 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires.
While it won’t fit her proposed new role as UN Ambassador, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a top member of Republican House leadership, was unambiguous, posting to Xitter: “I will DEFUND NPR.”
This is nothing new: Republicans in the House voted this past July to remove all federal funding for NPR by 2026; Musk and Ramaswamy, working hand-in-glove with Marjorie Taylor Greene (who was just made chairperson of the new subcommittee charged with implementing their recommendations) could probably speed up that timeline.
While NPR goes to great lengths to avoid political bias in their news (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even hired last month, “in response to right-wing criticism,” multiple editors specifically to spot and stamp out any progressive perspectives that may creep into their reporting), if they were crippled, it’s safe to assume the roughly 1,500 rightwing hate radio stations in the country stand more than ready and willing to pick up their radio audience.
Rightwing billionaires brought us Fox “News,” Sinclair, two other web- and cable-based rightwing TV channels, nationwide networks of hate radio (now also in Spanish), tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to rightwing podcast hosts, and the destruction of about half the nation’s local newspapers.
Not to mention an entire network of billionaire-funded hard-right phony “pink slime” newspapers that pop up around the country every election year.
There’s no equivalent politically-tilted media systems on the left; Democratic-leaning billionaires have stayed out of the media space ever since Romney’s company took down Air America.
The closest TV and radio counterparts we have are Free Speech TV (available on the web, Dish, Sling, Roku, AppleTV, and DirecTV) and the Progress Channel on SiriusXM (my daily program is carried on both).
In the print media space, Substack is growing (although they also carry hard-right content) and provides a solid community of progressive publications (like HartmannReport.com), but that’s a drop in a much larger ocean; even The Washington Post and The New York Times don’t come close to the strength of editorial bias found in the Murdoch family’s The New York Post or The Wall Street Journal.
Publications like The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Guardian provide solid progressive content, but all have funding bases that are trivial compared to conservative publications supported by rightwing billionaire networks. Ditto for websites like Raw Story, Common Dreams, Alternet, LA Progressive, Democratic Underground, and Daily Kos.
As my old friend and the former CEO/founder of Air America, Jon Sinton, noted on his excellent “reluctant” Substack newsletter:
“The left-wing silo is barren. A couple of old line newspapers and magazines. MSNBC and a handful of smallish digital platforms and shows. Pod Save America stands nearly alone as a left-leaning podcast with a large audience.
“By contrast, the right-wing silo is vast and deep. It houses YouTubians, TikTokkers, broadcasters on Fox, Newsmax, Sinclair TV stations, and talk radio stations; posters on social media; and narrowcasters on myriad podcasts.”
All, I would add, heavily supported by rightwing billionaires. As Politico reported in 2014, the Heritage Foundation used to give $1 million a year to Sean Hannity and $2 million a year to Rush Limbaugh alone.
A close acquaintance who was, for years, a mid-level rightwing talk show host told me how a dozen or more times a year he’d give a speech at a random high school and would receive a check for $20,000-$30,000 by a rightwing foundation as a “speaking fee” each time. It was their way of supporting conservative talk radio.
Again, there is literally nothing like that on the left. Not even close.
I’ve repeatedly called for progressive billionaires to jump into the media space, and perhaps the Musk/Trump assaults that are coming will provoke some to act. It may be wishful thinking, but if it does happen it can’t come too soon.
In the meantime, we all must support (and share with our friends) those outlets where we find useful news and information; if we fail to, America’s media landscape may soon mirror Hungary’s and Russia’s with every station and publication praising Dear Leader 24/7/365.
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'One of the Most Pathetic Things I've Ever Seen': Watch Vance Refuse to Say Whether Trump Lost in 2020
A New York Times interview carried echoes of Vance's "damning non-answer" in the vice presidential debate.
Oct 11, 2024
Characterizing questions about whether Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump lied about his 2020 election loss as an "obsession" of the media, vice presidential contender JD Vance on Friday refused five consecutive opportunities to acknowledge the election results.
In an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of The New York Times podcast "The Interview," Vance repeatedly attempted to suggest that questions about whether Trump refused to accept the results of a democratic election were unimportant, saying he was "focused on the future."
"Do you think he lost the 2020 election?" asked Garcia-Navarro, point-blank.
"I think that Donald Trump and I have both raised a number of issues with the 2020 election," Vance replied. "I think there's an obsession here with focusing on 2020. I'm much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable."
When Garcia-Navarro asked him the straightforward question a second and third time, he claimed tech companies' censorship of a New York Post story about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop "cost Donald Trump millions of votes," still refusing to answer whether President Joe Biden was, in fact, the election winner in November 2020.
"I've asked this question repeatedly, it is something that is very important for the American people to know," said Garcia-Navarro. "There is no proof, legal or otherwise, the Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election."
Vance later said he would not have certified the 2020 election if he had been in Congress at the time, citing his claim that "industrial scale censorship" cost Trump millions of votes.
"Vance definitively stated that he would have voided the votes of millions of Americans, and paved the way for installing Trump, after Trump lost the 2020 election," said lawyer and writer David Lurie.
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar called Vance's refusal to answer the question "one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen."
The interview came days after Vance faced Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz in a debate. Vance responded to a direct question about whether Trump lost in 2020 with his favored refrain and more claims of censorship.
"Tim, I'm focused on the future," Vance said at the debate. "Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?"
Walz condemned Vance's "damning non-answer."
Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign, responded to Friday's interview by calling Vance "the Project 2025 enabler of Trump's dreams."
"Donald Trump chose JD Vance to be his running mate for one reason and one reason only: He will do what Mike Pence wouldn't and put Donald Trump over our Constitution," said Chitika. "His refusal to acknowledge the simple fact that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election is proof that if Trump wins, there will be no one left to check his worst instincts and stop him from gaining unprecedented, unchecked power to do whatever he wants and put our country at risk."
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