Citations Needed

In this News Brief, we talk to Joyce Ajlouny of the American Friends Service Committee, discuss a recent episode where the New York Times refused to run an AFSC pro-ceasefire ad with the word "genocide" in it, and detail the broader battle within liberalism over labeling the US and Israel's "war" as genocide––and what it would entail if our media did.

"White House frustrated by Israel's onslaught but sees few options," reports the Washington Post. "White House cancels meeting, scolds Netanyahu in protest over video," announces Axios. "Biden Works Against the Clock as Violence Escalates in the Middle East," asserts The New York Times. Since Oct. 7, 2023, we've heard seemingly endlessly that the Biden White House disagrees with the violence in Gaza, but can't do anything to stop it. A number of hindrances frustrate the administration, we're told. There are limits to the United States’ influence and power. President Biden is furious and anguished at Israeli leadership. The administration is working around the clock toward a ceasefire, which — we are repeatedly told — will come any day now.  But, as everyone from the Brookings Institution to the Financial Times to Israeli officials and generals themselves make clear: Biden has been able to, and still can, end Israel's genocidal onslaught whenever he wants. The US has dispositive leverage over Israel, leverage Biden has repeatedly––and openly––ruled out using.  The stark reality is that Biden simply doesn't want to stop Israel and, while he may have complaints about the excesses and PR around the margins, he largely agrees with the outlines of Israel’s destruction of Gaza. To obscure this central fact, US media has now spent over a year pushing out three White House and Israeli-curated media genres of hand-wringing deflection: (1) Helpless Biden, (2) Fuming/Deeply Concerned Biden, and (3) Third Partying.  On this episode, as Biden is set to step down next month, we will go over the media's legacy of covering for the President for 15 months, examine these fictitious reporting genres designed to distance him from the carnage in Gaza, and look at how they worked tirelessly to minimize responsibility and absolve US officials from their involvement in a genocide being live-streamed for over a year. Our guest is journalist Dalia Hatuqa.

"The Bad Guys Are Winning," wrote Anne Applebaum for The Atlantic in 2021. "The War on History Is a War on Democracy," warned Timothy Snyder in The New York Times, also in 2021. "The GOP has found a Putin-lite to fawn over. That's bad news for democracy," argued Ruth Ben-Ghiat on MSNBC the following year, 2022. Within the last 10 years or so, and especially since the 2016 election of Trump, these authors — Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in addition to several others — have become liberal-friendly experts on authoritarianism. On a regular basis, they make appearances on cable news and in the pages of legacy newspapers and magazines–in some cases, as staff members–in order to warn of how individual, one-off “strongmen” like Trump, Putin, Orban, and Xi, made up a vague “authoritarian” axis hellbent on destroying Democracy for its own sake. But what good does this framing do and who does it absolve? Instead of meaningfully contending with US's sprawling imperial power and internal systems of oppression — namely being the largest carceral state in the world — these MSNBC historians reheat decades-old Axis of Evil or Cold War good vs evil rhetoric, pinning the horrors of centuries of political violence on individual "mad men." Meanwhile, they selectively invoke the "authoritarian" label, fretting about the need to save some abstract notion of democracy from geopolitical Bad Guys while remaining silent as the US funds, arms and backs the most authoritarian process imaginable — the immiseration and destruction of an entire people — specifically in Gaza. On this episode, we look at the advent and influence of MSNBC-approved historians, dissecting their selective anti-authoritarian posture and discussing how their work does little more than polish their careers and provide cover for US and US-allied militarism. Our guest is historian and author Greg Grandin.

"Salvadoran Ties Bloodshed To a 'Culture of Violence'", reported The New York Times in 1981. "The violence in Lebanon is casual, random, and probably addicting," stated the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in 1985. "Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims," wrote long-time New Republic publisher and editor-in-chief Marty Peretz in 2010. There’s a recurring theme within media coverage of subjugated people in the US and around the world: they’re mindlessly, inherently savage. Whether the subject is immigrants from Central and South America, Black populations in major American cities, or people in Lebanon or Palestine, we’re repeatedly told that any violence they may be subjected to or carry out themselves is inevitable, purposeless, and baked into their "culture." The pathologizing of violence in certain racialized communities is one side of the coin. The other side of the coin, which reinforces this notion, is the equally sinister concept of selective empathy. It’s a conditional sense of compassion, reserved for victims who media deem deserving—say, Ukrainian victims of Russia’s invasion—and not for those who media deem undeserving, like Palestinians under siege by Israel in Gaza. What motivates this asymmetry, and how does it shape public understandings of suffering throughout the world? How is empathy as a form of media currency central to getting the public to care about victims of certain violence, while a lack of empathy––and even worse, pathologizing violence in certain communities––conditions the public to not care about those whose deaths those in power would rather not talk about, much less humanize. In this episode, we look at the concept of selective empathy in media coverage, examining how it continues centuries-old campaigns of dehumanization – particularly against Arab, Black, and Latino people – bifurcates victims of global violence into the deserving and the undeserving, and influences contemporary opinion on everything from pain tolerance to criminal-legal policy. Our guest is Dr. Muhannad Ayyash.