CNN’s Industry Spin Shows Need for Independent Debates

AUGUST 2, 2019

JULIE HOLLAR

https://fair.org/home/cnns-industry-spin-shows-need-for-independent-debates/?awt_l=7pV2m&awt_m=gb0AYn5zcmOI_TQ

CNN painfully demonstrated this week why we need independently run presidential debates. With its ESPN-like introductions to the candidates, and its insistence on questions that pit candidates against each other, CNN took an approach to the debates more befitting a football game than an exercise in democracy.

The CNN hosts moderated as if they weren’t even listening to what candidates were saying, inflexibly cutting them off after the inevitably too-short 30-to-60-second time limit—in order to offer another, often seemingly randomly selected, candidate the generic prompt, “Your response?” At times, these followed on each other so many times it was unclear what the candidate was even supposed to respond to, or why.

CNN started its first debate (7/30/19) by challenging Bernie Sanders to respond to an attack on Medicare for All from Rep. John Delaney.

But worse than the entirely unhelpful format was the heavy reliance on right-wing assumptions and talking points to frame the questions. Over the two nights, healthcare dominated the debates; the first night (7/30/19), CNN‘s Jake Tapper kicked off the questions with one to Sen. Bernie Sanders:

You support Medicare for All, which would eventually take private health insurance away from more than 150 million Americans, in exchange for government-sponsored healthcare for everyone. Congressman Delaney just referred to it as bad policy. And previously, he has called the idea “political suicide that will just get President Trump re-elected.” What do you say to Congressman Delaney?

Debate moderators will typically start with top-polling contenders and challenge them to defend their positions. Doing so with attacks from a contender polling below 1%, however, would seem unusual—except that in this case, the candidate unpopular with the public voiced an opinion very popular in corporate media.

The second night of  the Detroit debates (7/31/19) also started out with CNN attacking Medicare for All—this time forcing Kamala Harris to respond to criticism from Joe Biden.

It was a particularly noteworthy tactic, given that the next night (7/31/19), which also started off with healthcare, CNN lobbed the first challenge to Kamala Harris (polling around fourth place) in the form of an attack on her version of Medicare for All from the top-polling Biden campaign—letting the front-runner start off on the offensive.

Tapper queried multiple candidates the first night about raising taxes on “middle-class Americans” to pay for Medicare for All, and when the floor came back to Sanders, he rebuked Tapper: “By the way, the healthcare industry will be advertising tonight, on this program, with that talking point.”

Tapper quickly cut him off, but CNN‘s commercial breaks that night, as observers pointed out, indeed featured healthcare industry ads. In one, the Partnership for America’s Healthcare Future—an industry group—ran an ad talking about how Medicare for All or the public option means “higher taxes or higher premiums; lower-quality care.”

In other words, CNN debate viewers got industry talking points on healthcare from CNN moderators, bottom-tier industry-friendly candidates given outsized speaking time, and industry advertisements.

Meanwhile, on the first night, CNN asked more non-policy questions (17)—primarily about whether some Democratic candidates were “moving too far to the left to win the White House”—than questions about the climate crisis (15). Across both nights, the 31 non-policy questions overwhelmed questions on important issues like gun control (11) and women’s rights (7).

The second round of debates may not have enlightened the public much about the candidates, but they made one thing clear: We desperately need serious, independently run debates, not over-the-top industry-friendly spectacles of the sort put on by CNN—and endorsed and gate-kept by the major parties.

Media Downplay Climate Disruption’s Ever-Growing Role in Driving Migration

JULY 30, 2019

JOSHUA CHO

https://fair.org/home/media-downplay-climate-disruptions-ever-growing-role-in-driving-migration/?awt_l=7pV2m&awt_m=gb0AYn5zcmOI_TQ

Journalists routinely dehumanize human beings crossing the southern border by comparing them to natural disasters like a “flood” or “deluge.” But while migration has always been a natural phenomenon, the increasingly forced migration of people escaping deteriorating conditions is an unnatural disaster driven, in part, by climate disruption.

The New Yorker (4/3/19) reported on how droughts, floods and changes to weather patterns have contributed to crop susceptibility to diseases and pests, degraded soil quality and shortened growing seasons. Reuters (5/2/19) covered UN estimates that 2.2 million people Central Americans have been affected by poor harvests as a result of climate change, with up to four in every five families having to sell animals and farm equipment to buy food in the past year.

It would be easy for even a diligent news consumer to not know that climate change is one of the central factors driving refugees to cross the border, since it’s usually not mentioned at all in most alarmist reports about the so-called “border crisis” (New York Times, 4/10/19; Wall Street Journal, 5/8/19). In fact, although a few good articles have been dedicated to making the connection (e.g., New York Times, 4/13/19; Washington Post, 4/16/19), it’s usually absent even among reports purporting to explain why people are making the dangerous journey.

Politico (3/28/19)

Politico’s “Here’s What’s Driving the ‘Crisis’ at the Border” (3/28/19) and Vox’s “The Border Is in Crisis. Here’s How It Got This Bad” (4/11/19) both correctly note that the Trump administration’s claims about “unprecedented numbers of undocumented immigrants” crossing the border from Central American countries like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are “untrue,” because, as Vox put it, the

total number of people coming into the US without papers is still lower than it was for most of the 20th century, and substantially lower its turn-of-the-century peak.

However, the strained resources from more families and children crossing the border, as well as the complications of the asylum process, figure heavily into their explanation for how the crisis “got so bad”—rather than the five-year drought ruining the crops of maize, coffee, bananas and beans depended on by mostly subsistence farmers, also known as campesinos, in Central America. The drought is also disrupting the traditional seasonal migration to harvest coffee in Honduras that Central American families have used to ease poverty, forcing them to flee to the US instead (Al-Jazeera, 5/13/19).

Politico’s report explained the border crisis with statements from Republican and Border Patrol officials noting how the “rise in families” and the “greater volume of children among the new Central American migrants” are creating a “capacity crisis,” unlike the less-needy single adult males from Mexico who “constituted most border migrants” a decade earlier, with increased asylum applications creating a longer immigration process.

Vox’s report observed that “we don’t have apples-to-apples data,” because there’s “substantial evidence that the raw number of children and families entering the US is higher than it’s ever been,” while also noting that “crushing poverty” and “gang violence” are factors, in addition to many migrants themselves not knowing “what asylum is,” or why they “might not qualify for it.”

Atlantic (6/26/18)

The Atlantic’s account, “Today’s Migrant Flow Is Different” (6/26/18), likewise explained that “the crux of the recent crisis at the border” is that there are

fewer male migrants in their 20s or 30s making the crossing, and many more families, newborns, children and pregnant women escaping life-or-death situations as much as poverty.

That’s how the outlet differentiated today’s “migrant flow” from previous decades, where Central Americans were fleeing “economic misery in their war-torn states.” The Atlantic actually mentioned that “previous US policies contributed to the extreme insecurity in their home countries,” but only discussed the US policy of deporting “tens of thousands of convicted criminals to Central America in the early 2000s,” and nothing else regarding why “thousands of Central American families” are “stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

Time’s “‘There Is No Way We Can Turn Back’: Why Thousands of Refugees Will Keep Coming to America Despite Trump’s Crackdown” (6/21/18) and NBC’s “Why Are So Many Migrants Crossing the US border? It Often Starts With an Escape From Violence in Central America” (6/20/18) described, not inaccurately but incompletely, migrants escaping “high levels of violence” from organized crime groups like “street gangs” and “drug cartels,” in addition to citing “corruption, weak and unstable government institutions,” and the “unrelenting turmoil of the region.”

NBC’s report mentions that “the conditions” in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras came to “Americans’ attention in full force” in 2014, when “tens of thousands of children arrived on their own” at the US border, without discussing that year’s climate change–related drought. A year later, NBC (7/9/19) would note 2014 as the year the drought began, as it cited immigration analysts and UN reports finding that “roughly half” of all adults apprehended at the border worked “in agriculture,” with a “lack of food” being the primary reason people leave.

Bloomberg (7/5/19)

Bloomberg (7/5/19) offered the victim-blaming headline “Why Roots of US Border Crisis Lie South of Mexico,” and noted that Honduras and El Salvador have among the “highest murder rates in the world.” It depicted Central American migrants as seeking economic opportunity, noting that 60 percent of the population in Honduras and Guatemala lives below the national poverty line, and characterizing those countries as “a hotbed of poverty, corruption, gang violence and extortion.”

In all these reports, the US’s contributions to the violence and corruption in Central America during the Cold War, and more recent US support for a 2009 military coup in Honduras deposing the democratically elected left-wing President Manuel Zelaya, and its funding for death squads in the country, are completely obscured. This despite the evidence (Migration Policy Institute, 4/1/06) that US-backed violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador during the Cold War “institutionalized” a migration pattern to North America that had been “very minor” beforehand.

But if these reports shrouded the connection between US foreign policy and the “violence” and “unrelenting turmoil” in the region, they more deeply buried the connection between increasing violence and climate change.

In fact, the Pentagon has long viewed climate change as a “threat multiplier,” and an indirect factor that could prompt outbreaks of violence in countries already staggering under the weight of other problems (Guardian, 3/31/14). Military planners point to the Syrian civil war—which has killed hundreds of thousands—as an example of how climate change contributes to violent conflict, with the worst drought there in 500 years creating massive internal displacement that led to government repression and sectarian violence (Inside Climate News, 6/13/19).

Guardian (10/30/18)

And while poverty is often featured along with “violence” among the list of things Central American refugees are fleeing, corporate media rarely discuss why so many people there are impoverished, and the connection to the ongoing climate catastrophe. In contrast, the Guardian(10/30/18) informed readers:

“The focus on violence is eclipsing the big picture—which is that people are saying they are moving because of some version of food insecurity,” said Robert Albro, a researcher at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University.

“The main reason people are moving is because they don’t have anything to eat. This has a strong link to climate change—we are seeing tremendous climate instability that is radically changing food security in the region.”

Migrants don’t often specifically mention “climate change” as a motivating factor for leaving, because the concept is so abstract and long-term, Albro said. But people in the region who depend on small farms are painfully aware of changes to weather patterns that can ruin crops and decimate incomes.

Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are part of the Dry Corridor, a region where droughts, tropical storms and flash floods are common, but climate change is influencing the severity and frequency of these disasters, and consecutive droughts can devastate the livelihoods of campesinos completely dependent on what they grow for survival. Unlike in the US and Europe, there are no crop insurance or aid programs, and often no irrigation systems either, to assist people in difficult times (Public Radio International, 2/6/19).

Climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh (Grist, 4/23/19)—lead author of a Stanford University study finding that the economic gap between the richest and poorest countries is about 25 percent greater than it would’ve been without anthropogenic climate change—stated that “most of the poorest countries on Earth are considerably poorer than they would’ve been without global warming.”

Climate change is also a major—yet often omitted—reason for the record number of African migrants crossing the US/Mexican border fleeing violence and poverty. The EU has exacerbated this, mirroring the Trump administration’s policy of making it as painful as possible for refugees to apply for asylum by making civil war–torn Libya the main processing center for applications (Foreign Policy, 6/26/19).

The UN’s 2019 Sustainable Development Goals Report found that “extreme poverty today is concentrated and overwhelmingly affects rural populations,” and that it’s increasingly being “exacerbated by violent conflicts and climate change.” It also found that 413 million out of the estimated 736 million people still living in extreme poverty are in Sub-Saharan Africa, where most of the new migrants are coming from, and the region with “the highest prevalence of hunger,” as the number of undernourished people increased from 195 million in 2014 to 237 million in 2017.

CNN (4/1/19)

The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization found that the 2015–16 El Niño phenomenon afflicting Central America—a warming of the Pacific Ocean surface that causes hotter and drier conditions there—was the strongest it’s been in 50 years, and was also affecting Sub-Saharan Africa’s food security, with 32 million people in the region unable to acquire food in 2016 due to dry weather conditions. The FAO (CNN, 4/1/19) noted that “evolving climatic patterns characterized by cyclic droughts, floods and cyclones have become more frequent in Southern Africa.”

Corporate media downplaying the ongoing climate catastrophe’s creation of large numbers of climate refugees encourages fatal inaction. The UN is warning of more than 120 million people pushed into poverty by 2030, and a “climate apartheid” scenario where the wealthy countries most responsible for carbon emissions are leaving the rest of the world with a stark “choice” between starvation and migration.

This is not one story, fit for the occasional Sunday piece, but many everyday stories, of which human movement across national borders is only one. Media have a responsibility to not only tell these stories, but to link them to climate disruption, if they intend to be part not of the problem but of the solution.

17 Million Americans Purged From Voter Rolls Between 2016 and 2018, Analysis Finds

"Voters often do not realize they have been purged until they try to cast a ballot on Election Day—after it's already too late."

Julia Conley, staff writer

Millions of Americans are still suffering the consequences of the 2013 Supreme Court decision that loosened restrictions of the Voting Rights Act, giving states with long histories of voter discrimination free reign to purge voters from their rolls without federal oversight.

The Brennan Center for Justice released a study Thursday showing that 17 million Americans were dropped from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018—almost four million more than the number purged between 2006 and 2008.

The problem was most pronounced in counties and election precincts with a history of racial oppression and voter suppression. In such areas voters were kicked off rolls at a rate 40 percent higher than places which have protected voting rights more consistently.

Following the Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, counties with histories of discrimination no longer have to obtain "pre-clearance," or approval from the Department of Justice (DOJ), before they make changes to voting procedures—allowing them to slash their voter rolls liberally, often resulting in voter suppression of eligible voters.

According to the Brennan Center, Shelby County single-handedly pushed two million people off voter rolls across the country over four years after the case was decided.

"The effect of the Supreme Court's 2013 decision has not abated," researcher Kevin Morris wrote Friday.

The Brennan Center said that while there are legitimate reasons for removing names from a state's voter database, such as a relocation to another state or a death, many voters' names—especially those of minority voters—are purged even though they meet the state's requirements for casting a ballot.

"In big states like California and Texas, multiple individuals can have the same name and date of birth, making it hard to be sure that the right voter is being purged when perfect data are unavailable," wrote Morris. "Troublingly, minority voters are more likely to share names than white voters, potentially exposing them to a greater risk of being purged."

"Voters often do not realize they have been purged until they try to cast a ballot on Election Day—after it's already too late," Morris added.

In its report, the Brennan Center included a map showing the counties where the most voters were dropped from the rolls.

17 million Americans were purged from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018.

Indiana purged close to a quarter of voters from its rolls between 2016 and 2018, while Wisconsin and Virginia dropped about 14 percent of voters. More than 10 percent of voters in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Maine were purged from voter databases.

High rates of voter purging in some states have made headlines in recent months. Georgia's Republican Gov. Mark Kemp came under fire during his election campaign last year for overseeing, as secretary of state, the purging of more than 100,000 voters from the state rolls, including many people of color.

In Ohio, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown was among those protesting this week against an impending purge of as many as 235,000 voters from the state's rolls.

Across the country, the Brennan Center said Friday, election officials must embrace efforts to make voting easier, not harder, and ensure eligible voters don't show up to the polls in upcoming elections only to find out that their name has been purged.

"Election administrators must be transparent about how they are deciding what names to remove from the rolls," said the organization. "They must be diligent in their efforts to avoid erroneously purging voters. And they should push for reforms like automatic voter registration and election day registration, which keep voters' registration records up to date."

"Election Day is often too late to discover that a person has been wrongfully purged," the group added.

Message to Corporate Democrats

Truth is many Democrat ‘moderates’ prefer Trump to Sanders in 2020 White House race

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/465667-sanders-trump-democrats-battle-2020/

Many so-called Democrat ‘moderates’ would prefer Donald Trump to retain the US Presidency than for Bernie Sanders, or another genuine leftist, to defeat him.

In this sense they are mirror-images of establishment Republicans, such as George W Bush and Colin Powell, who publicly expressed support for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 contest.  

In the course of this week’s heated Democratic Party primary debate, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper warned that “you might as well FedEx the election to Donald Trump” if the party adopts radical platforms. Such as Bernie Sanders’ ‘Medicare for All’ plan, the Green New Deal and other game-changing initiatives. 

The ensuing passionate exchange clearly exposed the two camps in the Democratic Party: the ‘moderates’ (representatives of the party establishment whose main face is Joe Biden), and the more progressive democratic socialists (Bernie Sanders, perhaps Elizabeth Warren, plus the four young congresswomen baptized by Trump as the “Dem Squad”, and whose most popular face is now Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.) 

This struggle is arguably the most important political battle taking place today anywhere in the world.

It may appear that the moderates make a convincing case.

After all, are democratic socialists not simply too radical to win over the majority of voters? Is the true struggle not the contest for undecided moderate voters who will never endorse a Muslim, like Ilhan Omar who keeps her hair covered? And did Trump himself not count on this when he brutally attacked the ‘Squad,’ thereby obliging the entire Democratic party to show solidarity with the four girls, elevating them to the status of party symbols? 

For the Democratic Party centrists, the important thing is to get rid of Trump and bring back the normal liberal-democratic hegemony which his election disrupted.  

Deja Vu

Unfortunately, this strategy was already tested: Hillary Clinton followed it, and a large majority of the media thought she couldn’t lose because Trump was unelectable. Even the two Republican Presidents Bush, father and son, endorsed her, but she lost and Trump won. His victory undermined the establishment from the Right. 

Now isn’t it time for the Left to do the same? Because, as with Trump three years ago, they have a serious chance of winning.

Of course it’s this prospect which throws the entire establishment into panic, even allowing for Trump’s pseudo-alternative. Mainstream economists predict the economic collapse of the US in the case of a Sanders victory and establishment political analysts fear the rise of totalitarian state socialism. At the same time, moderate Left liberals sympathize with the goals of the democratic socialists but warn that, unfortunately, they are out of touch with reality. Yet, they are right to panic: something entirely new is emerging in the US.

What is so refreshing about the leftist wing of the Democratic Party is that they left behind the stale waters of Political Correctness, as recently seen in the ‘MeToo’ excesses. While firmly standing with anti-racist and feminist struggles, they focus on social issues like universal healthcare and ecological threats, etc. 

Far from being crazy socialists who want to turn the US into a new Venezuela, the left wing of the Democratic Party has simply brought to the US a taste of good old authentic European social democracy. 

Indeed, a quick look at their program makes it abundantly clear that they pose no greater threat to Western freedoms than Willy Brandt or Olof Palme did.       

All Changed

But what is even more important is that they are not only the voice of the radicalized young generation. Already their public faces –four young women and an old white man– tell a different story. Yes, they clearly demonstrate that the majority of the younger generation in the US is tired of the establishment in all its versions. Also that they are skeptical about the ability of capitalism as we know it to deal with the problems we are facing, and that the word socialism is for them no longer a taboo.

However, the true miracle is how many who have joined forces with “old white men” like Sanders represent the older generation of ordinary workers, people who often tended to vote Republican or even for Trump. 

What is going on here is something that all the partisans of Culture Wars and identity politics considered impossible: anti-racists, feminists, and ecologists joining forces with what was considered the “moral majority” of ordinary working people. Bernie Sanders, not the alt Right, is the true voice of the moral majority, if this term has any positive meaning. 

So no, the eventual rise of the democratic socialists will not guarantee Trump’s re-election. It was Hickenlooper and other moderates who were actually fedexing a message to Trump from the debate. Their message was:

“we may be your enemies, but we all want Bernie Sanders to lose. So don’t worry, if Bernie or someone like him will be the Democratic Party candidate, we will not stand behind him – we secretly prefer you to win.” 

US Withdrawal from INF Treaty Creates Greater Nuclear Instability

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p56oTHUhCk

KAMALA HARRIS RECEIVES DONATIONS FROM BIG PHARMA EXECUTIVES DESPITE CLAIM SHE REJECTS THEM

Lee Fang

July 30 2019, 5:05 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/30/kamala-harris-big-pharma-donations/

KAMALA HARRIS’S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, while releasing a new health care proposal yesterday, balked at criticism that private industry interests would seek to influence her election effort.

Ian Sams, the national press secretary for the Harris campaign, told CNN on Monday that Harris “is not taking any money from pharmaceutical executives.”

Federal Election Commission campaign finance records, however, show that the California senator has received thousands of dollars from executives at drug companies this year, most of which has not been returned.

Donors include Therese Meaney, a vice president at Endo Pharmaceuticals, a company that manufacturers opioid painkillers, who has given $1,250 to the Harris campaign; Ted Love, the president and chief executive of Global Blood Therapeutics, a startup biopharmaceutical company, who gave $2,800; J. Dana Hughes, a vice president at Pfizer, gave $250; Damian Wilmot, an executive at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, gave $1,000; and Jeffrey Stein, the chief executive of Cidara Therapeutics, another drug startup, who gave $1,000.

There has been some effort by the Harris campaign to return drug company money. Records show the campaign returned a $2,700 donation from John Guthrie, an executive at Pharmaceutics International Inc., in March, for example. Why some drug company donations were accepted and returned, while others were not, is not immediately clear.

During his remarks, Sams swiped at the Bernie Sanders campaign, suggesting that the demand by Sanders that candidates reject drug and insurance money is hypocritical because Sanders also “took some money from pharmaceutical companies before he gave it back.” Sams added that the donations “blurs the line of what the actual issue is here.” The Sanders campaign returned donations from employees at drug companies last month when they were flagged by ABC News.

In an email, Sams reiterated that the campaign does not accept drug company executive money. Sams said the campaign had already returned the donations from Meaney and Stein, though he did not say when the money was returned. Many of the donations, including donations by Meaney and Hughes, were made early in the year — and were not refunded in either the first or second quarter filings. Sams also said the campaign is in the process of returning the donation from Global Blood Therapeutics’ executive. He did not address the other donations.