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    US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms

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    The United States has been added to the Civicus Monitor Watchlist, which identifies countries that the global civil rights watchdog believes are currently experiencing a rapid decline in civic freedoms.Civicus, an international non-profit organization dedicated to “strengthening citizen action and civil society around the world”, announced the inclusion of the US on the non-profit’s first watchlist of 2025 on Monday, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia.The watchlist is part of the Civicus Monitor, which tracks developments in civic freedoms across 198 countries. Other countries that have previously been featured on the watchlist in recent years include Zimbabwe, Argentina, El Salvador and the United Arab Emirates.Mandeep Tiwana, co-secretary general of Civicus, said that the watchlist “looks at countries where we remain concerned about deteriorating civic space conditions, in relation to freedoms of peaceful assembly, association and expression”.The selection process, the website states, incorporates insights and data from Civicus’s global network of research partners and data.The decision to add the US to the first 2025 watchlist was made in response to what the group described as the “Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms and global cooperation”.In the news release announcing the US’s addition, the organization cited recent actions taken by the Trump administration that they argue will likely “severely impact constitutional freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression, and association”.The group cited several of the administration’s actions such as the mass termination of federal employees, the appointment of Trump loyalists in key government positions, the withdrawal from international efforts such as the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, the freezing of federal and foreign aid and the attempted dismantling of USAid.The organization warned that these decisions “will likely impact civic freedoms and reverse hard-won human rights gains around the world”.The group also pointed to the administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters, and the Trump administration’s unprecedented decision to control media access to presidential briefings, among others.Civicus described Trump’s actions since taking office as an “unparalleled attack on the rule of law” not seen “since the days of McCarthyism in the twentieth century”, stating that these moves erode the checks and balances essential to democracy.“Restrictive executive orders, unjustifiable institutional cutbacks, and intimidation tactics through threatening pronouncements by senior officials in the administration are creating an atmosphere to chill democratic dissent, a cherished American ideal,” Tiwana said.In addition to the watchlist, the Civicus Monitor classifies the state of civic space in countries using five ratings: open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed and closed.Currently, the US has a “narrowed” rating, which it also had during the Biden administration, meaning that while citizens can exercise their civic freedom, such as rights to association, peaceful assembly and expression, occasional violations occur.For part of Trump’s first term, Tiwana said, the US had been categorized as “obstructed”, due to the administration’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests and restrictive state laws that were enacted limiting the rights of environmental justice protesters, and other actions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnder Joe Biden, the classification went back to “narrowed”, Tiwana, said, but as of Monday, the US has been placed on the watchlist as the group says it sees “significant deterioration” in civic freedoms occurring.Tiwana noted that the US is again seemingly headed toward the “obstructed” category.While the Trump administration often say they support fundamental freedoms and individual rights, like free speech, Tiwana believes that the administration seem “to be wanting to support these only for people who they see as agreeing with them”.Historically, Tiwana said, the US has been “considered the beacon of democracy and defense of fundamental freedoms”.“It was an important pillar of US foreign policy, even though it was imperfect, both domestically and how the US promoted it abroad,” he added.But Tiwana believes that the recent actions and statements made by this US administration could empower authoritarian regimes around the world, undermine constitutional principles, and embolden those who “want to accumulate power and increase their wealth and their ability to stay in power for as long as possible”.Tiwana says that he and the organization want to draw attention to the fact that those in power in the US are, in his view, engaging in a “zero-sum politics game” that is eroding “constitutional principles and frankly, engaging in, anti American behavior”.“We urge the United States to uphold the rule of law and respect constitutional and international human rights norms,” said Tiwana. 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      Democrats are reeling. Is Stephen A Smith the way back to the White House?

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      The View, one of the US’s most popular daytime television programmes, was a vital campaign stop last year for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. This week, it played host to a cable sports channel personality who might be nurturing political ambitions of his own.Stephen A Smith was asked by co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin what he makes of hypothetical polls that show him among the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.“I make of it that citizens, particularly on the left, are desperate,” Smith said in characteristically forthright style. “And I mean it when I say it: I think I can beat them all.”Despite – or because of – his lack of political experience, Smith is emerging as an unlikely force in a Democratic party badly in need of critical friends, fresh ideas and blunt truth-telling. The idea of him running for the White House remains wildly speculative – but speaks volumes about a shift in the US media ecosystem and a blurring of the lines between culture, entertainment and politics.The 57-year-old, born Stephen Anthony Smith in the Bronx in New York, began his career in print journalism, writing for newspapers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, then made his name as a broadcaster, especially on ESPN. Smith is now the co-host of First Take, where he shares provocative opinions on basketball and other topics.His fans include Kurt Bardella, a media relations consultant and Democratic strategist who watches First Take “religiously”. Bardella said: “He is out there with passion and charisma and he provokes emotion and conversation and debate. He has become the singular most influential person in all of sports.“We live in a time where our politics is shaped and informed by culture more than at any time in our history. There’s that old adage that politics is just culture downstream, and Stephen A is a good embodiment of that.”Smith’s star continues to rise. It emerged this week that he had agreed to a new ESPN contract worth at least $100m for five years. He will continue on First Take but reduce other sports-related obligations, increasing his opportunities for political commentary: in recent months he has appeared on Fox News, NewsNation and HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.The Stephen A Smith Show, which streams on YouTube and iHeart, has featured interviews with Hakeem Jeffries, the House of Representatives Democratic minority leader; rightwing personality Candace Owens; and Andrew Cuomo, in his first interview since announcing his candidacy for New York mayorThe political chatter around Smith is also a symptom of the demoralisation in the leaderless Democratic party following last November’s defeat in elections for the White House, House and Senate. This week, for example, Democrats struggled to find a coherent response to Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress.After nominating Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in past elections, some in the party hunger for a fighter in the mould of Trump, an outsider not beholden to the traditional political establishment. And witnessing the rise of podcasters such as Joe Rogan and an entire “Maga” media ecosystem, they crave a liberal alternative.In Smith, they see a bracing energy. He voted for Harris but has been outspoken in criticising Democrats for failing to connect with voters and for prioritising niche issues – which in his view includes the transgender community – and failing to address the concerns of a broader electorate.In January, appearing alongside the Democratic representative Ro Khanna on Real Time with Bill Maher, he offered a blistering diagnosis of why Democrats lost to Trump: “The man was impeached twice, he was convicted on 34 felony counts and the American people still said: ‘He’s closer to normal than what we see on the left.’”Smith added: “What voter can look at the Democrat party and say: ‘There’s a voice for us, somebody who speaks for us, that goes up on Capitol Hill and fights the fights that we want them fighting on our behalf’?”His gift for storytelling and communicating impresses Bardella, a former spokesperson and senior adviser for Republicans on the House oversight committee. Bardella said: “His style of speaking, the directness, the boldness, the bombastic at times kind of PT Barnum-esque quality that he brings to the conversation is exactly what Democrats are lacking and exactly what made Donald Trump the showman such an appealing character to begin with when he arrived on the stage.“Rather than just dismiss it or make fun of it or ignore it, Democrats would be wise to study what makes him so successful because there is nobody in the Democratic party that is as relevant a voice on a day-to-day basis as Stephen A Smith.”It was striking that a January poll by McLaughlin & Associates for the 2028 Democratic nomination decided to include him in a survey that put Kamala Harris at 33%, Pete Buttigieg at 9%, Gavin Newsom at 7%, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at 6%, Josh Shapiro at 3%, Tim Walz at 3% and Smith at 2%.Still, many Democrats would think twice before gambling on an outsider such as Smith or the billionaire businessman Mark Cuban. Lack of experience could be a liability in the eyes of some voters. Smith’s controversial statements and “yelling” style could alienate certain segments of the electorate. The perception of Smith as a celebrity candidate could undermine his credibility.Bill Whalen, a former media consultant for politicians including the former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, said Smith’s eloquence and in-your-face style could be appealing to voters in this political moment: “But the question is, what does Stephen A Smith believe in at the end of the day? He’s been very vocal criticising the Democratic party. What positions does he hold? What does he believe in?“The fact is, if you’re going to run for a party’s nomination in America, there are about a half a dozen or so issues in which you need to be on the right side. Otherwise, you’re not going to go very far. Where is Stephen A Smith on abortion? Where is he on DEI? Where is he on quotas and affirmative action? Where is he on crime? Where is he on spending?“The list goes on. You just don’t know, so my advice to any Democrat looking at this is: before you become a Stephen A Smith supporter, give him a questionnaire and have him fill it out and see what the answers are.”Whether Smith, who has a recurring guest-acting role on the ABC soap opera General Hospital, would want to take on a gruelling election campaign is far from certain.He has expressed ambivalence on the topic but told the Daily Mail last month that “if the American people came to me and looked at me and said ‘Yo, man, we want you to run for office’, and I had a legitimate shot to win the presidency of the United States, I’m not gonna lie. I’ll think about that.”But on Friday, Smith’s agent, Mark Shapiro, sought to quell the rumours, insisting at a conference in Boston: “He will not run for president. He’s going to continue to entertain those conversations, but he will not run for president.”Still, the buzz reveals a bigger picture about Democratic soul-searching in the aftermath of election defeat. Trump proved effective at exploiting the new media ecology of podcasts, TikTok and other platforms in portraying the party as elitist, out of touch and obsessed with “woke” issues. Some Democrats are now recalibrating – for example, by removing gender pronouns from their social media accounts.David Litt, an author and former speechwriter for Barack Obama, said: “Democrats, for most of my lifetime, which is 38 years at this point, sort of assumed we are dominant in the culture, whether or not we’re dominant politically. One of the things we learned from this most recent election is, that may not be the case and either things are more even than we thought or, I would even argue, the right, at least during the election season, took an advantage in the culture.“It’s important that Democrats are saying our ‘political voices’ may not come from the world of politics, particularly at a moment when people are deeply sceptical of politicians. Who are some people who have ways of thinking and communicating that don’t sound like every politician out there? That search and that openness is going to end up being pretty useful and pretty important one way or the other.” More

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      in Elections

      Trump Wants to Kill Carried Interest. Wall Street Will Fight to Keep It.

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      President Trump has been trying to eliminate the tax loophole, which benefits Wall Street, but Congressional Republicans may stand in the way.Nearly a month has passed since President Trump last spoke publicly of his desire to kill the carried interest loophole. (Yes, we know, some of you don’t consider it a “loophole.”) And yet the private equity industry, which stands to lose big if the president upends the tax break, is still bracing for a fight.This is the biggest challenge to the provision since it was nearly neutered three years ago under former President Joe Biden, Grady McGregor writes for DealBook.A reminder: the carried interest rule means that executives at hedge funds and P.E. and venture capital firms pay roughly 20 percent tax on their profits, a rate that’s so low it’s drawn criticism from Warren Buffett and from progressive senators like Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts.One Washington lawyer described the lobbying effort to DealBook as “significant,” a sign of the escalating stakes.Consider what’s happened in the past month: The American Investment Council, the private equity lobbying group, is reportedly circulating memos on Capitol Hill reminding lawmakers that private equity is a jobs creator. Venture capitalists, seemingly omnipresent in Trump’s Washington, grumble that they have to keep returning to Congress to “educate lawmakers” about the rule’s benefits. So-called free market groups, meanwhile, have banded together to ask Congress to maintain the status quo.“They’ll fight tooth-and-nail on any sort of change,” said Jessica Millett, a tax partner at Hogan Lovells.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      The Future of News Looks Niche

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      The media entrepreneur Jessica Lessin chats with DealBook about the news landscape and her latest media bet.In 2013, Jessica Lessin, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, left the paper to start a competing publication, The Information.A few years later, her fledgling newsroom had grown to nearly two dozen reporters and editors and booked more than $20 million in sales, as she revealed in a profile I wrote for The Times’s Sunday Business. She says she has since doubled her editorial staff and continued to stay profitable, with revenue growing 30 percent in 2024 over the previous year.But it’s her investments outside of The Information that are gaining attention these days.Her company Lessin Media has put money into Semafor, The Ankler, the former Business Insider editor Nicholas Carlson’s Dynamo, Kevin Delaney’s Charter Works and other titles at a time when the news business appears bleaker than before. Lessin, however, is optimistic.I caught up with the entrepreneur about her latest media bet, the tennis publication Racquet magazine, and what she thinks about the changing news landscape. This interview has been edited and condensed.This investment seems different from your others. How did you come to it?I actually got introduced to Racquet by a number of fans of the magazine. And it was like the weirdest experience, because I was reading the magazine, and then I wanted to buy, like, all the clothes in the magazine. I went to the website, and I wanted to buy all the merch. And they’re hosting an event at the U.S. Open. And I was like I want to go to that. And I want to read this great profile about the mental coach behind the world No. 1 tennis player.This sounds like it was something that just struck you personally. I assumed you’d be more focused on sales and market size and margin.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Musk? He’s horrendous’: Martha Lane Fox on diversity, tech bros and International Women’s Day

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      As Elon Musk grinned in the Oval Office, one of Britain’s most influential tech investors looked on in horror. “He is absolutely horrendous. I have said it multiple times: I think it is horrifying what is happening,” says Martha Lane Fox.For the British peer and ex-Twitter board member, the sight of Musk holding forth from the bully pulpit of Donald Trump’s White House shows the Silicon Valley dream has gone sour.“The richest man in the world, who can stand there alongside the president, and kind of carte blanche make jokes about how he’s carving up people’s jobs in the government. Then he can be there with a chainsaw laughing on stage…“It is really, really alarming, and I find it extremely unpleasant at a values-based level – but also, just how can we be watching this in plain sight? It makes me feel very anxious. I think it is gross.”In an interview with the Observer to mark International Women’s Day, the president of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) warned the diversity pushback orchestrated by Trump and his tech bro acolytes will not only damage society, but also the economy at large.Since his return to the White House, the US president has shut down all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, while Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is ripping up funding schemes.Some of the world’s biggest companies are following suit. Amid a wider pushback against everything from environmental targets to sustainable development, among the most prominent taking part are US finance and tech companies, including Goldman Sachs, Accenture and Amazon, while UK businesses such as GSK have also fallen in line.“He needs to be contained,” Lady Lane Fox says of Musk’s role in the rollback. “I find it extraordinary that the richest man in the world is trampling all over these things and that we still have kind of fanboying from the tech sector. It’s already been corrosive for society, and I would argue it is going to continue to be.”For businesses, she says the bottom line is that companies that take diversity seriously appeal to the widest possible employee talent pool and are better placed to target a broad range of customers. This, she adds, is about profit as much as social justice. However, she has a broader concern about the future.“The first thing, it’s financial. But the second thing, it’s about power and money – like everything, right?“If you’re looking at a sector like the digital sector, where there’s the growth in jobs, growth in opportunity – it is the growth sector in the economy. Yet you are not including a whole bunch of people in that. Then you are going to be creating inequality. Full stop. So it’s financial and it’s a question of social justice.”Given the close ties between Britain and the US, there is a view that where corporate America treads, the UK naturally follows. But there are signs that some UK businesses – and even the British operations of some US companies – are prepared to stand apart.The accountancy firm Deloitte instructed staff working on contracts for the US government to remove pronouns from their emails, while also announcing the end of its DEI programme. But its UK boss told staff its British operations remained “committed to [its] diversity goals”.“It feels as though global companies rooted in the US are making a politically motivated slight shift in emphasis and tilt, through to rowing back everything. And it does feel a bit more tempered here,” says Lane Fox.UK businesses have an opportunity to do something different, she says, which could bring financial benefits. “I think we’ll build more robust companies, attract talent and have a much better shot at building the most resilient companies of the future.”For almost three decades, Lane Fox has built a career – and multimillion-pound fortune – in tech. She made her first big money floating Lastminute.com, the online travel site co-founded alongside fellow Oxford graduate Brent Hoberman in 1998.View image in fullscreenShe joined the board of Twitter – now X – in 2016, landing herself a huge payday in Musk’s $44bn hostile takeover in 2022, before he dissolved the board and appointed himself the sole director.Seeing Musk in the Oval Office, parading his son X on his shoulders, made her question the gender divide. “Can you imagine if that was a woman? Can you imagine what that would look like? I mean, I just think the whole thing is really gross.”But while railing against Musk in a personal capacity, the BCC president does not suggest this approach is for everyone. “It is really tricky to navigate. You have a responsibility to your customers and your employees that might be different to our personal view sometimes.”Government regulation to enshrine diversity targets is also a bad idea, she says, preferring instead that companies report their progress. “Keeping it in the light, keeping up the reporting, is important – keeping up good investors, looking at the right metrics and investing in the right companies all helps.”However, not enough progress is being made. Analysis this week showed that worsening unemployment and workforce participation for women has pushed the UK behind Canada to its lowest global ranking for workplace equality among large economies in a decade.The gender pay gap has been declining slowly over time, but average pay is still 7% less for women than for men. It is a challenge Lane Fox is all too aware of. “Look at the data and it is really freaking depressing – and it is not moving,” she says.“What worries me is that it’s far too easy to find numbers that I thought we were moving on from.“In this week of International Women’s Day, we see representation at the executive level has gone back. I see progress on boards is still good at the FTSE 100 level, but bad at FTSE 250 and 350 level.“I know there will be people in the sector thinking: ‘Oh, here she goes again.’ That’s true of many women [that people think that]. But it is so important to keep making these arguments.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump is turning the media into a mouthpiece of the regime | Lawrence Douglas

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      You know we’re in trouble when Fox News emerges as the great defender of freedom of the press. But such was the case when Jacqui Heinrich, a senior political correspondent at Fox, responded to the news that Trump’s White House would now handpick the reporters who get to cover the president in small settings, with the post: “This move does not give the power back to the people – it gives power to the White House.” Heinrich was specifically responding to press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s Orwellian claim that letting Donald Trump choose who would cover him was designed to restore power “back to the American people”.The fruits of the new policy were richly on display during the sickening scene that unfolded in the Oval Office last week. If the president and JD Vance’s disgraceful treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy wasn’t bad enough, there was the unprecedented role that the “press” played in the unseemly drama.Here I’m not simply referring to Brian Glenn’s pugnacious demand that the leader of a war-torn nation justify his sartorial decisions – less a question than a provocation that served as a prelude to the pile-on that followed. Trump appeared to wink at Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice, a far-right cable channel freshly included in the press pool, leading to speculation that Glenn’s question had been scripted in advance, a speculation that is both plausible – I mean, why not? – and irrelevant.For whether scripted or not, these are the kinds of questions we should expect when serious journalists are replaced with mouthpieces of the regime, puppets who perform the role of state propagandists in the guise of reportage. Glenn, who dates Majorie Taylor Greene and describes himself as “100% behind President Trump”, claims not to truck in far-right conspiracy theories – while insisting that January 6t was an antifa-instigated inside job and that a vast mechanism of fraud cost Trump the 2020 election.But before Glenn turned on the Ukrainian president, he had directed an earlier question to Trump: “Mr President, [do] you think ultimately your legacy will be the peacemaker and not the president that led this country into another war … ?” This puffball in the guise of a query gave Trump the opportunity to wax poetic: “I hope I’m going to be remembered as a peacemaker … I’m doing this to save lives more than anything else … Thank you, Brian, for that question. It was a nice question.”But we weren’t done with paeans to the great peacemaker. No sooner had Zelenskyy tersely assured Glenn that he would wear a suit once the war had ended, we were greeted with this question: “Keir Starmer … praised your courage and conviction to lead … What gave you the moral courage and conviction to step forward and lead?”In a properly functioning press corps, we might have expected that the question was directed to Zelenskyy, who, with exceptional fortitude and resolve, has led his countryin a war against a ruthless aggressor. But no. The question was directed to Trump, who responded: “Boy, I love this guy. Who are you with?” The answer was One America News, another network that operates to the far right of Fox, trafficking in conspiracy theories and committed to an unwavering support of Maga politics – and also a beneficiary of the White House’s commandeering of its own press pool.Once again, Trump grew almost wistful – “I like the question … it’s a very good question” – before blaming Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel on Joe Biden. From there, as we witnessed, things grew more acrimonious, but lost in the belligerent and belittling treatment of Zelenskyy, particularly at the hands of Vance (“Have you said thank you once, this entire meeting?”) was the Pyongyang-esque quality of Trump’s hand-picked pool reporters using their questions not to challenge or examine, but to burnish and bolster the Great Leader with ever fluffier valentines of adoration.Meanwhile, the Associated Press remained barred from the historic meeting, because it continues to call a body of water that lies almost entirely outside of US jurisdiction by the name it has carried since the 16th century.

      Lawrence Douglas is a professor of law at Amherst College in Massachusetts More

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      in US Politics

      AP files amended complaint against White House over press pool ban

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      The Associated Press amended its complaint against the Trump administration on Monday, including in its epigraph a punchy quote from an anonymous White House adviser: “The AP and the White House Correspondents Association wanted to f–k around. Now it’s finding out time.”The unnamed White House adviser’s quote came about during an exchange on 25 February 2025 and was first reported by Axios last week.The Associated Press filed its lawsuit against the Trump administration on 21 February, after the White House restricted its journalists from attending presidential events.The decision by the White House came in response to the news agency’s refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” following an executive order issued by Donald Trump that renamed the body of water in the US.The AP claims that the actions of the Trump administration violate both the first and fifth amendments of the US constitution and is an unconstitutional effort by the White House to control speech.The lawsuit names three White House officials as defendants: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich, and chief of staff Susan Wiles.Last week, the federal judge overseeing the case, who was appointed by Trump, denied a request from AP to immediately restore full access to presidential events for its journalists.The judge acknowledged that existing case law “is uniformly unhelpful to the White House”, described the White House’s ban on AP journalists as “problematic” and indicated that the issue needed more exploration before a ruling can be made.Trump administration lawyers have argued in court filings that the AP does not have a constitutional right to what they called “special media access to the president”.On Monday, the AP amended its complaint, nearly doubling the size of the document from 18 pages to 32, and once again asked the federal judge to reinstate its access to the press pool during specific presidential events.“As the DC Circuit has made clear, journalists’ ‘first amendment interest’ in access to the White House, at events both large and small, ‘undoubtedly qualifies as liberty which may not be denied without due process of law under the fifth amendment,’” the amended complaint states.“The AP’s liberty interest in access is rooted in the First Amendment’s free speech and press guarantees and its related protections for news gathering.”The AP also highlighted and cited recent and ongoing instances of AP journalists being denied access and pointed out the recent decision from the White House to take control over which news organizations and reporters are allowed into the presidential press pool covering Trump.The complaint states that “rather than heed this Court’s warning that precedent ‘is uniformly unhelpful’ to the government”, the White House has “instead retaliated against the AP further” by abandoning the press pool system and “again barring the AP from the very same spaces – both small and large – that are at issue in this lawsuit.”“The AP’s journalists are also banned from larger events – including press conferences with the President and other world leaders” it adds. “The AP’s journalists, despite signing up in advance, are turned away”, and the result is that “the AP’s press credentials now provide its journalists less access to the White House than the same press credentials provide to all other members of the White House press corps.”The next hearing in this case is scheduled for 20 March. More

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      UN human rights chief ‘deeply worried by fundamental shift’ in US

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      The UN human rights chief has warned of a “fundamental shift” in the US and sounded the alarm over the growing power of “unelected tech oligarchs”, in a stinging rebuke of Washington weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency.Volker Türk said there had been bipartisan support for human rights in the US for decades but said he was “now deeply worried by the fundamental shift in direction that is taking place domestically and internationally”.Without referring to Trump by name, Türk, an Austrian lawyer who heads the UN’s rights body, criticised the Republican president’s measures to overturn longstanding equity and anti-discrimination policies, as well as repeated threats against the media and politicians.“In a paradoxical mirror image, policies intended to protect people from discrimination are now labelled as discriminatory. Progress is being rolled back on gender equality,” Türk said in comments to the UN human rights council in Geneva.“Disinformation, intimidation and threats, notably against journalists and public officials, risk undermining the work of independent media and the functioning of institutions,” he added. “Divisive rhetoric is being used to distort, deceive and polarise. This is generating fear and anxiety among many.”Since returning to power, Trump has continued to attack the press. Last month, he barred the Associated Press news agency – on which local and international media have traditionally relied for US government reporting – from the White House.His administration has launched a purge of anti-discrimination policies under the umbrella term of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and moved to slash rights for transgender people. At the same time, the administration has sent panic through communities with its widespread and muddled immigration crackdown.Internationally, the US has moved to withdraw funding for international organisations that promote health and human rights, such as the World Health Organization, and imposed economic sanctions on the international criminal court, which is investigating war crimes in Gaza.Washington’s traditional allies, including Canada, France and Germany, are feeling increasingly alarmed as Trump lashes out at democratic leaders while expressing a fondness for autocrats, including the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.In his speech on Monday, Türk presented a concerned overview of the global rights situation, saying the world was “going through a period of turbulence and unpredictability”.“[What] we are experiencing goes to the very core of the international order – an order that has brought us an unprecedented level of global stability. We cannot allow the fundamental global consensus around international norms and institutions, built painstakingly over decades, to crumble before our eyes.”He called out the growing influence wielded by “a handful of unelected tech oligarchs” who “have our data: they know where we live, what we do, our genes and our health conditions, our thoughts, our habits, our desires and our fears”.Türk added: “They know how to manipulate us.”While his comments were not directed at the US, they come at a time of rising and consolidated power among American tech and social media billionaires who have fallen in line behind Trump.They include Elon Musk, who owns X and has been the 78-year-old president’s most prominent backer, but also Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who has ended factchecking programmes on Facebook and Instagram – a move the UN chief, António Guterres, has warned will open the “floodgates to more hate, more threats, and more violence”.Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest man and owner of the Washington Post, which in the last US presidential election declined to endorse a candidate for the first time in decades, recently banned opinion articles that did not support his views on “personal liberties and free markets”.Türk, whose comments were not limited to the situation in the US but could also apply to tech leaders in China and India, said that “any form of unregulated power can lead to oppression, subjugation, and even tyranny – the playbook of the autocrat”. More

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      in US Politics

      Shake-up for Trump era gives liberal MSNBC a whiter, more centrist look

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      The brutal shake-up at MSNBC, the liberal news channel that has been been at the forefront of scrutinizing Donald Trump and his politics, could lead to the loss of progressive voices and stories affecting people of color, media experts said.All of this arrives at a time when the Trump administration is actively attacking the media.MSNBC announced on Monday that the progressive host Joy Reid was being fired from her weeknight show, with Alex Wagner also losing her prime-time nightly broadcast. Katie Phang and Jonathan Capehart also lost their solo weekend shows, along with Ayman Mohyeldin, who has been a fierce critic of Israel’s bombing of Gaza. A “bloodbath of non-white anchors”, as the Daily Beast termed it, as the move was widely criticized, including on MSNBC.“Indefensible,” was the verdict of Rachel Maddow, the channel’s highest-profile host, as she lambasted the network live on her show on Monday. “I think it is a bad mistake to let [Reid] walk out the door. It is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two non-white hosts in prime time, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend.”Other criticism was even more strident. Elie Mystal, justice correspondent at the Nation, wrote on Twitter/X: “I owe the television part of my career to Joy Reid, as do so many other Black voices y’all never would have heard of if not for her. And *that’s* why she’s gone. They can treat black folks as interchangeable, but everybody Black knows that Joy was indispensable.”Mehdi Hasan, a progressive journalist and Guardian columnist whose MSNBC show was canceled in 2023, wrote: “It’s a big loss for MSNBC viewers as [Reid] did talk about issues – racism, fascism, Gaza – that other hosts have avoided. And I’m also sad to see my brilliant friend Ayman lose his unique show, too.”Phang and Wagner will remain with the network, Phang becom​ing a legal correspondent and Wagner a political analyst, and​ Capehart and Mohyeldin will become co-hosts on other programs. But with non-white journalists underrepresented in the media, the loss of those voices from prime-time shows and at the helm of their own programs represents a blow for those concerned about diversity.“Joy Reid represents another loss of amplifying Black and brown voices who will report news on stories that oftentimes go under the radar or underreported by mainstream journalists,” said Emmitt Riley, a professor of politics and African and African American studies at the University of the South and the president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.“When we think about what diversity truly means, it means that we bring a wide variety of perspectives to the table. And certainly a person’s life experiences with discrimination, their life experiences in terms of where they occupy certain positions of power or lack thereof, informs what stories they decide to amplify. And so we saw Joy covering a number of different stories that I think will go under the radar now.”Along with losing the perspectives that journalists from a range of backgrounds and life experiences can bring, there is also concern that MSNBC is losing progressive voices and sidelining some of its most prominent critics of Israel, including Reid and Mohyeldin.At a time when Trump has made it clear that he will offer little support to Gaza – last week the president shared an AI video showing the US turning it into a cross between Dubai and Las Vegas – the loss of those voices is a concern.Reid’s show will be replaced by Symone Sanders Townsend and Michael Steele, who are Black, and Alicia Menendez, who is of Cuban descent. Although Sanders has progressive bona fides as a former national press secretary for Bernie Sanders, Steele is a former chair of the Republican national committee who describes himself as “an American, a conservative and a Republican, in that order”.Menendez also has deep connections to the center of US politics – her father is Bob Menendez, the former Democratic senator who in January was sentenced to 11 years in prison for taking bribes. Her brother, Robert Menendez, is a Democratic congressman.Wagner, who in 2022 MSNBC described as the only Asian American to host a prime-time cable news program, platformed critics of Joe Biden as he declined in mid-2024. She will be replaced by Jen Psaki, who served as Biden’s White House press secretary and previously had roles in communications for centrist Democrats including Barack Obama and John Kerry.“It is going to change the discourse,” said Heather Hendershot, a professor of communication studies and journalism at Northwestern University.“It’s still going to be in keeping with the MSNBC brand, it will still be liberal. But they’re moving a little bit away from the left with these recent changes.”The moves came two weeks after the Federal Communications Commission, led by the Donald Trump appointee and Project 2025 co-author Brendan Carr, launched an investigation into Comcast, MSNBC’s parent company over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies, part of a broader policy which has seen Trump order an end to all DEI programs in federal government and also target the programs in schools and universities.“At a time when the very value of diversity in American institutions is in question, implementing changes which result in firing and demotions of the channel’s highest-profile non-white anchors seems a bizarrely off-brand action for a news channel that is supposedly liberal-oriented,” Eric Deggans, an NPR TV critic and media analyst, wrote on his Switching Codes Substack.It is a delicate time for Comcast, which is seeking approval to spin out MSNBC and other cable shows into a new company, called SpinCo, later this year. The shake-up also comes as other media organizations have been targeted by the Trump administration.The FCC is investigating NPR and PBS to assess whether they should be continued to be allowed access to public funding, while Trump is suing CBS, alleging that they selectively edited an interview with Kamala Harris – something CBS denies – and has threatened legal action against the New York Times, among others.There are signs some news organizations are already acquiescing to Trump. This week Jeff Bezos, who pulled an endorsement of Harris in the run-up to the 2024 election and later attended Trump’s inauguration, announced that the Washington Post editorial pages would in the future only publish pieces “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets”.The Post’s former editor, Marty Baron, described the move as a “betrayal of the very idea of free expression” that had left him “appalled”, and the Post’s opinions editor quit in the wake of the move, which could further hit the Post’s number of subscribers – 250,000 people previously canceled their subscriptions after Bezos blocked the Harris endorsement.At MSNBC, Mark Lazarus, who is set to be CEO of SpinCo, told staff at a meeting: “The only thing I’ll say is the worst thing any leader can do is change something that’s working just because they can. So, if this is working, then there’s no reason to change it.”However, Oliver Darcy reported for Status that Lazarus had suggested he would like the network to be on better terms with Republicans.“The SpinCo boss, who now oversees the progressive network, has privately indicated to people that he would like the outlet incorporate more GOP voices on its air,” Darcy reported.Apart from the need to have media that stand up to the Trump administration, left-leaning organizations were missing an opportunity by not standing their ground, Hendershot said.“Part of the bigger picture of MSNBC is that now is the time for these stations or newspapers or magazines that lean left, to lean into what they do best. Anything that slants left does the best in terms of ratings when the right is the White House. And likewise, when the other party is in the White House, publications who are on the right do best,” she said.“If you lean toward objective coverage of the authoritarian situation we find ourselves in right now, your numbers could go up, whether you’re MSNBC or the New York Times or whatever entity. So it’s hard not to read it as bowing to the authority of the White House. I don’t see any other interpretation. That’s certainly how Trump sees it.” More