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    Struggling in politics? Consider a war – the media will help | Margaret Sullivan

    “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war,” was the storied response of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to Frederic Remington after the illustrator was sent to Cuba to cover an insurrection and cabled back to the boss that there was little going on.Much has changed since that famous (if true) exchange of the late 19th century, in the heyday of sensationalism known as yellow journalism.But one thing that hasn’t changed is that there’s nothing like military conflict to capture the attention of the public, with plenty of help from the media. And the media – whether a tabloid newspaper or a cable news network – benefits, too.These days, Donald Trump’s recent strike on Iran has proved the point once again, with the media’s attention intensely focused on Operation Midnight Hammer, as it was dramatically dubbed.First the emphasis was on the threat of attacks to Iran’s budding nuclear arsenal, then on the possibility of all-out global war, then on the strikes themselves and then the announcement of a supposed ceasefire.All to the greater glory of Trump, at least as he tells it.For those who are trying to bring public attention to other important matters – even matters of life and death – that’s a frustrating reality.Jennifer Mascia knows this all too well.She is a founding reporter for the Trace, a non-profit news site dedicated to tracking the epidemic of gun violence in America and trying to do something about it, through exploring solutions.When elected officials in Minnesota were shot earlier this month – the former state House speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, and the state legislator John Hoffman and his wife were wounded – it was a huge story.Huge, but fleeting.“Pitted against a global conflict, domestic news doesn’t really stand a chance,” said Mascia, who previously contributed to the now-defunct Gun Report at the New York Times, begun by the then columnist Joe Nocera.That’s true for domestic news that, in an earlier era, would have commanded the media’s attention for many days, if not weeks. The Minnesota violence was even more newsworthy because of an early manhunt and disinformation swirling around the apparent assassin’s political leanings.Still, coverage seemed to disappear in the blink of an eye.“The Trump era has all but ensured that important news will get smacked out of the news cycle in favor of the latest development in Trumpworld,” Mascia wrote to me in an email, after we had talked by phone.Mascia is quick to clarify that she’s not suggesting that the media ignore what the chaotic president is doing.“It’s important that we cover Trump’s constitutional breaches. We shouldn’t become numb or complacent in the face of eroding democracy,” she said.But it was remarkable to see how quickly the Minnesota shootings faded from media attention. A CNN contributor herself, Mascia is often called in to provide perspective for “Day Two” of coverage after the initial reporting of gun-related news. But often these days, she notes, there is no Day Two.By then, the media has moved on.“Maybe if the Israel-Iran war wasn’t going on, we’d still be talking about it,” she said. “Anderson Cooper would be broadcasting from Melissa Hortman’s funeral. But instead, he’s in Tel Aviv.”And, of course, this extends to all sorts of other subjects, not just gun violence.Those who try to focus attention on voting rights, the rule of law, crucial supreme court decisions, widespread citizen action such as the vast “No Kings” protests – to mention just a few – may get a modicum of attention.But nothing compares to a show of military force. And Trump, always attuned to how he’s being perceived, is well aware of that.“A spectacular military success,” he crowed after the strikes. “A historic success,” echoed his defense secretary. Pete Hegseth couldn’t countenance being asked actual questions and claimed the press was trying to distort the story “for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country”.Was the administration’s bragging accurate? Perhaps not, said intelligence reports that indicated the strikes may have only added months to the time Iran needs to produce the material for a nuclear weapon.But no matter.The strikes – from the lead-up to the aftermath – sucked up all the oxygen in the media universe for many days.Even by Thursday early afternoon, the top four news articles (plus one photo) on the Washington Post mobile app, for example, were Iran-related.And Fox News, of course, remained largely a cheering section.Whatever the effect on world peace, military conflict sure is good for ratings, as William Randolph Hearst knew in his bones.“Historians point to the Spanish-American war as the first press-driven war,” noted a PBS article accompanying the film Crucible of Empire.It wouldn’t be the last.

    Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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    Bill Moyers, Lyndon Johnson press chief and celebrated broadcaster, dies at 91

    Bill Moyers, the former White House press secretary who became one of television’s most honored journalists, masterfully using a visual medium to illuminate a world of ideas, died on Thursday at age 91.Moyers died in a New York City hospital, according to longtime friend Tom Johnson, the former chief executive of CNN and an assistant to Moyers during Lyndon B Johnson’s administration.Moyers’ son William said his father died at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York after a “long illness”.Moyers’ career ranged from youthful Baptist minister to deputy director of the Peace Corps, from Johnson’s press secretary to newspaper publisher, senior news analyst for CBS Evening News and chief correspondent for CBS Reports.But it was for public television that Moyers produced some of TV’s most cerebral and provocative series. In hundreds of hours of PBS programs, he proved at home with subjects ranging from government corruption to modern dance, from drug addiction to media consolidation, from religion to environmental abuse.In 1988, Moyers produced The Secret Government about the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, and simultaneously published a book under the same name. Around that time, he galvanized viewers with Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, a series of six one-hour interviews with the prominent religious scholar. The accompanying book became a bestseller.His televised chats with poet Robert Bly almost single-handedly launched the 1990s Men’s Movement, and his 1993 series Healing and the Mind had a profound impact on the medical community and on medical education.In a medium that supposedly abhors “talking heads” – shots of subject and interviewer talking – Moyers came to specialize in just that. He once explained why: “The question is, are the talking heads thinking minds and thinking people? Are they interesting to watch? I think the most fascinating production value is the human face.”Demonstrating what someone called “a soft, probing style” in the native Texas accent he never lost, Moyers was a humanist who investigated the world with a calm, reasoned perspective, whatever the subject.From some quarters, he was blasted as a liberal thanks to his links with Johnson and public television, as well as his no-holds-barred approach to investigative journalism. It was a label he didn’t necessarily deny.“I’m an old-fashion liberal when it comes to being open and being interested in other people’s ideas,” he said during a 2004 radio interview. But Moyers preferred to term himself a “citizen journalist” operating independently, outside the establishment.Public television (and his self-financed production company) gave him free rein to throw “the conversation of democracy open to all comers”, he said in a 2007 interview with the Associated Press.“I think my peers in commercial television are talented and devoted journalists,” he said another time, “but they’ve chosen to work in a corporate mainstream that trims their talent to fit the corporate nature of American life. And you do not get rewarded for telling the hard truths about America in a profit-seeking environment.”Over the years, Moyers was showered with honors, including more than 30 Emmys, 11 George Foster Peabody awards, three George Polks and, twice, the Alfred I duPont-Columbia University Gold Baton award for career excellence in broadcast journalism. In 1995, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.Born in Hugo, Oklahoma, on 5 June 1934, Billy Don Moyers was the son of a dirt farmer-truck driver who soon moved his family to Marshall, Texas. High school led him into journalism.“I wanted to play football, but I was too small. But I found that by writing sports in the school newspaper, the players were always waiting around at the newsstand to see what I wrote,” he recalled.He worked for the Marshall News Messenger at age 16. Deciding that Bill Moyers was a more appropriate byline for a sportswriter, he dropped the Y from his name.He graduated from the University of Texas and earned a master’s in divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was ordained and preached part time at two churches but later decided his call to the ministry “was a wrong number”.His relationship with Johnson began when he was in college; he wrote to the then senator offering to work in his 1954 re-election campaign. Johnson was impressed and hired him for a summer job. He was back in Johnson’s employ as a personal assistant in the early 1960s and for two years, he worked at the Peace Corps, eventually becoming deputy director.On the day John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Moyers was in Austin helping with the presidential trip. He flew back to Washington on Air Force One with newly sworn-in President Johnson, for whom he held various jobs over the ensuing years, including press secretary.Moyers’ stint as presidential press secretary was marked by efforts to mend the deteriorating relationship between Johnson and the media. But the Vietnam war took its toll and Moyers resigned in December 1966.Of his departure from the White House, he wrote later: “We had become a war government, not a reform government, and there was no creative role left for me under those circumstances.” More

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    Trump administration almost totally dismantles Voice of America with latest terminations

    The Trump administration has terminated 639 employees at Voice of America and its parent organization in the latest round of sweeping cuts that have reduced the international broadcasting service to a fraction of its former size.The mass terminations announced Friday rounds out the Trump-led elimination of 1,400 positions since March and represents the near-complete dismantling of an organization founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, whose first broadcast declared: “We bring you voices from America.”Just 250 employees now remain across the entire parent group the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), who operated what was America’s primary tool for projecting democratic values globally.“For decades, American taxpayers have been forced to bankroll an agency that’s been riddled with dysfunction, bias and waste. That ends now,” said Kari Lake, Trump’s senior advisor to USAGM, in Friday’s termination announcement.VOA once reached 360 million people weekly across dozens of languages, former USAGM CEO and director John Lansing told Congress in 2019. In March, the White House put out a statement calling the outlet “propaganda”, “leftist” and dubbed it “The Voice of Radical America”. One of the examples cited to justify that explanation was VOA’s refusal to use the term “terrorist” to describe members of Hamas unless in statements, which falls in line with common and basic journalistic practice.The cuts represent a major retreat from America’s Cold War strategy of using broadcasting to reach audiences behind the iron curtain. VOA had evolved from its wartime origins to become a lifeline for populations living under authoritarian rule, providing independent news and an American perspective in regions where press freedom is under assault.The layoffs also came just days after VOA recalled Farsi-speaking journalists from administrative leave to cover the war between Israel and Iran, after Israel shot missiles at Tehran less than a week ago in the dead of night.“It spells the death of 83 years of independent journalism that upholds US ideals of democracy and freedom around the world,” said three VOA journalists, Patsy Widakuswara, Jessica Jerreat and Kate Neeper, who are leading legal challenges against the demolition, in a statement.The agency’s folding began in March when Trump signed an executive order targeting federal agencies he branded as bloated bureaucracy, and VOA staff were placed on paid leave and broadcasts were suspended.Lake, Trump’s handpicked choice to run VOA, had previously floated plans to replace the service’s professional journalism with content from One America News Network (OANN), a rightwing pro-Trump network that would provide programming without charge.The sole survivor of the cull is the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which transmits into Cuba from Florida. All 33 employees there remain, according to the announcement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUSAGM offered voluntary departure packages through what it termed a “Fork in the Road” program, providing full pay through September plus benefits. Some 163 employees accepted the buyouts rather than face involuntary termination, the agency said in a press release.Federal courts have allowed the administration to proceed with the terminations while legal challenges continue for now.The VOA cuts form part of Trump’s broader assault on the federal workforce, with tens of thousands terminated across agencies including the IRS, Social Security Administration, USAID, and departments of education, health and agriculture. More

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    Welcome to a new ‘gloomcycle’ of news. Here’s how to stop compulsive scrolling | Margaret Sullivan

    The threat of a world war. Political assassinations. Federal raids on unsuspecting migrants.There seems to be no end to terrifying news these days. In fact, it comes at us so unceasingly that numbness can set in. Or even depression or melancholy, like a black cloud over every part of our lives.The “gloomcycle” is what Rachel Janfaza, who founded the gen Z-oriented site known as the Up and Up, has dubbed what’s going on. In a recent piece, she quoted one 23-year-old from Alabama: “I am really overwhelmed by all of the bad news I am seeing right now.”Whatever generation we’re from, that’s a familiar sensation.The question is, how to deal with it? After all, particularly because of Donald Trump’s chaotic ways, it shows no signs of slowing down. And while it’s important not to tune out altogether, it’s also important to stay grounded.Where’s the balance?I’m certainly not a life coach but as someone whose work requires me to stay connected and informed, I’ve developed some coping resources.Here are three recommendations to manage the firehose of bad news and to protect your spiritual and emotional health while still staying engaged in the world.Set thoughtful limits. Can you put your phone in another room or in a drawer for a period of each day? Can you pledge never to sleep with it nearby? I have a friend who has made a pact with her spouse to have an hour after waking and an hour before going to bed in which they don’t talk about current events, and certainly never utter the name of the 47th president.Can you decide not to be on social media during significant hours of the day? And maybe even to ignore your email unless it’s during loosely defined business hours? (This is an especially tough one for me; I always want to respond immediately, which only elicits another response.)Engage in self-care. Maybe you go to the gym or for a run. Maybe it’s a bubble bath. Maybe it’s listening, without any other distractions, to Mozart – or Jon Batiste. For me, it’s daily yoga (the challenging ashtanga practice) followed by meditation. And it’s reading fiction or memoirs unrelated to politics – most recently, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Fredrik Backman’s My Friends, Molly Jong-Fast’s How to Lose Your Mother, and, in galley form, Susan Orlean’s not-yet-published memoir, Joyride.A friend told me recently that she’s rereading all six novels of Jane Austen as an antidote to these fractious times. I like to read books in print, not on a device, since screens are already too dominant in my life. Can you slow down enough to give your full attention to literature for an hour? It will help, and it will also help to build back your undoubtedly frayed attention span.Rely on trusted voices and sources of news. I think the Guardian is one of these, and I would think so even if I didn’t write here almost every week. I know a lot of people who count on the perspective of Heather Cox Richardson, the history professor who writes a daily newsletter, Letters from an American. Robert Reich, a former labor secretary, is one of my go-to sources of perspective, as are a few columnists, including Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Lydia Polgreen at the New York Times.While traveling in Asia recently, I read the Japan Times and the international edition of the New York Times each morning; they were bundled together and delivered to my hotel room. There was something about that well-organized news – delivered in old-fashioned print form – that was incredibly calming. A prominently displayed column about Israel by Thomas Friedman gave me more context than a freaked-out social media thread, no matter how smart. While it’s unlikely that we’re going to return to reading a print newspaper as a major news source, the daily pacing and the sensible curation of what’s important has a lot to recommend it.In Chris Hayes’s recent book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, the political commentator identifies what’s going on for all of us – and the dangers. Hayes confessed in a Vox interview that despite his knowledge about the “attention economy” and its personal costs, he still struggles.“I’ve written a recovery memoir,” Hayes joked that he told his wife, “and I’m still drinking.”The bad news will keep coming. As citizens, we need to know what’s happening so we can act – in the voting booth, at a protest rally, in conversations with our neighbors or loved ones.But that doesn’t mean constant immersion. A little of the gloomcycle goes a long way.

    Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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    Fired ABC News journalist stands by his post criticizing Trump and adviser

    A journalist who lost his job at ABC News after describing top White House aide Stephen Miller as someone “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” has said he published that remark on social media because he felt it was “true”.“It was something that was in my heart and mind,” the network’s former senior national correspondent Terry Moran said Monday on The Bulwark political podcast. “And I would say I used very strong language deliberately.”Moran’s comments to Bulwark host Tim Miller about standing by his remarks came a little more than a week after he wrote on X that Stephen Miller – the architect of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies – “eats his hate”.“His hatreds are his spiritual nourishment,” Moran’s post read, in part. He added that the president “is a world-class hater. But his hatred [is] only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification”.Moran subsequently deleted the post, which had been published shortly after midnight on 8 June. ABC News initially suspended Moran pending an investigation, citing a policy against “subjective attacks on others”. But then the network announced it would not be renewing his employment contract, effectively dismissing him.Among the polarizing reactions which stemmed from Moran’s deleted post was one from Stephen Miller, a white nationalist, which read: “The most important fact about Terry’s full meltdown is what it shows about the corporate press in America. For decades, the privileged anchors and reporters narrating and gatekeeping our society have been radicals adopting a journalist’s pose. Terry pulled off his mask.”But Moran on Monday maintained that he is “a proud centrist” who opposes “the viciousness and the intolerance that you feel when we argue politics”.Tim Miller asked Moran whether he was drunk at the time of the post. Moran replied that it had actually been “a normal family night” that culminated with him putting his children to bed before he wrote out his thoughts about Stephen Miller.“I typed it out and I looked at it and I thought ‘that’s true’,” said Moran, who had been at ABC since 1997. “And I hit send.“I thought that’s a description of the public man that I’m describing.”Some of Trump’s most high-profile allies took verbal aim at Moran before his departure from ABC News was announced. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared on Fox News and said Moran’s post was “unacceptable and unhinged”, and JD Vance said it was a “vile smear”.Nearly six months earlier, ABC News had agreed to pay $15m to a Trump presidential foundation or museum to settle a defamation case that he brought after the network’s anchor George Stephanopoulos incorrectly asserted that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a lawsuit filed by columnist E Jean Carroll. Trump had actually been found liable for sexually abusing Carroll.Moran by Monday had joined the Substack publishing platform as an independent journalist. He told Tim Miller that he was hoping to interview members of the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio.Members of that community were politically villainized after Trump boosted debunked stories about Haitian immigrants eating pets ahead of his victory in November’s presidential election.Moran alluded to how the vast majority of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield were there legally through a temporary protected status that had been allocated to them due to violent unrest in their home country.They generally arrived in Springfield to work in local produce packaging and machining factories whose owners were experiencing a labor shortage after the Covid-19 pandemic. And many are facing the prospect of being forced to leave the US by 3 August after the Trump administration decided to end legal visa programs for Haitians such as humanitarian parole and temporary protected status.“The town had come to depend on them,” Moran said. “That town was falling flat and now had risen.” More

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    The mainstream media has enabled Trump’s war on universities | Jason Stanley

    US universities are facing the Trump regime’s fury. The justification given by the regime is that universities are run by leftist ideologues, who have indoctrinated students to adopt supposedly leftist ideological orientations, as well as hostility to Israel, anti-whiteness and trans inclusivity. Donald Trump and his allies believe the election gave them the mandate to crush America’s system of higher education. But what may be less clear is that it is the mainstream media’s obsession with leftists on campus that has led to the current moment.The US mainstream media has waged a decade-long propaganda campaign against American universities, culminating in the systematic misrepresentation of last year’s campus anti-war protests. This campaign has been the normalizing force behind the Trump administration’s attack on universities, as well as a primary cause of his multiple electoral successes. Unless the media recognizes the central role it has played, we cannot expect the attack to relent.It is easy to pinpoint the time that US confidence in higher education started to drastically plummet – the year was 2015. For those of us who have followed this attack throughout the last decade, there is no surprise about this date. It was the year that a spate of political attacks against universities started to emerge, resurrecting the 1980s and 90s conservative panic about “political correctness on campus”, except this time in mainstream media outlets.In 2016, the media scholar Moira Weigel, in an article in the Guardian entitled “Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy”, laid out in detail how this attack, suddenly legitimized by mainstream media outlets, led to Trump’s 2016 victory. Weigel singles out an enormously influential piece in the Atlantic by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, “The coddling of the American mind”. In it, Haidt and Lukianoff decried the supposed trend of shielding students from “words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort”. Haidt and Lukianoff’s goal was to suggest that younger generations were “coddled” and protected from emotional harm by college campuses, beginning a trend of infantilizing college students.From 2015 on, much of the mainstream media went on a crusade to vilify universities for political correctness. The Trump regime’s vicious targeting of US universities was justified and normalized by a decade of panicked op-eds about leftists on campus in the New York Times, which included laying the basis for the administration’s cynical attack on DEI (to understand the staggering number of concern-trolling op-eds about leftists on campus the New York Times has published over the last decade, consider this article in Slate, by Ben Mathis-Lilly, about this exact topic; it was published in 2018.)There have always been excesses of what was called “political correctness” and now is called “wokeness”. During times of moral panic, excesses are held up as paradigms. One might single out attempts to de-platform speakers as one such excess. To judge by the mainstream media, there have been a wave of such attempts. The organization that counts them, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), has recorded 1,740 attempts to de-platform speakers at colleges and universities over the last two decades or so. That sounds like a lot. However, the methodology for counting a “de-platforming attempt” includes petitions calling for the speaker’s invitation to be canceled or withdrawn – so if a dozen people sign a petition to revoke a speaker’s invitation, it counts as an “de-platforming attempt”, even when (as is often the case) nothing comes of it. Even in the case of successful de-platforming attempts, a speaker whose talk is postponed or who is reinvited counts as a case, as is when a venue has to be switched from one on-campus auditorium to another (say, for safety concerns). This methodology blatantly inflates the prevalence of problematic cancellations of speakers (given that de-platforming attempts count towards evaluating a university’s position on Fire’s influential “Campus Free Speech Rankings”, this methodology also distorts public conversation about the topic). Fire unquestionably does good things. But its very existence depends on fanning the flames of moral panic about universities.More generally, in many cases of university actions that can legitimately be regarded as problematic, the fault was not “political correctness” or “wokeness”, but a corporate and legalistic environment at universities that requires the investigation of every complaint, no matter how overblown. We college professors are fairly uniformly opposed to this culture. But it is hardly the fault of leftists.Finally, no one should mistake an epidemic of faculty members performatively quitting their jobs with an epidemic of firings. When a university fires an academic for their speech, that is a crisis. When a faculty member chooses to resign rather than face student opprobrium, that is just life.It may surprise the reader to learn that during the last decade, the main “chill” at universities has not been “leftists on campus”. It has instead been a relentless attack on college professors and students by rightwing outlets. In 2016, Turning Point USA introduced its “Professor Watchlist”, targeting supposedly radical professors on campus. Campus Reform is an outlet devoted to reporting on liberal professors for their speech – for example, by student reports, social media usage or academic publications. For around a decade, Rod Dreher used his position as a senior editor at the American Conservative to target leftist academics, often to devastating effect. And Canary Mission has steadily and for many years targeted professors for their advocacy for the Palestinian cause. These are hardly the only, or even the most powerful, outlets involved in this long assault (I have not even mentioned Fox News). University professors are terrified of being targeted by these organizations.Major mainstream media outlets have consistently failed to report on the rightwing media assault on college professors over the last two decades. This exacerbated the effects of these attacks. In 2016, when Dreher targeted me in several posts for an offhand comment I made on a private Facebook post, I was inundated by hate mail and phone calls to my office. This was my first experience with such an attack; it deeply destabilized me. In the meantime, my colleagues assured me that Dreher was simply a worried liberal with the sorts of concerns about free speech on campus they had been reading about in the liberal media they consumed (Dreher has since moved to Budapest, Hungary, where he is a fellow at the Danube Institute, a thinktank funded by Viktor Orbán autocratic government).Finally, last year, the media committed its worst error yet, for months erasing the participation of sizable numbers of Jewish students in the protests on college campuses in support of divesting from US military support for Israel, including as movement leaders. In truth, there is a generational conflict about Israel among American Jews. As many American Jews under 40 believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as believe this claim to be antisemitic (about one-third). The media’s complete erasure of the large group of American Jews, especially younger American Jews, critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, has allowed the Trump regime to conduct its dismantling of the US higher education system under the pretext of fighting antisemitism.None of this is to deny the obvious fact that college professors skew heavily Democratic. In some disciplines, there are clear reasons for this. Sociology has few Republican voters, because rightwing ideology since the 1980s has generally rejected its metaphysical presuppositions – such as the existence and importance of societies. Women and gender studies, Middle Eastern studies, and African American studies are disciplines whose very existence is directly and regularly attacked by Republican politicians. But the fact is that the partisan tilt of universities has basically nothing to do with these departments.A study of my university by a conservative campus group found that out of 23 professors in the chemistry department whose political affiliation could be identified, 19 were Democrats and one was a Republican. Astronomy, Earth and planetary sciences, economics, molecular biophysics and biochemistry were all departments with zero professors with Republican affiliations. According to this study, biology and biomedical sciences at Yale had 229 professors with Democratic party affiliations, and eight with Republican party affiliations. None of these are areas in which it makes sense to speak of political bias. As the “asymmetric polarization” of the Republican party has accelerated over the last decade, is it any wonder that there are fewer and fewer professors who vote for Trump’s Republican party? Why would academics vote for a party that is now bent on dismantling the US system of higher education?Unfortunately, instead of debunking the media-driven moral panic about leftists on campus, universities have largely accepted the premises of the drivers of this panic – that there is a problem on campus exemplified by the fact that few professors support Trump (“intellectual diversity”), and that protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza (with large representations of Jewish students) were antisemitic. Even universities that are challenging the Trump regime’s assault seem to accept its nonsensical premises that college students have been overly protected from controversial speech, and, simultaneously, that Jewish students must be shielded to the maximum extent of the law from criticism of Israel’s actions.In the meantime, the media has elevated some of the very academics most responsible for the moral panic, such as Steven Pinker, who has described universities as having a “suffocating leftwing monoculture”, into spokespersons for universities, and continues to trumpet the propaganda that led to this moment. For example, the New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall, who has long promoted the moral panic about “wokeness” that fuels the Maga movement, still simply pre-supposes that “ideological conformity and past failures to restrain antisemitism” are “vulnerabilities” of the current US higher education system.According to the agents of the moral panic, the blame for Trump’s all-out assault on the American system of higher education falls squarely on supposed “leftists on campus” whose actions supposedly undermined trust in these institutions. But the fault, instead, lies squarely with those responsible for driving this moral panic. The mainstream media has delivered the Republicans a win in a multidecade long propaganda war against academia, one that began with William F Buckley in the 1950s. Within the university, powerful actors are superficially standing against the Trump regime’s attack, while implementing its agenda themselves (giving the lie to the absurd pre-supposition that universities are run by gender studies departments).The “war on woke” is the calling card of the global fascist right. Orbán’s attack on Central European University for “gender ideology” began his destruction of Hungarian democracy. Putin justified his full-scale invasion of Ukraine by appealing to the supposed dangers Ukraine’s liberal democracy poses for traditional gender roles. Americans should hold mainstream media’s Trump enablers responsible for Trump and his actions, and not let them pretend otherwise. As we witness the entire research apparatus of the US being taken down in the name of attacking DEI, trans rights and antisemitism, the mainstream media must halt its absurd fantasy that leftists control universities, and focus instead on the problem it has spent the last decade enabling – namely, fascism.

    Jason Stanley is Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

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    As military is deployed to LA, rightwing media decry protesters as ‘invaders’

    There were unsavory scenes in Los Angeles over the weekend, as police used teargas and “less-lethal munitions” on thousands of people gathered to protest against the arrest of undocumented immigrants.The events playing out on rightwing TV channels and in the conservative podcasting realm were almost as miserable, as excitable media figures decried protesters as “invaders”, called for both the mass arrest of elected officials and the invocation of a two-century old laws and used the chaos to push racist conspiracy theories.It came as the Trump administration said the military will remain on the ground in LA for two months, after Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. About 700 US marines deployed to the US’s second largest city on Tuesday, after LA’s police chief effectively said their presence would complicate law enforcement’s efforts.The clamor for arrests mainly focused on Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, as rightwing media followed the lead of the US president, who first made the suggestion over the weekend. Trump didn’t seem to know under what law Newsom should be arrested, and the conservative commentariat wasn’t sure either. Still, it didn’t stop them crying for the California governor to be placed in handcuffs.Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, claimed Newsom “should be arrested for obstructing US immigration law”, even as Tom Homan, the border czar, said Newsom hadn’t done anything to warrant detention. Wayne Root, a host on the rightwing channel Real America TV, suggested Newsom should be charged with “treason” and be detained at Guantánamo Bay while he awaits trial. “Be sure he showers with MS-13,” Root added, a take that, even for the rightwing media cesspool, was particularly macabre.But the right wasn’t just calling for the caging of Newsom. Some wanted Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, to be arrested too, including Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist adviser-turned-podcast host.“Right there, LAPD,” Bannon announced on Monday, apparently under the impression that the entire LA police force was listening to his War Room show.“The mayor is involved in this and having the stand down [sic]. She ought to be arrested today. Immediately.”Bannon went on to call for “hard actions,” whatever they are, adding: “Not even question we’re on the side of the righteous.”The bad takes were everywhere. Chris Plante, a host at rightwing TV channel Newsmax, said on air: “The Democrats are just – I mean, at what point are they declared to be a terrorist organization – with all of the affiliations and all the violence and the shootings and the fire-bombings and the targeting Jews and on and on?”Laura Ingraham, who often seems to be trying just a bit too hard to be offensive, went further. On her Fox News show she accused Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas, the former secretary of homeland security, of having “opened the border” and given “benefits to 10 million illegal aliens”.“The goal was to resettle America with new people in order to transform it completely in ways that you really can’t do at the ballot box, at least when you’re that radical,” Ingraham said.She was referring, not very subtly, to the concept of “great replacement”, a racist conspiracy theory that falsely claims there is an ongoing effort by liberals to replace white populations in current white-majority countries. It’s a concept that started on fringe websites before making its way to Fox News.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOthers were upset by more prosaic matters, including the sight of people at the protests flying flags other than the stars and stripes. It really set off Charlie Kirk, with the influential rightwing declaring that the US has “a parasitic relationship with Mexico, and we have for quite some time”.He added: “If you loved the promise of America, you wouldn’t wave a Mexican flag when American police tried to remove criminals. This should be a wake-up call. If you did not realize it before, guess what? Pat Buchanan and President Trump were right. We are a conquered country that has been invaded by a force in certain areas.”Kirk is uniquely placed to comment on such matters. His Turning Point USA organization sent 80 busloads of people to Washington on the day that hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, and Kirk has celebrated Trump’s mass pardon of people who attacked police officers that day.When it came to the treatment of people protesting in LA, however, Kirk was of a different mind, as he called for US troops to be used in policing US civilians.“Los Angeles does not feel like a protest, what’s happening there. It’s an entire city that’s declaring open rebellion to American sovereignty and authority,” he said. “We must be unafraid to declare the Insurrection Act of 1807.” More

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    ABC News suspends journalist after calling Trump and adviser ‘world-class’ haters

    ABC News has suspended its senior national correspondent after he described top White House aide Stephen Miller as “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” on social media.In a now deleted post, Terry Moran, who recently conducted an interview with Donald Trump, said that the president and his deputy chief of staff, Miller, were both “world-class” haters.An ABC News spokesperson said that Moran “has been suspended pending further evaluation”, adding: “ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others. The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards.”According to a screenshot of the post, Moran said that Miller was not the brains behind Trumpism and his ability to translate the movement’s “impulses” into policy was “not brains. It’s bile.”“You can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment,” Moran added. “He eats his hate.”He added of Trump: “Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification.”Miller shot back, saying: “The most important fact about Terry’s full public meltdown is what it shows about the corporate press in America. For decades, the privileged anchors and reporters narrating and gatekeeping our society have been radicals adopting a journalist’s pose. Terry pulled off his mask.”The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, described Moran’s rhetoric as “unacceptable and unhinged” on Fox News. “I think this speaks to the distrust that the American public have in the legacy media,” she added. JD Vance, the vice-president, described Moran’s post as a “vile smear”.ABC News’ suspension of Moran comes nearly six months after the organisation agreed to pay $15m to a Trump presidential foundation or museum after he filed a defamation case following anchor George Stephanopoulos repeating an assertion on ABC’s This Week that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a lawsuit filed by the columnist E Jean Carroll. He had not.The latest incident will probably deepen suspicion on the right that US mainstream media outlets are fundamentally biased against the administration.In its statement, ABC News maintained a position of neutrality, saying: “ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others.” More