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      Why are so many Democratic politicians appearing on Fox News?

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      Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden’s transport secretary, introduced himself to Democrats at their convention earlier last month in unusual fashion. “I’m Pete Buttigieg and you might recognize me from Fox News,” he told the crowd in Chicago.The comment drew laughter, but beneath it was a certain truth: in the final two months of the 2024 election, politicians and campaign aides are less siloed in their ideologically aligned media bubbles in an effort to poach potentially persuadable voters.Buttigieg said he is proud to go on conservative outlets to speak on behalf of the Harris-Walz campaign because their arguments and facts might not otherwise be aired to that audience. So too have the Democratic governors Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer, and senators Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, John Fetterman and Chris Coons also dropped in on the network.Meanwhile, Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski has been on MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber, and JD Vance on CNN. Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris told CNN she would find a place in her cabinet for a Republican if elected.In an election that is likely to turn on a small number of undecided voters in a handful of swing states, and considering that the Harris-Walz campaign has been on a bus tour of heavily Republican, mainly pro-Trump rural Georgia where there aren’t many votes to get, the cross-border forays into enemy TV territory makes sense.“We have so many hyper-close elections in swing states that even if you only get a point or two that you take away from Republicans and put in your column can be the 10,000 votes that give you that swing state,” said the University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato.The same is true for going on a cable news station holding perceived political biases. When Buttigieg goes on Fox News, Sabato says, he is “not just addressing Republicans, but also getting Democrats indebted to him for the unpleasant task he’s performing”.But the media too likes to play the game – albeit for different reasons. The issue of the media, and its perceived political biases, has become a central campaign issue in the US and there is a deep public hostility to journalists. For the more partisan television networks like Fox and MSNBC, there is an advantage to having people from the other side on – as it may somewhat defuse accusations of one-sidedness.It is also a long tradition. Fox News used to have a now-distant show called Hannity & Colmes that was presented by conservative Sean Hannity and liberal Alan Colmes. Typically, Colmes would come off worse – and indeed was often the subject of much mockery.“Both play a game here,” said Sabato. “Fox News chooses people who are quote-unquote Democrats who haven’t been in the game for sometime or who are out of sync with the party, and the same is true with Republicans on CNN. They feel an obligation – if not balanced, then at least a voice to the other side.”The passage of Democrats to Fox may also be entirely pragmatic given the power of the channel. Nielsen Media Research shows Fox News is the highest-rated network in all swing states. According to a recent YouGov poll –54% of Republicans, 22% of Democrats and 28% of independent voters had watched the cable station in the past month.An Axios/Harris 100 Poll also found that Fox News has gained ground this year with more independents and Democrats in terms of trust. Jessica Loker, vice-president of politics at the network, told Bloomberg that the network sees ratings go up when Democrats are on. The Fox News anchor Bret Baier told Axios: “If you build it, they will come.”A Fox News spokesperson confirmed that the outlet has seen, even before the Democratic convention in Chicago, a 41% increase in Democrat guests, excluding strategists, in the year to August.But that comes as politicians are fighting daily battles over media representation, most recently over whether microphones at the ABC-hosted Harris-Trump debate on 10 September would be muted when it is the other person’s turn to speak. Before that, the campaigns were locked in disputes over which network would host and when.“The inner workings of the political process are so much the subject matter, and that includes how the political process interacts with the media,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. “If they’re talking about microphones, or if it’s a fair place, then they’re not talking about the issues that they should be talking about in a debate, which they may or may not actually talk about that debate.”Moreover, Thompson points out, “the whole debate over doing a presidential debate on ABC or Fox demonstrates how much everyone assumes that each one of these operations are part of a set of established political ideologies.”“The things being debated are newly self-generated parts of how journalism has become so intimately part of the story as opposed to being the medium by which we communicate these two people,” said Thompson.And it is apt to go wrong. Last week, MSNBC’s Ari Melber threatened to sue Lewandowski for lying about him over comments he made over the attempted Trump assassination. Trump is suing ABC News and George Stephanopoulos over the anchor’s assertion that a jury concluded Trump had raped magazine writer E Jean Carroll. So, it seems, even if Democrats are venturing on to hostile territory more and more, the terrain still remains thoroughly part of a battlefield. More

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      Harris’s interview: Democrats swoon while Republicans grimace

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      Democrats lauded it as the perfect pitch; Donald Trump dismissed it as “boring”, while fellow Republicans invoked derogatory terms like “gobbledygook”.Between the two extremes, Kamala Harris appeared to have achieved what she wanted from Thursday’s groundbreaking CNN interview, given along with her running mate, Tim Walz – her first since become the Democratic presidential nominee.Under fierce scrutiny after nearly six weeks of interview radio silence, the vice-president earned lavish praise from the Democratic base while denying Republicans a clear line of attack simply by avoiding major missteps of the type that undid Joe Biden’s candidacy in June’s climactic debate.The performance is also unlikely to shake up a race that has reversed itself since Harris entered it and replaced Biden, flipping a narrow but solid Trump lead into a contest in which she is now firmly ahead.A commentator with AZCentral.com – a news site in the key swing state of Arizona – called the performance “too sane to be great TV”, an implicit comparison with Trump’s frequently ostentatious media appearances.Commenting on her championing of Biden’s record in office, the New York Times noted that “it turns out, Ms Harris is a better salesperson for Mr Biden’s accomplishments and defender of his record than he ever was”.But the highest praise came from Harris’s party supporters.“This interview with Dana Bash is a moment to recognize that it is absolutely under-appreciated that Vice President Harris is running a perfect campaign,” Bill Burton, a former deputy press secretary in Barack Obama’s presidency, posted on X.“She took over a campaign that she did not hire. She added pieces to the team who have made it stronger. She ran a convention that was absolutely electric in its energy. And she stepped up to the biggest speech of her life and achieved at the highest level … She is a true inspiration.”Ed Krassenstein, a pro-Democrat X user with 1m followers, wrote: “Kamala Harris is killing it. She’s showing she is a unifying, non-divisive force … Her poll numbers will go up after this interview.”Another vocal Democratic supporter, Alex Cole, praised Harris for sidestepping a question from the interviewer, Dana Bash, on Trump’s recent comments denigrating her mixed racial identity, which the vice-president dismissed as “the same tired old playbook”.“Kamala isn’t playing by Trump’s or the media’s rules. They can’t lay a hand on her,” Cole wrote. “Trump craves the attention.”Harris’s low-key approach even won the grudging praise of the Republican pollster Frank Luntz when she vowed to enact a bipartisan immigration bill that Trump had pressured his GOP congressional allies into torpedoing.“Harris reminding voters that Trump sunk a bipartisan immigration solution makes him look pretty bad. Smart approach,” Luntz wrote.Predictably, the most forceful attacks came from Trump himself, who began went on the offensive even before the interview was broadcast.On Harris’s response to being pressed on her abandonment of previous leftwing policy positions, Trump wrote: “Her answer rambled incoherently, and declared her ‘values haven’t changed.’ On that I agree, her values haven’t changed.”A related post conjured up Trump’s frequent and bizarre depiction of Harris as a communist, reading simply: “Comrade Kamala: ‘My values have not changed.’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnder a Harris presidency, “America will become a WASTELAND,” Trump wrote, reverting to his habit of using block capitals.He even took issue with the interview’s setting, a Black-owned restaurant in the historic Georgian city of Savannah, suggesting it made Harris look unpresidential.“She was sitting behind that desk – this massive desk – and she didn’t look like a leader to me,” Trump said at a campaign event in Wisconsin. “I’ll be honest, I don’t see her negotiating with President Xi of China. I don’t see her with Kim Jong-un like we did with Kim Jong-un.”Jason Miller, a Trump spokesperson and former presidential assistant, asked why the interview lasted only 27 minutes, well short of the hour CNN had slotted for it in its schedule.“How many minutes of fluff filler did CNN have to run to make up for the ridiculously short interview?” he wrote, asking if the network was forced to “cut some of Kamala’s answers, and that’s why they couldn’t fill the hour?”The rightwing Fox News channel highlighted the mocking responses of conservative commentators to Harris’s comments on the climate crisis, when she extolled her work on the Green New Deal and said the administration was “holding ourselves to deadlines around time”.“Gobbledygook,” posted a conservative commentator, Steve Guest, on X. “The definition of a deadline is ‘the latest time or date by which something should be completed’.”But having promised a presidency that would seek “consensus” and vowed to appoint a Republican to her cabinet, Harris may have noted with quiet satisfaction Trump’s ultimate verdict on her interview: “Boring!”The judgment could have been a tacit admission that Harris’s performance had denied him a clear target as he prepares for a keynote debate with her in two weeks.“On issue after issue, Harris signaled moderation and a gauzy centrism that has been the hallmark of every winning Democratic presidential campaign for decades,” Politico said on its Playbook column. “The interview suggested to us how tough Donald Trump’s job is now – and especially at the Sept. 10 debate.” More

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      Harris and Walz to give first sit-down interview as Democratic ticket on CNN

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      Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will sit for their first interview as the Democratic ticket on Thursday, after weeks of demands from Republicans and members of the media for the nominees to open themselves up to questions.The interview, which will be conducted by CNN anchor Dana Bash from the battleground state of Georgia, is set for a primetime spot on CNN at 9pm ET.Despite a whirlwind of media coverage of the Harris campaign and a surge of support in the six weeks since Joe Biden ended his bid for re-election and endorsed her, the vice-president has yet to do a formal interview or hold a press conference.“There are a lot of questions that have been lingering out there for her to answer as we go into this fall campaign,” David Chalian, CNN’s political director, said after announcing the interview on the network Tuesday. “We have been waiting to see this next important hurdle for Kamala Harris and her campaign to jump,” Chalian added, noting that Harris and Walz successfully rallied the party, raised heaps of money, and pulled off the convention. “All of that is very scripted,” he said. “This is the first time she is going to take questions.”Harris laid out some broad policy agendas at the Democratic national convention last week, promising a middle class tax cut at home and a muscular foreign policy of standing up to Russia and North Korea. In recent weeks, Harris also shared some of the first glimpses into what her policy priorities might look like, including a proposal for $25,000 down-payment support programs for first-time home buyers and a call for cracking down on price-gouging companies.But while her campaign is busy spreading enthusiasm for her nomination, some details have been left scant. There still isn’t a dedicated policy page on the official campaign website and Harris has turned down interview requests, opting instead for less-risky campaign appearances and short conversations with pool reporters.“On the whole, Harris’s top communications aides are deeply skeptical, as Biden’s inner circle was, that doing big interviews with major TV networks or national newspapers offer much real upside when it comes to reaching swing voters,” Politico reported earlier this month, citing two unnamed people close to the campaign. An anonymous source claimed there is little incentive to change course: “She’s getting out exactly the message she wants to get out,” they said.Now, as time ticks down for Harris and Walz, the governor of Minnesota, to make their final appeal to anyone who might still be undecided, their campaign has embraced a slight shift in strategy.Harris and her opponent, Donald Trump, are scheduled to debate each other next month, even as a back-and-forth continues between the campaigns over what rules have been agreed.The dispute has centered on the issue of microphone muting, which Biden’s campaign made a condition of his decision to accept any debates this year. Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday that the parameters for the 10 September debate would be “the same as the last CNN Debate”, when both candidates’ microphones were muted except when it was their turn to speak.But Harris’s campaign said on Tuesday that specifics for the debate are still being worked out with the host, ABC News. A Harris spokesperson noted: “Both candidates have publicly made clear their willingness to debate with unmuted mics for the duration of the debate to fully allow for substantive exchanges between the candidates – but it appears Donald Trump is letting his handlers overrule him. Sad!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, the Democratic ticket will make good on its promise to do an interview.“Now is the opportunity to hear her ruminate aloud,” Chalian said, “with Dana asking her about her policy positions, her plans for the future, her plans for the country, in an unscripted setting – and, of course, to see the Democratic ticket interacting with each other.”The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this story More

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      in Elections

      Edgar Bronfman Jr. Drops Pursuit of Paramount

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      Mr. Bronfman had frantically put a bid together over the last week even as Paramount raised questions about his financing.Edgar Bronfman Jr. abandoned his pursuit of Paramount on Monday, dropping his 11th-hour bid roughly a day before the deadline to submit a final offer for the owner of CBS and MTV.Mr. Bronfman’s decision to suspend his bid all but ensures that Paramount will be acquired by Skydance, an up-and-coming Hollywood studio that has spent most of this year courting, cajoling and cudgeling Paramount into a deal. Skydance reached an $8 billion merger agreement in July, but that deal included a “go shop” window that allowed Paramount to seek other buyers.In a statement, Mr. Bronfman said his bidding group had notified a special committee of Paramount’s board of directors Monday that the group would drop its pursuit, adding that it was “a privilege to have the opportunity to participate” in the deal-making process.Mr. Bronfman said in a statement that “Paramount’s best days are ahead.” Mike Blake/Reuters“While there may have been differences, we believe that everyone involved in the sale process is united in the belief that Paramount’s best days are ahead,” Mr. Bronfman said. “We congratulate the Skydance team and thank the special committee and the Redstone family for their engagement during the go-shop process.”Mr. Bronfman said in his statement that Paramount was “an extraordinary company,” calling it “an unrivaled collection of marquee brands, assets and people.”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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      Donald Trump threatens to pull out of 10 September presidential debate

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      Donald Trump has expressed doubt that he will participate in a scheduled televised debate with Kamala Harris next month, hurling a trademark “fake news” slur at the network that had agreed to host it.The former president and Republican nominee threatened to pull out of the 10 September meeting with Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee for November’s election, in a post on his Truth Social network on Sunday night.Referring to an interview on ABC’s This Week earlier in the day with the host Jonathan Karl and the Republican Arkansas US senator Tom Cotton, Trump questioned the network’s fairness for the only debate that both presidential candidates had already agreed on.“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s(K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump wrote with his usual penchant for erroneous upper case letters.He also alluded to his ongoing defamation lawsuit against the This Week host George Stephanopoulos and the ABC network over comments the anchor made in March stating Trump had been found “liable for rape” instead of sexual abuse in a case brought by the New York writer E Jean Carroll.It is not the first time that Trump, who trails Harris by seven points nationally in a new Fairleigh Dickinson University poll published on Saturday, has sowed doubt over his debate appearance.“Right now I say, why should I do a debate? I’m leading in the polls. And, everybody knows her, everybody knows me,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network earlier this month after Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.He stated he had pledged instead to take part in a 4 September debate on Fox News, to which the Harris campaign did not agree, saying he would see Harris there “or not at all”, before changing his mind again.Harris, meanwhile, seized on Trump’s wavering commitment before a lively crowd at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, last month. “If you got something to say, say it to my face,” she said.Trump’s latest hesitation comes amid a reported impasse between the two presidential campaigns over the conditions of next month’s debate. Politico cited four sources on Monday claiming that negotiations had broken down over the turning off of the participants’ microphones when it was not their turn to speak.According to the report, the Harris campaign is demanding that the microphones be left “hot” at all times, in the apparent belief that the vice-president can make Trump lose his cool under questioning and utter something damaging or inappropriate.Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, has been pressing for them to be turned off.“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Brian Fallon, senior adviser for communications for the Harris campaign, told Politico in a statement.“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own. We suspect Trump’s team has not even told their boss about this dispute because it would be too embarrassing to admit they don’t think he can handle himself … without the benefit of a mute button.”On Monday, Trump appeared to undercut his campaign’s position by declaring he would prefer to have the microphones on.“I’d rather have it probably on, but the agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted. I didn’t like it the last time, but it worked out fine,” he told reporters.Trump’s campaign had insisted Harris was reneging on terms agreed for the debate by the Biden campaign when it accepted the 10 September date – and another meeting on CNN in June that never took place.Conditions for those debates included the turning off of microphones between exchanges, as was traditional in debates during previous presidential campaigns.“Enough with the games,” Jason Miller, a Trump senior adviser, told Politico in a statement on Sunday.“We accepted the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate. The Harris camp, after having already agreed to the CNN rules, asked for a seated debate, with notes, and opening statements. We said no changes to the agreed upon rules.”The Harris campaign disputed the accuracy of Miller’s statement, as well as his assertion that it was Harris seeking to withdraw from the debate – and not Trump.“This seems to be a pattern for the Harris campaign. They won’t allow Harris to do interviews, they won’t allow her to do press conferences, and now they want to give her a cheat-sheet for the debate. My guess is that they’re looking for a way to get out of any debate with President Trump,” he said.The dispute comes as the Trump campaign seeks ways to blunt significant momentum built by Harris since she became the Democratic nominee, including a surge in both polling and donations.On Monday, the Guardian reported growing fears among the former president’s senior staff that “palace intrigue” over its leadership could distract from the urgency of regaining a solid footing in the race with little more than 10 weeks until the 5 November polling day. More

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      Tactical ad breaks and lies: rightwing coverage of DNC is exactly as expected

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      As the Democratic party enjoys the afterglow of an exuberant national convention, the rightwing media has settled on consistent counter-programming: complaining about “joy”, hyping up pro-Palestinian protests and expressing a newfound concern for the treatment of Joe Biden.The coverage, which has at times avoided the more pointed Democratic criticisms of Trump by cutting to ad breaks, has also including the criticism of women both for smiling too much and not smiling enough, and the coining of a new name for Barack Obama: “Barack-Stabber”.There has also been the bizarre revival of the racist Obama birther conspiracy theory by a Fox News host, as well as the straight-faced claim by a Republican-supporting news host that it is “all vengeance at this year’s DNC [Democratic national convention]”.In short, it’s been days of coverage that will be unfamiliar to anyone lucky enough to be outside the rightwing media bubble, and depressingly recognizable to those who dip into conservative coverage.“The words that we hear on the ground over and over is [sic]: ‘Trump, Trump, Trump’, and that Harris and Walz are full of joy,” Daniel Baldwin, a reporter on the hard-right OANN news channel, reported on Tuesday.Baldwin, who seemed quite upset, added: “Guess what: vibes and joy don’t put fool … food on the table. They don’t bring prices down, they don’t clean up the streets, they don’t do any of that.”Others in the rightwing media complained that the joy was insincere. Sean Hannity, a staunch Trump supporter and one of Fox News’s most celebrated hosts, told his audience on Tuesday: “The convention has been full of a lot of hate, instead of the politics of joy, which you’ve been promised.”Laura Ingraham, another Fox News stalwart, sang from the same hymn sheet as she claimed that Kamala Harris’s “joyful branding is a cover for something far more sinister”.“I like to call it socialism with a smile. It’s a seething disdain for tens of millions of Americans who still support Donald Trump,” Ingraham said, adding that the DNC is not about “love or optimism: it’s about hatred and retribution”.“There’s not much joy in this convention hall, certainly not compared to what we say at the RNC,” Ingraham added.Ingraham’s analysis was apparently unironic, but the idea that the Republican national convention was happy and joyful will come as a surprise to anyone who was there.The Republican event saw Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, claim that Americans were being “murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released”, while Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, warned that “millions of illegal aliens” should not be allowed to “harm our country”, as attendees waved signs reading: “Mass deportation now.”When it came to joy, at times it seemed like conservative media didn’t quite know what line of attack they were supposed to be using.“Hillary Clinton, she’s the most joyless person I think who has ever walked on this earth,” Matt Schlapp, a Republican political operative, told Newsmax on Monday.But minutes later, Schlapp performed an about turn on how much happiness women should express.“Kamala Harris came out on the stage … all the laughing, it’s like she got into the sherry or something,” Schlapp complained, in comments highlighted by Desi Lydic on The Daily Show.As well as questioning joyfulness and levity, the right wing has focused on protests rather than what was going on in the convention hall. That caused problems for the likes of Fox News and Newsmax at the start of the week, when a smaller than expected group of people congregated peacefully in Chicago. Fox News still tried valiantly to make the protests seem more of a thing, but the channel was outshone by One America News Network.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn OANN, the host Kara McKinney claimed: “DNC protests are spiraling out of control” over footage of pro-Palestinian activists calmly holding a flag and a crowd standing quietly behind a fence.Away from the protests, a common feature was anguish at Democrats’ treatment of Joe Biden – a man who rightwing media has spent years accusing of ill-defined crimes and senility.On Newsmax, one guest complained that Biden was mentioned “maybe twice”, “as they shoved him out in the dark of the night on the first night”, while an OANN host claimed Biden had been “buried at the end of the night”.Fox News’s The Five took a similar angle, portraying senior Democrats as nefarious plotters. A chyron on the show dubbed Obama “Barack-Stabber Obama”, as the host Jeanine Pirro lamented that Biden spoke on the first day of the convention and then “was exiled to California”.Michelle Obama didn’t escape unscathed either. A chyron under one discussion of the former first lady: “Michelle Obama snubs Biden in her DNC speech”, while Nancy Pelosi was also criticized, just for good measure.As the week wore on, it became clear that one tactic for news channels was just to ignore certain things happening at the convention. When a video was aired at the DNC about about the January 6 insurrection, Fox News cut to an advert for a landline telephone.When three women, including one who had been raped as a child, took the stage to discuss their experiences with pregnancies, miscarriages and abortions, Fox News skipped the segment entirely, Media Matters reported. Instead, the network had its male chief political analyst, Brit Hume, pontificate on the issue, and offer more faux Biden outrage, on air.“What does it say about the modern state of the Democratic party that it could not ask these abortion speakers to stand aside to make room for the president of the United States to speak at a reasonable hour tonight?” was Hume’s take.Among the critical analysis of the term “joy”, the wailing over Biden’s speaking spot and the ongoing female smiling debate, at least Fox News offered something more familiar to its viewers: the revival of the more-than-a-decade-old Obama birth certificate conspiracy theory. The idea, which Trump pushed even before he was a presidential candidate, posits that Obama was not born in the US, and therefore should not have been US president.Ignoring the fact that Obama has published his birth certificate, and that he has not been president for eight years, Jesse Watters, a primetime Fox News host, declared on the channel that he was going to send someone called Johnny to investigate.Obama is “definitely going to interfere in this election”, Watters said.“That’s why we’ll be sending Johnny to Hawaii to get the truth about the birth certificate – this time we will dig deep and find out what really happened.” More

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      Stop using the term ‘centrist’. It doesn’t mean what you think it does | Arwa Mahdawi

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      I would like to start a petition for journalists – and everyone else – to immediately stop using the C-word. Centrist. It’s an insidious word that has degraded how we think about politics and distorted how we see the world.Perhaps that statement sounds a little over the top. After all, being a “centrist” sounds eminently reasonable, doesn’t it? A centrist is a moderate, right? Someone who is rational and practical and takes the middle ground. Someone who isn’t extreme like those crazy ideologues on the far right or far left. A centrist, logic dictates, is really what everyone should strive to be.But stop for a moment and ask yourself how you would define a centrist in more specific terms. When you start spelling out what the word really means, it becomes clear that it obfuscates more than it illuminates. The word does not describe a set of ideas so much as it reinforces a system of power.This, of course, is a feature not a bug of political language. As George Orwell wrote in his famous essay Politics and the English Language: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”Orwell wrote that essay in 1946. Today, 78 years later, it feels just as relevant. Look, for example, at the carnage in Gaza and the West Bank. Look at the statements from Israeli leaders that clearly suggest genocidal intent. Look at the tragedies that barely make a dent in the public consciousness any more. This week, for example, an Israeli airstrike killed four-day-old twins, along with their mother and grandmother, when their father went to collect birth certificates in central Gaza. Look at the levels of brutality that barely seem to register any more: there is video evidence of the sexual abuse of Palestinians at a notorious Israeli military prison (though the more accurate term is “torture camp”) and, even with that evidence, we know there will be no real accountability.Look at the dead. Nearly 40,000 people in Gaza are now dead, including nearly 15,000 children. When you look at the scale of devastation, it seems likely that those figures are an underestimate. Further, counting the dead is excruciatingly difficult: kids are being blown into fragments so small that their surviving relatives have to collect pieces of them in plastic bags. Then there are the tens and thousands more who are now dying from starvation, or facing a looming polio epidemic.Look at the West Bank, meanwhile, where Israel has published plans for new settlements, which violate international law. Since 7 October, the Israeli army and settlers have displaced 1,285 Palestinians and destroyed 641 structures in the West Bank, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Ethnic cleansing is taking place before our eyes.Now look at how all of this is being justified. This war isn’t just being waged with bombs, it’s being waged with “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”. When you lay out what is happening in clear language, it is indefensible. So political language dresses all those dead and starving children up in euphemism. It obscures ethnic cleansing with vagaries. Don’t believe your eyes, political writing says. What you are seeing is far more complex than your eyes can possibly comprehend.This narrative is so entrenched that people don’t believe their eyes when it comes to Palestinians. Last October, the actor Jamie Lee Curtis posted a photo on Instagram showing terrified-looking children peering up at the sky. She captioned the post “terror from the skies” with an Israel flag emoji. When it was pointed out that the kids were Palestinian, she deleted the post. Her eyes may have told her that those innocent children were terrified; the narrative, however, was more complicated.Around the same time, Justin Bieber posted a photo of bombed houses with the caption “praying for Israel”. When it was pointed out the picture was of Gaza, he deleted it and apparently stopped praying.In 2022, a picture of a small blonde confronting a soldier was widely shared online, with the claim that it was a Ukrainian girl standing up to a Russian soldier. How brave, people though. How inspiring! When it was revealed that it was actually old footage of a then 10-year-old Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian activist, interest in the image fizzled out.Again: when you lay out what is happening in clear language it is indefensible. When people see what is happening with their own eyes, it is indefensible. I say that as someone who has seen what life is like for Palestinians with my own eyes. As someone who had to run from soldiers shooting teargas when I visited my dad’s village in the West Bank when I had just turned six. Who was interrogated by an IDF soldier when I visited my dad’s village at 15, because I had a school chemistry book in my bag. Who knows what is like to be harassed and humiliated by heavily armed soldiers at checkpoints when you are just trying to go from one village to another. If you experience life under occupation for even a day it becomes starkly apparent that there is no way to defend it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn order to defend the indefensible, politicians and political writers move away from concreteness, from clear language, and hide behind the respectableness of terms like “centrism”. Pro-Palestinian protesters are labelled the far-left or extremists. Continuing to unconditionally send arms to Israel and shield the country’s far-right government from accountability, however, is considered a centrist – and therefore reasonable – position.See, for example, this paragraph from the New York Times, earlier this month, when Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, was still being considered as a possible candidate for Kamala Harris’s running mate.“Mr Shapiro has emerged as the choice of the party’s pro-Israel donors, those with ties to the school-choice movement and business-friendly contributors in Silicon Valley. But his centrist positions that appeal to those groups are the same ones that make him the least favorite of the party’s most liberal funders.”This paragraph is one of the rare instances where there is some explanation as to what centrism actually means. Centrism we are told, is being pro-Israel and pro-business, no matter what. This piece came out while Shapiro was facing criticism from the left for an old essay he wrote in which he called Palestinians too “battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own”. He has never properly apologized for this, nor will he ever have to, because being racist against Palestinians is a centrist position.As Orwell wrote, atrocities can be defended, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties”. If the Democratic party were to be honest about why it is doing very little to stop the carnage in Gaza and the settlements in the West Bank, the bluntest argument would be along the lines of: “Israel is an important tool in maintaining US imperialism and western interests. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is expedient to those interests. Human rights law doesn’t apply to the west.” Of course, being pro-ethnic cleansing doesn’t quite square with the do-gooding branding of the Democratic party. Instead, we are bombarded with the idea that massacring children is somehow a centrist and moderate position.“If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy,” Orwell wrote. There is very little that most of us can do to change what is happening in Gaza, but the one thing we can all do is simplify our English. So let’s begin with “centrism”. If we are to be honest about what we mean, if we are to express it in its simplest terms, we should use the word “status-quoism” instead. The point of words like “centrism” is to prevent thought and prompt acquiescence. It’s up to you whether you want to acquiesce.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘I’m better looking than Kamala’: why Donald Trump is so rattled by his rival’s Time magazine cover

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      Name: Time Magazine’s Kamala Harris cover.Age: Published last week.Appearance: Well, that’s the question.Hang on, what’s the question? Does the magazine’s illustrated portrait of Kamala Harris make her look like “the most beautiful actress ever to live”?Eh? Who’s that? Unclear, but it might be Sophia Loren, or possibly Elizabeth Taylor.I’ve looked at the picture, and no, she doesn’t look like either of them. She looks perfectly nice, but definitely like Kamala Harris. Why? Because that’s what Donald Trump said about the illustration; that it makes Harris look like Loren or Taylor. He has also said the sketch resembles “our great first lady Melania”.Only in the sense that it represents a human woman. What on earth is going on? Trump appears to be in a huff because he thinks the picture is too flattering. It’s got so severely under his skin he’s mentioned it four times so far since it was published.Delicious. Tell me more. He made the Melania claim in his Elon Musk interview last Monday (wrapping up, weirdly, with “She’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that”). Then, at a rally on Wednesday, he said he wanted to use the cover artist himself, because he liked the artist “very much”. On Thursday, at a press conference, he called the decision to use an illustration “crazy”. Finally, on Saturday, he came out with the Sophia Loren thing at another rally.Oof. It actually got worse after the Loren bit: “I say that I’m much better looking than her. Much better. Much better. I’m a better-looking person than Kamala,” he added.The repetition definitely makes it more convincing. The thing is, Trump is famously obsessed with Time covers. He has claimed – wrongly – to be the most frequent cover star (that was Richard Nixon). He also hung fake Time covers featuring pictures of him in his golf clubs. So this is hitting him squarely where it hurts: in the Time-related vanity.The rightwing media has grumbled about overly complimentary coverage of Harris recently. Is it remotely possible Trump has a point about this picture? No. It actually seems to be based very closely on a recent photo. New York Magazine did some detective work and the “photo-illustration by Neil Jamieson” credit indicates it was drawn quite precisely from a 22 July photograph by Andrew Harnik for Getty Images.I’ve just looked again and the text under the illustration reads: “Her moment”. Is Trump’s ranting really insecurity about Harris smashing fundraising records, seducing the TikTok generation and drawing ahead on national polling? No. It’s definitely about her looking prettier than him in his favourite publication.Do say: “She’s a beautiful woman so we’ll leave it at that.”Don’t say: “Time cover is brat.” More