{"id":39568,"date":"2025-02-15T21:40:25","date_gmt":"2025-02-16T05:40:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=39568"},"modified":"2025-02-15T21:40:26","modified_gmt":"2025-02-16T05:40:26","slug":"support-oppositional-press-not-media-owned-by-fascist-collaborators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2025\/02\/15\/support-oppositional-press-not-media-owned-by-fascist-collaborators\/","title":{"rendered":"SUPPORT OPPOSITIONAL PRESS\u2014NOT MEDIA OWNED BY FASCIST COLLABORATORS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

FRI, 2\/7\/2025 – BY\u00a0CARL GIBSON<\/a> (Occupy.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

(This is part three of a multi-part series proposing an oppositional strategy to the Trump regime. Read part one<\/a>, and part two<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the next four years, we\u2019re about to be inundated with a flood of lies \u2014 including from federal agencies themselves. We sadly can\u2019t count on legacy media outlets to give us the unvarnished truth, as many of them are owned by wealthy men eager to collaborate with President Donald Trump\u2019s regime. So in order to separate truth from lies, the anti-Trump opposition should make sure to include a healthy amount of oppositional press in our media diets, and to take reporting from non-oppositional press with a grain of salt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his second and final term in the White House, President Donald Trump is consistently communicating<\/a> the (false) message that his extreme actions and policies are defensible, given his election victory. Of course, while Trump was the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote along with the Electoral College, he did so with the smallest margin of victory<\/a> of any popular vote winner since Richard Nixon in 1968. Trump\u2019s claims of having the popular support to justify ruling with an iron fist should be contextualized by the fact that he told nearly 31,000 lies<\/a> during his first term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the Washington Post documented in 2021, the frequency of Trump\u2019s lies accelerated the longer he was in office. The outlet reported that while he told an average of six lies per day in 2017, he told an average of 16 lies per day in his second year in office. That climbed to 22 false or misleading claims per day by 2019, and 39 lies a day by 2020. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPut another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later,\u201d the Post wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the vast majority of Americans who aren\u2019t trained journalists, and the millions of Americans who haven\u2019t been formally educated in media literacy, it will be a daunting task to learn the truth amid the dizzying flurry of lies coming from the Trump regime. It\u2019s entirely possible that Trump could do as former President Richard Nixon did and replace the people in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics<\/a> (BLS) with Republican loyalists eager to paint a rosier economic picture than the data shows. Trump could also simply defund the BLS (as Canada under the Conservative Party did in 2015<\/a>) and make the job of gathering economic data impossible if he finds it too difficult to fudge the numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in late January, Trump officially issued the executive order<\/a> that implements the \u201cSchedule F\u201d changes to the civil service proposed in the authoritarian far-right Project 2025 playbook. This means he will now have free rein to pack federal agencies full of political stooges who will put loyalty to him over truth and facts. So while .gov web domains were considered among the most reliable, that will no longer be the case until at least January of 2029. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Journalists will have their hands full digging through the piles of lies propagated by Trump and his apparatchiks, and it will be incumbent on ordinary Americans to rely on reporters unencumbered by pressure from collaborationist owners currying favor with the regime to give them the full truth. While it\u2019s important to state that this doesn\u2019t mean completely writing off reporting by legacy media outlets with compromised ownership, it\u2019s still important to diversify our media diets to make sure that the media we consume is primarily produced by people who have nothing to gain by lying, or by laundering lies from the regime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

HOW TRUMP\u2019S COLLABORATORS ARE WEAKENING THE FOURTH ESTATE<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The Los Angeles Times\u2019 billionaire owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong has emerged as one of the most eager collaborators with the Trump regime. Semafor\u2019s Max Tani, who covers the media, wrote that Soon-Shiong enlisted the help of longtime Republican operative Eric Beach<\/a> to help recruit far-right voices for the LA Times\u2019 opinion section. Before his work helping Soon-Shiong, Beach ran the Great America PAC, which backed Trump in both 2016 and 2020. He notably had to pay a $25,000 fine<\/a> to the Federal Election Commission after accepting money from two undercover journalists posing as emissaries of a Chinese donor purportedly trying to spend $2 million influencing elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Occupy.com reported previously<\/a>, Soon-Shiong \u2014 a billionaire medical technology entrepreneur \u2014 has relied on the FDA\u2019s blessing for his products to be approved for public consumption. He also once sought a role as a \u201chealth care czar\u201d<\/a> in Trump\u2019s first administration roughly a year before he bought the LA Times.  Beach\u2019s addition as an informal advisor to Soon-Shiong comes on the heels of the LA Times\u2019 owner hiring pro-Trump CNN pundit Scott Jennings<\/a> as an opinion columnist in November. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s important to acknowledge that the LA Times\u2019 news section has been doing objectively great reporting<\/a> in the wake of the recent wave of wildfires, and the opinion section and the news sections are different departments. Still, the audience of a publication owned by someone whose business interests intersect with the federal government should read any coverage of the Trump regime with a healthy amount of skepticism. Soon-Shiong unilaterally killed the LA Times\u2019 endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris and personally nixed<\/a> the paper\u2019s planned editorial criticizing Trump\u2019s Cabinet appointments, which means that the largest state\u2019s largest newspaper is incapable of holding the regime fully accountable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As much as the LA Times has pulled its punches with Trump, the New York Times has been noticeably downplaying some of the regime\u2019s most extreme actions and doing what City University of New York journalism professor emeritus Jeff Jarvis describes as \u201cbothsidesing\u201d and \u201csmart-washing.\u201d Whereas the former term is used to create false equivalence and moral ambiguity when there is none, he uses the latter term to describe papers like the Times assuming that Trump and his administration are more brilliant than they actually are. Jarvis keeps a close eye on both the Times and the Washington Post, and documents some of their worst offenses using the #BrokenTimes<\/a> and #BrokenPost<\/a> hashtags on Bluesky. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jarvis lamented that the national newspaper of record framed Trump\u2019s openly totalitarian ambitions as a \u201cmuscular vision of presidential power<\/a>,\u201d and skewered<\/a> a puff piece by the paper\u2019s chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, in which Baker wrote about Trump\u2019s second inauguration in the vein of a royal coronation. And he characterized the Times\u2019 watered-down description<\/a> of billionaire Elon Musk\u2019s viral inauguration day gestures \u2014 which fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat described as a \u201cNazi salute\u201d<\/a> that was \u201cvery belligerent\u201d \u2014 as \u201cnaziwashing<\/a>.\u201d To contrast, the Guardian plainly called them \u201cback-to-back fascist salutes.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Times\u2019 most damaging move, however, may be against one of its own now former columnists. In December, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman announced he was leaving the Times after more than two decades as a top opinion columnist, where he wrote two weekly columns and produced a weekly newsletter. Krugman told the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) in January that while he initially didn\u2019t want to leave, he was effectively marginalized by his editors<\/a> and felt he had no choice but to walk away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always been very, very lightly edited on the column,\u201d Krugman told CJR. \u201cAnd that stopped being the case. The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my voice, toning down of the feel, and a lot of pressure for what I considered false equivalence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CJR described Krugman as a \u201clone voice in the wilderness\u201d as a progressive voice in an increasingly right-wing opinion section. The Times\u2019 op-ed page regularly features voices like Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, and conservative pundits like David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Thomas Friedman (who enthusiastically backed<\/a> George W. Bush\u2019s invasion of Iraq), and Bret Stephens. Krugman was also openly critical of what he called the Times\u2019 \u201creal negativity bias\u201d toward former President Joe Biden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou know, if the price of gas goes up to five dollars, that\u2019s all over the pages,\u201d Krugman told CJR. \u201cIf it comes back down to three dollars, not a peep, right?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interestingly, Friedman appeared to bolster Krugman\u2019s argument that the Nobel laureate was being singled out for heavy editing by telling CJR that he personally had \u201cnot experienced any change in the editing of my column\u201d since Friedman started working with Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy. And as I wrote for Occupy.com in October<\/a>, the Times played a significant role in elevating JD Vance by relentlessly promoting his \u201cHillbilly Elegy\u201d memoir when it was first released, and eventually allowing him a regular opinion column.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It isn\u2019t just newspapers cozying up to the Trump regime, but also some of the biggest broadcasters. Journalist Oliver Darcy, who writes the Status newsletter covering the media, reported that the day before Trump\u2019s second inauguration, CNN CEO Mark Thompson held a call with the network\u2019s biggest voices to make it clear that he wanted coverage to be toned down<\/a>. Thompson instructed on-air talent to be \u201cforward-thinking\u201d and to not \u201cpre-judge\u201d the incoming president, in contrast to his predecessor, Jeff Zucker, who \u201cthrew the weight of CNN at Trump.\u201d When none of the hosts on the call pushed back, Darcy reported that Thompson\u2019s message to \u2014 as the Daily Beast\u2019s Sean Craig wrote \u2014 \u201ctreat the president with kid gloves<\/a>\u201d had been heard loud and clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Darcy, who worked at CNN for seven years, told WNYC\u2019s \u201cOn the Media\u201d podcast that there was a \u201cvery stark difference<\/a>\u201d between how his former employer covered Trump in his first term and how the network has been covering him since he won the 2024 election:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the noticeable things, for instance, during inauguration coverage was that none of the CNN anchors pointed out that Donald Trump is the first convicted felon to take that office. They didn\u2019t point out that he was twice impeached. So you had a lot of right-wing extremists and a lot of right-wing conspiracy theorists stuffed in the Rotunda. People like Tucker Carlson, an extremist, Marjorie Taylor Greene, an extremist, Robert F Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist, on and on it went. In the previous iteration of CNN, you would have seen that called out pretty forcefully. That acting rotunda for years after January 6th, you have a lot of people who pushed the big lie, who even in Tucker Carlson\u2019s case, suggested that that insurrection was a false flag, that you have them now gathered at the citadel of American democracy, welcoming Donald Trump back to power. And Jake Tapper was pretty tame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other major broadcast outlets are also showing signs of capitulation. After Trump sued ABC News over George Stephanopoulos for saying the president had been \u201cfound liable for rape\u201d of writer E. Jean Carroll, the network chose to settle by making a $15 million donation<\/a> to his presidential library and $1 million more for legal fees. This is despite US District Judge Lewis F. Kaplan stating that while Trump was technically liable for \u201csexual abuse,\u201d that\u2019s essentially the same thing as rape<\/a> as the public understands the term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, CBS News may be the next major network to settle with Trump<\/a>, who sued the network for $10 billion in response to its editing of Harris\u2019 interview with \u201c60 Minutes\u201d journalist Bill Whitaker. Trump claimed that in airing one version of Harris\u2019 answer about Israel\u2019s bombing of Gaza on \u201c60 Minutes\u201d and another version on \u201cFace the Nation,\u201d the network was engaging in \u201celection interference.\u201d The Wall Street Journal reported that CBS may settle with the president not because his claims have merit, but because its parent company Paramount needs approval from his administration for a planned merger with Skydance. The Journal\u2019s sources said Paramount executives acknowledged they would \u201clikely need to offer concessions to win approval\u201d from Trump\u2019s Federal Communications Commission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

OPPOSITIONAL JOURNALISM NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In the wake of Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos cancelling the paper\u2019s endorsement of Harris in the 2024 election, more than 250,000 paying subscribers<\/a> cancelled their monthly payment. Earlier this month, Bezos announced he would be laying off roughly 100 workers<\/a> (approximately 4% of the Post\u2019s workforce) even though with a personal net worth of more than $248 billion<\/a> he could easily shoulder the burden of the paper\u2019s payroll in perpetuity. It\u2019s not known if those 250,000 former Post subscribers took their money to another publication or if they divested from supporting journalism altogether, but those subscription dollars would be much better served by helping oppositional publications and journalists unafraid to plainly speak the truth about the Trump regime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Occupy.com of course will continue being an oppositional voice and welcomes reader support<\/a> as a registered nonprofit not beholden to any corporate owners. ProPublica, which is also a nonprofit, has lately been doing important accountability-focused journalism covering both Trump and his Cabinet appointees<\/a>. The nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation is similarly covering the regime as well as the Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress from a healthcare policy perspective<\/a>, and with an oppositional voice. But there are many journalists who are doing important oppositional reporting while maintaining a new level of control of their style, substance, and editorial perspective via the newsletter approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n