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Forget Citizens United, If We Don't Have Independent Media We're Done For
If progressives are going to have any hope of competing with the billionaires’ candidates, we need to ensure that the Trumpers don’t control the portion of the media not currently in their possession.
May 24, 2026
I was briefly sent into a rage last week, throwing ketchup against the wall, when I saw that one of the Murdoch sons was buying up Vox Media. After seeing Elon Musk take over Twitter, Junior Trumper David Ellison take over Paramount and CBS, and now ready to buy Warner Brothers and CNN, and senior Trumper Larry Ellison taking over TikTok, the thought of yet another serious new outlet falling into Trumper hands was pretty appalling.
Fortunately, the buyer turned out to be James Murdoch, the relatively sane Murdoch son. While that is comparatively good news, no one should feel too relieved over this outcome.
It’s good that Vox isn’t being taken over by a right-wing billionaire, but that’s just luck. It could be. There are any number of right-wing billionaires who have the means to buy up just about any media outlet in sight. And once they do, they could turn their new acquisition into another variant of Fox News.
Part of my reason for the ketchup throwing was that I just saw yet another diatribe against Citizens United, with someone attributing the failures of our political situation to this decision. To be clear, I think the decision was bad in both logic and its outcome.
The government creates corporations; how can it not have the authority to limit their political behavior? Individuals and the organizations they create can do whatever they want politically, but leave corporations out of politics. And we certainly saw more money flooding into politics following the Citizens United ruling, but people need to keep their eye on the ball.
Elon Musk contributed close to $300 million to get Trump and other Republicans elected in 2024. That was Elon Musk, not Tesla or any other company he controls. Other billionaires have also contributed millions or tens of millions to political campaigns.
Reversing Citizens United will require a Constitutional amendment, which is impossible for practical purposes in any foreseeable future. Alternatively, it can be reversed through a court-packing scheme, which is only slightly more feasible.
And then after this great victory, Elon Musk can still contribute $300 million to elect his favorite reactionaries and racists. Would we be celebrating? For the rich, contributing to candidates through the corporations they control is a convenience, not a necessity.
As a practical matter, we are not going to be able to limit the amount the rich spend on campaigns. The only plausible route to preserve democracy is through various forms of public financing, like the super-match in New York City that multiplies small contributions by a factor of 8. Alternatively, Seattle has “democracy vouchers” where each voter gets $100 to contribute to the candidate(s) of their choice. These programs can allow candidates to have enough money to be competitive even without relying on rich people’s money.
We need the same approach to the media. Many progressives seem to have the view that campaign spending has a magical impact on people’s voting, as opposed to everything else that people come across in their lives.
If voters heard nothing but Fox News 24/7, it would take an enormous number of campaign ads to get voters to take arguments from a candidate like Bernie Sanders or AOC seriously. If progressives are going to have any hope of competing with the billionaires’ candidates, we need to ensure that the Trumpers don’t control the portion of the media not currently in their possession.
Part of that story depends on trying to block the right-wing takeovers that are still in the works. That includes the Paramount effort to take over Warner Brothers and the Nexstar-TEGNA merger, which would lead to an unprecedented consolidation of local news outlets in the hands of a right-wing media group.
But it is also necessary to develop an alternative stream of funding, like the super match or democracy vouchers provide for elections. One route is a system of journalism vouchers that people can use to support the news outlets of their choice. This can be done at the state or even local level, since this Republican Congress is not about to pass a measure challenging the power of the rich.
Building up alternative media to challenge the views being pushed by Trumper media is a long and uphill battle, but it is essential if we’re going to preserve democracy. And the first step is recognizing the need for the battle and getting people to stop worrying about Citizens United. If we’re going to undertake a tough fight, we need to be sure we get something important if we win.
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‘How to Sell a Genocide’: Media Critic's Book Details Biased Coverage of Israeli Assault on Gaza
Adam Johnson said his analysis of thousands of articles and TV segments showed that "US media coverage of the war on Gaza was one-sided, racist, dehumanizing, and often veered into outright incitement."
May 12, 2026
A new book is using an exhaustive data analysis to demonstrate that mainstream US media outlets "systematically favor Israel" in their coverage of the Gaza genocide.
For his book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, which became available last month from Pluto Books, journalist Adam Johnson said he "examined over 12,000 articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, Politico, Axios, USA Today, and The Associated Press, along with 5,000 TV segments that aired on CNN and MSNBC," which has since rebranded as MS NOW
He said that by analyzing the content of these news outlets, he seeks to "demonstrate, beyond a reasonable doubt, that US media coverage of the war on Gaza was one-sided, racist, dehumanizing, and often veered into outright incitement," frequently using "double standards" that treat Israeli life and safety as inherently more important than those of Palestinians.
Johnson focused especially on center-left outlets that were considered influential within the administration of then-President Joe Biden, who continued to provide almost totally unrestricted aid to Israel despite fierce opposition by many Democratic voters in the lead-up to the 2024 election.
An article written by Johnson published Tuesday in The Intercept previews seven statistical findings proving this anti-Palestinian bias, particularly during the first year of the conflict when Israel's leaders were working hardest to establish a "narrative" in the American press that could justify the total destruction of Gaza and the mass displacement of its people.
He found that the media used the phrase "right to defend itself" almost exclusively to refer to Israel, which used it to justify numerous civilian massacres. Guests, anchors, and reporters on CNN and MSNBC referred to the right of Israelis to defend themselves 755 times during the first 90 days of the conflict, while the same right was invoked for Palestinians only eight times over that period.
Johnson found that print media outlets invoked Israel's right of self-defense 100 times more frequently than for Palestinians.
Although Palestinians lack a sovereign state due to Israel's illegal occupation, meaning their right to self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter is disputed, they are still afforded the right to self-determination and the right to resist occupation under international law.
Media outlets examined by Johnson also used the phrase "human shields" to describe instances where civilians were killed in close proximity to Palestinian militants. Though Johnson noted that this justification is "rejected by human rights groups," he found that CNN and MSNBC described Palestinians killed by Israel that way nearly 800 times, while print outlets did hundreds more.
But media outlets almost never described Israel's use of Palestinians as human shields, even though there have been multiple cases of Israeli troops documented forcing Palestinian detainees to carry out life-threatening tasks on the battlefield in order to protect themselves from injury.
The killing of Israeli civilians was frequently described in much more "emotive" terms than it was for Palestinian civilians, even as the latter were killed in far greater numbers.
Words like "massacre," "slaughter," "savage," and "barbaric" were used hundreds of times by print and TV outlets to refer to the killing of roughly 1,200 Israelis by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023. But Israeli forces' subsequent killings of approximately 24,000 Palestinians during the first 100 days of the conflict hardly ever elicited these words.
This is despite numerous documented attacks on schools, hospitals, aid facilities, and other civilian sites, as well as a near-total blockade of food, water, and medicine entering Gaza, which resulted in mass starvation and illness.
All the while, the horrific statistics coming out of Gaza were downplayed by the persistent use of the phrase "Hamas-run" by news networks to cast a shadow of doubt over the Gaza Health Ministry, which was the main official source for death toll figures in Gaza.
The US State Department, the World Health Organization, and Human Rights Watch had long relied on the ministry figures and investigations into their reporting on past conflicts found them to be accurate. But CNN nevertheless adopted it as an official policy to refer to the health ministry as "Hamas-run," a term which implied its figures were likely being inflated for propaganda purposes, even though independent estimates suggest it actually vastly undercounted the dead.
Facing pressure to cut off support for Israel, Biden and several officials in his administration used similar language to suggest the death tolls could be exaggerated, including National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, who called the ministry “just a front for Hamas.“
In January 2026, after spending more than two years using the "Hamas-run" pejorative to cast doubt upon the idea that civilians were killed en masse in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) finally acknowledged the accuracy of the Gaza Health Ministry's death count, which by that point had surpassed 71,000.
Johnson further contextualized this anti-Palestinian bias by comparing coverage of the Gaza conflict to the coverage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
He found that CNN and MSNBC discussed child casualties more often in Ukraine, where about 262 children were killed during the first 100 days of the war, than in Gaza, where more than 10,000 children were killed during the same time frame. The killings of journalists was mentioned with roughly the same frequency, even though the number killed in Gaza was 77 compared with just eight in Ukraine.
The words "war crime" and "genocide" were also rarely invoked in the early days of the Gaza war, but were used liberally to describe Russia's attacks on Ukraine, despite the fact that vastly more civilians were killed and displaced in Gaza during the respective periods.
Johnson found that this biased coverage extended to the home front, especially as the war in Gaza fomented ethnic hatred. Incidents of both antisemitism and Islamophobia increased in the months after October 7. But headlines from the first six months of the conflict referred exclusively to antisemitism about 31 times as often as they referred exclusively to Islamophobia.
This emphasis on antisemitism only grew as protests on college campuses became more forceful throughout the conflict's first year. Though the protests often exclusively focused on Israel, they were commonly framed as attacks on Jewish students.
Coverage and discourse surrounding these protests and campus administrators' responses to them often drowned out coverage of the conflict itself.
One example of this that Johnson described as particularly "poignant" was The New York Times' wall-to-wall coverage of Harvard University President Claudine Gay, who resigned following pressure from Congress to crack down on pro-Palestine protests and a plagiarism scandal.
While hundreds of articles and TV spots were dedicated to covering the Gay story, Johnson found that the media almost totally ignored the IDF's killing of the 5-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, who was left to die in a car by soldiers after her entire family was killed around the same time. In fact, there were 95 headlines about Gay in print media between December 5, 2023, and January 5, 2024, while just six focused on the killings of thousands of Palestinian children.
In an interview promoting the book's release, Johnson said that the role of media institutions was not ancillary to the Gaza genocide, but rather they played a central role in prolonging it and maintaining support from the Biden administration.
"You need them as a kind of validator... to justify things like [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East] is Hamas, aid workers are Hamas, Al-Shifa [Hospital] is actually a secret command and control center, mass rapes were Hamas policy," he said. "These fundamental axioms of genocide were essential to the genocide, and they cannot exist without The New York Times."
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Biggest Con of All: The Genuinely Staggering Scale of Trump's Robbery
What we are living through is a deliberately constructed fog of lies and grievance with one purpose only: to keep us screaming at each other about bathrooms and brown-skinned invaders while the people writing the checks rob us blind.
May 09, 2026
For decades, many Democrats have suspected what’s now being confirmed in plain English by a Trump insider. Ashley St. Clair — the 27-year-old former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and mother of one of Elon’s 14 kids who built a million-follower platform on X and became one of MAGA’s most visible young women — has spent the past few weeks blowing the lid off the entire racket.
In a series of TikTok monologues and a recent feature in The Washington Post, she’s describing in detail how the Republican’s right-wing influencer economy actually works, and her bottom line is brutal: she estimates that “roughly 99 percent” of the largest right-wing influencers are compensated in some form, most of it locked behind nondisclosure agreements so airtight that anyone who tries to talk about it will get buried under litigation they can’t afford.
According to St. Clair, GOP consulting firms (some run by former White House officials) run platforms where wealthy donors and Republican political operatives can list influence campaigns, and influencers will sign up to push specific scripts, petitions, or even GOP legislative messaging on a per-click rate or for a flat fee.
There’s no disclosure requirement because the content is “political” rather than “commercial” and the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that political lies (“speech”) are protected in ways that wouldn’t be the case for lies told to simply make money.
She’s shared screenshots of DMs offering thousands per post, and she’s detailed coordinated group chats on X where administration officials and Trump’s team can push talking points to the biggest accounts in real time.
Smaller influencers and the mainstream media see the resulting wave of identical posts across social media, assume it’s an organic movement, and jump on the bandwagon, creating an even larger echo chamber for rightwing talking points that benefit billionaires or monopolistic corporations.
It isn’t. As she put it: “There is no free thinking here. They are waiting to get marching orders and a direct deposit.”
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because we already saw a version of it in 2024, when the Biden Justice Department unsealed an indictment revealing that Putin’s people had funneled almost $10 million through a Tennessee shell company, Tenet Media, to bankroll a group of right-wing influencers including Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin who podcast to millions daily.
One right-wing influencer was reportedly paid $400,000 a month plus a $100,000 signing bonus to produce videos that just happened to riff on topics serving Trump’s and the Kremlin’s interests. (The influencers all swore they were victims who didn’t know the money was Russian, if you can believe that, but they sure were happy to take and keep it.)
And the broader point stands: the entire ecosystem of right-wing media is so saturated with covert money that a foreign adversary could plug straight into it without anyone even noticing, and did!
I’ve been around long enough to remember when this stuff was happening to radio hosts, before podcasting took off. Back in the early 2000s, I had a friend who was a nationally syndicated right-wing talk show host, and he told me how every time he gave a speech to a high school audience, a right-wing foundation would cut him a $20,000 check as a “speaker’s fee” to supplement his income. He did a dozen or more a year. That was the level of subsidy on offer just for keeping kids’ minds tilted in the right direction, and it was, he said, available to hundreds of right-wing radio hosts across the country.
None of this came out of nowhere.
It started with the Powell Memo of August 1971, when corporate lawyer and tobacco company board member Lewis Powell (about to be appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon) sent a confidential blueprint to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce telling American business it had to build a permanent infrastructure of think tanks, media operations, scholars-on-call, colleges, and legal foundations to destroy New Deal programs like Social Security and union rights.
Joseph Coors took that memo and used it to seed the Heritage Foundation in 1973 with $250,000. Richard Mellon Scaife followed with tens of millions. The Bradley, Koch, Uihlein, and Seid family fortunes joined the party.
Today that same network of six billionaire family fortunes has been joined by other right-wing billionaires to put more than $120 million into the groups behind Project 2025 alone, and dark-money conduits like DonorsTrust and Leonard Leo’s network have funneled additional hundreds of millions more into Heritage, the Federalist Society, Hillsdale College, Turning Point USA, the Cato Institute, ALEC, and the rest of the Powell ecosystem.
Then there’s Rupert Murdoch, who brought his Australian poison to America with a little help from Ronald Reagan, built Fox “News” into the propaganda flagship for the GOP, and then had to write a $787.5 million check to Dominion Voting Systems for knowingly broadcasting lies about the 2020 election.
And let’s not forget Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and, according to peer-reviewed research published in Nature and the Queensland University of Technology study, tilted the X algorithm in mid-July 2024 to dramatically boost his own posts and Republican-leaning accounts. After that change, views on Musk’s posts surged 138 percent, and right-wing accounts saw engagement leaps that progressive accounts simply never get any more on billionaire-run social media.
So, step back and look at what all that money buys. It buys a constant drumbeat telling:
— Working-class white people that they should be afraid of Black and Hispanic neighbors,
— Women in the workplace are stealing their jobs,
— Gay and trans people are coming for their kids,
— Low or no taxes on billionaires will “trickle down” somehow despite forty-five years of evidence to the contrary,
— Deregulation will lower prices instead of raising them,
— Fossil fuels are essential and climate science is a hoax, and that
— Russia and Israel are our friends while Canada, Germany, and France are our enemies.
It’s a deliberately constructed fog of lies and grievance, and it has one purpose: to keep us screaming at each other about bathrooms and brown-skinned invaders while the people writing the checks rob us blind.
And the scale of that robbery is genuinely staggering. The most recent RAND Corporation working paper by Carter Price, updated in 2025, calculates that since 1975 a cumulative $79 trillion has been “redistributed upward” from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent.
In 2023 alone, the transfer to the morbidly rich was $3.9 trillion, enough to give every working American a $32,000/year raise. Meanwhile, we’re still the only developed country on earth without a national health care system, our kids go into a lifetime of debt to attend college, our infrastructure is crumbling, and we’re falling further behind Europe and China every year on the clean-energy transition that climate science says we have maybe a decade to get right.
Republicans don’t have any real answers for any of the crises we’re creating, because their actual policy agenda (more tax cuts for billionaires, more deregulation for monopolists, more handouts to fossil fuels) both caused most of these problems and is also wildly unpopular when stated plainly.
So they manufacture the rage, pay the influencers, bias the algorithms, fund the think tanks, bankroll rightwing podcasts, radio and TV, and then coordinate and pay for the talking points in private group chats.
They have to do it this way because if American working people ever stopped to add up what’s actually been done to them over the past forty-five years of the Reagan Revolution, the political landscape would shift overnight.
This should be a national scandal. It should be the lead story on every progressive show, in every Democratic stump speech, in every union newsletter, and on every front page.
Ashley St. Clair has handed us a confession that Democrats need to use. Call your senators and representatives at the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and demand legislation requiring full disclosure of paid political messaging by online influencers, the same way every other form of paid political advertising is regulated.
Make sure your registration is current at vote.org. Find out who’s running for your state legislature and county offices at openstates.org, because that’s where the next round of voter-suppression and gerrymandering fights will be won or lost.
And the next time somebody in your life forwards you a piece of viral right-wing outrage, ask them one simple question: who paid for that post?
The answer, more often than not, will be a rightwing billionaire or the fossil fuel, pharma, insurance, tech, or banking industry that made them rich. And once people know that, the spell starts to break.
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