Ep 228 - Billionaires as Insta-Experts: How Our Media Conflates Extreme Wealth with Expertise

In this News Brie, we detail the major factions seeking to rewrite the history of the 2024 election as "woke" Gone Too Far, downplay Gaza, and prevent economic populism at all costs.

Please join us Monday, Oct 13 for a Beg-A-Thon live show @ 9:30ET/8:30CT! We will be joined by Justin Feldman to discuss the rise of MAHA, the broader Granola-to-Fascist Pipeline and how corporate-written food policies and our horrible, for-profit medical system fuel hucksterism.

In this episode we detail the rise of detached "who's winning and who's losing" political analyses that reduces high stakes life and death issues to fodder for ESPN-style navel-gazing. With guest Jack Mirkinson.

In Ep 228, "Billionaires as Insta-Experts: How Our Media Conflates Extreme Wealth with Expertise," we break down the media convention of assuming the rich are per se experts on everything from education to "the economy" to poverty in Africa when, in reality, they are Just Some Guys. With guest Rob Larson.

In this News Brief, we detail recent "updates," "clarifications" and "added context" pro-Israel crybullies have pressured Western media outlets to make (some more willingly than others) that give readers the distinct impression emaciated children in Gaza aren't really an urgent humanitarian crisis if they have rickets, cancer, or cerebral palsy.  With guest Beatrice Adler-Bolton. 

"Exclusive Look at Life in War-Ravaged Gaza," reads the title for a CNN interview with correspondent Clarissa Ward. "'It's a Killing Field': IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid," report Yaniv Kubovich and Bar Peleg for Ha'aretz. "I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It," argues Omer Bartov in The New York Times. These stories have something in common: they’re vital pieces of journalism about Gaza, or Palestine more broadly, published in Western and Western-aligned outlets. This is, obviously, important. Reporting like this keeps Western audiences informed about Israel’s genocide in Gaza, fortifies sympathetic Westerners’ solidarity with Palestine, and serves as an essential counter to the pro-Israel PR machine powering so much other Western media coverage. But while these pieces have made a splash among their audiences, in many cases, they’re building upon points that Palestinian journalists, writers, and activists had been making weeks, months, even years before. So why is the reporting of Palestinian journalists–especially their reporting on what’s happening within their own country and cities–so often ignored, only to be heeded after it gets the Western stamp of approval? On this episode — our Season 8 finale and also the second part of our two-part series on “The Importance of Seriousness, or Why Palestinians Can’t Be Witness to Their Own Genocide” — we explore the discrepancies in the alleged credibility between Western and Israeli journalists and Palestinian and other Arab journalists, especially when it comes to reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We’ll look at how, by Western standards, journalists don’t build legitimacy by being correct, so much as by being in close proximity to the political and media establishments. Our guest is writer and organizer Kaleem Hawa.

“12 UN Relief Works Agency staff members are accused of involvement in Hamas' attack against Israel,” reports NPR. “Details Emerge on U.N. Workers Accused of Aiding Hamas Raid,” announces The New York Times. “Hamas Military Compound Found Beneath U.N. Agency Headquarters in Gaza,” claims The Wall Street Journal. In January 2024—literally on the same day the International Court of Justice deemed Israel was committing “plausible genocide”—a number of sensationalistic headlines broke across U.S. media, namely The Wall Street Journal and New York Times, telling us in 40-point font that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the single most important supplier of food and medical aid in Palestine, was in fact a front for "Hamas." Western audiences were told that, based on “Israeli intelligence”, 12 workers at the agency may have been involved in the attacks on October 7, 2023, and, in another blockbuster claim, that “Around 10% of Palestinian aid agency’s 12,000 staff in Gaza have links to militants, according to intelligence dossier.” Given this history, the logic went, who knows how else the agency might be operating at the behest of Hamas? It would have been a major revelation if there were any evidence to support it. But there wasn’t and the story was later dropped, walked back or ignored by the media. But the damage was done: President Biden quickly defunded UNRWA and Israel criminalized it, helping fast track mass starvation in Gaza. So why did media outlets publish so many breathless and lurid headlines about Israel’s claims without an ounce of independent confirmation? To what extent, if any, have outlets acknowledged their journalistic and moral recklessness? And how has this contributed to the mass starvation, immiseration, and wholesale murder of the population of Gaza? On this episode, Part I of our two-part season finale on “The Importance of Seriousness, or Why Palestinians Can’t Be Witness to Their Own Genocide,” we examine the role of legacy news media in inciting the starvation of millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the racist double standard of what sources and experts can be trusted and the broader incitement campaign against the UN Relief and Works Agency which directly caused today’s mass starvation in Gaza. Our guest is Moureen Kaki, Head of Mission at Glia.

"Student loan forgiveness is a bribe for young voters," shouted Newsweek in 2022. "Harris's call for price controls on groceries is more pandering than policy," declared The Hill in 2024. "Free for all: Democratic socialist’s policy pitches face tough fiscal reality in New York," warned Politico this year. Every time an elected official or political candidate proposes a policy with even the slightest hint of actual populism, U.S. pundits, analysts and alleged experts line up to tell us that it’s just a scheme to "buy votes." Offering student-debt relief is just cheating. Lowering grocery costs is simply pandering. Eliminating public-transit fares is merely bribing voters. These initiatives aren't developed in good faith in order to improve the lives of the public; they're cynical ploys to help a given politician get ahead. We know that some policymakers make promises that they'll never fulfill, or chisel away at robust and universal proposals, or backtrack on bold and transformative ideas. This happens all the time. But all too often, media’s default position is to assert that even the most modest of economically populist proposals are mere strategies to buy votes, revealing grim truths about what our media class seems to think the responsibilities of lawmakers and governments are. On this episode, we examine the media tendency to assume that anything remotely close to populism is somehow cheating, playing the game on "god mode" or "democracy game genie," and ought to be discouraged by Serious People, putting a sinister spin on what is simply Doing Things People Want. Our guest is FAIR's Janine Jackson.

In this episode, we detail the classic PR gambit of corporations anticipating regulation, offering to "self-police," implementing token or superficial reforms, waiting for the outrage to blow over, then going back to business a usual. With guest Timi Iwayemi of Revolving Door Project. 

In this News Brief, we break down recent bad faith attacks on Zohran Mamdani, the ADL's DO YOU CONDEMN extortion racket, and the broader "antisemitism scandal" playbook to derail moderate social democratic policies and any meaningful criticism of Israel.