Corporate Media Failing to Call This What It Is: A Coup - Robert Reich; Rogue Regime
Common Dreams, Feb. 14, 2025. Photo: Demonstrators gather at OPM, Office of Personnel Management, Wash., D.C., Feb. 7, 2025 to protest federal layoffs and demand the termination of Elon Musk from the Dept. of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
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'Corporate Media Failing to Call This What It Is: A Coup.' If this is not a coup d’etat, I don’t know what is. It is not "taking sides" to say so. Rather, it is accurately describing the dire emergency America now faces. By Robert Reich, Inequality Media, Feb. 14, 2025.
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I want to talk today about the media’s coverage of the Trump-Vance-Musk coup. I’m not referring to coverage by the bonkers right-wing media of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and its imitators. I’m referring to the U.S. mainstream media — The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, National Public Radio — and the mainstream media abroad, such as the BBC and The Guardian.
By not calling it a coup, the mainstream media is failing to communicate the gravity of what is occurring.
Yesterday’s opinion by The New York Times’ editorial board offers a pathetic example. It concedes that Trump and his top associates “are stress-testing the Constitution, and the nation, to a degree not seen since the Civil War” but then asks: “Are we in a constitutional crisis yet?” and answers that what Trump is doing “should be taken as a flashing warning sign.”
Warning sign?
Elon Musk’s meddling into the machinery of government is a part of the coup. Musk and his muskrats have no legal right to break into the federal payments system or any of the other sensitive data systems they’re invading, for which they continue to gather computer code. This data is the lifeblood of our government. It is used to pay Social Security and Medicare. It measures inflation and jobs. Americans have entrusted our private information to professional civil servants who are bound by law to use it only for the purposes to which it is intended. In the wrong hands, without legal authority, it could be used to control or mislead Americans.
By not calling it a coup, the media have also permitted Americans to view the regime’s refusal to follow the orders of the federal courts as a political response, albeit an extreme one, to judicial rulings that are at odds with what a president wants.
By failing to use the term “coup,” the media have also underplayed the Trump-Vance-Musk regime’s freeze on practically all federal funding — suggesting this is a normal part of the pull-and-tug of politics. It is not.
Congress has the sole authority to appropriate money. The freeze is illegal and unconstitutional...
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/corporate-media-failing-to-call-this-what-it-is-a-coup
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Also: 'He's Building a Concentration Camp': Fears Grow as Images Emerge of Offshore Prison at Gitmo,'
https://www.commondreams.org/news/gitmo-concentration-camp