Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now, And Rachel Maddow, of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, In Talks About Merging Their Broadcasts

Amy Goodman left, Rachel Maddow right

It’s not like `continental drift’ although there is a `drift’ to be gotten, . . . and it is drift on a truly monumental scale.  People talk about `watching grass grow’ or ‘watching paint dry’ when they talk about things happening slowly so as to go unnoticed.  `A watched pot doesn’t boil,’ but when your tea kettle starts whistling, you know that something’s happened.

These are the words of Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman letting the cat out of the bag about her talks with Rachel Maddow about merging their shows based on the things they increasingly have more in common.  Goodman seems very happy to be the one giving the exclusive `cat out of the bag’- or is it `trial balloon’?- interview.

“Look,” says Goodman, “change is part of life.”  Goodman seems more relaxed than usual, as though allowing herself to wax philosophically this way is allowing her to speak her thoughts more truthfully in a liberating way.  She continues:

Yes, change is part of life.  It was when Rachel was doing Air America radio with Al Franken as a “left–wing,” albeit poorly funded, counter to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, that people got to know who she is.  That was then. [2004] Now she, like us, has regular headlines that track well with the lead you can get from the New York Times.  Rachel, us, and also pretty dependably the New York Times, we’re true blue behind the powerful narratives of the Democratic Party. When I say that those narratives are powerful, I don’t mean that they are inspiring or attuned to the populace, or to the directions for leadership our populace may yearn and hunger for, what I mean is the power of Democratic party coming from the corporations that the party aligns with and, of course, coming from Wall Street.  It’s those alignments that give the selective narratives of the party extraordinary force as they are deployed and can be insisted on.  And I am very happy about the whole identity politics thing.

If, with some migration of platforms, Democracy Now and the Maddow show are going to merge, the reason for their discussion of the possibility is the growing commonality of themes.

Goodman points out that the nation’s had an era where the awfulness of Donald Trump made it easy to find common ground, “I mean Donald Trump’s awfulness was so important, that you didn’t need to pay attention to really anything else.”  And, she points out there have been a lot of things tying into Donald Trump’s awfulness that were consequently easy to agree on: Russiagate and the way that Russians are nefariously interfering to make this country worse and make Trump more dangerous, January 6th and the way we have to stop insurrectionists from taking away our democracy, which we are realizing really needs to be revered (“January 6th sort of taught me that word `insurrectionist’ and got me thinking about it, before then I doubt I’d thought to know what it meant– did you know it’s right out of the constitution?- Though no law under it yet”- interjects Goodman parenthetically), the way we have to censor hate speech (including anything an insurrectionist or any of those election deniers might have to say, and then there’s need to regulate speech in our social media Town Squares so that people don’t get depressed by conversational downers.

Goodman sips her green tea and goes on: “Rachel is very much against hate speech,” she says, “she’s a firm counter the bad kind of hate speech we both deplore.”  Blowing on her tea, she continues:

We are also aligned by being both on the right side of those divisive cultural issues that the Trump presidency made even easier to checklist for future segment coverage.  Thank God Trump changed his position on abortion, thankfully 180 degrees, before taking on his role as a supremely obnoxious president, otherwise it could have been confusing!

We were also both perfectly aligned on the Covid narrative thing: "Wear a mask, wear two masks," we told our Democracy Now audience, "it’s an act of love.'  (We didn’t get to adding the eye visor thing, but thought about it.- Oh maybe we did)  While Rachel was beautifully firm and emphatic: "Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person."!

The whole Covid thing, the crazy need for lock-downs meant there were a lot of fearful things, numbers and statistics to tumble out before the public in a stream; for a while Democracy Now even changed its mantra slogan from "the war and peace report? to the "quarantine report."  When it comes to history and wars waged, history, when it doesn’t repeat itself, at least rhymes.

But that Covid fear and what to do about it, that’s another thing where we both agreed about how important it was to be saying the right thing and make sure that people were not allowed to say the wrong thing– That Joe Rogan! Talk about people who need to be stopped in their tracks with a dose of good old healthy censorship and centrally managed social opprobrium- Imagine saying good things about the `horse paste’ Ivermectin,

 Mentioning Rogan and Ivermectin Goodman wrinkles her nose in disgust.

“We still have significant differences, Rachel’s show and mine” says Goodman, “so I don’t know where that takes us.”

She mulls:

Rachel is more provincial, addressing herself more specifically to what riles Americans living locally in this country, more specifically, her kind of Americans.  Democracy Now has an increasingly worldwide audience and worldwide sensibility, for instance, Rachel hasn’t caught up to match me with things like my guttural pronunciations, like when I say“Afghanistan,” or introduce my co-host Nermeen Shaikh.  It just isn’t her style, and we can’t expect it.

But Democracy Now can’t leave its worldwide audience behind it.  If this thing is going to happen, we have to take that worldwide audience along with us in the merger.  We at Democracy Now, also spend more time feeling for the victims in this world, which is not exactly the way Rachel likes to keep the energy up, especially when those victims come from far-flung places in the world that Americans have rarely heard of.  When the time comes, we at Democracy Now are better positioned to do truly convincing ‘worthy victim’ stories.

Some things are going to be very problematic.  Democracy Now was originated out of, was incubated out of WBAI, out of the Pacific network of station.  We are still carried on that family of stations, still with a reasonably hefty listenership.  We’ve established ourselves and Pacifica has cast its lot reporting, with a fair amount of honesty, about the Israeli state’s vile and horrendous treatment of Palestinians.  That honesty, on our part and many other Pacifica carried programs, has been determinative in the loss of a certain appreciable amount of funding for Pacifica.  Unlike perhaps some other things, that’s something where we can’t now leave our audience behind by backtracking or denying our core DNA. . .

    . .  But you can imagine what a problem this would be for Rachel.  Even if our meld is only accomplished by doing back-to-back shows that could be a toxic proximity for her.  The solution, if the time comes, may be to take our cue from her.  She deep-sixes those kinds of stories and that kind of reporting.  So you also don’t hear anything about our U.S. Saudi Yemen war from her.— Out of sight is out of mind.  What we could do, and might do, is just move all of out Israel/Palestine reporting and coverage to our web edition special section.  There it would be invisible to the kind of audience that never looks for that kind of thing and justifiably still there for the kind of audience that still does.  You know we are all in our individual bubbles these days.  So you always have to remember to think in those terms.

It causes Goodman to sigh.

But merging these shows is meant to take us counter to that bubble thing.  Instead of isolating bubble thinking, we’ll have more people thinking the same things when we get our shows together.  But we can’t move too fast.  Our audience has to move with us.  We do polling and focus groups to make sure we don’t get too far out in front of them.  We are alert for feedback.  And, for instance, at Democracy Now we’ve recently had to go back and do some stories to illustrate that we are still anti-war and ant-US imperialism, like what’s expected of us from our past.   Like, for instance, with that particular segment of the audience that still listens to us on Pacifica stations, those we haven’t yet pulled away to listen to us just through the disintermediation of our multiple internet platforms, it can a bit jarring right now if our content is too different from other Pacifica shows.

We want to be on the same page with Rachel and crew about things like the Ukraine war, [Goodman catches herself and doubles back]. .  The `Russian provoked’ Ukraine war, [she emphasizes], but our audience can get a little unnerved by the idea we are on the brink of possible nuclear annihilation of the world and wonder if we really are still sincerely for peace enough if we are to expect them to keep following us where we go. An easy way to offer reassurance, like we just did, is to use the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war, ahem, U.S. invasion of Iraq, and reiterate where we stood on that twenty years ago.  The past is a place where you can anchor the trust you hope to keep getting  in the future.  So people will keep following into whatever Heraclitian storms may toss us on the waves in that future.

Look, I believe that `in solidarity there is strength.’  For progressivism to win, we have to be rowing in the same direction.  When we marched into wars, the Democrats were once thought of as the anti-war party.  Now we have two war parties, but it’s clear that the Democrats are now taking the lead.  The Republicans have a few isolationists who are against our bringing democracy-enhancing regime change to other countries. . .  The name of our show is Democracy Now, something to remember, when we try to keep our bearings.

The interview can’t end without posing one obvious question: Why not PBS or NPR instead?  Goodman smiles, shaking her head as if disappointed with the quality or lack of perspicacity of such a question, even if it might be obligatory and expected as inevitable.  Goodman speaks slowly and deliberately:

Merging our audience with PBS or NPR wouldn’t be any kind of achievement.  PBS and NPR are already where Rachel and her show are, which is to say, aligned with The Washington Post and New York Times, but PBS and NPR are selling the audience the idea that they are the thinking man’s version and the cultured man’s of media consumption.  That pose already successfully siphons audience, say from Pacifica, when the audience is looking for better production values along not so obvious and time-consuming commercials that you get with `commercial’ broadcasts.  But sliding over there wouldn’t be an achievement.  Because it’s sort of contrary to their brand, PBS and NPR don’t fish for audience indignation, including the Red Team, Blue Team variety of indignation, the way that Rachel and I do,– not so overtly–  Rachel does it with her raised-to-the-sky eyebrow and cocked neck, while I put it in my voice.  I can do it with slight variations in my tone and I also pick words to drawl out more slowly.  Moreover, we at Democracy Now do subtle, not quite subliminal, editorializing with our interspersed music segments, something Rachel doesn’t do.  Bringing our audience to MSNBC with skillful drifting would be a much more real achievement.      

One last question to Goodman (but is it too rude?): And the true “achievement” to be aspired to might also be inextricably associated with handsome recompense?— Doesn’t Rachel Maddow get paid something like $30 million a year counting salary and regular bonuses?  Goodman simply smiles.

Democracy Now and The Rachel Maddow Show are not merging broadcasts just yet.  This April 1st interview with Goodman was just to preview how it’s being talked about.  Goodman was specific that if it happens it could be a year from now, say next April 1st, or two years from now on the April 1st after that.

Looking For Clarity On The Situation In Lebanon? You Won’t Get It From Democracy Now Where Its Question Is: “Can you respond to the World Bank saying Lebanon is in one of the worst economic collapses in the last 150 years?”

Democracy Now pitches the question: "respond to the World Bank saying Lebanon is in one of the worst economic collapses in the last 150 years"

Want to get clarity about what might possibly be happening now in Lebanon?  You are not going to get it from the reporting of Democracy Now, or as we might better call it these days, Democracy Not Now What It Once Was (“DNNWIOW” or #DNNWIOW).  What you’ll get from DNNWIOW is that the situation in Lebanon is confused, awful, pretty much impossible to explain and just about anything that happens next will probably be alright, maybe perhaps better, or at least acceptable.  Like it might be acceptable if Lebanon was one more country subjected to the kind of externally provoked regime operations we conduct?  OK if its government is  replaced by a puppet subservient to our interests?  Or maybe, not really so bad if, like Lybia or a number of other countries where were we have meddled, Lebanon was just kept in perpetual chaos?

In other words, DNNWIOW’s `there is terribly confusing awfulness in Lebanon you’ll never understand’ reporting is very much the same thing that you get from mainstream corporately owned media all the time about Israel and Palestine; it’s the kind of befuddlement building that then allows Israel, without significant protest from the American populace, to continue carrying out its persecution and removal of Palestinians from what was their country.

In other words, I make the case that DNNWIOW’s reporting on Lebanon, similar to the New York Times reporting on Lebanon, is just a useful conduit of the narrative that the United States Government wants put out there.  Or to cut through the crap: It’s pure propaganda.

We are talking right now about DNNWIOW’s first segment, its opening segment, on Thursday, October 14, 2021, an interview of more than 20 minutes of Lara Bitar, the editor-in-chief of The Public Source, what DNNWIOW described as “a Beirut-based independent media organization.”

Probably the interview question that most quintessentially captures the flavor and content of the interview is when DNNWIOW host Amy Goodman asks Bitar: “Can you respond to the World Bank saying Lebanon is in one of the worst economic collapses in the last 150 years, a bit further explain?”  (Much of the interview was conducted by co-host Nermeen Shaikh, but Amy Goodman chose to step in to ask this question herself.)

Gee, Lebanon is suffering `an economic crisis’?  That’s what’s going on?  The World Bank says so?  The World Bank’s assessments and characterizations of what are going on are referred to a half a dozen times in the interview and any offered understanding of Lebanon’s plight basically stops there.  

To read or watch the interview:  Snipers Fatally Attack Protesters in Beirut as Lebanon Reels from Devastating Economic Collapse, October 14, 2021.

Amy Goodman on left, Lara Bitar on right

The DNNWIOW propaganda is basically the subtle kind of propaganda that relies on misdirection and what is tactfully, or, as a matter of tactics, left out of the picture rather than being an attempt mounted to sell unadulterated and obviously false misinformation.  The best way to recognize what DNNWIOW was providing as the propaganda, is to hold it up against some actually good, context-setting reporting that will give you a very clear view of the situation in Lebanon.  I recommend that, for that contrast, you go to another interview about what is happening now in Lebanon– Again it is two women. Again it’s a female show host doing the interview, and again, the interviewee is a woman residing in Lebanon.  I’ll make the case, that in this instance, the dialogue between these two women and their ability to analytically present relevant facts does a much better job to qualify each of them as competent and sincere journalists.

The interview is conducted by Mnar Muhawesh, founder and editor-in-chief of MintPress News, interviewing Rania Khalek an American journalist living in Lebanon.  Ms. Khalek, writing under her Breakthrough News brand, was on my National Notice list of the many alternative media female journalists well worth paying attention to these days.  Ms. Muhawesh should have been on my list also; sorry I missed her.

Mnar Muhawesh on left, Rania Khalek on right

Here is the interview via Twitter, MintPress News' Facebook post, and via PSCP TV: Lebanon economic crisis, US Sanctions wars & Israeli resource exploitation in the Middle East region with @mnarMuh & RaniaKhalek

What do we learn from this interview that explains and puts Lebanon’s crisis into perspective?- We learn the following:

    •    Lebanon, a small country of about six million people, is mostly bordered by Syria a country that’s now war-torn nation in the throws of a regime change violence and destruction largely set in motion by the U.S. government.  Syria is naturally an important trading partner for Lebanon (Syria supplied about 10-15% of all of Lebanon’s power- now lack of power is another critical shortage Lebanon deals with), and because of US sanctions against Syria, Lebanon, locked in, cannot now trade across this crucial border.
    •    The other country bordering Lebanon is Israel on Lebanon’s southern border.  But Lebanon is on a continuing war footing with Israel so it cannot trade across that other border either, and instead must deal with continued threats by Israel, a country which previously invaded it.
    •    The only other access to Lebanon is the Mediterranean Sea, but a year ago last August there was a huge destruction in the port of Lebanon from a truly extraordinarily massive explosion.  Khalek does not assert she exactly knows the explanation for the explosion that involved stored fertilizer, but can give important background about it and she can expertly recite what she refers as the many politicized theories offered to explain what actually happened.
    •    The structure of the Lebanon government (set up in compromise when its civil war ended in 1991 and with the intention that the government be “intentionally weak”) carefully divides and shares power between different factions, different sects.  A substantial portion of the government, part of its majority coalition, is allied with Hezbollah and for that reason that portion of the government is the subject of US sanctions. The sanctions have the effect of hamstringing the entire country in its dealings with the rest of the world.  Plus the US backed and Saudi financed sect has worked in an adversarial fashion to make the harmful US sanctions apply more and cause more harm than they have to.
    •    Lebanon desperately needs fuel and power, it affects just about everything. Iran was willing to supply oil to Lebanon, but that help was blocked by other US sanctions, the US sanctions against Iran.
    •    The US also got involved to block help to Lebanon from China, Russia, and from Qatar.    At the same time the West is generally pulling back and refusing to help.  One excuse is that they want Lebanon to change the structure of its government, which is not about to happen. 
    •    The US and its banks and financial institutions are allied with Lebanese elites and with the International Monetary Fund and they, through this alliance, set up the Lebanese financial systems institutions that are now failing.
    •    The US and Western powers are also interfering with local Lebanese politics by providing support for both fascist and failing parties and factions in Lebanon. The many factions in the country provide ripe opportunities for co-optation, which the US takes advantage of and tries to weaponize.
    •    The US, and Israel along with it, wants, dominance and hegemonic power in the region.  The US, and Israel along with it, is therefore directing much of its energy toward trying to quash Hezbollah in Lebanon, but Hezbollah is immensely popular particularly in certain parts of the Lebanon because, ‘as a force of protection’ for the country, Hezbollah defeated and evicted Israel when Israel invaded, plus Hezbollah was critical in repelling ISIS and Al-Qaeda when they came into the country, with Hezbollah then pushing ISIS back even into Syria because of its threat.
    •    Continued chaos is probably what the US and its allies want in Lebanon, because the probably emerging alternative would be Hezbollah running the country.
    •    The formerly praised structure of the now collapsing Lebanese financial system that was set up with US banks involved was always something of a Ponzi scheme. Hezbollah was shut out of participation in and creation of that now collapsing defective financial system.    
    •    Not that it is high on the list of causes for the current crises and power shortage, but Israel repeatedly bombed Lebanon’s power stations in the past decade.
    •    Lebanon is also dealing with climate change and wild fires.
    •    Toward the end of the discussion, all this was related to how have an overall strategy of promoting sectarianism, balkanization and division in the entire region to the extent the US and Israel actually promote and fund right-wing religious fundamentalism.  (Reminder: Israel was the first sectarian state in the region.) Without this regional debilitation, Lebanon might, through its relationships with its neighbors might have a much stronger and resilient economy.

Much of what is important above is pure fact.  Some of it ventures into characterizations with a point of view.  It is not necessary to agree with all of the characterizations above- some might choose to dispute a few (but everything said seems pretty on target to me)-- Still these points all go a long way in explaining a lot and to provide much needed clarity.

By contrast, the 20-minute Democracy Now report (pardon, that's the "DNNWIOW report") mentions absolutely none of the facts set forth above.  Its only allusion to Lebanon’s long border with war-torn Syria is to note passingly that for some reason there is a bad situation with destitute Syrian refugees (as well as Palestinian and "other" refugees) who for some reason now live in Lebanon.  Nowhere is Israel mentioned nor the threat posed by it at the southern boarder.  There is no mention of any of the sanctions imposed by the US or their effect, not the sanctions against trade involving neighboring Syria, not the sanctions blocking aid from Iran, not the sanctions against Hezbollah nor their effect on the rest of the country.  Hezbollah does get mentioned, but only to describe the political party that's part of the government as trouble making and a source of problems being faced.

When it comes to trouble making in Lebanon, there is no mention of any covert involvement of the US to manipulate things or how, when there is mysterious trouble making, it is hard to know whom to pin the blame on.

Simply put, coming to it with some understanding, the DNNWIOW report is so inadequate it’s virtually the most laughable of jokes.  Unfortunately, this is not a laughing matter.  The people at whatever this new Democracy Now is cannot be unaware of the deceptive nature of their Lebanon reporting.  This certainly includes chief show host, executive producer, and long term figurehead for the program, Amy Goodman herself.  They must obviously be aware of the deceptive nature of their reporting because Democracy Now for decades, since its early origins out of WBAI 99.5 FM New York, has a long and distinguished history of covering Israel and its occupation of Palestine in a way that was a meaningful counter on that subject to exactly that kind of reporting about that situation emanating from the US corporate media.

What is the thinking of those working at DNNWIOW when they work to put out this kind of misleading reporting?  Is the thought that by acquiescently conduiting mainstream US State Department narrative one day, they'll get an improved chance at doing something good in the world the next? Is the thought that they will please their big money foundation funders by going along to promulgate these narratives so that they can later go on later, with good, glitzy production values, to accurately cover other more important controversial, undercovered, stories they want to deliver to a big audience on later occasions?  . . Maybe?

Maybe, but if that is the case, DNNWIOW is getting to be an insidiously dangerous program to watch.  That’s because you’ll never know when you are getting reliable reporting on an important story and when you are getting a spiel of establishment propaganda.  Moreover, as DNNWIOW keeps promoting itself as “independent global news” and “the war and peace report,” and has a fabled and reputable history, and as DNNWIOW wears its social justice “heart” on its sleeve, unsuspecting members of the public are all the more likely to be confused when these ruses in reporting are subtle enough.

Confused?. . .  Here, as just that sort of example-  the next story DNNWIOW was reporting that day on October 14, 2021 (about our withdrawal from a senseless 20-year war) was this- see if you find any of its slant identifiable and suspicious:

Afghan Interpreter Who Rescued Biden in 2008 Is Evacuated from Afghanistan with His Family- After weeks of pleading for help, an Afghan interpreter, who helped rescue then-Senator Joe Biden when he was stranded 13 years ago in Afghanistan, has finally escaped Afghanistan. Aman Khalili describes his journey out of the country, and we speak with the reporter who broke the story. “I was in the safehouse for 15 days,” Khalili tells Democracy Now! Khalili is “representative of a group of people that are still appealing for help from America.

A Week of Reporting Important Conspiracy Theories Respecting The Pharmaceutical Industry, Including Participation of One of The Major Covid Shot Manufacturers in One of Those Conspiracies

Two stories in the New York Times the same day published across from each other on a double page spread both about the pharmaceutical industry conspiring with government officials and deceiving the public, one about a bogus "Alzheimer's" drug, the other about selling the public addicting heroine pills, the ingredients supplied by Johnson & Johnson.

It’s been an interesting week in terms of seeing two conspiracy stories published about the pharmaceutical industry and its collusion with government regulatory agencies to put out dangerous and harmful drugs whose supposedly beneficial effects were misrepresented in order to foist them onto an unsuspecting public.  Yes, there are two of these stories out this week, at least two of them where the outlines of the conspiring seem to be endorsed by outlets like that paper of record, the New York Times.  One of the stories prominently features as a wrong-doer, Johnson & Johnson, a company elsewhere very much in the news these days as a top tier manufacturer of Covid vaccine shots.        

The alleged suspicious collusion with government in these stories also involves the way that pharmaceutical industry wrong doers are getting off practically scot-free for their misdeeds, and are being allowed to ultimately profit by keeping their ill-gotten gains.  That may be ascribed to state attorneys general not being sufficiently aggressive (or just being feckless stage props?) while courts friendly to the pharmaceutical corporations and the wealthy opiod-manufacturing Sackler family steer things in the direction of ensuring the wrong doers are protected from paying any real price.  Fiendish collusion? Amounting to conspiratorial behavior?

Here is what is being reported.

In the smaller scale, less notorious of the two stories, a very expensive ($56K per annum) multi-year drug, aducanumab, that Biogen wanted to market for Alzheimer’s even though there was insufficient evident that it worked and might instead have harmful side effects (brain swelling or brain bleeding) was approved by the FDA., with the FDA involving itself to work and closely collaborate with Biogen to help the company deal with the fact that they were asking for approval of a drug that shouldn’t be approved given that the evidence wasn’t there that it worked.  (That FDA assistance reportedly included at least one secret off-the-record meeting.)  Oh well, whatever the medical side effects, what’s more important to everyone, bad actors included, is that Biogen would be soaking Medicare and, via expensive co-pays, families desperate to treat their Alzheimer’s suffering family members . .  . The what-the-heck approach to someone with Alzheimer’s apparently being `what they don’t know can’t hurt them’?

I recommend the coverage that comes from FAIR in its second segment of their weekly half-hour Counterspin program:  Chris Bernadel on Haitian Assassination, Michael Carome on FDA Alzheimer’s Investigation, July 16, 2021.
 
Here is the program segment summary:

Cronyism between pharmaceutical companies and their ostensible government regulators is an infuriating fact of US life, along with the unsurprisingly obscene cost of drugs. Yet somehow the story of aducanumab takes it to a new level. We talk about what pharma and the FDA call a breakthrough Alzheimer’s drug, and what public advocates call an example of all that’s wrong with the FDA, with Michael Carome, M.D., director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen.

In that interview Dr. Michael Carome ends by laying blame squarely at the feet of Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting head of the FDA.  He calls for her resignation as commissioner.  He says, that for three decades she was director of the center of the FDA that reviews and approves new drugs and asserts that over her three decades she has:

fostered an ever cosier relationship between her agency and pharmaceutical companies and that has resulted in regulatory capture of the agency by the pharmaceutical industry. She regularly refers to the agency as being a partner with industry, a partner– that they work with, you know, collaboratively– and she actually defended the collaborations that occurred between her agency and companies like Biogen.

Dr. Carome says she needs to be replaced by someone who is more aligned with protecting public health instead of the interests of the pharmaceutical industry.

The more notorious of the two stories during the week is about the pharmaceutical industry and the Sackler family’s responsibility, again working with the FDA (yes, recently and within that last three decades), for drug approvals that have led to an estimated 500,000 opiod addiction deaths in this country.  Most recently, in just the 12-month period ending in November, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures show that drug overdoses were soaring during Covid (egged up by Covid despair?) causing deaths just shy of another hundred thousand (92,000) ascribed to the “increasing availability of synthetic opioids” like fentanyl.  Now for the last year of 2020 the figure is stated to be up to 93,000. Compare that to the figures offered the national toll offered for Covid since it was first announced.  They are actually in the same neighborhood.

Among others covering this story during the week was Democracy Now, giving time to documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney who has a new documentary out about the collaborative and highly coordinated misconduct generating all that opiod addiction sickness and death. According to Gibney there were all sorts of “terrible incentives, where the incentive is not to cure the patient.”  See: “Crime of the Century”: How Big Pharma Fueled the Opioid Crisis That Killed 500,000 and Counting, July 19, 2021

According to Democracy Now’s story “overall, drug overdoses accounted for more deaths in 2020 than car crashes, gun violence and HIV/AIDS combined.”

In the Democracy Now segment it is described how with the Sackler family’s oxycodone marketed by their Perdue Pharma involved selling “drugs that are essentially heroin pills.”   Gibney says that “Purdue didn’t have any evidence that the drug was safe,” so the company obtained help from a medical officer at the FDA to deal with that.  Is this, perhaps, beginning to sound familiar?  Gibney says that, working with an FDA officer, Perdue took actions that “really coalesce around the idea of fraud” and “launched that fraud with a drug called OxyContin” working with the FDA official to “write the review of their own application.”   They got “inserted into the package insert, the paper that comes along with a prescription,” what Gibney observes were two very consequential falsehoods: “one, that it [the drug] wasn’t terribly addictive, and, two, because of the time-release mechanism, the Contin system, it wasn’t prone to abuse.”

According to the Democracy Now story, when Purdue was pursued by the authorities, the company lied under oath.  Moreover, when there were efforts to hold the pharmaceutical companies “accountable,” the companies “decided to change the statute,” changing the rules rather than their behavior.  It’s not just regulatory capture of federal agencies, it’s also insanely cooperative law making legislators.

Beyond the pharmaceutical companies and the Sackler family playing its part, the unfolding of the opiod addiction crisis permeated many aspects of the industry, a legion of doctors complicit in prescribing pills, pharmacies or “pill mills” filling the prescriptions.  The Democracy Now interview goes into financial incentives that drove this permeating complicity, vacation jaunts, payments (including for “speaking” fees) and, for instance, job promotions that made it clear that Purdue knew what it was doing.  Not everyone in the industry was directly involved, of course, but with something so widespread and effects that must have been widely evident, one wonders where the whistleblowers were.  Was everyone else just a passive bystander?  Of course, we know that whistleblowers pay prices.  And with all the interlocking ownership and interconnected interests, you never know whose toes you might be stepping on, so you have to be careful before taking any risks.

Running a big scale heroine selling racket sounds a lot like what we tend to classify as the work of organized crime.  If fact, Amy Goodman, the Democracy Now host, noted that Gibney’s documentary “describes the Sackler family, Purdue Pharma, as a kind of crime syndicate” and Gibney says it’s a “blurry line between licit pharmaceutical sales and, essentially, cartel sales,” that “they’re not so very different.”    

But there is more to this conspiracy tale of collusive bad behavior; the final part of it is the kind of intricate coordination that got the Sacklers and other wrong doers off essentially scot-free.  This is part of exchange between Goodman and Gibney on that about the Sacklers using political “muscle” from those high up the government ladder to escape liability and keep their misdeeds secret:

    AMY GOODMAN: So, Alex Gibney, in fact, while you talk about Insys, people there were jailed. The Sackler family — and this goes to the recently settled lawsuit, and I’m wondering if you could comment on this — 15 states recently abandoning their fight to block the bankruptcy plan of Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin; in exchange, Purdue releasing tens of millions of documents, paying a settlement expected to reach $4.5 billion, but the Sackler family agreeing to cede ownership of Purdue but will not have to admit responsibility.

    ALEX GIBNEY: Yeah, it’s really — that settlement was designed to sound good, like, “Oh my gosh, $4.5 billion, that’s a lot of money.” It is a lot of money. But the Sacklers have about $11 billion. And that $4.5 billion gets paid over nine years. So, if you’re taking in at least 5% on your money, it’s really not affecting the principal at all.

    But I think the larger thing here goes to a failure of accountability. You know, Purdue was investigated by the federal government back in 2006, and indeed found guilty. But that investigation, which was a very robust investigation, really laid out the roadmap for how Purdue did what it did. And the attorneys were arguing for very extensive felony convictions. Ultimately, Purdue used its muscle to go above those attorneys and have the charges knocked way back to misdemeanors and a fine. And most importantly — and this gets to the current episode — they were able to seal all the records relating to the prosecution. So the most important evidence was buried, which meant that all of us, the public, couldn’t see what had really happened, in order to be able to stop it.

If you want to hear essentially this same assessment of the Sacklers’ escape act repeated you can read it in an New York Times opinion piece of the week by Patrick Radden Keefe, who says “it is difficult to overstate the fiendish brilliance” of how the Sacklers manipulated the court system to come out still ultra-wealthy and essentially unscathed: See: How Did the Sacklers Pull This Off? July 14, 2021.

He notes:

American corporations can pick the jurisdiction where they file for bankruptcy and, thus, often the judge who determines their fate. Even though Purdue has never had any real business presence in White Plains, N.Y., that is where it filed its bankruptcy case. Purdue has maintained that this choice was driven by proximity to the company’s headquarters in Stamford, Conn. But it may also have been relevant that only one federal bankruptcy judge presides in White Plains: Robert Drain. In the past, he indicated a willingness to shield from litigation certain parties who had not even filed for bankruptcy in his court. He promptly granted the request, temporarily protecting the Sacklers from those suits.

    * * * *

    . .  Their offer: $4.5 billion, with no admission of wrongdoing by the family and permanent immunity from any future civil liability related to the opioid crisis.

That may seem like a lot of money, but billionaire math can be deceptive. The Sacklers proposed to pay the $4.5 billion out over nine years. Their current fortune is estimated to be at least $11 billion. Conservatively, with interest and investments, this means they can expect a 5 percent annualized rate of return on that fortune. If that’s the case, they’ll be able to pay the fine without even touching their principal. When they’re done paying in 2030, they will probably be richer than they are today.

It’s not just about the Sacklers.  Especially, now, today, we should notice that, along with others in the industry it is also about a top-tier Covid vaccine manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson who got a similar settlement.  Here is Gibney, again on Democracy Now:

one thing I would like to point out, as much as we talk about the Sacklers — and it’s very important to talk about them and Purdue — we shouldn’t be naive and think that that was the only company that was making extraordinary profits out of the opioid crisis and indeed didn’t know better. I mean, you know, [the huge companies distributing the drugs] knew very well that their pills, their opioid pills, were being diverted in ways that were causing massive addiction, but they didn’t do anything about it. And indeed, they ended up influencing Congress to pass a law which made them even less accountable, because they used the power of the revolving door to rig the rules. Johnson & Johnson, you know, famous for baby shampoo, was one of the biggest manufacturers of a potent kind of opioid, produced in Tasmania, that actually supplied Purdue Pharma with all the oxycodone that they needed in order to be able to market their drug. They wouldn’t have been able to do it without Johnson & Johnson. . . .

The amount of the settlement, Johnson & Johnson paid for their role working with Purdue in fueling the opioid crisis?: A paltry $230 million to New York State announced the end of June, and, bore broadly, in a settlement announced this week affecting other of the big pharmaceutical companies alongside of which it acted badly, $5 billion over nine years.  In other words, it wasn’t it wasn’t meaningful.

Maybe there will be those who say that this could have been all for the best if  Johnson & Johnson, after paying dividends to its shareholders, managed to squirrel away extra cash from the profits it made from selling opiods to  Purdue Pharma* on the theory that the extra cash might have helped the company come out with their Covid vaccine.  That’s the same sort of the thinking behind the idea of what makes it OK for the CIA to self-finance off the books through its engagement over the years with the illicit drug trade.

(* Johnson & Johnson also famously made money knowingly selling asbestos laced baby talcum powder.)

What a week! Two conspiracy theories at the same time about Big Pharma being engaged with government officials to cause harm to the public by marketing drugs that are misrepresented and shouldn’t have been approved– And one of those conspiracy theories extends to secrecy and coverups aided by more government officials outside the FDA and the politically very high up?  And that conspiracy theory involves one of the most prominent of the Covid vaccine manufacturers?  Are we allowed to believe in such conspiracy theories?  Well the New York Times in subdued, grey lady, respectful-of-power fashion is endorsing both of them.

For an official answer on the question of what we are allowed to believe, we could consult Cass Sunstein, an expert on conspiracy theories, an expert on what should, and should not, be censored by the media and a man who is also in charge of World Heath Organization group charged with steering what the public should think about Covid.  See: Samantha Power, “Humanitarian Hawk,” Is Married To Cass Sunstein, “Libertarian Paternalist”: They Both Advocate Censorship– Should That Advocacy Be On WBAI “Free Speech” Radio 99.5 FM?

(Note: Both FAIR's Counterspin and Democracy Now are programs who reporting is cited here air on WBAI radio 99.5 FM in New York City.  I am currently a member of the WBAI Local Station Board and urge people to donate to the station.)

Postscript: After this article was posted July 25, 2021, Democracy Now ran another story July 28, 2021 about how the pharmaceutical industry is corruptly and incestuously connected to government to make decisions that shortchange and fleece the public, decisions that are definitely contrary to the public’s interest and decisions that put Big Pharma profit and payoffs to the government officials they work with ahead of actually attending to the public’s healthcare needs.  See: Workers Beg Joe Manchin to Save West Virginia Pharma Plant as His Daughter Walks Away with $31M, July 28, 2021.

The story probably ran getting the prominence it did, because it is comfortably in the current vein of other let’s make Joe Manchin the villain (calling him “the most powerful man in Washington”) stories, so we have a someone to blame and a distraction from the rest of lawmakers as a whole should be held accountable as they deliver, both the Republican and the Democrats doing it, the spoils that the corporatist interests that placed them in office expect.  Nonetheless, this story is valuable as another window into how brazenly connections can be in place between the pharmaceutical companies and government officials that conflict with the public interest, allowing what are pretty clearly payoffs so that government officials don’t protect the public’s health.

In this story we learn that Joe Mansion’s daughter Heather Bresch, heads a pharma company in his state of West Virginia, Viatris, and formerly Mylan.  Pfizer is involved because Viatris, which Ms. Bresch heads and was thereby able to recently pocket $31 million, was created through a merger involving Pfizer in December 2020.  Ms. Bresch is likely mainly qualified for the job and to pocket such sums (in 2014 as head of Mylan she pocketed $25 million) via her relationship with her father.  There was a scandal concerning how her MBA had to be revoked by West Virginia University.  She had been given the now revoked degree right after Manchin became governor, (before he became senator) without doing the course work on the basis of doctored transcripts.

As Mylan’s chief executive, Senator Manchin’s daughter was famous for her company’s raising by 400% the price of its life-saving EpiPen, used by millions who are vulnerable to reverse fatal allergic reactions.   And more in the family: Mansion’s wife, Gayle Conelly Manchin was on a school commission that was trying to get the U.S. government to mandate that schools purchase the EpiPen at the insanely inflated price.

The Democracy Now story reports about how Viatris is, with government, Biden and Mansion all doing nothing about it, shutting down its West Virginia plant (that should be designated “vital infrastructure”) and moving manufacturing operations abroad although according to Katherine Eban, author of the book Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom and Dangerous Doses: A True Story of Cops, Counterfeiters, and the Contamination of America’s Drug Supply:

We have seen five years of congressional reports, policy reports and bipartisan agreement that we need to make as many of our own pharmaceuticals as possible. We know from data, from reporting, that the drugs that are made overseas can be full of carcinogens and toxic impurities. There is all kinds of data fraud and other quality questions that the plants overseas are riddled with, including Viatris’s own plants, which are operating in India under an official action indicated warning from the FDA. So, why, in the middle of a pandemic, are we going through this exercise that every single report has told us is absolutely counterindicated to public health and our national interest?   

Ms. Eban says there is a:

sort of cone of silence that has come down over this shuttering of this critical manufacturing plant in West Virginia. It seems like it is both pharmaceutical and national security suicide to close this plant.

PS #2- Democracy Now October 22, 2021- Remember the TPP?  The Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty?  It was a proposal to use a “treaty” between countries to override national laws and invert the relationship between government and corporations; government would become subservient to and accountable to corporations rather than the traditional vice versa; corporate contracts would tell governments what laws could be passed.  Democracy Now did a story about how, during Covid, Pfizer has used contracts with countries worldwide to exactly that. . . Contracts that put Pfizer in charge so that the Pfizer corporation tells the countries what they can do when conducting what would normally be the province of government.  See: Public Citizen Blasts Pfizer for Putting Corporate Profit Over Increasing Access to COVID Vaccines, October 22, 2021.  That leaves us with a peculiar situation when it comes to these medical matters- Is it government or Big Pharma that we are dealing with? You'll never know which is which.

My Experiment With “Russian Doll” Tweets (Tweets Starting From Bernie Sanders Suspending His Campaign To Michael Bloomberg Being Declared U.S. Treasury Secretary In The Event of Marshal Law– And Back Again!)

I’ve just experimented with creating a chain of “Russian Doll” Tweets.

Maybe it’s cabin fever from spending too much time alone indoors sequestered away from friends and community . . .

. . . or maybe, it’s that this Russian Doll Tweet exercise I’ve engaged in is solace, providing the illusion of an organized structure for information as we experience overload.  The inflow of news and information about coronavirus that spins around us seems so disorganized and unhelpful, at least to me, the 24/7 news cycle pelting us with statistics that inadequately describe multiple unknowns.

My Russian Doll Tweets (from @WhiteMDD, my personal Twitter account, not the @NatNotice National Notice Twitter account) started with noting that I still have the option of voting for Bernie Sanders in the primaries (I am a New Yorker), and those tweets went eventually to the observation that Michael Bloomberg’s buying up of Democrats’ voter data (follow the links) might have the outcome of Bloomberg’s being appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary if marshal law is declared in the wake of a “failed” national election.  (I apologize for my spelling, which on Twitter I can't go back to correct.). .

. . Twitter allowed me to create the chain because, with Twitter, you can retweet another tweet "with comment" to make a new combined Tweet.

But the only way, through Twitter, to open the Tweets and enjoy them Russian Doll style is to start with the last tweet about how Bloomberg becomes U.S. Treasury Secretary and follow it back to how I will still able to vote for Bernie Sanders even if he is not running a campaign I can financially contribute to.

However, via the posting here, I can give you the choice of enjoying the Russian Doll tweets in either direction:

To read them backward you can go to Twitter. . .

(Also, please note that some of the individual tweets, as you will see, themselves have links embedded in them that can take you to some interesting, informative places.)

Tweet: My experiment with “Russian Doll” tweets: Keep clicking on the retweeted tweet and see what I mean. 

. .  or go to the Part II end of this article.  To read them forward, as they were written, from the first, start below with Part I:

PART I

Here are the Russian Doll tweets in the order they were tweeted.

Tweet: Bernie’s suspension of it means I can no longer contribute $ for him to use in a campaign almost impossible to really run in a virus environment, but b/c he remains on all ballots collecting delegates I can still vote for him as reality continues to endorse him and Biden dements.

Tweet: And I still regret that Bernie is not more of a fighter, willing to challenge whether Biden really, truly, and honestly gained and holds the delegate lead purportedly given him by the media despite evidence to the contrary such as the highly discrepant exit polls.

Tweet: While I fume that Bernie suspended his campaign, I find his “suspension” speech seductively good. Am I just a sucker? Or is my cynical suspicion resulting in a crippling rejection of “hope.” (“Hope”? That was the Obama promise.) https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/9/bernie_sanders_drops_out_of_race

Tweet: On @democracynow @noamchomskyT offers “hope” that a “Biden” administration would be better than a Trump, even an Obama administration, b/c it would be more susceptible to the influence of a newly assertive left awakened by Sanders campaign; & address . . https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/10/noam_chomsky_trump_us_coronavirus_response

Tweet: Would a “Biden” admin be susceptible (more than Trump’s) to the influence of newly assertive left and finally address climate chaos, income inequality, militarism, etc.- The Sanders list? Biden “conceding” to lower Medicare age to 60 puts him far to the right of other Dems.

Tweet: It is time to start referring to a possible “Biden” administration in quotes because with Biden dementing it is far from clear who sent from the DNC would be running things.

Tweet: But there are those that think rather than wonder about the possibilities of how Continuity of Government (“COG”) concerns would be handled in a demented “Biden” administration we should worry if there will be any national elections at all. https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/09/standing-on-the-precipice-of-martial-law/

Tweet: Those worrying that Marshall Law would bring in unconstitutional Continuity of Government changes in the wake of a “failed” election include @_whitneywebb who has been writing of these worries since before the virus arrived. https://twitter.com/blacklistednews/status/1242240104644505600?s=21

Tweet: If Marshall Law is declared in the wake of a “failed” election we might, to give it cover, get something like the absolutely inane “National Unity Cabinet” proposed by bombastic NY Times columnist Tom Friedman! https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/10/bide-a10.html

Tweet: In the Tom Friedman “National Unity Cabinet” the country might get if Marshall Law is ushered in in wake of a “failed” election, Michael Bloomberg would be U.S. Treasury Secretary in exchange for spending billions to scoop up the Democrats’ voter data. https://twitter.com/whitemdd/status/1249017082987118593?s=21

Tweet: My experiment with “Russian Doll” tweets: Keep clicking on the retweeted tweet and see what I mean. 

PART II

Here are the Russian Doll tweets in the order they can be followed backward through Twitter.

Tweet: My experiment with “Russian Doll” tweets: Keep clicking on the retweeted tweet and see what I mean. 

Tweet: In the Tom Friedman “National Unity Cabinet” the country might get if Marshall Law is ushered in in wake of a “failed” election, Michael Bloomberg would be U.S. Treasury Secretary in exchange for spending billions to scoop up the Democrats’ voter data. https://twitter.com/whitemdd/status/1249017082987118593?s=21

Tweet: If Marshall Law is declared in the wake of a “failed” election we might, to give it cover, get something like the absolutely inane “National Unity Cabinet” proposed by bombastic NY Times columnist Tom Friedman! https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/10/bide-a10.html

Tweet: Those worrying that Marshall Law would bring in unconstitutional Continuity of Government changes in the wake of a “failed” election include @_whitneywebb who has been writing of these worries since before the virus arrived. https://twitter.com/blacklistednews/status/1242240104644505600?s=21

Tweet: But there are those that think rather than wonder about the possibilities of how Continuity of Government (“COG”) concerns would be handled in a demented “Biden” administration we should worry if there will be any national elections at all. https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/09/standing-on-the-precipice-of-martial-law/

Tweet: It is time to start referring to a possible “Biden” administration in quotes because with Biden dementing it is far from clear who sent from the DNC would be running things.

Tweet: It is time to start referring to a possible “Biden” administration in quotes because with Biden dementing it is far from clear who sent from the DNC would be running things.

Tweet: Would a “Biden” admin be susceptible (more than Trump’s) to the influence of newly assertive left and finally address climate chaos, income inequality, militarism, etc.- The Sanders list? Biden “conceding” to lower Medicare age to 60 puts him far to the right of other Dems.

Tweet: On @democracynow @noamchomskyT offers “hope” that a “Biden” administration would be better than a Trump, even an Obama administration, b/c it would be more susceptible to the influence of a newly assertive left awakened by Sanders campaign; & address . . https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/10/noam_chomsky_trump_us_coronavirus_response

Tweet: While I fume that Bernie suspended his campaign, I find his “suspension” speech seductively good. Am I just a sucker? Or is my cynical suspicion resulting in a crippling rejection of “hope.” (“Hope”? That was the Obama promise.) https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/9/bernie_sanders_drops_out_of_race

Tweet: And I still regret that Bernie is not more of a fighter, willing to challenge whether Biden really, truly, and honestly gained and holds the delegate lead purportedly given him by the media despite evidence to the contrary such as the highly discrepant exit polls.

Tweet: Bernie’s suspension of it means I can no longer contribute $ for him to use in a campaign almost impossible to really run in a virus environment, but b/c he remains on all ballots collecting delegates I can still vote for him as reality continues to endorse him and Biden dements.

How To Listen To “Democracy Now”- A Mind Boggling List of Possibilities For A Program That Was Incubated By Terrestrial Radio In NYC: Plus, Part II, A Few Cautions About Internet “Generosity”

How to listen to Democracy Now? The options that are multiplying make it complicated, but we are about to tell you.

Democracy Now is a very good place to get a lot of news.  You’ll get a get dense, comprehensive, very intelligently compiled overview of most world and national events every week day.  It's an hour broadcast every day.  The fast paced headline coverage that starts the program generally runs from about 12 to 19 minutes, depending on what's happened.  (Appropriately, there's usually more to catch up with on the Monday mornings that follow the weekend .)

Democracy Now covers news and issues that corporate media typically shuns such as the climate chaos catastrophe (including how mankind and the fossil fuel industry are causing it), corporate malfeasance in general (its coverage of the Boing 737 max crashes was better than anywhere else), misadventures of the U.S. military, and U.S. meddling in the affairs of other countries.  Democracy Now will not shy away from telling you about the plight of disadvantaged members of our society whose rights are being ignored and abused.  It will tell you what the powerful are tying to get away with.  Their coverage of issues such as the recent Supreme Court nominees under consideration (Kavanaugh and Gorsuch) sets standards that, by contrast, made clear how embarrassingly inadequate coverage by NPR and the New York Times is. It almost seemed that the NPR and the Times, with a modicum of objection, were smoothing the way for eventual acceptance of bad outcomes.

I generally recommend Democracy Now as a good starting place where you can get about 85% of the important national news, versus the maybe the 20% and inevitably misleading stuff you may get if, for instance, you watch NBC's nightly half hour of advertising-interspersed national news.  Democracy Now's hour is free of commercial interruptions.  It runs on listener support.

I say you can get about "85%" of the news from Democracy Now, because, valiant and comprehensive as it is, there is some news that Democracy Now seems to treat as off limits.  (For instance, there was one significant story involving the Kennedy, King and Macolm X families joining with a number of respected notables that was- perhaps oddly?- covered in January, very thoroughly and respectfully by the Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post, but Democracy Now never mentioned or reported it at all.  Of course Democracy Now wasn't alone, NPR didn't report on it and it went unreported just about everywhere else as well. . .  And Washington Post Coverage didn't provoke the New York Times or anyone else to follow in its footsteps.  .  .

 . . . To be fair, perhaps once upon a time (and just once), Democracy Now, way back in 1997, did previously report one aspect of that particular story-- There's a link extant for some June 18, 1997 coverage!-- Ah!  The internet giveth!  Isn't the internet amazing with respect to what it can do?-  It can take you all the way back to 1997!   However, if you click on the Democracy Now video link to hear and see the video link reporting of that story, the link is broken.  Yikes! The Democracy Now reporting is not there to be found (frown).  The internet taketh away!

How do you get news from Democracy Now?  There are lots of ways and this article will fill you in.  Following that instruction we have a few cautions to offer about the future.  Those cautions concern the internet.

Democracy Now began with WBAI radio.  WBAI is the New York City Pacifica Network radio station that once was a home to Amy Goodman, Democracy Now's principal host, and it is the home out of which Democracy Now was incubated and able to emerge.  WBAI is still a way to listen to Democracy Now.  Here, starting with WBAI, are the ways you can plan to be informed by getting the comprehensive news Democracy Now furnishes.

Tune in and listen on WBAI FM radio, where it all began, where the show was incubated.

1.    Listen to a terrestrial broadcast of WBAI radio in New York weekdays at 8:00 AM as Democracy Now is first being broadcast.  WBAI radio has a strong signal so you can listen up in Westchester and New Jersey, all the environs immediately surrounding the greater NYC metropolitan area.

2.    Listen to WBAI’s live internet stream station broadcast.  Like most radio stations these days, WBAI also streams its broadcasts on the internet.  The internet giveth!

The internet live stream straight from Democracy Now's website is an interesting alternative, and there is video to provide a visual, but you may find the live stream cuts out (the faltering is very trying during election night coverage).

3.    Listen, or even watch, directly at 8:00 AM ET on the internet by going to the Democracy Now website, where you can get both an audio and a video stream of the show.  Plus you can get special Democracy Now broadcasts like election night coverage.  It’s almost like TV, you know the kind when you cut the cable?  The internet giveth!  The vexing problem with the live video stream however is that the video often cuts out.  In our household, the cutting out of the video stream was especially pronounced one night when we were trying to watch the 2016 election night coverage.  Otherwise, Democracy Now would have been almost as convenient as watching any of the major corporate network coverage that night.  I am told that, since, in Brooklyn Heights, we sit atop a Spectrum (formerly TimeWarner) trunk line, internet bandwidth should not have been a problem and should not have been causing the halting of the stream.   The internet taketh away!

There are others now following in the footsteps of Democracy Now to launch, using the internet, what are essentially their own television broadcasts.  Mid-July (July 12, 2019) the alternative website Consortium News launched CN Live to start such video broadcasting.   It's an appealing idea, being able broadcast video over the internet that could be as satisfying in quality to the viewer as anything the major networks put out over cable or the airwaves.  The internet giveth!  Just as it launched its CN Live broadcasts, Consortium News tweeted (July 15, 2019) "Our website is completely down. Our media host said we have been attacked by malware. . .  Every article published since 2011 now gets a 404 Not Found. They are working on it. Problem started slowly on Friday first day of CN Live!"  . . . Oh my!: The internet taketh away!

Pacifica Radio app

4.    Listen to WBAI at 8:00 AM using the Pacifica Radio app that plays an internet live stream of all five Pacifica Network Stations (WBAI from NYC, KPFA from Berkley, California, KPFK from Los Angeles, KPFT from Houston, WPFW from Washington D.C.) plus one Pacifica affiliate station, WQRT from Madison, Wisconsin.  Since KPFT, the Houston station, broadcasts a second signal using its HD capacity (high definition radio), the Pacifica app actually affords a choice of seven streams to listen to Pacifica Network content.  The app can play on your phone or can play of your iPad tablet. The internet giveth!

Democracy Now phone app- It used to work on an iPad too, but doesn't now.

5.    Listen to or watch a Democracy Now live internet stream on your phone via the Democracy Now phone app.  Listening live, the same cautions apply about how the show may cut out as you listen because there isn’t enough bandwidth.  The Democracy Now app also once worked on the similar Apple iPad Operating systems– That was until Apple introduced a new operating system.  Now the app still works on iPhones, but not on the iPads any longer.  The internet taketh away!

6.    Now it’s 9:00 AM ET and Democracy Now has finished its one hour weekday morning broadcasts.  What if you missed it?  You can listen via the Pacifica App and hear it broadcast again on KPFA from Berkley. (It’s 6:00 AM California time!)  The Democracy Now show always begins with host and anchor Amy Goodman reading the headlines, which, will, as noted, in ten minutes or perhaps just under twenty, cover about three times as much news as the corporate networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, etc.) cover in their half hour evening news broadcasts.  It means Amy is speaking very fast.  If you are not fully awake, there is no quick rewind.  It's best to be fully awake when you listen.  Maybe that's what some Californians thought--  Pacifica’s KPFK from Los Angeles just moved Democracy Now from a 6:00 AM California time slot to an 8:00 AM California time slot which means you can hear it again in New York at 11:00 AM ET.  All the Pacifica stations carry Democracy Now and the twin Houston stations carry it differing times.  So there are lots of options using the Pacifica app.   The internet giveth!

For a while, after the 9:00 AM hour, the only way to listen is WBAI's archive

7.    But what if its after 9:00 AM ET and, hungry to catch up on the news (particularly the headlines?), you’ve missed the beginning of Democracy Now?  Anytime after 9:00 AM you can go to the WBAI archive and listen to the previous broadcasts of Democracy Now.  In fact, for a while, after 9:00 AM that’s the only way you can listen to it.  The internet giveth!

8.    Still later in the day (it could be as late or later than 11:00 AM ET), Democracy Now will make its program available on demand on the internet.  At that time, it will be available for listening or watching from Democracy Now from its website or, alternatively through its Democracy Now app.  Plus, the broadcast Democracy Now show is an hour; but, on the internet, Democracy Now posts extra “web exclusives,” extensions of on-air interviews if you are interested in hearing more and going into greater depth on the subjects covered.  The internet giveth!

Two day's Democracy Now Show segments

9.    Still later in the day, Democracy Now will start dividing its broadcast up into different segments, so you can pick and choose portions of the show to listen to specifically.  And you will be able to share links to specific content that way too.  The internet giveth!

When the text transcript of show content like this goes up like this, it is more likely that Google will, for example, help you find out that an unusually long lasting sustained drought in Honduras is one of the things driving refugees away from their homes (that is if Google's algorithms are in the mood to let you know).

10.     Eventually, later in the day, there is another way to take in Democracy Now.  That’s when the text of the segments for the day get written up and posted.  That also makes the content searchable on Google.  The internet giveth!  But has Google been adjusting its algorithms to make Democracy Now content harder to find, the way that Google has been spiking the algorithms of many alternative news sites?  You will probably find that Democracy Now content does not Google as high as it should . . . The internet taketh away!  But if Democracy Now behaves . .?

Amazon’s Alexa

11.    At some point during the day it has become possible to ask Amazon’s Alexa to play that day’s Democracy Now program.  Command "Alexa: Play Democracy Now," and the show starts!  For now, without looking into it, we’ll assume things work much the same way with Siri alternatives that listen to your home commands: Google Assistant, Cortana, Mycroft, whatever.  The internet giveth!  (if you want these kinds of things in your home.)  Asking a willing Alexa to play Democracy Now was, we observed, possible for a number or weeks. . .  For a number of weeks, that is just up until recently: Now, if you ask Alexa to play Democracy Now it has found a substitute program to play.  Alexa now refuses to play Democracy Now.  The internet taketh away!

Democracy Now on cable TV via the CUNY station in New York

12.    Want to watch Democracy Now as good old fashioned cable television?  In New York City, wait until 6:00 PM and you will find it broadcast on the local city university CUNY station.  However, if you want to capture it reliably for time shifting on your Tivo, you will have to deal with the fact that CUNY TV and Tivo haven’t been coordinating on exchanging programming information the usual way so you will have to set up a specified word “wish list” program to capture the show rather than a Tivo "season pass." These electronics are all so reliably smart and dependable, until they are not.

13.    Don’t like old fashioned cable television?  Do you think that YouTube is the answer?  Democracy Now also goes up on YouTube, which allows you to subscribe to it there.  The internet giveth!  One thing we must note, however, about content that is put up and made available on YouTube: Sometimes it gets taken down by YouTube for reasons that seem totally inexplicable, or, if those reasons are explicable, then for reasons that are downright scary.  (Ditto Facebook.) 
The internet taketh away!
  

14.    You can also listen or watch Democracy Now in Spanish because it gets translated.

The iTunes audio Podcast

15.    Prefer everything via podcasts?  You can get podcasts of the audio through iTunes
Google Play, and Spotify.  And iTunes also has podcasts of the video too.

PART II: A Few Cautions About The Internet

With such a mind boggling multiplicity of options, it certainly seems like there is cornucopic wealth to the variety of ways in which you can access the news that Democracy Now will provide. The internet giveth!  However, the illusion fades when you realize that almost all of these options that seem to afford such liberating choice come through just one spigot: the internet.  There are hands ready to turn the handle on that spigot.  They could turn it off entirely, or just adjust the flow.

The Federal Communications Commission under Trump appointed chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer and telecommunications industry corporate lobbyist, is determinedly doing away with net neutrality.  Net neutrality is the principle that lets Democracy Now and others compete with the conglomerate telecommunication giants that consistently stream government friendly news-- even when those telecommunication giants don't want that competition.

The elimination of net neutrality isn't the result of democracy.  Quite the opposite- "poll after poll after poll shows that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or an independent or any other party: Overwhelming majorities of people in the United States support net neutrality rules."  So it is not as if democracy can be counted on to protect us from this change.  Instead, with 83%, perhaps more of the public, wanting net neutrality, the FCC's elimination of it is just one of the most extreme examples of how on issue and after issue democracy is being overridden to give corporate and moneyed interests and other powers in charge the things they want instead of the things that the vast majority of the public, supermajorities, want and should by all reason be allowed to have.  The internet taketh away!

There are all sorts of ways that the internet can take things away: Things can disappear, they can just get lost or buried, they can become unfindable, the enabling technology by which they are accessed might not keep up to date or it may fail, tech product interfaces foe accessing content can be withdrawn, you can be steered or warned away from things, or things can be censored.  From early on, the model of the internet has been to lure people in by offering up things seemingly for free.  The internet giveth! But that doesn't mean those things will stick around or are that they are actually free. 
The internet taketh away!

I was one of the many who was heavily solicited by Google to become a trend-setting first adopter of Google+ when Google launched Google+ as an alternative, perhaps preferable in certain ways, to Facebook.   Google shut down Google+ this past April deleting all its users' accounts and posts.  Google+ was a favorite means of sharing information and content of Yoko Ono.  I could show you what I mean by linking to her posts, but they have all been deleted.  In a sense, these deletions were also a re-erasure of John Lennon's presence in our lives, assassinated in 1980-- many of Yoko's posts were about John.  The internet taketh away!  Google announced its plans to end the Google+ (originally launched in June of 2011) in October.

Google's October announcement of the Google+ withdrawal was contemporaneous with Facebook's October shutdown of more than 800 mostly anti-war, anti-authoritarian pages, including things like popular Black Lives Matters and police watchdog sites.  The October Facebook shutdowns occurred during the run up to the mid-term elections and involved coordinated action with other social media giants like Twitter.

Scary?  Wondering why this is something that people know so little about?  Here is something scarier.  When this was breaking as news, in a brilliant bit of nonreporting and disinformation the New York Times ran a contemporaneous story about the Facebook deletions that made you complacently think you knew what was going on.  The Time story communicated `not to worry . . . everything is under control.'   The report of the Facebook take downs was hidden, Purloined Letter fashion, on the paper's front page.  The Times article made it seem like mainly that Facebook was taking down pernicious, maliciously motivated  right wing disinformation sites.   The article's headline?: Made in U.S.: Untruths Infest Social Websites- The Right and the Left Try Russia’s Methods, By Sheera Frenkel, October 11, 2018.

The Times October 12, 2018 front page from the internet (The internet giveth!): Prominently displayed, but escaping notice, an article about how Facebook took down more than 800 web page sites, mostly anti-authoritarian and anti-war.

The main example the Times article led with and gave considerable focus to was what it described as a sketchy conservative right wing blogger publishing “several false stories” about Christine Blasey Ford as she was accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault.  Eliminating such “false stories” doesn’t seem like it would be upsetting to Times readers.  The sketchy blogger's "Right Wing News" site gets a total of 19 mentions of it by its full name in the Times article.
        
Or maybe the front page Times article successfully escaped much notice because readers were turned off and very bored, and didn't read the damned thing because it sounded so much like just another of the endless run of Times' articles harping on "Russiagate."  . . . The article simply characterized the rest of Facebook take downs being about another manifestation of the conspiracy theory that "state-backed Russian operatives" swung the 2016 election to Trump, albeit that in this case the Times pontificated that we were dealing with the "spreading of disinformation started by Americans, for Americans . .   emulating the Russian strategy of 2016."  "Americans, for Americans"?  The article said that "such influence campaigns are increasingly a domestic phenomenon fomented by Americans on the left and the right."

If you are trying to go back in time find the Times article about the Facebook take downs without knowing exactly what you are looking for, it is very hard to find because the online headline for the article makes the article sound even more like it is just another Russiagate story: Facebook Tackles Rising Threat: Americans Aping Russian Schemes to Deceive.  (The Times frequently uses different headlines for its web edition than it uses for its print edition- It's one of the vagaries of what we think the internet documents and preserves for posterity.)
        
The Times article quotes two seemingly impartial third parties for perspective.  One of them is presented as "Ryan Fox, a co-founder of New Knowledge, a firm that tracks disinformation" who assures that the Facebook take downs don't present a worrisome free speech issue with these words: “These networks are trying to manipulate people by manufacturing consensus — that’s crossing the line over free speech.”  You might catch in that statement something altogether too coy: "manufacturing consensus."  It's a virtually and obviously synonymous with "Manufacturing Consent" or "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media."   That is the seminal and now key reference book written by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988 that explains the propaganda model by which the government and those in power in our society manipulate and control public opinion in a "democracy."

The Times does not explain that Ryan Fox was at "New Knowledge" (does "New Knowledge" sound Orwellian?) having just come from the National Security Agency where he was  an “Intel Analyst,” nor does the Times indicate how that probably also tells you a lot about "New Knowledge."  On his LinkedIn profile Ryan says the New Knowledge mission is "to secure the integrity of public discourse."  For good measure, please know that Facebook is partnering with the Atlantic Council to determine which web pages it will censor.  The internet taketh away!  That is not mentioned by the Times article.

Ryan Fox's LinkedIn info and more information (The internet giveth!): "Ryan spent 15 years at the NSA championing next-generation SIGINT solutions, driven to support national security interests. Prior to his civilian roles as a Counter Terrorism Fellow and NSA Representative European SIGINT partners, he served under U.S. Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC), as a CNO Analyst for the U.S. Army."

To be clear, the Atlantic Council has been described by Peter Phillips as the unofficial policy-making and consensus-building arm for the transnational corporate elite as they seek to protect their interconnected capital investments throughout the world.  Phillips is the author of the new reference book "Giants - The Global Power Elite," that, identifies, boiling down to a very few people, about 300, controlling most of the world's wealth.  He furnishes the bios of 199 directors of seventeen global financial Giants controlling $50 trillion of the world's wealth- $41 trillion in 2017.  He furnishes estimates that overall world wealth is about $255 trillion two-thirds of which is U.S. and European.

As noted, while the prevailing model of the internet is to lure you in for free, much of it is here today, and (The internet taketh away!) gone tomorrow.   My central storage hard drive device came with the option of using a free program that allowed me (my family too) to stream and listen anywhere to any of the music I had stored on my computer, a large music collection.  Did that console me for the fact that my once upon a time "lifetime" purchase of the Music Match music player meant the "lifetime" was only that of the corporation owning Music Match, not my own?   Eventually, my ability to stream and listen to my music collection anywhere via the program from my hard drive device maker simply ended as well without warning or fanfare.  Now, I think we are all supposed to be uploading our music collections to the Amazon cloud, or using streaming services like Spotify where the security of my being able to access that music in the future is dependent upon my ability to pay future rent.

Much of the fitful starting and stopping with which the lure of free internet convenience has proved undependable has to with the acquisition and consolidation of the internet companies into increasingly few giant tech monopolies.  Music Match was subsumed into Yahoo.  Yahoo faded, pushed aside by the dominance of other fast growing companies.  Eventually, Yahoo's remnants were picked up by Verizon to be administered alongside Verizon's previously acquired AOL so that the AOL and Yahoo email services became clones, both subject to new simultaneously implemented restrictions on promulgation of information through email distribution lists.

While the lure of the internet may often be things that seem to be free, the provision of those things is far from free at all: The other recognized key to the standard model of internet provided services is the prevalence of data scraping.  Would I have a right to expect that, with the internet music services I just mentioned, those services will not be tracking and collecting data about my music preferences, listening and buying habits?  When was the last time you read or bothered to understand the "terms of service" agreement according to which you got a computer or internet program?

Of course we all know how some of that generally expected data scraping results in our being micro-targeted with advertisements tailored very specifically to us after we looked into the availability of a product.  Or did I express interest in that product writing in an email or mention it on a Facebook post?  Even if I disregard or chose to like this volunteered assistance from the internet, including the way it reduces my need to think, in other contexts it can be creepier.  What if what this kind of surveillance notes that I seem to be paying a lot of attention to stories on Democracy Now about mistreatment of immigrants and asylum seekers at the boarder?  About ICE misconduct?  And what if the follow up to that is that someone micro-targets me with links to stories that convey a mistaken impression that immigration at the border involves a flood of immigrants at unprecedented levels and an insoluble crisis?  Or what if the follow up is simply to ramp up the distractions being offered with more Russiagate conspiracy theories?

You may put yourself at ease by saying to yourself that no one is likely to want to pay attention to your little needle in the big haystack out there, and you may virtuously feel that to the extent you get fed distracting or misleading stories you have the strength of mind and mental acuity to think for yourself no matter what.  If so, you'd be right be right in one respect: Most of the surveillance methods sweeping up data tend not to focus on the individual; they focus broadly on interconnections and relationships throughout cyberspace.

If your emerging individual political predilections were lonely and aberrant they'd hardly be a concern for those seeking to maintain power and control.  What is more to be worried about is something the internet and the data collection surveillance systems are designed to do very well: Keep track of where groups of people and their ideas are swarming.  So when you and your neighbors in your extended political community all start paying attention to, for example, certain Democracy Now stories and reports, you may find that you and your neighbors all get headed off and deflected in similar ways.  Algorithms may do a lot of the work and those algorithms again may smartly incorporate informed instincts of what is the best and most tailored way of deflecting you and like-minded neighbors to other modes of thought.

Would any of the big internet monopolies take actions that steer public discourse (the way that their sister corporate media giants do)?  Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has been doing very well recently despite the way that the corporate media has been working to shut out her anti-war themed campaign.  Right now Gabbard is suing Google for halting and refusing to accept her campaign advertisements.  Is she likely to win?

Nor is it necessarily good when we teeter on the brink as politicians finding fault with the biases of Facebook, et al. threaten to regulate the internet giants as common carriers (the giants assuredly control what has become the public square) without actually doing so. . .  Because then those ongoing unconsummated threats become a vehicle for coercing political favors and bias that could not be demanded of entities that were actually, in fact, regulated by the government.

The internet, created by the U.S. government, was privatized in the mid 1980's without fanfare and with virtually no discussion about that privatization as Yasha Levine notes in his book “Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.”  Also as Levine notes, the original purpose of the internet when the government created it had a lot to do with surveillance and information control.  Lawrence Preston Gise, the mentor and maternal grandfather of Amazon's Jeff Bezos was involved was involved with DARPA (originally ARPA- which he helped set up and he worked)  in setting up the internet.
 
The privatizing of the internet is an interesting thing.  Legal distinctions of what is permissible mean that those who control the internet privately have not been subject to the same restrictions on surveillance to which the government itself was theoretically subject. But the convenience of that distinction does not prevent data collected by private firms from being sold to politically active individuals (where is the dividing line really?), nor, probably, at least as a practical matter, to private firms hired to work for the government.

As noted, almost every way to get the news from Democracy Now involves information that flows through the interruptible spigot of the internet.  The two exceptions are the evening CUNY cable television broadcast and listening to Democracy Now via terrestrial radio such as the broadcasting of the WBAI NYC radio station that helped incubate and give birth to the Democracy Now program.

It is nice to think about cable as affording one of the backstopping alternatives to the internet, but the cable services owned by private communication conglomerates like TimeWarner (Spectrum) and Verizon can’t be relied upon for secure access to information either.  Just as internet access to content and ideas can be choked off, so can access through cable.  The Supreme Court, in the very recently decided DeeDee Halleck (Manhattan Neighborhood Network) case written by new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, ruled that cable TV companies, even in the case of channels regulated for the purpose of providing “public access,” are not subject to  First Amendment free speech constraints and requirements and that the cable companies as private entities can censor and deny transmission to whomever they want.  So for instance, as with Halleck, they can cut you off if you raise questions about broadcasting access or the economics affecting the content provided by the public access channels.

If internet access to information and content is choked off more in the United States than it is now (and other countries like China provide examples of just how choked off it can be), would we be able to rely on Newspapers for more robust information flow as once was the case?  Newspapers once wielded the power of printing press production linked with their own channels of very effective distribution.  It was a huge, very powerful physical infrastructure for information delivery that, now supplanted by the internet, is getting dismantled.

The internet has given us ready access to information like we once got from newspapers, including information from the remaining newspapers that still survive (The internet giveth!), but, disruptively, the internet has largely demonetized the newspaper business. That demonetization includes the advent of services like Craigslist, which has diverted all of the classified advertising revenue that previously supported those papers.  The internet taketh away!

The demonetized newspapers can now be bought up for a pittance by wealthy individuals (like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post) interested in their propaganda value.  That's what will generally happen with the legacy papers whose great names still afford branding value for propaganda.  The lesser papers are simply going out of existence-- or maybe they become meaningless by just simply republishing corporate press releases.  The internet has worked brilliantly as a disruptive force to slice and dice things in a way that the production of content, going every which way, has become untethered from monetary streams.

Unless you have independent resources, monetization and access to monetization is obviously important.  Because there are also controls and levers with respect to monetization on the internet it is another way that content on the internet can be regulated and controlled.  YouTube, owned by Google under its Alphabet umbrella, demonetized The Jimmy Dore Show videos when The Jimmy Dore Show was putting out facts about how reports of chemical attacks attributed to Assad's government in Syria were probably false and designed to draw the Unites States into further conflict there. In retrospect, as opposed to the uniform and unquestioning incendiary reports of the corporate media, it appears clear that Dore, while suffering this kind of censorship, was correct. . . 

. . . This is why the model of donor-supported news production is becoming increasingly critical.  Among other things, speaking in old fashioned terms, it eliminates one of the "filters" that Herman and Chomsky identified in  "Manufacturing Consent" as a hurdle blocking the content reaching the public: Advertising and sponsorship.  The Jimmy Dore Show now supports itself through donor support from the show's fans coming in via Patreon.  Like Democracy Now, the radio show version of the Jimmy Dore Show plays on the Pacifica Network radio stations, including WBAI in New York.

With cable being unreliable, if the internet damps down to throttle a news broadcasting show like Democracy Now, the terra firma that remains to which Democracy Now could return will consist only of publicly owned independent terrestrial radio stations like Pacific Network stations, a fittingly poetic homecoming to its origins.

How firm is that terra firma?  Would Democracy Now continue in such a future and is it assured that WBAI would still be broadcasting in New York, able to provide Democracy Now with a future within its embrace?   As is obvious from the production values when you watch Democracy Now, it is a show with ample resources and very well funded.  In fact, its budget may now dwarf the entire budget of WBAI radio.

It should also be noted that a good number of all of the internet options for watching Democracy Now that were described at the beginning of this article involve mechanisms (accompanied by appeals) by which those watching and listening to Democracy Now can support the program by donating directly to it.  The internet giveth!  At the same time, all of the separate multiple ways the internet furnishes for donating directly to Democracy Now represents ways in which supporting Democracy Now and other shows on Pacfica radio stations like WBAI that also have alternate incarnations on the internet (The Jimmy Dore Show is another example) have become untethered from supporting the terra firma of terrestrial radio.  The internet taketh away!

Stations like WBAI and the other Pacifica network stations rely on listener donations just does.  Thus, in a sense, the stations are almost being asked to compete with shows like Democracy Now for donations.  Much like the untetherings that the internet caused to occur in the newspaper industry, that untethering of the stations from shows that are spread through the internet is weakening the guarantee of terrestrial radio as an alternative and backstop that may be turned to if the increasingly few hands controlling the internet spigot impede further information that threatens existing power structures.

If the information traveling through the internet that is critical of power is further damped down in the future, maybe Democracy Now will still be around because it will continue to broadcasts via terrestrial radio.  Or maybe Democracy Now will adapt and mange to stay around because it will simply broadcast less of the news than it currently does.  Nevertheless, Democracy Now, broadcasting over the internet, might even position itself as being still nominally critical of the government.

Does Democracy Now already pull any of its punches with respect to what it reports? 

Democracy Now covered the issue of Facebook censorship, albeit, somewhat gingerly, in September 2018, when the website ThinkProgress (which is somewhat middle-of-the-road politically despite its name) was peculiarly censored by Facebook for reporting about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's position with respect to overturning Roe v. Wade (yes evidence is Kavanaugh has such instincts).  That September 17, 2018 Democracy Now reporting was just weeks before Facebook’s massive censorship take down of more than 800 pages, but Democracy Now never followed up that ThinkProgess story to report on Facebook’s subsequent big take down.

Facebook censors a story about Brett Kanaugh's Roe v. Wade position-  Are there any other stories that relate to this?:  Only a 2012 story about the effect of media consolidation on journalism?

If you go to the Democracy Now page reporting the censorship of ThinkProgress's reporting of Kavanaugh's Roe v. Wade position, Democracy Now offers up as “related” a soon-to-be-vintage January 12, 2012 story: Ex-FCC Commissioner Michael Copps on Media Consolidation, Broadband Expansion, Threats to Journalism. . . . . Not linked to on their site was a more confusing pre-Facebook-take-down August 1, 2018 Democracy Now story that was even somewhat sympathetic to Facebook. It was about how Facebook was then taking down just a few sites that Facebook said had “coordinated inauthentic behavior” to “undermine democracy.” 

If you'd absorbed that August 1st Democracy Now story beforehand, it probably would not have prepped you to be alarmed when reading the New York Times front page story published in October.

. . .  As we noted, Democracy Now is a good place to get about 85% of your news, not a full 100%. 

PS (8/11/2019): After this article was written and posted, there was this breaking (August 9, 2019) news- “leaked documents show the White House is planning an executive order that would put Ajit Pai in charge of policing free speech online and allow government censorship of the Internet.”