Category: Briefings

The Media’s Horse-race Coverage of the Election as CNN’s Pathetic Harris/Walz Interview Asks Trump/Vance Attack Lines to Avoid the “Liberal Media” Label

We begin with last Thursday’s CNN interview with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz during which Dana Bash only asked four questions that were not Trump/Vance attack lines in a pathetic attempt by the mainstream press not to appear to be the “liberal media”, a bogus charge the Republicans have hoisted to move the goalposts of political discourse to the right. Joining us to discuss how the political press has doubled down on the horse-race coverage of the election, overlooking the threat Trump poses to democracy is James Risen, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author whose investigative reporting has triggered a series of political firestorms. Among his best-selling books are State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration and Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War. He is the Senior National Security Correspondent at The Intercept and a former investigative journalist with the New York Times, his new book is The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy. We discuss his latest article at The Intercept, “Why the Media Won’t Report the Truth About Trump.”

Give a Post-Gaza Israeli/Palestinian Peace a Chance

Then we assess the chances of a two-state solution emerging from the end of the war in Gaza which both Biden and Harris have promised but Netanyahu seems determined to thwart. Joining us is a long-time champion of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, Rabbi Steven Jacobs, who has spent over five decades as an advocate on behalf of social change, spirituality, and civil rights. The founder of the Rabbi Steven B. Jacobs Progressive Faith Foundation, until his recent retirement, he also served as the spiritual leader of Temple Kol Tikvah, a Reform congregation he founded in 1984. Active in the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, he has traveled internationally with the Reverend Jesse Jackson to promote peace, justice, and global understanding in locations such as the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East. He has worked to promote tolerance and cooperation among the African American, Jewish, and Muslim communities of Los Angeles.

The Domestic Threat to Democracy Posed by Trump and Project 2025

Then finally we discuss the domestic threat to democracy posed by Trump and Project 2025 and speak with a specialist on global threats to democracy, Jennifer McCoy, a professor of political science at Georgia State University and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She focuses on political polarization and democratic resilience in the U.S. and around the world and was recently a research scholar at the Democracy Institute at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She is the author, most recently, of Polarizing Polities: A Global Threat to Democracy.