Approaching the Election

PCIM hosted the 12th Izzy Award ceremony, featuring engaging, incisive, and moving speeches from each winner. Matt Taibbi described how the current media landscape necessitates change from journalists, saying, “No amount of money or fancy credentials are worth it if you can’t say what you want when you need to.”

Lawrence Bartley, Director of The Marshall Project’s “News Inside,” told his story of a 27-year sentence in prison. “Incarcerated people are largely seen as invisible . . . I remember scrounging through old garbage cans to find something to write about,” looking for newspapers prison officers threw away.

Executive Director Carla Minet of Puerto Rico’s Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI, the Center for Investigative Journalism) spoke to the outlet’s commitment to exposing corruption on the island. “From a team with a deep commitment to its profession, we found a place in the media landscape.”

Watch the ceremony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQrcCsQednQ

Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept, resigned from the outlet on Thursday, after its editors refused to publish a piece he wrote this week criticizing Joe Biden. Greenwald encouraged them to publish the piece followed by their own writing to critique his perspectives. “But modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it.”

The piece in question examines available information on Joe Biden’s work in Ukraine and the Biden family’s business in China. It questions the “extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories.”

Greenwald posted news of his resignation on Substack, the subscriber-based platform where he will continue to publish his journalism alongside his “good friend, the great intrepid reporter Matt Taibbi.” Both journalists are recipients of the Izzy Award: Greenwald won the inaugural award in 2009, and Taibbi the 2020 award on Wednesday.

Matt Taibbi responded to the news on his own Substack page, providing a detailed summary of the events leading to Greenwald’s resignation, with insights into the repressive editorial process.

On Wednesday, Big Tech CEOs were grilled in Congress about censorship of conservatives on social media. The hearings overlooked reports that Facebook altered its News Feed algorithm in 2017 to reduce the visibility of left-leaning sites like Mother Jones.

Ari Berman, senior writer at Mother Jones magazine, appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss how Facebook is “deliberately sabotaging” the outlet’s readership. Berman won the ninth annual Izzy Award in 2017, for reporting on voter suppression.

Read PCIM’s roundup of Facebook’s algorithm changes that dramatically affected the readership of Mother Jones and other progressive outlets.

Through discriminatory tactics that go back hundreds of years, white people have clung to disproportionate political power and wealth. Now, as that power is threatened by demographic shifts and backlash against the president, the effort to rule has become more brazen.

In The Center for Public Integrity’s Barriers to the Ballot Box series, the outlet collects stories of voter disenfranchisement. This latest story rounds up age-old tactics used to suppress votes in 2020, including slowing the mail, speeding up a Supreme Court appointment, not counting people of color in the census, not counting ballots, and reducing polling locations near communities of color while expanding locations in white communities.

Immense lines in Iowa and North Carolina due to sparse or closed polling places illustrate widespread and varied instances of suppression, exacerbated by the pandemic.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued decisions allowing Pennsylvania and North Carolina to accept absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day, until November 6. This came as relief to voters and advocates dreading mass invalidation of late ballots, but analysts warn that the possibility remains for ballots arriving after Nov 3 to be tossed by the Supreme Court later.

Common Dreams reports that ballots arriving after 8:00 p.m. on Election Day are to be segregated from ballots that arrive before then. The advice from election advocates and experts: drop off your ballot in person to avoid the mail delays caused by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Find local drop-off sites here.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump sparred over domestic problems of racism, health care, climate change, the economy and the pandemic, and alleged foreign election interference. They did not engage in discussions of foreign policy and the threat of nuclear war, nor did the issues arise during primaries.

Meanwhile, “relations with Russia, China and Iran are the worst they’ve been in decades under the Trump administration. And nuclear war looms more menacing than since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962,” writes Truthout.

It may not have been politically advantageous to bring up nuclear war—but reducing nuclear spending “would go a long way to extending the life expectancy of our species.”

1. Greece-Turkey earthquake – latest: 14 killed as 7.0-magnitude tremor destroys buildings (The Independent)

2. The Pandemic Is in Uncharted Territory (The Atlantic)

3. More People Have Now Voted Early In Texas Than In All Of 2016 (HuffPost)

4. Breonna Taylor: Police officer sues shot black woman’s boyfriend (BBC)

5. Your absentee ballot never showed up. Now what? (The Guardian)