PhilipTheBucket

The news org Axios launched in 2017, just as the first Trump administration began, created by some ex-Politico folks, claiming that they would be “an antidote to this madness” and talking about how “the world needed smarter, more efficient coverage” of important news stories.

The reality is that Axios launders rightwing talking points in ugly short form vignettes that not only hide nuance, but reveal how their version of “neutral, objective” coverage actually means normalizing Donald Trump’s madness.

Two recent examples show how this works in practice. Last week, we wrote about how Tulsi Gabbard was trying to mislead the public into believing President Obama had “faked” Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election.

We went into great detail about how she misrepresented documents she had declassified to imply things they did not say. From the documents, it was entirely clear that (as multiple bipartisan research efforts had determined) Russians had tried to influence the election via social media, but had not been able to hack election infrastructure to change votes. Gabbard conflated the two things, using reports of the failure to attack election infrastructure to pretend it meant that there was no intent to influence the election.

So how did Axios cover this story? By focusing on how MAGA folks played their role in buying into Gabbard’s false narrative, talking about how they were calling for Obama’s arrest for treason.

The entire framing of the article is all about people who are believing the misrepresentations Gabbard made, and it literally takes 25 paragraphs (I counted… twice) before they add in a “reality check” admitting that Gabbard is lying:

Meanwhile, Gabbard’s accusation of Obama-era “treason” hinges on a claim that no serious investigation ever made: that Russia hacked and altered vote tallies in 2016.

I fail to see how this is “smarter, more efficient” coverage when it uses Gabbard’s misleading and dangerous framing for the first 24 paragraphs of the article, before adding in the kinda important fact check down towards the end of the article.

Doing it this way reinforces the false MAGA narrative and framing, and leaves people with the impression that there must be some sort of legitimate reason for the accusations.

But the more damning example came the same day. Two of Axios’ founders, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, published a column claiming that Trump was “winning” in his accomplishments while seeming genuinely perplexed why his approval ratings were at historic lows.

The column opens in a hilariously disconnected-from-reality manner:

President Trump, in terms of raw accomplishments, crushed his first six months in historic ways. Massive tax cuts. Record-low border crossings. Surging tariff revenue. Stunning air strikes in Iran. Modest inflation.

Yet poll after poll suggests most Americans aren’t impressed. In fact, they seem tired of all the winning.

This isn’t just bad reporting—it’s active propaganda dressed up as analysis. Here’s how that same paragraph could easily be rewritten by someone whose brain hadn’t been pickled in a MAGA brainwash stew:

President Trump has failed to do basically anything to make American’s lives better, while focusing almost all of his attention on culture war nonsense that decidedly is making lives worse. Massive tax cuts for the wealthy paid for by slashing Medicaid, sending the military in to our cities to silence protestors, kidnapping students and farmworkers, increasing the cost of most goods through foreign import taxes, breaking his promise to avoid costly military entanglements in the Middle East, and generally destroying American good will throughout the globe.

Trump promised a ton of shit he hasn’t accomplished: lower prices on day one. An end to the war in Ukraine. An end to fighting in Israel/Gaza. Oh, and the release of the Epstein files.

This kind of analysis only makes sense if you’ve completely bought into Trump’s own framing of success, and believe that his culture war conspiracy theory claptrap were actual real issues.

The mass deportations his base celebrates for their performative cruelty frequently target asylum seekers who did, in fact, follow the law, not the “criminals” Fox News obsesses over. The fact that Trump shipped many of them to foreign gulags without any due process seems to have escaped VandeHei’s and Allen’s notice. The tariffs that supposedly brought money into US coffers did so by raising taxes on everyday items—because, contrary to Trump’s claims, American consumers pay those tariffs.

Yes, he cut taxes. But mainly for the extremely wealthy, while stripping Medicaid from those who need it most.

And that doesn’t even touch on how he destroyed things like funding for cancer research, has made public health in the US a joke leading to a revival of measles, how he is pardoning criminals, and much, much more.

This is the Axios formula: adopt Trump/MAGA framing wholesale, present it as “neutral” analysis, then act bewildered when Americans reject policies that a cowed Congress rubber-stamped. They’re grading on a curve with a rubric set by the MAGA faithful.

Judd Legum, over at Popular Information, calls out how Axios has “rebranded conservative ideology as objectivity” and it’s quite true. Legum documents how VandeHei and Allen repeatedly invoke “neutrality” and “objectivity” while pushing transparently MAGA-friendly analysis.

Indeed, VandeHei and Allen have political opinions and express them publicly. VandeHei simply redefines his right-wing ideology as patriotism. “The American miracle rests on untamed democracy, the animal spirits of capitalism, the magic of unrestrained innovation, and the soft power of a vigilant and vibrant free press,” VandeHei wrote in a December 2, 2024, Axios column. “I’m a believer in — and beneficiary of — all four.”

On January 20, 2025, the day Trump was inaugurated for the second time, VandeHei and Allen wrote, “Think of the U.S. government as a once-dominant, lean, high-flying company that grew too big, too bloated, too bureaucratic, too unimaginative.” The piece says Trump has a vision to remake government that “binds Trump with leading innovators.” The pair wrote that an “optimistic scenario” is that the second Trump presidency could “jar lawmakers and the public into realizing how a slow, bloated, bureaucratic government handcuffs and hurts America in the vital race for AI, new energy sources, space and overall growth.” They stated it is “correct” to believe “America’s government is so vast, so complex, so indebted that it makes fast, smart growth exponentially more complicated.”

VandeHei and Allen then outlined a plan for fixing the federal government’s problems — “cut workforce,” “cut costs,” “break stuff,” and “ignore the whiners.” While this is presented as a common-sense approach that a CEO would take, it essentially parrots the plans from the early days of the Trump administration.

Legum further notes that the “Trump is winning” article incredibly only quotes (anonymously, of course) from Trump insiders:

Notably, in the piece, Allen and VandeHei cite conversations with “Trump advisers,” “a longtime Trump aide,” and “Trump aides” concerning Trump’s record over the first six months. There is no mention of views expressed by Trump’s critics or even anyone not working for Trump.

The old “liberal mainstream media” narrative was always mostly bullshit—most mainstream outlets bent over backwards to seem “balanced,” even to the point of platforming the most disingenuous nonsense peddlers. But now we’re seeing the real thing: a media ecosystem where rightwing and MAGA-friendly outlets dominate the conversation.

Fox News dominates cable news by far. Tons of people get their news from blatantly pro-Trump right-wing podcasters. There are tons of openly pro-MAGA news organizations out there. And even the supposed “liberal” mainstream media seems to bend over backwards to normalize Trumpism and MAGA nonsense. The NY Times and the Washington Post go out of their way to de-crazify anything Trump does. ABC and CBS have both paid Trump bribes and promised to be more MAGA-friendly. Same with Facebook and Twitter on the social media side.

Into this landscape steps Axios, insisting it’s the grown-up in the room. When Legum pressed them on their obvious bias, they offered this laughable response:

Axios provides essential clinical reporting drawn from conversations with top leaders and experts. The analysis — never opinion — in these columns reflects that, and we stand by our journalism.

Call it what it is: stenography masquerading as journalism. Taking insider talking points and presenting them as “clinical reporting” isn’t analysis—it’s propaganda with better fonts.

Axios represents everything wrong with how media has responded to Trump: the pretense of objectivity while actively normalizing authoritarianism, the elevation of access over accuracy, and the complete abdication of journalism’s fundamental responsibility to challenge power rather than fluff its ego.

In the end, there’s nothing “neutral” about laundering fascist talking points through slick presentation and insider access. That’s not journalism—it’s complicity.

The New York Times repeated Israel’s baseless claim that Hamas was stealing aid nearly two dozen times before its own sources contradicted that talking point, an Intercept analysis has found, as Palestinian people suffered mass starvation and risked their lives to find food amid Israel’s blockade.

During its near-total blockade on humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, Israel has repeatedly claimed that Hamas steals aid and that restricting it will help the two parties achieve a ceasefire. The U.S. and Israel pointed to that argument in May when they handed aid operations over to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a contested American nonprofit that funnels Gazans to limited aid sites where the Israeli army has repeatedly opened fire on starving civilians. At each turn, the New York Times dutifully printed the official justifications.

Then the Times published an article on Saturday reporting that there was “no proof” that Hamas was stealing aid from the United Nations, citing four anonymous Israeli sources. The story noted that the U.N. aid system, which provided the bulk of the aid to Gaza, was “largely effective,” and there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the U.N., though the unnamed sources claimed that Hamas did steal from smaller organizations.

But in 61 articles related to Gaza’s hunger crisis the Times published since January, 23 included Israel’s accusations that Hamas was stealing aid. Nine of those stories did not include opposing statements refuting Israel’s claim. Twelve articles of the 61 analyzed by The Intercept cited concerns about Hamas diverting aid without an explicit accusation. At the time of publication, the Times had not added a correction or update to these stories to indicate that the claims were false.

None of the articles provided any evidence in support of the claims except for the comments of Israeli officials, who work for a government that has repeatedly spread disinformation, including in its record-breaking fatal attacks on journalists, aid workers, and children.

In a statement to The Intercept, New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said that the paper’s journalists have done “deep reporting on both Israel and Hamas’ actions and tactics during the war, and will continue to report hard and publish facts.”

“The Times has reported deeply, fairly and accurately on the war in Gaza since it began, including the hardships and food shortages faced by Gazans, and when government officials provide claims and accusations, our reporters put them in context,” Stadtlander said.

Even before the Times’s Saturday story, aid groups on the ground in Gaza had repeatedly refuted the Israeli government’s claims of aid theft.

The U.N. agency tasked with distributing aid in Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, has maintained for months that it has received no specific evidence that Hamas or other armed groups were diverting its humanitarian aid in Gaza.

“These claims are used as a pretext to justify the aid distribution system supported by the Israeli authorities and the United States of America (so called GHF), which falls far from abiding to the humanitarian principles and international humanitarian law,” an UNRWA spokesperson told The Intercept in a statement.

[

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Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Head Boasts Success as Palestinians Starve](https://theintercept.com/2025/07/24/gaza-humanitarian-foundation-israel-aid-starvation/)

Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza has now subjected 500,000 people — nearly a quarter of the occupied territory’s population — to famine-like conditions, according to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Alert. The rest of the population is facing emergency levels of hunger, and every child under the age of 5 is at risk of acute malnutrition.

The Israeli government’s blockade and ensuing starvation has killed over 100 Palestinians, UNICEF said. Eighty percent of them are children.

UNRWA says it has thousands of trucks waiting in Jordan and Egypt that could surge aid to Palestinians and prevent fatal hunger. But instead of resuming U.S. funding for UNRWA — which President Joe Biden ended last year — President Donald Trump has opted to support GHF even as Israeli soldiers have killed hundreds of aid-seekers at its food distribution sites since late May.

As the starvation catastrophe began to draw international condemnation, Israel said that it would allow aid airdrops in Gaza — a strategy human rights groups have rebuked as ineffective and dangerous. On Sunday, Al Jazeera reported 11 Palestinians were injured after a pallet fell directly on the tents of displaced people.

Last month, the International Crisis Group published a report titled the “Gaza Starvation Experiment,” which found that while Hamas likely extracts some revenue, audits have shown less than 1 percent of assistance has been lost to theft. Aid officials and Gaza residents told the group that the Abu Shabab gang, armed by Israel, has been the “single most prolific looter” during the war on Gaza. Other reports challenging claims of Hamas diverting aid have come out in recent weeks from USAID, the EU Commission, and Israeli media.

Reuters reported last week that a USAID analysis found that out of 156 reported incidents of theft or loss of U.S.-funded supplies between October 2023 and May 2025, at least 44 were related to Israeli military actions.

Despite the mounting evidence, the Times continued to parrot Israel’s claims, including on July 10, June 26, and June 17 — after the ICG released its report. The Times also published an article on Monday that included statements by Trump claiming that Hamas was stealing aid. The article did not clarify that no evidence had been shown to prove this claim.

Past Intercept analyses and investigations have found that the New York Times and other mainstream outlets have demonstrated a bias against Palestinians.

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Leaked NYT Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” and “Occupied Territory”](https://theintercept.com/2024/04/15/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide-palestine-coverage/)

In April 2024, The Intercept published a report on an internal Times memo that instructed journalists to restrict use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land. The memo also instructed against using the word “Palestine” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians, despite the fact that the United Nations recognizes the areas as refugee camps, and they house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.

A quantitative analysis of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times’s coverage of the first six weeks of the conflict showed a consistent bias against Palestinians, finding that major U.S. newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7. Pro-Palestinian activists have accused major publications of pro-Israel bias and protested at the Times headquarters in Manhattan for its coverage of Gaza. [

Read our complete coverage

Israel’s War on Gaza](https://theintercept.com/collections/israel-palestine/)

The Times and other major mainstream media outlets have often minimized top Israeli officials’ genocidal remarks calling for collective punishment of Palestinians and failed to note that using starvation as a weapon of war is a violation of international law.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned as early as October 11, 2023, that the regime “will continue to tighten the siege until the Hamas threat to Israel and the world is removed.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said a week later that “the only thing that should enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of air force explosives, not a gram of humanitarian aid.”

“No one in the world will allow us to starve two million people, even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said last year. And last week, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said in a radio interview his government “is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” describing Palestinians as indoctrinated Nazis.

“There’s no hunger in Gaza,” Eliyahu said, dismissing reports of starvation as anti-Israel propaganda. “But we don’t need to be concerned with hunger in the Strip. Let the world worry about it.”

The post The New York Times Repeated Israeli Claims of Hamas Stealing Aid Without Evidence appeared first on The Intercept.

For weeks, ICE and DHS have been claiming there’s been an outsized outbreak in violence against ICE officers. The government preferred to use a misleading stat: the percentage. That way it could claim assaults were up 500, 600, 790%(!!!) in successive press releases and Fox News appearances, leading many to believe being an ICE officer was perhaps the most dangerous job in America.

Unbelievably, it was Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin that finally revealed the actual numbers behind the panicky percentage claims. A 690% increase in assaults meant nothing more than this: ICE officers had been “assaulted” 69 more times since the beginning of this year as compared to the same six-month period last year.

Now, there’s even more bullshit to unpack. “Assault” means something else to law enforcement officers who want to claim they’ve been assaulted than it means to them when they’re filling out paperwork for assaults reported by citizens. According to ICE and other law enforcement officers, “assault” means anything from getting handed a beating to simply being inadvertently bumped when “interacting” with regular people while performing their public duties.

That’s exactly what happened in Ontario, California, when a masked officer claiming to be an ICE officer attempted to enter a private area of a private building — namely, the inner rooms of a surgery center. Employees of the surgery center demanded identification and a warrant — something well within their rights. In response, they got refusals and one employee got an ICE forearm to their throat.

Supposedly, there’s an assault in here but all I see is someone instinctively reacting to an assault by an ICE officer — one in which the employee did nothing more than place a hand on the officer’s arm in hopes of dissuading the officer from further assaulting their coworker:

DHS has arrested two medical personnel at a surgical center in California for demanding that the officers trespassing in their building identify themselves & provide a warrant, accusing them of another…. wait for it… ASSAULT. The case shows how DHS lies relentlessly to violate the Constitution

— David Bier (@davidjbier.bsky.social) 2025-07-27T13:55:16.100Z

While the officer was probably salty that the staff managed to separate him from the person he had illegally entered private property to pursue, having someone stand between you and your illegal acts is not engaging in assault. Instead, it’s you — the federal officer — who is both ignoring the constitutional limits on your power as well as refusing to respect the protections extended to the people you actually serve: the general public.

Once this recording began circulating on social media, the Trump administration reacted like it always does: by piling lies on top of lies before scattering some criminal charges on top of its mountain of bullshit. David Bier’s thread on Bluesky unpacks all of it extremely well, but let’s hit some of the high points.

First, there’s the government’s bullshit, which was, of course, delivered by DHS head Kristi Noem’s second-in-command, Tricia McLaughlin:

In a statement to KTLA about Tuesday’s incident at the surgery center, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said:

“ICE officers conducted a targeted enforcement operation to arrest two illegal aliens. Officers in clearly marked ICE bulletproof vests approached the illegal alien targets as they exited a vehicle. One of the illegal aliens, Denis Guillen-Solis who is from Honduras, fled on foot to evade law enforcement. He ended up near the Ontario Advanced Surgical Center where hospital staff assaulted law enforcement and drug the officer and illegal alien into the facility. Then, the staff attempted to obstruct the arrest by locking the door, blocking law enforcement vehicles from moving, and even called the cops claiming there was a ‘kidnapping.’”

First off, it’s not “obstruction” to prevent someone from engaging in an illegal act, even if that person claims to be a federal officer. Even federal officers are not allowed to engage in warrantless searches of private areas not open to the general public.

As for “clearly marked ICE bulletproof vests,” don’t make me choke on my own bitter laughter. Anyone with a couple hundred dollars of equipment can crank out an embroidered patch at home that contains the same letter and then attach it to anything they’ve picked up from the local military surplus outlet. ID cards, badges, and warrants might be just as easy to fake, but that still doesn’t explain why this alleged officer refused to provide any of those things when asked to, as though all that was needed was an embroidered patch and the willingness to violate the Constitution.

There’s even more bullshit in this response, but those are the things that can be immediately gleaned from the officer’s actions, the surgical center employees’ response, and the DHS’s belated attempt to paper over a clearly illegal act one of its employees attempted to carry out.

The government is now pressing assault charges against two of the surgical center employees. That affidavit [PDF] directly contradicts the claims made by the soulless cretin currently employed as the assistant secretary of the DHS.

McLaughlin claimed this was a “targeted enforcement operation” seeking a known criminal. The charging documents say otherwise, as KTLA points out in its follow-up reporting:

According to an affidavit filed in the case, the confrontation began after two immigration officers conducting roving immigration enforcement operations in Ontario followed a truck carrying three adult men. The vehicle pulled into the parking lot of a local surgery center, and two of the men fled on foot when approached by agents.

There it is: ICE was just driving around looking for people who looked foreign and then sprung into action when the officers came across a few Hispanic-looking men. There’s nothing illegal about fleeing a non-consensual stop, but the ICE officer who followed the man into the surgical center apparently thought otherwise.

And that’s where the affidavit begins to fall apart. The government claims “exigent circumstances” (namely “hot pursuit”) completely nullified the Fourth Amendment. But the government is wrong. It doesn’t do that automatically in all cases and it especially doesn’t do it when the only suspected crime isn’t a violent offense. Fleeing from an officer isn’t always probable cause for further pursuit and/or arrest. Neither does looking sorta Mexican while doing it, as a federal court in California forcefully pointed out recently.

Even if you ignore those two factors, you’re left with the suspected “crime” of being in the country illegally, which is actually a civil law violation. And civil law violations don’t justify the abuse of warrant exceptions like “hot pursuit.”

The government probably won’t drop these charges because it’s too invested in pushing the narrative that ICE is beset on all sides by assailants. But it would be the smart thing to do because it’s going to have to explain why these officers chose to ignore the Constitution en route to being “assaulted” by people unwilling to be pushed around by thugs pretending to be interested in anything resembling actual law and order. And for the rest of us, we have another data point indicating that the exponential increase in “assaults” on ICE officers is likely just a whole lot of stuff like this where people are reacting normally to masked officers who choose to behave like rogue agents.

Russia's attempts to spread Kremlin propaganda in occupied areas of Ukraine by replacing home TV satellite dishes with ones that only receive Russian broadcasts, have been met with resistance from local residents, according to reports from the Ukrainian Resistance Center (URC).

Television, mass and social media are key instruments used to spread Russian propaganda and russify residents of temporarily occupied territories.

In just one week, over 1,000 pieces of equipment that enable access to Ukrainian television were taken away, the URC reported on July 21.

"The goal is to completely cleanse the information space," the URC report says, adding Ukraine's "Horynych" TV dishes are being replaced with Russian versions called "Russkiy mir" (Russian world).

The "Russkiy Mir" satellite project was launched in December 2022, aiming to provide "citizens of new territories" with access to Russian television. The project was implemented by Russian President Vladimir Putin's political coalition, All-Russia People's Front.

The project's official website says it was created specifically for Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporozhia oblasts, and Crimea.

Russia occupied Crimea and partially occupied Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts in 2014. After the full-scale war began, Russia also partially occupied the Kherson and Zaporozhia oblasts. Moscow illegally declared the annexation of the four regions in September 2022, despite not controlling them fully.

A Ukrainian police investigator examines debris at the Kharkiv Television Tower after a reported Russian strike on the structure on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine, on April 22, 2024. (Sergey Bobok / AFP via Getty Images)

The "Russkiy Mir" channel package includes 20 Kremlin state  TV channels, 10 regional TV channels from the four occupied oblasts, and 11 "entertainment channels," including ones for children.

On May 7, 2024, the Institute for the Study of War said in a report that "the installation of 'Russkiy Mir' satellites in occupied Ukraine allows the Russian government to directly control what news and media residents are consuming, thereby consolidating control over the information space and platforming Kremlin propaganda as mainstream news."

But residents of the occupied territories have boycotted the replacement by refusing to voluntarily switch to "Russkiy Mir," the URC reported on July 27.

According to the report, the resistance "irritates" the local occupation authorities, and Moscow is dissatisfied with the pace of the project.

The Russian-installed head of occupied Kherson, Volodymyr Saldo, said on June 23 that the Kherson Oblast residents can replace TV equipment for free from July 1 until Nov. 30.

Previously, on Feb. 11, Saldo issued a decree recognizing Ukrainian TV satellites as instruments of "enemy propaganda" and prohibited watching it.

On March 31, Yellow Ribbon resistance movement activists said that residents had been warned of systematic inspections in the occupied part of Kherson Oblast, with fines and forced confiscation imposed on those using satellite dishes capable of receiving Ukrainian broadcasts. Additionally, private homeowners would be required to dismantle any "suspicious" equipment.

Local authorities claimed 25,000 "Russkiy Mir" satellites were installed in Kherson Oblast during 2023 and 2024.

Resistance in Russian-occupied territories is dangerous — anyone deemed to be defying the occupying authorities faces the very real possibility of imprisonment and torture.

During peace negotiations, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on March 12 that Ukraine will not recognize any occupied territories as part of Russia.

As talks proved ineffective, the question of occupation has gradually faded into the background.

Read also: Russia’s new mobilization law yet another sign Kremlin is preparing for war with NATO, analysts say