Black MPs and groups were ‘shut out’ of Keir Starmer’s ‘race equality’ launch last night. Several had expected to attend the event in Tottenham, but were not given the new location after Starmer and Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy cancelled the original meeting to avoid facing protesters eager to challenge them over their support for Israel’s war crimes.

Black paper The Voice has reported that:

Black MPs, community media and leading campaign groups were not invited, leading to accusations from party members we spoke to that the Labour party intentionally excluded them in a bid to censor opportunities to grill party leader Keir Starmer and equalities secretary Anneliese Dodds preventing any real scrutiny of the Race Equality Act plans which were launched back in 2020.

This appears to have left Doreen Lawrence, a Starmer supporter, as essentially the only Black attendee – and ensured that no Black MPs or activists who might have challenged Starmer and his equalities spokeswomen Anneliese Dodds about the lack of substance in their ‘plan’.

Diane Abbott, Britain’s first Black woman MP, dismissed Labour’s plan as ‘window dressing’:

The proposed Race Equality Act is just window dressing. The foremost Black media organisation, The Voice, was not invited to the launch and most Black MPs were excluded. This reveals the reality of where Keir Starmer’s Labour party really stands on fighting anti-Black racism.

Even the paper-thin plan is unlikely ever to come to fruition under habitual promise-shredder Keir Starmer.

Labour’s issues with Black people and other racialised groups under Keir Starmer go back to the beginning of his tenure, when he named an all-white ‘diversity panel’ and excluded Labour’s most senior ethnic minority staffer. Since then, the party has been embroiled in rampant Islamophobia, attacks on Black women MPs and other senior elected figures, wholesale deselection of Black councillors and blocking of Black candidates in areas with large Black communities and more, as well as disgraceful racism toward Gypsy Roma people and naming an entirely male, entirely white panel to select local authority election candidates.

This report is true. I can confirm that Black journalists were excluded too. https://t.co/G4BUu9hXXA

— Nadine White. (@Nadine_Writes) February 6, 2024

The party has also done nothing to root out the embedded racism exposed by the Forde Report, which Starmer reluctantly commissioned under pressure, then ignored when he could no longer delay its publication.

Read the full story on The Voice here.

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Staff threatened to strike over management's decision

Originally published on Global Voices

Antoinette Lattouf – Screenshot: TedX Talks YouTube video ‘Reverse Discrimination? It doesn't exist…but ‘tokenism’ does’ October 2022. Fair use.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has caused a furore down under after firing Lebanese Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf  on December 20, 2023 for sharing a post on the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Her employment as a short-term radio host was abruptly ended for allegedly breaching social media policy by reposting a Human Rights Watch (HRW) video on Instagram.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Human Rights Watch (@humanrightswatch)

Lattouf added the comment: “HRW reporting starvation as a tool of war.” The ABC justified their decision, saying that “she failed or refused to comply with directions that she not post on social media about matters of controversy.” The ABC itself covered the HRW claim on TV News.

The corporation is a government-funded national broadcaster, which has independence within a legislated charter. Its board and chair are appointed by the government.

Subsequently, ABC journalist Nour Haydar resigned over the broadcaster’s coverage of the Gaza conflict and treatment of culturally diverse staff. She posted on X (formerly Twitter):

Does this mean all ABC employees can’t share info from @hrw?

What if it’s about the treatment of Uyghurs in China or protestors in Iran?

Does this rule exist exclusively for findings that are critical of Israel?

Did this directive apply only to @antoinette_news and why? https://t.co/vqsb3ocW82

— Nour Haydar (@NourHaydar) January 16, 2024

Haydar also has Lebanese heritage.

Mastodon user MilennialZero posed a question that was concerning many people on social media:



Artemis went further in their response:

Journalists at the ABC threatened to take strike action. Their union, the MEAA (Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance) has given Lattouf strong backing:

The decision to sack Antoinette Lattouf from her role as an ABC radio presenter over sharing a social media post from a reputable human rights organisation is incredibly disturbing. Read the full statement: https://t.co/B1IAkQkl3W #MEAAmedia pic.twitter.com/a2Xt7wyft3

— MEAA (@withMEAA) December 21, 2023

There were accusations that the ABC management was influenced by a campaign by pro-Israel lobbyists via a WhatsApp group called Lawyers for Israel.

Antoinette has taken an unlawful termination case to the Fair Work Commission. However, mediation talks between Lattouf and the ABC have failed to resolve the issue. Lattouf posted a video response on X. She not only raised the question of free speech but said that her dismissal involved racism:

Some words following my Fair Work Commission conciliation with the ABC today.
This is such an important case because it is not just about me.#NoFearNoFavour pic.twitter.com/gDqlH89CkI

— Antoinette Lattouf (@antoinette_news) January 18, 2024

Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism, canvassed some of the issues at The Conversation:

One is the issue of how to deal with journalistic staff posting on social media about issues in the news. Another is whether it has the backbone to protect its journalists and presenters from external attack. A third is whether the organisation is culturally capable of respecting and supporting staff from diverse backgrounds.

Veteran Australian journalist and TV news presenter Mary Kostakidis spoke out in the strongest terms on public policy website Pearls and Irritations:

The Lattouf story shows that the same level of white colonial supremacist attitudes that have forged the bond of western leaders on the Middle East issue permeates the leadership of public broadcasting.

… A one sided narrative in the media cultivates ignorance in the public and enables our leaders to maintain unquestioned entrenched support for Israel, not only with words but with supplies and intelligence, and possibly with armed forces should they see fit to do so. Attempts to interfere and prevent the interrogation of our foreign policy are anti democratic.

The ABC managing director, David Anderson sent an email to all staff, denying Lattouf's claims and rejecting any influence by external pressure.

At the Fair Work Commission mediation, the ABC denied that race or political opinion were part of their decision to terminate her contract.

There is a GoFundMe fundraiser for her legal fees, plus a couple of online petitions calling on ABC to rehire Lattouf.

In the latest twist, the ABC is now claiming that it did not sack Lattouf, according to a Guardian report:

In its submission, the ABC wrote it decided “not to require” Lattouf to perform the last two of her five shifts as a casual presenter of Sydney’s Mornings because she had “failed or refused to comply with directions that she not post on social media about matters of controversy during the short period she was presenting”.

On X, Lattouf mocked what she called the use of a euphemism:

“If I wasn’t sacked what was it? I’m keen to hear all the creative euphemisms that will be used to try and explain this backflip to me, ABC staff and Australians who are very concerned about their public broadcaster. Was I unshackled? Liberated? Untied?”

https://t.co/0lquXJBtw8

— Antoinette Lattouf (@antoinette_news) January 22, 2024

A meeting of ABC journalists overwhelmingly passed a motion of no confidence in Managing Director David Anderson. The resolution included:

Winning staff and public confidence back will require senior management:

1. Backing journalism without fear or favour.
2. Working collaboratively with unions to build a culturally informed process for supporting staff who face criticism and attack.
3. Take urgent action on the lack of security and inequality that journalists of colour face.
4. Working with unions to develop a clearer and fairer social media policy.
5. Upholding a transparent complaints process, in which journalists who are subject to complaints are informed and supported.

According to Mediaweek, ABC Global Affairs Editor John Lyons spoke forcefully in favor of the motion. Lyons has been reporting from the Middle East on the Gaza conflict for the ABC.

David Anderson has agreed to meet with staff in the coming weeks to discuss their concerns.

Meanwhile, Pedestrian TV has reported claims of another coordinated lobbying campaign against Lattouf on WhatsApp group J.E.W.I.S.H. Australian creatives and academics. Australian researcher and journalist Claire Connelly posted:

‘Screenshots show a coordinated letter campaign that encouraged the group’s 628 members to complain to Buttrose, ABC Managing Director David Anderson and Federal Communications Minister Michelle Rowland over the ABC’s hiring of Lattouf.’ pic.twitter.com/hSj831HGKQ

— Claire Connelly (@_ClaireConnelly) January 22, 2024

An emergency ABC board meeting on January 23, passed a unanimous vote of confidence in the managing director.

The dispute is ongoing for now. In the meantime, the satirical website The Shovel has a lighthearted take:

The ABC says it is simply adhering to its charter by ending journalist Antoinette Lattouf’s employment, but also not sacking her.

“It is incumbent on us to provide both sides of the story,” an ABC spokesperson said. “So while some may say Ms Lattouf has been fired, others would say she has been freed up to pursue other opportunities. Some will say she has been let go, others will say has been de-hired. All of those views deserve to be heard.

Written by Kevin Rennie

Download: PDF | EPUB

In their book Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that the mainstream media functions largely as a propaganda arm for the state. When the war drum beats, the corporate media tows the government’s line, censoring facts that don’t fit the official narrative.

Outside of war, media bias is typically less overt. But to the careful observer, it can still be discerned. In this case, our careful observer is Canadian oil critic Regan Boychuk.

Boychuk lives in Calgary — a prairie city that is famous for two things. Calgary hosts the world’s largest rodeo. And it is the corporate heart of the Canadian oil business. Calgary … home to cowboys and crude-oil CEOs.

As you might guess, our story of media censorship is not about cowboys. Calgary’s main newspaper, the Herald, is staunchly pro-oil. And that means its editorial pages are filled with oilpatch jingoism. However, the rest of the paper is an archetype of neutral reporting.

Just kidding.

Unsurprisingly, the Herald’s pro-oil stance shapes the content that appears in the paper. This post takes a quantitative look at the editorial ‘curation’.

Most of the heavy lifting has been done by Boychuk, who had the brilliant idea to track the reporting of environmental journalist Mike De Souza. Between November 2010 and July 2013, De Souza wrote a series of articles documenting scandals related to the Canadian oilpatch, and its staunch defender, the Harper government.

At the time, De Souza was working for Postmedia, a news conglomerate that operated a wire service for its many subsidiaries. So when De Souza’s pieces were published, they were delivered to local papers like the Ottawa Citizen, the Edmonton Journal, and the Calgary Herald.

Here’s the catch. Although owned by the same conglomerate, these local papers had leeway to edit (or shelve) their wire-service articles. The result, Boychuk realized, was a controlled setting to analyze media censorship. Earlier this year, Boychuk published his findings in a piece called ‘Proximity to Power: The oilpatch & Alberta’s major dailies’.

My contribution here is mostly visual. I’ve taken Boychuk’s investigation and translated it into charts. The results largely speak for themselves. As De Souza’s articles approached the center of Canadian oil-and-gas power in Calgary, they were increasingly gutted, and their message changed. It’s a fascinating case study of how business interests shape the news.

The geography (and geology) of Canadian oil-industry power

This post is mostly about the myopia of human bickering. But since that’s a depressing topic, let’s start with something more majestic. Let’s frame the ideological landscape of the Canadian oilpatch by looking at the big picture of fossil fuels.

***

Long before humans existed, life on Earth was doing chemical magic, taking energy from the sun and converting it into biomass. In the ancient seas, dead organisms fell to the seabed where they slowly accumulated. Over the eons, the Earth ground and compressed this seafloor biomass until its chemistry changed into the hydrocarbons we call ‘oil’.

In many regions, this oil remained locked under the sea. But in other places, moving continents and changing climates pushed the seabed above water, where it awaited discovery by a scrappy group of primates.

The North American plains are one of these above-ground-waiting-to-be-discovered places.

One hundred million years ago, though, the great plains were not ‘plains’ at all. They were a sea that ran the length of today’s North America, connecting the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. On the seabed, biology and geology did their thing, slowly forming an immense deposit of oil. When the poles later froze and sea levels sank, the whole area rose above land, awaiting primate infestation.

***

It’s here that we return to human myopia. Roughly ten thousand years ago, the great plains were discovered by indigenous peoples. Much later, Europeans conquered the territory, setting up a nation-state called ‘Canada’. In the 20th century, Canadians began to exploit the fossil fuels underfoot, drilling hundreds of thousands of oil wells, building teeming oil-driven cities, and, of course, squabbling about the business of exploiting oil.

Before we focus on this fossil-fuel bickering, though, let’s connect the big picture of geology and geography to the Canadian ideological landscape. Due to quirks of geology, oil formed in the west of North America. But due to quirks of human history, Europeans conquered the continent from the east. As a consequence, eastern centers of power — cities like Toronto and Ottawa — were established long before western oil was discovered. And so these cities never became dominated by the oil business.

The same was not true for the western cities of Edmonton and Calgary. At the turn of the 20th century, both places were rural backwaters — settlements with a few thousand people. But the discovery of oil changed that. By the late 20th century, Edmonton had grown into a sprawling industrial hub for the Canadian oilpatch. And Calgary became the oil business’ corporate epicenter, with a downtown brimming with oil-company headquarters. In short, the politics of both cities became dominated by the oil business.

Pulling together this interplay of geology and geography, Figure 1 shows the big picture of Canadian oilpatch myopia. In Canada’s east sit the cities of Toronto and Ottawa — centers of corporate and government power with no oil to their name. In the west sit Edmonton and Calgary — cities that are geographically in the thick of the Canadian oilpatch, and ideologically under its spell.

Figure 1: The big picture of Canadian oilpatch myopia. Canada’s oil reserves formed millions of years ago under an ancient sea that eventually became North America’s great plains. The result is that today, the western cities of Edmonton and Calgary lie in the thick of the oilpatch, and are ideologically under its spell. Meanwhile, Europeans conquered North American from the east, long before oil was discovered. So that’s where the centers of corporate and government power are located — in Toronto and Ottawa, respectively. (Side note: this map plots data for over 700,000 oil wells, with depth shown in color. Zoom in for a closer view of the individual wells.) [Sources and methods]

Looking at this map of Canada, keep the geography in mind as we turn to the ideologically charged business of publishing the news. We’ll watch Mike De Souza’s environmental reporting get sliced and diced as it leaves Postmedia (headquartered in Toronto) and journeys to papers in Ottawa, Edmonton and Calgary.

Of course, it’s conceivable that our three papers — the Ottawa Citizen, the Edmonton Journal, and the Calgary Herald — could treat De Souza’s work with an equal hand. But as you’ll see, that’s not what happened.

Environmental reporting during the Harper years

To set the stage for De Souza’s journalism, let’s wind the clock back to 2006. In Canada, it was a year of jarring political change — the moment when neocon politician Stephen Harper became Prime Minister.1 It’s not an exaggeration to say that Harper — a former employee of Imperial Oil and resident of Calgary — ran the country for the benefit of oil companies. As you’d expect, a string of controversies ensued. And De Souza was there to document the political flames, publishing a string of exposés.

In 2014, De Souza left Postmedia, prompting environmental magazine The Narwhal to write a retrospective ranking his twenty most important pieces. Seeing the opportunity to study censorship, muckraking investigator Regan Boychuk took these twenty pieces and tracked down how (or if) they’d been published by the Ottawa Citizen, the Edmonton Journal, and the Calgary Herald.

In ‘Proximity to Power’, Boychuk conducted an article-by-article analysis of the censorship. In this post, we’ll leave the specifics of De Souza’s articles behind. Instead, we’ll take a bird’s-eye view of how his reporting was censored as it approached the heart of the Canadian oil business.

Saving space? … Or saving face?

Every day, newspaper editors face a dilemma: far more stories are written than can possibly be published. The result is a kind of constant ‘editorial churn’ in which numerous worthy stories are axed.

Turning to Mike De Souza’s environmental reporting, editorial churn means that for banal, space-saving reasons, some of his stories will inevitably get cut as they journey from paper to paper. But amidst this churn, there could also be politically motivated censorship. So how can we separate this censorship from the non-political churn?

Regan Boychuk has devised a simple solution: we see if the ‘churn’ has a geographic pattern. We watch a sample of De Souza’s reporting leave Postmedia, and then observe how the articles get cut as they travel across the country. When we carry out this exercise, we find that the editorial ‘churn’ has a conspicuous direction.

Figure 2 shows the pattern. As we approach the heart of oil-and-gas power in Calgary, newspapers mysteriously run out of space for De Souza’s reporting. Of the 20 De Souza articles that left Postmedia, the Ottawa Citizen was able to publish 14, the Edmonton Journal had room for 12, while the Calgary Herald had space for only 11. Funny. When the Herald ‘saves space’, it looks a lot like saving the oil business’ face.

Figure 2: Saving space or save face? A geographic pattern to newspapers’ ‘editorial churn’. This figure tracks twenty Mike De Souza articles as they leave Postmedia and travel to subsidiary papers in Ottawa, Edmonton, and Calgary. Curiously, papers closer to the heart of oil-and-gas power seem to have less space for De Souza’s environmental journalism. [Sources and methods]

Diving shallow

Before we lay charges of ‘censorship’, we should consider some non-incendiary explanations for the pattern in Figure 2.

Here’s a possibility: maybe the Herald opted for depth over breadth. In other words, the Herald might have published fewer of De Souza’s articles because it was saving space for long-form content. If so, then counting words (instead of articles) should remove our geographic trend.

Except that it doesn’t.

Figure 3 shows the pattern. When we count the number of De Souza words published, we again find that the editorial churn has a geographic direction. As we journey to the corporate epicenter of the Canadian oilpatch, newspapers spill less and less ink publishing De Souza’s work.

Figure 3: Diving shallow — a curious case of declining De Souza word counts. As De Souza’s twenty articles travel from Postmedia into the oilpatch (headquartered in Calgary) the total published wordcount declines. [Sources and methods]

Back-page news

Although the case for ‘objectivity’ looks bleak, let’s continue to hand the Herald olive branches. When it comes to De Souza’s work, maybe the Herald is substituting prominence for quantity — making a splash by publishing a few pieces at the front of the paper.

Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be true. Not only did the Herald print fewer De Souza articles, it tended to bury these pieces at the back of the paper. Figure 4 runs the numbers.

Looking at the evidence, the contrast between the Citizen and the Herald is stark. In the Citizen, most of De Souza’s pieces were published in the first four pages of the paper. But in the Herald, none of De Souza’s pieces graced the first four pages, and several were placed deep within the paper. In short, if the Herald editors aren’t biased against De Souza’s environmental reporting, they have a funny way of showing it.

Figure 4: Back-page news — the published location of De Souza’s articles. For each newspaper, the ‘violins’ show the distribution of the published location of De Souza’s articles. Black points show the location of individual articles. As we move from the Citizen to the Herald, De Souza’s reporting gets pushed to the back of the paper. [Sources and methods]

Headlines hacked

Forging ahead, perhaps there’s a more creative way to show that the Herald really cares about De Souza’s journalism. Maybe the proof lurks within its headlines.

On that front, let’s turn to Figure 5. Here, each word cloud shows the top dozen (or so) words that appear in the published headlines of De Souza’s articles. If the Herald is trying to preserve De Souza’s message, it has an odd way of showing it. The Herald’s headline vocabulary seems palpably different than the source material from Postmedia.

Figure 5: Hacking De Souza’s headlines. Each word cloud shows the dozen (or so) most-used words in the published headlines of De Souza’s articles. Font size indicates word frequency. [Sources and methods]

Let’s put some numbers to this game of headline hackery. We’ll start with the ten most frequent words used in De Souza’s Postmedia headlines. Then we’ll track the frequency of these words as our headlines journey across the country.

Figure 6 shows the results, which remind me of a bad game of telephone. As De Souza’s headlines move from the Citizen to the Journal to the Herald, the original message gets progressively lost.

Figure 6: A game of De Souza telephone? Tracking headline vocabulary across newspapers. This figure tracks the frequency of the ten words shown in the grey panel. (These words are the most frequent vocabulary in De Souza’s Postmedia headlines.) As we journey to the center of oil-and-gas power in Calgary, these headline words gradually disappear — like a game of telephone gone wrong. [Sources and methods]

Content, creatively curated

So far, the Herald’s editorial churn looks a lot like censorship. But let’s not give up. Perhaps the key to the Herald’s lack of De Souza bias lies in the content of its published articles.

Speaking of content, there’s no substitute for actually reading the different versions of De Souza’s articles and observing how the text changes. If this close reading interests you, head over to ‘The De Souza Files’, where you can browse annotated versions of each published De Souza article.

Here, though, I’m going to skip the close reading and instead, count words. In what follows, I use word frequency to measure how the content of De Souza’s writing varies across papers. The patterns are … not subtle.

Communication clawbacks

Looking at our De Souza content, let’s start with words that describe communication. For some reason, the frequency of these words declines precipitously as we journey into the Canadian oilpatch. Figure 7 shows the pattern.

Figure 7: Communication clawbacks. As we move from Postmedia to the Herald, communication words become less frequent in the published versions of De Souza’s articles. [Sources and methods]

So why is the Herald cutting communication content? Here’s my guess. These communication words are associated with the nuts and bolts of good investigative journalism — the part where a journalist describes what people say. If you happen to gut this investigative reporting, a plausible side effect is that you gut the language of communication. In short, the pattern in Figure 7 smells of biased editing.

Glossing over government

Next, let’s look at vocabulary associated with government. Figure 8 shows how this vocabulary varies across the different versions of De Souza’s articles. After a modest surge in the Ottawa Citizen, government language collapses as we head into the oilpatch.

Figure 8: Glossing over government. As we move from Postmedia to the Herald, government words become less frequent in the published versions of De Souza’s articles. [Sources and methods]

Given that the Citizen is published in the national capital, it’s understandable that it would have a governmental emphasis. But what’s with the Journal and the Herald? Why would they gut governmental language?

To understand the pattern, recall that our De Souza articles documented a series of scandals involving the Harper government — a regime that was staunchly pro oil. Now, if you happened to publish a pro-Harper, pro-oil newspaper, you might want to dampen news about government scandals. And if you carried out this dampening, you might end up cutting lots of government vocabulary, giving rise to a pattern much like Figure 7.

Hmm … there’s that censorship smell again.

Indigenous exclusion

Speaking of the aroma of censorship, let’s look at Figure 9. Here, I’ve plotted the frequency of words referring to indigenous peoples. For some reason, in the Herald versions of our De Souza articles, this indigenous vocabulary collapses.

Figure 9: Indigenous exclusion. As we move from Postmedia to the Herald, indigenous words become less frequent in the published versions of De Souza’s articles. [Sources and methods]

To understand this pattern of indigenous extirpation, it helps to understand the relationship that indigenous peoples have with big oil.

Going back a century, indigenous peoples signed a series of treaties with the Canadian government — treaties that they believed would preserve indigenous land. But by ‘treaty’, the Canadian government mostly meant ‘piece of paper that we will honor until we discover natural resources on you land.’ When the resource boom started, the (hidden) understanding was that different pieces of paper took precedence — the legal documents that leased indigenous lands for corporate exploitation.

Fortunately, the Canadian government has since embarked on a mission of ‘truth and reconciliation’. So there’s no need to worry about the on-going exploitation of indigenous lands, or the censorship of indigenous issues.

What’s that you say? Something about the ‘oilsands’? Well that’s uncomfortable. Yes, there does seem to be a huge land rush to secure exploitation rights to the oilsands. And this massive resource trove does seem to cover a significant swath of treaty land, as Figure 10 illustrates. But I’m sure that oil companies have a harmonious relationship with indigenous groups, with no need for corporate censorship.

Figure 10: A fossil-fuel land rush — oilsands lease agreements on treaty lands. The colored regions show the Alberta territory cover by historic First Nations treaties, signed with the federal government during the late 19th and early 20th century. The black regions indicate land agreements for oilsands extraction, made with the Alberta provincial government. [Sources and methods]

What’s that you say? Indigenous groups have been taking provincial governments to court, challenging oilsands lease agreements … and winning? Well, that does look bad. But I’m sure oil companies are playing fair.

True, this ‘fair play’ sometimes has the air of one-sidedness. For example, it seems that historically, when the Alberta government consulted indigenous groups about oilsands exploitation, it did so on a project-by-project basis. And it seems that this tunnel-vision had the effect of downplaying cumulative impacts, much to the chagrin of First Nations communities.

In this light, it does seem that a pro-oil, pro-corporate paper would have compelling reasons to censor indigenous issues from the reporting of an environmental journalist. So again, the Herald’s behavior has the scent of censorship.

Removing resistance

Continuing with our censorship sniff test, it seems that when the Herald published De Souza’s work, it rescinded words describing resistance. Figure 11 shows the pattern.

Now admittedly, this evidence doesn’t look good. At face value, it seems like the Herald is running a PR machine — a machine that guts language describing anti-oil resistance. Alternatively, the Herald was just chronically short on space, and these resistance words were by chance, the first to go.

Figure 11: Removing resistance. In the Herald versions of De Souza’s articles, words describing ‘resistance’ are noticeably less frequent than in the original pieces. [Sources and methods]

Glorifying growth-speak

So far, we’ve quantified the Herald’s tendency to cut certain themes from De Souza’s writing. While the direct effect of this cutting is to de-emphasize what was gutted, the indirect effect is to emphasize what remains. And what remains, it turns out, is growth-speak.

This is my term for words like ‘income’, ‘jobs’, and ‘profit’ — vocabulary that gets wielded whenever someone wants to justify ecological harm in the name of economic growth. In De Souza’s reporting, growth-speak appears as he seeks comments from various government and industry representatives.

As we head into the oilpatch, hefty chunks of De Souza’s reporting get cut. But for some reason, the language of growth-speak avoids the knife. The result is the trend in Figure 12 — an magical rise of growth-speak on the road to Calgary. It’s as if the Herald edited De Souza’s reporting in a way that emphasized oil-business revenue. Now why would a pro-oil paper, located at the corporate heart of the oipatch, do a thing like that?

Figure 12: Glorifying growth-speak. As we move from Postmedia to the Herald, business growth-speak becomes more frequent in the published versions of De Souza’s articles. [Sources and methods]

Oil-business consent

Looking at the weight of evidence, we get the clear impression that Mike De Souza’s environmental journalism didn’t get a fair shake. As his pieces made the journey into oil country, they were curated in a rather conspicuous way.

Numerous articles were cut. And the ones that did get published were pushed to the back of the paper. Headlines were changed. Text was gutted, de-emphasizing themes of communication, government, indigeneity, and resistance. Meanwhile, as if by magic, the language of growth-speak got emphasized.

In sum, the editorial evidence reeks of censorship.

I doubt that Herman and Chomsky would be surprised. In Manufacturing Consent, they note that since the corporate media is funded by ads, it is beholden to the interests of business.

That said, business capture doesn’t mean that all corporate journalism is heavily censored. Far from it. Topics that offend a niche set of businesses are fair game, so long as that niche is a marginal advertising client. But when that niche becomes the dominant player — like the oil business is in Calgary — the demands of censorship set in.

Thus we get the Calgary Herald’s blatant gutting of Mike De Souza’s environmental reporting. It’s disturbing behavior … if you think that newspapers have a duty to deliver inconvenient truths. But while this duty may be part of newspapers’ journalistic motto, it’s not part of their business model. So in a business sense, the Herald was just doing its job — making sure that journalism didn’t interfere with the more important business of selling oil.

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Sources and methods

The De Souza Files

For the interested reader, I’ve made a webpage (below) where you can browse the published versions of De Souza’s articles.

https://sciencedesk.economicsfromthetopdown.com/data/2023/desouza/home.html

Article position

Here’s how I quantify the page number of De Souza’s articles. In the simple case that the article is published in the A section, the page number is simply the section page number (i.e. A7 = page 7). This covers all but two cases — both of which are in the Herald.

The Herald saw fit to bury two De Souza articles in the D section. To quantify the position of these articles, I used ProQuest data to figure out how many pages were in the A, B and C sections of the relevant Herald issue. Then I summed this page count and added it to the section page number in the D section.

Map data

• Shape files for Canada (Figure 1) and Alberta (Figure 10) are from Statistics Canada and can be downloaded here.
• Shape files for the geological regions of Canada (Figure 1) are from Natural Resources Canada, and can be download here.
• Shape files for Alberta oil wells (Figure 1) are from the Alberta Energy Regulator, and are available here. I used depth and location data for ‘bottom holes’.
• Data for BC oil wells (Figure 1) is from the BC Energy Regulator (formerly the BC Oil and Gas Commission). A list of available data lives here. I used the following datasets:
  • Drilling Data for All Wells in BC [BCOGC-41984]
  • Directional Survey Data [BCOGC-2354]
• Data for Saskatchewan oil wells (Figure 1) is from the Government of Saskatchewan, and can be downloaded here.
• Data for Manitoba oil wells (Figure 1) is from the Government of Manitoba and is available here.
• For oil wells in the Northwest Territories (Figure 1), I couldn’t find data about actual wells. As a substitute, I used data for oil-and-gas rights (i.e. well leases). The data is available here.

Note: In Manitoba and the Northwest territories, I couldn’t find data for oil-well depth. So I assumed a generic depth of 1 km.

• Shape files for First Nations Treaties (Figure 10) are from Global Forest Watch, and can be download here.
• Shape files for oilsands leases are from the Alberta Energy Regulator, and can be downloaded here.

Notes

1. Harper’s ascent was jarring in much the same way as the election of George Bush south of the border. It’s not like the previous governments — the Clinton administration in the US and the Chrétien regime in Canada — were progressive. They weren’t. But they hid their neoliberal zeal below banal centrist rhetoric. Not so with Bush or Harper, who governed with neocon bravado.︎

Further reading

Achbar, M., & Wintonick, P. (1992). Manufacturing consent: Noam Chomsky and the media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = Li2m3rvsO0I

Boychuk, R. (2023). Proximity to power: The oilpatch & Alberta’s major dailies. Capital as Power. https://capitalaspower.com/2023/01/proximity-to-power-the-oilpatch-albertas-major-dailies/

Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Pantheon Books.

Linnitt, C. (2014). Mike De Souza’s 20 most important articles for Postmedia. The Narwhal. https://thenarwhal.ca/mike-de-souza-s-20-most-important-articles-postmedia/

The post Massaging the Message: How Oilpatch Newspapers Censor the News appeared first on Economics from the Top Down.

Coinbase, the U.S.'s largest crypto exchange, is openly processing Ethereum transactions involving Tornado Cash, a piece of blockchain infrastructure that was sanctioned by the U.S. government last year for providing mixing services to North Korea. 

Over the last two weeks Coinbase has validated 686 Tornado-linked transactions, according to Tornado Warnings. I've screenshotted the table below:

This table shows how many blocks each validator has proposed that includes a transaction that has interacted (either depositing or withdrawing)
with Tornado Cash contracts in
all denominations, or with TORN tokens. Source: Tornado Warnings by Toni Wahrstätter

This is awkward for everyone involved.

First, it's embarrassing for the agency that administers U.S. sanctions, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC. OFAC clearly states that U.S. based persons are not to transact with sanctioned entities unless they have a license. Yet here is America's largest crypto exchange interacting with a sanctioned entity, Tornado Cash, without a license.

OFAC can look away and pretend that nothing unusual is happening, which is pretty much what it has done so far. But since these financial interactions are clearly displayed on the blockchain, everyone can see the infraction occurring. Eventually, OFAC will have to confront the problem and make some tough decisions, a few of which may end up damaging companies like Coinbase and the Ethereum network.

The whole affair is also awkward for the crypto industry. After a 2022 in which much of the ecosystem went bankrupt or succumbed to fraud, crypto currently finds itself in the damaging crosshairs of the culture war and the pervasive threat of being banned. It is desperate for social license, yet here is crypto's leading company choosing to operate in contravention of one of the key pillars of U.S. national defence.

Meanwhile, Coinbase's main U.S. competitor, Kraken, has taken a very different approach to dealing with Tornado Cash. As the table above shows, Kraken has processed zero Tornado Cash transactions over the last two weeks compared to Coinbase's 686. These diverging approaches to handling sanctioned transactions only highlight the awkward nature of crypto's "compliance" with sanctions law.

Before I dive deeper, we need to fill in the basics. For folks who are confused about crypto, what follows is a quick explanation why Coinbase is interacting with Tornado Cash, whereas Kraken isn't.

What is validation?

To begin with, Coinbase and Kraken operate in many different businesses. Their most well known business line is to provide a trading venue where people can deposit funds in order to buy and sell crypto tokens.

I suspect that both companies are being very careful to ensure that their trading venues avoid any dealings with Tornado Cash. If someone were to try to deposit Tornado-linked funds to Coinbase's exchange, for instance, I'm sure Coinbase would quickly freeze those transactions, which is precisely what OFAC obliges it to do. Crypto trading venues have gotten in trouble before for dealing with sanctioned entities: last year Kraken was fined by OFAC for processing 826 transactions on behalf of Iranian individuals.

But the issue here isn't these companies' trading platforms. Coinbase's interactions with Tornado Cash are occurring in an adjacent line of business. Let's take a look at how Coinbase and Kraken's validation services business operate.

Say that Sunil lives in India and wants to make a transaction on the Ethereum network, perhaps a deposit of some ether to Tornado Cash. He begins by inputting the instructions into his Metamask wallet. This order gets broadcast to the Ethereum network for validation, along with a small fee, or tip. A validator is responsible for taking big batches of uncompleted transactions, one of which is Sunil's Tornado Cash deposit , and proposing them in the form of "blocks" to the Ethereum network for confirmation. As a reward, the validator collect the tips left by transactors.

The biggest validators are the ones that own large amounts of ether, the Ethereum network's native token. Since Kraken and Coinbase have millions of customers who hold ether on their platforms, they have become two of the most important providers of Ethereum validation services. Coinbase accounts for 14% of global validation while Kraken stands at 3%, according to the Ethereum Staking dashboard. So even though Sunil is not actually depositing any crypto to Coinbase's trading venue, he may end up interfacing with Coinbase via its block proposal and validation business.  

Validators can choose what transactions to include in their blocks. This explains the difference between the two exchanges. Whereas Kraken chooses to exclude transactions like Sunil's Tornado Cash deposit, Coinbase includes all transactions linked to Tornado Cash in the blocks that it proposes, in the process earning transaction fees linked to Tornado Cash.

To sum up, Coinbase operates its trading venue in a way that complies with OFAC regulations, but it doesn't run its validation service in the same manner, whereas Kraken does. Next, we need to fill in another important part of the story. What does OFAC do?

OFAC around and find out

For folks who don't know how U.S. sanctions work, a big part of OFAC's job is to blacklist foreign individuals and organizations who are deemed to undermine U.S. national security or foreign policy objectives. These blacklisted entities are known as SDNs, or specially designated nationals. U.S. citizens and companies cannot deal with SDNs without getting a license.

OFAC also administers comprehensive sanctions. These prevent U.S. individuals or businesses from interacting with entire nations, like Iran.

With each of the individuals or entities that it designates, OFAC discloses an array of useful information including the SDN's name, their aliases, address, nationality, passport, tax ID, place of birth, and/or date of birth. U.S. individuals and firms are supposed to take a risk-based approach to cross-checking this information against each of the counterparties they transact with so as to ensure that they aren't dealing with an SDN. They must also be aware of U.S. comprehensive sanctions so they don't accidentally interact with an entire class of sanctioned individuals, say all Iranians. Failure to comply can result in a monetary penalty or jail time.

Whereas Coinbase appears to have chosen to ignore OFAC's requirements when it comes to validation, Kraken hasn't, and has incorporated the SDN list into the internal logic of the validation services that it provides. But Kraken has only done so in a limited way, as I'll show below.

Five years ago OFAC began to include an SDN's known cryptocurrency addresses in its array of SDN data. To date, OFAC has published around 600 crypto addresses, including around 150 Ethereum addresses, of which a large chunk are related to Tornado Cash. Kraken is using this list of 150 addresses as the basis for excluding certain transaction from the blocks that it is proposing to the Ethereum network.

Data source: OFAC and Github

Among members of the crypto community, this sort of editing out of OFAC-listed addresses is sometimes described as creating "OFAC-compliant blocks." Hard core crypto ideologues believe that it compromises Ethereum's core values of openness and resistance to censorship.

While Kraken's approach may appear to be the compliant approach to proposing blocks, it's not. It's half-compliance, or compliance theatre. 

OFAC-compliant blocks as compliance theatre 

Right now, Kraken's block validation process merely weeds out transactions involving the 150 or so Ethereum wallets that OFAC has explicitly mentioned, which includes Tornado Cash addresses. But many of the SDNs linked to these 150 wallets have probably long since adapted by getting new wallets. Kraken isn't taking any steps to determine what these new wallets are, and is therefore almost certainly processing these SDN's transactions in its blocks. This would put it in violation of OFAC policy.

Of the 12,000 or so SDNs on OFAC's SDN list, most are not explicitly linked by OFAC to a specific Ethereum wallet. But that doesn't mean that these entities don't have such wallets. To be compliant, Kraken needs to scan the entire list of 12,000 SDNs and verify that none of them are being included in Kraken blocks. Again, it doesn't appear to be doing that.

Complying with OFAC isn't just about crosschecking the SDN list. Remember, OFAC has also levied comprehensive sanctions on nations such as Iran, which prohibit any U.S. entity from dealing with Iranians-in-general. Because Kraken limits its block editing to the 150 or so Ethereum addresses mentioned by OFAC, it is almost certainly letting Iranian transactions into the blocks that it is proposing. Which is ironic, since the very infraction that Kraken was punished for last year was allowing Iranians to use its trading platform. Apparently Kraken has one Iran policy for its trading venue, and another policy for its block proposal service.

Coinbase's decision to ignore OFAC altogether now makes more sense. Perhaps it's better to not comply at all and thereby retain the ability to claim the non-applicability of sanctions law to validation, than to comply insufficiently but in the process tacitly admit that OFAC has jurisdiction over validation. As part of this strategy, Coinbase may try to fall back on arguments that validation isn't a financial service, but qualifies as the "transmission of informational materials," which is exempt from sanctions law.

Having started down the path to compliance, the only way for Kraken's validation business to be even close to fully compliant with sanctions law is to adopt the very same exhaustive process that its own crypto trading venue abides by. That means painstakingly collecting and verifying the IDs of all potential transactors, cross-checking them against OFAC's requirements, and henceforth only proposing blocks that are made up of transactions sourced from its internal list of approved addresses.  

By adopting this complete approach to verifying transactions, Kraken would now be closer to compliance. As for OFAC, it would be relieved of its awkward situation.

There is no easy policy decision for OFAC

However, this approach has its drawbacks. A requirement that IDs be verified for the purposes of block inclusion would be expensive for Kraken to implement. I suspect that the company would react by ceasing to offer validation services. Even if Kraken and Coinbase were to roll out an OFAC-compliant know-your-customer (KYC) process for assembling blocks, most Ethereum transactions would probably flow to no-hassle offshore validators, which don't check ID because they are under no obligation to comply with OFAC.

So in the end, the very transactions that OFAC wants to discourage would end up happening anyway.

Compounding matters, by pushing validation away from U.S. soil, the U.S. national security apparatus would have destroyed a nascent "U.S. Ethereum nexus," one they might have otherwise levered as a tool for projecting U.S. power extraterritorially. If you're curious what this entails, consider how the New York correspondent banking nexus is currently harnessed by the state to exert U.S. policy overseas. A San Francisco-based Ethereum nexus would be the crypto-version of that. But not if it gets chased away.

To prevent validation from being performed everywhere but the U.S., the government could twin a requirement that domestic block validators implement KYC with a second requirement that all U.S. individuals and companies submit all Ethereum transactions to sanctions-compliant validators. This would pull U.S. Ethereum transactions back onto U.S. soil and into the laps of Coinbase and Kraken.

But this is a complicated chess game to play, and you can see why OFAC has been hesitating.  

On the other hand, OFAC can't prevaricate forever. Sure, crypto is still small. But OFAC is an agency with a democratic mandate to administer law, and law is clearly being broken. It cannot "not govern." To boot, sanctions are a matter of national security, which adds to the urgency of the issue.

One option would be for OFAC to offer an explicit sanctions law exception to U.S. blockchain validators in the form of a special license. But that invokes questions of technological neutrality and equal treatment before the law. Why should Coinbase and Kraken be allowed to maintain financial networks that admit sanctioned actors whereas other network operators, like Visa or American Express, do not enjoy this same exemption?

This isn't just about fairness. By providing a blockchain carve-out, OFAC may unintentionally spur the financial industry to switch over to blockchain-based validation, because that has become the least-regulated and therefore cheapest technological solution for deploying various financial services. At that point, OFAC will find itself with far less to govern, because a big chunk of finance now lies in the zone that OFAC has carved-out.

I don't envy the mandarins at OFAC. They've got a tough decision to make. In the meantime, Coinbase continues to process Tornado Cash transactions every hour.