FRONTLINE VOICES-with Jesse Lent
A WAPO OBIT PLUS CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED IN NORTH CAROLINA?
Massive newsroom staff cuts by oligarch Jeff Bezos to his Washington Post as he seeks favor with the Trump junta, sets off more hand wringing about who killed journalism. Meanwhile, in broad daylight, at the instruction of President Trump, the GOP is trying to steal North Carolina's CD I, an historic Black district.
3-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ashley Parker was certainly ahead of the curve when she left the Washington Post eight years ago due to the mismanagement of Jeff Bezos and publisher William Lewis. Jesse speaks with Parker about that decision and the status of authenticated journalism during Trump 2.0.
"The Post was my hometown paper," Parker told WBAI. "When I got there, I truly believed in my bones that's where I was going to end my career."
She added, "It became very clear to me that Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis...the publisher until quite recently and their leadership team, they didn't have a business plan. They didn't have a vision. And what they had in lieu of that was essentially, in my view, contempt for the newsroom. And I didn't want to work for people who I didn't trust and I didn't respect."
But first we will go LIVE after headlines to Pacifica's Bob Hennelly who is on the ground covering an historic march led by Bishop Rev. William Barber from rural northeast North Carolina to Raleigh, that state's capital. The 50 mile trek is to protest efforts by that state's Republican state legislature to gerrymander out of existence that state's 1st CD which is a majority minority district now represented by Rep. Donald Davis (D), who is African American.
The scheme to deprive this majority minority district of a seat in Congress was developed at the direct instruction of President Trump as a way to head off Democrats reclaiming the majority control on the House to stave off what he predicts would be his third impeachment.
"The core issue is that North Carolina went from being a 7 to 7 split between Democrats and Republican to a 10 to 4 split with Republicans using all sorts of 1950s type gerrymandering techniques to minimze African-Americans and minority voting," Hennelly told Frontline Voices. "In this district where we are focused on the 1st, 48 percent are white folks and 52 percent be everybody else. An under Doanld Trump's America, we can't have any Congressional districts represented by everybody else."
First our headlines:
According to an Al Jazeera Arabic investigation, Civil Defence teams in Gaza have documented 2,842 Palestinians who have been what the news organization describes as “evaporated” through the use of cutting-edge weaponry provided by the US, since the war with Israel began in October 2023, making their bodies impossible to identify.
According to the investigation, temperatures exceeding 6,332 degrees Fahrenheit are generated by the use of tritonal, a mixture of TNT and aluminium powder used in United States-made bombs like the MK-84, leaving behind no remains other than blood spray or small fragments of flesh. “Four of my children just evaporated,” Rafiq Badran, who lost four children in the Bureij refugee camp during the war told the publication. “I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?” Israel’s systematic use of these weapons is a direct violation of international law.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its job growth numbers down today, claiming the U.S. economy has generated over a million less jobs than was previously reported. According to the New York Times, the revisions are part of a longstanding yearly process in which the agency compares its monthly estimates of job growth, which are derived from surveys, with more reliable data from state governments. U.S. employers added just 181,000 jobs last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday, 69 percent fewer than its initial estimate of 584,000. The agency also lowered its estimate of job growth in 2024 by nearly 28 percent.
The Trump administration has withdrawn all federalized National Guard troops from U.S. cities, after encountering resistance to their agenda in federal court thwarting the President’s efforts to send troops into states with Democratic governors.
The pullout was reportedly finalized late last month, with no public announcement from the White House or the Pentagon. President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had previously insisted the mobilizations were necessary to combat what they claimed was unchecked violence and to support enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.
The deployments included more than 5,000 troops to Los Angeles, approximately 500 into Chicago and 200 to Portland, Oregon. More than 2,500 National Guard members remain in Washington, D.C., in response to Trump’s ordered deployment, but under a nonfederal status. Their mission is expected to last through the end of the year.
