Readers of this blog who have never heard of Katie Halper or even of The Hill, where she worked, should nonetheless find the piece that begins below worthwhile. It includes a video of the career-altering segment Halper put together and an interview between her and its author. Click on TK NEWS below for more about that Substack newsletter. — MCM
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Meet the Censored: Katie Halper
The longtime co-host of Useful Idiots, Katie Halper, made headlines last week, and not for any reasons she would have asked for. Katie was fired from a part-time hosting arrangement at The Hill’s Rising, whose editor told her an editorial critical of Israeli policies in Palestine was “not in our sweet spot of coverage.”
Rising grew a significant audience as an independent media vehicle between 2019 and 2021, when it was hosted by the left-right team of Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti. It has since undergone changes, piloted for a time by Intercept reporter Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky of The Federalist, and ultimately moving to a new incarnation featuring Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave. Part of the hosting job involves monologues called “radars.” Katie, who had a fill-in arrangement at the outlet for years, was let go over just such a radar. You can see it [in this video].
The controversy began when Michigan Democrat Rashida Tliab spoke at an online seminar on September 20th and said, “It has become clear that you cannot claim to hold progressive values, yet back Israel’s apartheid government.” Tliab gave her talk in the wake of the shooting of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed in the West Bank City of Jenin in May. Abu Akleh’s family met with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in July, and asked the International Criminal Court to open a case two weeks ago, simultaneous to Tlaib’s seminar.
Tliab’s comments inspired an immediate reaction from the Anti-Defamation League, which deemed them anti-Semitic. CEO Jonathan Greenblatt ripped Tliab for ostensibly telling “American Jews they must pass an anti-Zionist litmus test to participate in progressive spaces.” The ADL reaction got wide play on stations like CNN.
Katie’s “Radar” argues Tliab’s comments laid bare what has long been a source of tension among self-described progressives, who often tiptoe around the subject of occupied Palestine. As you’ll see [in the video], she approached her subject with great care, leaning on statements from groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Agree with her or not, her editorial certainly wasn’t fake news, or flippant, or gratuitous. It’s what the media business normally wants: a decisive, well-argued opinion.
However, the Hill thought otherwise, and what makes the situation unusual is a media company saying the proverbial quiet part out loud. When editors refused to run the “Radar,” Katie asked flat-out if the problem was the subject of Israel. Though there was some hemming and hawing (at one point she was told the problem was that the show’s focus was on domestic and not foreign policy, despite running content about Brazilian elections, Italy’s new prime minister, and multiple Ukraine pieces that week), eventually they just told her that was, in fact, the case. The next day, she was let go via a curt email ending, “We wish you all the best.”
Gary Weitman, the chief communications officer for Nexstar Media Group, which owns the Hill, declined to respond to queries from Grim, for a story in The Intercept. My own queries have so far not elicited a response.
Israel’s Palestine policies, which Human Rights Watch and others have long described as apartheid, obviously arouse very strong feelings. Still, a lot of media figures avoid the topic, as it can be a career-defining or at minimum a career-complicating decision to go there. The fact that Palestinian journalists and Palestinian news sites are often canaries in the content moderation coal mine, deleted or suppressed in creative ways by platforms like Facebook and Google, has added another layer of trepidation for editorialists. Episodes like this don’t help:
Katie Halper: I’ve been appearing [on Rising] for three years as a weekly guest. There are some weeks I took off when things were in disarray, but then the new iteration of the show came, and they asked me if I wanted to appear. So I started doing a weekly segment once again with them.
When you’re a host, you do these things called “Radars,” which are monologues. I came up with three ideas of radars I wanted to do. One was on Ukraine, one was on immigration, and one was on Israel. It’s funny, because had I done the other ones first, I’d still be working at the Hill. At least, until I did the Israel one.
Anyway, I did my Israel radar. I put a lot of work into it because I thought it was really important. You have to be thorough, because you get attacked, and . . . READ MORE . . .