A founder of the Mexican Communist party.  Does that sound like someone for whom politics in general was incidental and communism in particular was just a passing fad? Of course not, but that is how Mexican muralist Diego Rivera is often depicted in the media. As for his sometime wife and lover, Frida Kahlo, she was even more fanatic in her devotion to communism. She was not only a party member, but a staunch Stalinist as well. And yet it appears that the their communist connection which was at the core of their beings as well as their art, as the Diego Rivera painting on this page reveals, could be whitewashed out of their media portrayals yet again. The evidence for this comes from a Variety story on Thursday by Anna Marie De La Fuente, "Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera Netflix Series in the Works." The closest Variety comes to mentioning their communism comes in this brief observation in passing: "The still untitled show will delve into their lives and explore how shifting political, social, and artistic upheavals shaped their relationship and oeuvre." Blink and you would have missed the vague reference to communism. Actually, if you don't blink you also miss the communism reference, because it doesn't exist.  It would be interesting if the Netflix series about Rivera and Kahlo dares to at least touch upon the devout communism of both those artists. However, judging from past media attempts to cover the pair, one should not expect too much. A good example was the 2002 big budget film Frida starring Salma Hayek that absurdly treated her (and Diego Rivera's) communism only very lightly. The leftist Current Affairs wrote in April 2025 about the absurdity of ditching the communism at the core of of Kahlo and Rivera in "How Frida Kahlo Went From Communist to Kitsch." ...The definitive biography of Kahlo is Hayden Herrera’s Frida, from 1983, and it covers her politics in considerable detail—from her childhood fascination with the ongoing Mexican Revolution, to her reading of Marx and Hegel as a teenager, to her later engagements with both Trotskyism and Stalinism. But sadly, a lot more people get their history from big-budget movies than from 400-page hardcover books, especially in the United States. There are two major films about Kahlo’s life: one a dramatization from 2002 with Salma Hayek in the lead role and the other a documentary released on Amazon Prime in 2024. Like Herrera’s book, both are simply called Frida, and both have their strengths. But they also distort their subject in important ways and, above all, downplay Kahlo’s devotion to the communist cause. The 2002 Frida, directed by Julie Taymor, really ought to be called Frida and Diego, the title it reportedly had at one point during its long and troubled development. Ostensibly, it’s an adaptation of Herrera’s book. At the time, Harper Perennial even released a new edition of the biography with the movie poster as the cover. But really, the film is less a straightforward biopic and more a romantic drama. It frames Kahlo’s life mainly through her romantic and sexual relationships—primarily with fellow artist Diego Rivera, but also with Leon Trotsky when he was exiled to Mexico in the late 1930s, and occasionally with a variety of female side characters. The tagline on one of the cinema posters reads “prepare to be seduced,” and that sums up the film’s approach. When communism comes up, it’s usually because Rivera (played with aplomb by Alfred Molina) or Trotsky (a slightly underwhelming Geoffrey Rush) are expounding about it. Kahlo takes part in their arguments and their protests; she helps Rivera crank out communist pamphlets on a clunky printing press and supports him when he feuds with Nelson Rockefeller over his decision to paint Lenin into his latest mural. But she seems to have little political initiative of her own. The implication is that she’s a communist mainly because the men in her life are. Instead of a portrait of her as a serious political thinker, we get a lot of prurient stuff about her sex life, whether she’s seducing the same woman Rivera has just slept with (out of jealousy, it’s implied) or having a fling with the much-older Trotsky. The performances save this version of Frida from being truly bad—both Hayek and Molina inhabit their roles perfectly—and Taymor’s use of color, plus the occasional stop-motion skeleton, bring Kahlo’s art to vibrant life. The film looks like one of her paintings, but as a portrait of the painter, it’s incomplete. It remains to be seen if the Netflix series will reflect at least a semblance of reality and cover in proper detail the very strong association with communism of both Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo instead of pretending that it was a mere sideshow for both.

This month, HBO Max's critically acclaimed medical drama The Pitt introduced an illegal immigrant sob story into its second season. Each season of The Pitt covers a 15-hour shift in a busy Pittsburgh emergency room. Patient stories introduced in one episode continue on in later episodes as the hospital shift progresses. On March 5th, in the episode "3:00 P.M.," a 12-year-old Haitian boy named Jude (Anthony B. Jenkins) was rushed into the ER after accidentally blowing off two of his fingers with a firecracker. He had a blood alcohol level of .08 in his system. Due to the alcohol in his system, hospital staff called social services. Jude's doctors and social worker then met with his sole guardian, an adult sister named Chantal (Sasha Compère). Chantal revealed that she is overwhelmed with work, school and caregiving because her parents were deported back to Haiti 9 months ago. She and her brother are anchor babies. Her parents desperately want Jude to stay in the United States. WATCH: HBO Max's The Pitt Pushes Deportation Sob Story pic.twitter.com/4rPA8ZvFgm — HollywoodClips (@awardshowclips) March 13, 2026 Needless to say, Jude's story is a beautiful example of illegal immigrant families enriching American life. What country wouldn't want a budding alcoholic who blows off his fingers with fireworks? As the episode ends, Jude's fate remains in the balance. Will he be able to stay in the United States and clog up future emergency rooms with his delinquency? Or will he be sent to live with his lawbreaking parents in a country Hollywood celebrities insist is definitely not a "sh*thole"? Season two of The Pitt is keeping the audience in suspense. Stay tuned. PS: The CBS drama Matlock had an immigration plot on February 26. A client of Matty Matlock's firm is detained by ICE agents. He's a government contractor, but his Mexican parents never told him he is not a citizen. The lawyers ended up preventing deportation, but the client lost any right to be a government contractor. 

CNN made headlines this week after two members of their London bureau were caught at a regime party at the Iranian Embassy in the U.K., thanks to images released by Iran’s state media Iran Press. But they weren’t the only media present at the gathering. Sky News international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn could also be seen in Iran Press images rubbing shoulders with an Embassy official, taking to X to defend those there.     In a series of X posts on Thursday March 12 and Friday March 13, Waghorn belligerently defended attendance at the event by the Labour Party officials from Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Foreign Ministry and the press. “It's called diplomacy and journalism, things the @dailytelegraph once used to know a bit about before its sad demise, don’t [sic] be so absurdly disingenous [sic],” he wrote. What solicited that kind of response? A post from Telegraph political correspondent Genevieve Holl-Allen touting the original report: “EXC: Foreign Office staff attended an event at the Iranian embassy to celebrate the Islamic revolution weeks after the regime massacred thousands of its people Civil servants heard a speech from the ambassador praising Iran’s “remarkable accomplishments”   It's called diplomacy and journalism, things the @dailytelegraph once used to know a bit about before its sad demise, dont be so absurdly disingenous https://t.co/MIxk6s2env — Dominic Waghorn (@DominicWaghorn) March 12, 2026   Waghorn bitterly lashed out at The Telegraph reporters with a dose of agism: “Just to be clear again journalists and diplomats go to all kind of national day events at all kinds of embassies.  The young staff at the @dailytelegraph may be forgiven for not knowing that yet but the rest of you for goodness sake behave[.]”   Just to be clear again journalists and diplomats go to all kind of national day events at all kinds of embassies. The young staff at the @dailytelegraph may be forgiven for not knowing that yet but the rest of you for goodness sake behave — Dominic Waghorn (@DominicWaghorn) March 13, 2026   In a Thursday post, Waghorn took to defending CNN from critics who took issue with how friendly CNN had been with their coverage of Iran since the conflict began: The 'who needs Iranian state media when you've got CNN' trope is crass and cynically contrived to discredit a team of journalists who took risks to do their job and tell the story inside Iran.  Peddled by propagandists or people who should know better.  Get over it.   The 'who needs Iranian state media when you've got CNN' trope is crass and cynically contrived to discredit a team of journalists who took risks to do their job and tell the story inside Iran. Peddled by propagandists or people who should know better. Get over it. — Dominic Waghorn (@DominicWaghorn) March 12, 2026   “Top Iranian official pushes back against Trump’s ‘fire and fury’ invoking the Shia spirit of resistance.  Farsi for ‘bring it on’,” he touted in a March 10 post. Judge by a review of Waghorn’s X account, he’s a pretty staunch leftist.

As the war in the Middle East rages, let’s take a pause and a walk back through some history of the media and America at war. Let's start specifically with the war in Vietnam. As someone (ahem!) old enough to recall the media coverage of the Vietnam War there is plenty to remember. And specifically to remember the slow and then rapid change of pace with the media of the day going from supportive to questioning to an outright anti-war coverage that was televised nightly into American living rooms.  So much did the media coverage of the war become a hot and then hotter topic in the day that it has even earned its own space in places like the Encyclopedia Britannica. The headline there:  The Vietnam War and the media  The entry reports:   The role of the media in the Vietnam War is a subject of continuing controversy. Some believe that the media played a large role in the U.S. defeat. They argue that the media’s tendency toward negative reporting helped to undermine support for the war in the United States while its uncensored coverage provided valuable information to the enemy in Vietnam.   Eventually the American media’s coverage of the war became heavily anti-war. The rest, as they say, became history as America recorded its first serious defeat in war. The media coverage effectively ended the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. LBJ had been elected in a landslide in 1964. But with the overwhelmingly negative media coverage of the war after his election his public support and the support for the war slowly drained away. And now? With President Trump’s decision to take out Iran’s growing nuclear capabilities? Now the media is on alert. A few days back Trump launched what is called “Operation Epic Fury” headlined as follows by NPR:  The U.S. and Israel launch a major attack on Iran That story reported:  “In an attack the Pentagon has called “Operation Epic Fury”, the United States along with Israel launched a major strike on Iran bombing sites in Tehran and other cities. In announcing the operation on social media, President Trump said the Iranian regime’s activities endanger the United States.” The question now, with an eye to the media’s history on Vietnam, is simple. That would be: How long will any favorable media coverage of the war in Iran and the larger Middle East last? The question has a reason behind it. As the Vietnam media experience illustrated vividly, as the media of the day - led by CBS anchor Walter Cronkite - turned against the war, so, slowly, did the American public, but that came because they got the sense the war was lost and victory was no longer a goal. Over time it made the Johnson Vietnam policy so hotly controversial that it forced the once-popular LBJ out of the 1968 race for re-nomination. An anti-war candidate, Minnesota Democrat Senator Eugene McCarthy, gained enough political steam, aided by the anti-war media, to humiliate LBJ in the party’s primary in New Hampshire.  With that, New York Senator Robert Kennedy got into the race. The Johnson presidency very quickly was effectively over. RFK was assassinated as he was winning various primaries, and by pure political force LBJ got his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, nominated. Humphrey would go on to lose to the GOP’s former Vice President Richard Nixon. Nixon effectively ended the war and was re-elected in a 49-state landslide. Which is to say, what started as a small regional conflict had been so escalated, with the anti-war media of the day slowly increasing its coverage until it became the dominant story of every day, that it forced a once popular president to cease his re-election campaign and his party to lose the 1968 presidential election altogether. The question now?  Will history repeat itself when it come to the media’s coverage of the situation in Iran and the Middle East? And will the Trump White House ignore the coverage? Or make it a hot topic all of its own? Already, we may have an answer. By Friday late afternoon the White House released this statement:  CNN Is Lying to Undermine Operation Epic Fury’s Crushing Success The statement says:  Fake News CNN is at it again. While U.S. forces deliver crushing blows to obliterate Iran’s terrorist regime, CNN’s hack ‘journalists’ are peddling Democrat-sourced fiction to undermine our decisive victories in Operation Epic Fury. The statement goes on by citing specifics.  The first:  CNN alleged the Pentagon and the National Security Council ‘did not plan’ for Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz. The second reads: CNN further alleged ‘Top Trump officials acknowledged’ this to lawmakers in a classified briefing. The White House statement goes into specifics to answer the charges, closing by saying that “No amount of CNN hackery will change that.” In short? Unlike 1968 and Walter Cronkite’s attack on LBJ’s Vietnam policy, President Trump is not sitting back and allowing today’s media - CNN in this case - to paint its own anti-media picture of the Trump Iran/Middle East policy. Time has moved on. As is said often enough in this corner: Stay tuned. What unfolds between the media and the Trump administration when it comes to the coverage of American policy in Iran and the larger Middle East remains to be seen.

CNN International/PBS anchor Christiane Amanpour welcomed former colleague Reza Aslan, whom she labeled an “Iranian-American religious scholar," to her Friday show to discuss what the future holds for ordinary Iranians after the current war ends. According to Aslan, it is the United States’s fault that previous protest movements have failed to topple the regime because we have “been doing the tyrant’s work for him.” Amanpour’s question was actually not that bad, “What hope do the Iranians have? Let's say this war ends or the bombing campaign ends and the regime is still in place. This is the regime that killed so many people and really crossed, if there was a line that it was going to cross, it really crossed the line of barbaric behavior to its own people in January. How do people who want change actually try to affect change?”   Reza Aslan tells PBS/CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour that it is America's fault that previous Iran protests have failed "Look, an authoritarian regime, a tyrant, stays in power by isolating his people from the rest of the world. The United States has been doing the tyrant's work… pic.twitter.com/hHAVlidQ8f — Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) March 14, 2026   Aslan’s answer, however, was that bad, “This is a question that we've been asking for a very long time. And there are models of this throughout the 20th century. Look, an authoritarian regime, a tyrant, stays in power by isolating his people from the rest of the world. The United States has been doing the tyrant's work for him in Iran for the last half century. Our policy of containment, isolation and sanction as a hope for regime change has done the exact opposite. That's just a fact.” He added, “We have entrenched this regime further into power. That's not illogical. If the people themselves have no access to the rest of the world, no access to the free market economy, then they are handicapped from being able to rise up and take down a government that they rely upon for their very sustenance, for their very bread.” In addition to wanting basic rights, Iranians also protest precisely because the regime can’t provide them with bread. Nevertheless, Aslan then made the illogical claim that if the U.S. wants Iranians to overthrow the clerical regime, then it needs to win the approval of low-level clerics, “No wonder that these protests that we see, these legitimate protests that we see almost every year, which had been brutally repressed by these dictatorial police state in Iran, have never actually managed to bring down this regime because the only way to do so is to get the entirety of the people and particularly the pious poor and the sort of mid-level, low-level clerics and seminary students to come out onto the streets as well.” The nonsensical suggestions were just beginning as Aslan continued, “Look, we actually had a plan in place. The P5+1 negotiations that President Obama put together, which miraculously brought in Russia and China, two countries that have radically opposing interests in Iran than the United States, was by every measure working. First of all, it absolutely removed Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons, to enrich uranium to the point in which it could develop nuclear weapons.” It is interesting Aslan cited Russia and China. Both countries are dictatorships. China is still very much economically connected to the outside world, and, before 2022, Russia was as well, and yet Aslan’s theory of economically empowering ordinary people to overthrow their dictatorial overlords never came to fruition. Besides, why would tethering our Iran interests to our Russian and Chinese adversaries be a good idea? Nevertheless, Aslan reiterated his earlier idea that America is at fault, only this time he implied that President Trump specifically is to blame: That relationship that we put together under President Obama had an opportunity to possibly give, particularly the struggling middle class in Iran, the chance to rise up and make their voices heard. We started seeing a wave of reform in Iran immediately following that negotiation, but of course the negotiation was torn up. And what we have seen since that moment, which has resulted in the destruction and death that we are seeing now, was a direct result of reversing course on a policy that had the possibility, not guarantee, but the possibility of actually creating the change that we are desperate to see in Iran. Aslan’s theory that the way to bring down the regime is to make it richer betrays any idea of common sense. More immediately, given that this war is just the latest in a series of post-October 7 events, it is likely that if the Iran deal had remained in place, Iran’s military would have been in a better fighting position than it was. Here is a transcript for the March 13-taped show: PBS Amanpour and Company 3/13/2026 CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: What hope do the Iranians have? Let's say this war ends or the bombing campaign ends and the regime is still in place. This is the regime that killed so many people and really crossed, if there was a line that it was going to cross, it really crossed the line of barbaric behavior to its own people in January. How do people who want change actually try to affect change? REZA ASLAN: This is a question that we've been asking for a very long time. And there are models of this throughout the 20th century. Look, an authoritarian regime, a tyrant, stays in power by isolating his people from the rest of the world. The United States has been doing the tyrant's work for him in Iran for the last half century. Our policy of containment, isolation and sanction as a hope for regime change has done the exact opposite. That's just a fact. We have entrenched this regime further into power. That's not illogical. If the people themselves have no access to the rest of the world, no access to the free market economy, then they are handicapped from being able to rise up and take down a government that they rely upon for their very sustenance, for their very bread. No wonder that these protests that we see, these legitimate protests that we see almost every year, which had been brutally repressed by these dictatorial police state in Iran, have never actually managed to bring down this regime because the only way to do so is to get the entirety of the people and particularly the pious poor and the sort of mid-level, low-level clerics and seminary students to come out onto the streets as well. Look, we actually had a plan in place. The P5+1 negotiations that President Obama put together, which miraculously brought in Russia and China, two countries that have radically opposing interests in Iran than the United States, was by every measure working. First of all, it absolutely removed Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons, to enrich uranium to the point in which it could develop nuclear weapons. That relationship that we put together under President Obama had an opportunity to possibly give, particularly the struggling middle class in Iran, the chance to rise up and make their voices heard. We started seeing a wave of reform in Iran immediately following that negotiation, but of course the negotiation was torn up. And what we have seen since that moment, which has resulted in the destruction and death that we are seeing now, was a direct result of reversing course on a policy that had the possibility, not guarantee, but the possibility of actually creating the change that we are desperate to see in Iran.