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JOHN YANG: Tonight on PBS News Weekend, eating disorders once thought to be
more prevalent among women and girls. They're affecting more and more adolescent boys. Then,
what the Biden administration is doing to tackle those hidden fees that hit
low income families the hardest, and the often misunderstood legacy of the
Black Panther Party and its influence on today's struggle for civil rights.
WOMAN: I think the greatest legacy was a youth movement,
a young organization composed mainly of people in their late teens and early 20s,
a new type of organization and youth movement that was focused on serving the community.
(BREAK)
JOHN YANG: Good evening. I'm John Yang, as Israel's bombardment of Gaza goes on
unabated. The World Health Organization says the
main hospital in southern Gaza is no longer functional after an Israeli raid last week,
and a post on X the head of the W.H.O. said 200 patients who remain in Nasser hospital
in Khan Youunis. The Hamas Ron Gaza health ministry says only 25 medical staff remain.
Israel says last week's raid was to look for the remains of hostages that
they arrested more than 100 who they say are suspected militants. Today's
airstrikes killed at least 18 people 11 of them in Rafah Han Eunice including children.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brushed aside international concerns about
a planned ground assault on Rafah saying that those in harm's way would be evacuated. But
many of the 1 million or so Gazans who've taken refuge and Rafah say there's no place left to go.
MHEDI CHBEIR, Gaza Resident (through translator): We will not go out of Rafah. We will die in our
country here. Where should we go? We have nowhere our homes in Khan Younis are gone.
Everything we own from money to possessions are gone. Any sustenance we got is gone.
JOHN YANG: Tomorrow the International Court of Justice opens hearings on the legality of
Israel's 57-year occupation of Gaza and the West Bank both captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
Two police officers and a paramedic are dead after an early morning shooting in Burnsville,
Minnesota. It's a well to do suburb of Minneapolis. The Minnesota Police
Association says the suspect is also dead. The association said seven children are inside the
home and that the suspect negotiated with police for four hours before SWAT officers entered.
City officials identified the victims as officers Paul Elmstrand and Matthew Ruge
and paramedic Finseth. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said they were responding to a call
about a family in danger and that other officers were also injured.
A senior Pakistani official has admitted that he helped rig election results in his
city that deepens the political turmoil surrounding the tumultuous and indecisive
national elections earlier this month. This weekend thousands of supporters
of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan took to the streets.
The official's admission seems to give weight to accusations that the military tampered with
the vote count. The official resigned and the election commission said it would investigate.
And at the NBA All Star Weekend in Indianapolis, Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry narrowly
New York Liberty's Sabrina Ionescu in the first ever NBA-WNBA three point contest.
Ionescu shot from the men's three point line which is about 12 to 18 inches beyond the WNBA
line. Curry had to rally a bit at the end to edge Ionescu by what else three points. The
real winners though are the charities the players chose to get $25,000 each.
Still to come on PBS News Weekend. Junk fees. Those charges millions of Americans are hit
with every year and the often hidden history of the Black Panther Party.
(BREAK)
JOHN YANG: For years, eating disorders were thought to be a condition predominantly affecting
women and girls. But it's estimated that one in three people with an eating disorder is male,
and that 10 million American males will struggle with it at some point in their lives.
Dr. Jason Nagata is a pediatrician specializing in eating disorders at the University of California
San Francisco. He's also editor of the book eating disorders in boys and men.
Dr. Nagata, do eating disorders look different in boys than in girls?
DR. JASON NAGATA, University of California, San Francisco: Yes, absolutely. The masculine
body ideal is big and muscular. And that can lead to muscle building behaviors,
like access to exercise, restriction of carbon and fats whilst over consuming protein and
use of muscle building supplements and drugs like anabolic steroids.
When taken to the extreme, this can lead to muscle dysmorphia, also known as reverse
anorexia or bigorexia. And this is when somebody pathologically becomes obsessed
with the idea that their body is too puny or scrawny, and they need to become more muscular.
JOHN YANG: What does over exercise, too much
protein not enough carbohydrates? What does that do to the body?
JASON NAGATA: In simple terms, we need to maintain an energy balance. So whatever
energy we're burning through physical activity or exercise, we need to take in and up for nutrition.
I think it's pretty well recognized that when people restrict their eating, like if they're
skipping meals, or really eating a small amount of calories, that can lead to energy deficit.
But I think it's relatively under recognized that if people are exercising a lot,
but not increasing their nutrition that can also lead to energy deficits. And this
is what we see in many of the boy athletes who develop eating disorders that we take care of.
JOHN YANG: We're hearing much more about eating disorders and boys. Is it because there are more
males with eating disorders? Or is it just being recognized more and diagnosed more?
JASON NAGATA: I think it's a little bit of both. The boys have more pressures for muscularity
now more than ever. Halloween (ph) superheroes have become more muscular than in past decade,
boys action figures are more muscular. And with the advent of social media,
boys' bodies are on display more than ever.
And there are all these studies that have shown that more engagement with
social media is linked with disordered eating,
muscle dissatisfaction, and even steroid use, particularly among teenage boys.
I think the last factor is that the COVID-19 pandemic really led
to an explosion of eating disorders among teenagers across the board including boys,
too, due to a perfect storm of social anxiety,
isolation, disruption of activities in school, and then a rise in screen time.
JOHN YANG: Are the treatments for males the same as the treatment
for females? Or do you have to come up with new techniques, new approaches?
JASON NAGATA: Well, unfortunately, most of the research has been based on female, not male.
And so we don't have really great guidance. And in fact, previously, lots of periods with
the criteria for anorexia nervosa, and so it's actually been hard to diagnose boys because some
of the diagnostic criteria actually don't reflect some of the experiences that they're facing.
One of the first patients that I took care of as a student was a 16-year-old male wrestler,
who had actually been struggling for years with an eating disorder
before anyone recognized it as an eating disorder.
By the time that we saw him, he was obsessed with his weight. He was
checking his weight 10 times a day. He was working out for seven hours a day,
and he would only eat protein supplements, nothing else.
And so unfortunately, he had gotten to a severely malnourished state and actually
had to be hospitalized. And I remember at the time trying to student, trying to read up about
guidelines and how to best help him. But I think that is all based on female samples.
JOHN YANG: What do you tell parents, guardians or anyone who's got a young
male that care about their lives? What are the signs they should look for?
JASON NAGATA: You know, muscle building goals are pretty common in teenage boys,
a third of teenage boys report that they're trying to bulk up or gain weight,
and not all of them will develop an eating disorder.
However, warning signs for an eating disorder occur when a boy develops the preoccupation
or obsession with food, exercise, appearance or weight in a way that impairs their school
or daily functioning, and also starts to really worsen their quality of life.
So for instance, some of the boys have eating disorders that I care for,
spend five plus hours in the gym. And if they aren't in the gym all day,
they feel guilty about it. They won't be able to eat out with family or friends because they
perceive restaurant food or home cooked food to be insufficient and protein or more to daddy.
And so when it really gets to a point where it's impairing your social functioning or work,
school functioning, that's I think when it borders into a disorder.
JOHN YANG: If parents spot these signs, what should they do to help?
JASON NAGATA: I think a good first step is to talk with your primary
care pediatrician who can help to get a referral to an eating disorder specialist,
a mental health provider and a nutrition provider that helps support your child.
JOHN YANG: Dr. Jason Nagata of the University of California San Francisco, thank you very much.
JOHN NATAGA: Thank you for having me.
JOHN YANG: The Biden administration has proposed new regulations that take aim at junk fees,
those hidden or misleading charges that boost the cost of things like concert tickets, hotel rooms,
even bank accounts by tens of billion dollars a year. Ali Rogin Rogan has the details.
ALI ROGIN: $8 billion, that's how much money the nation's biggest banks take
in roughly every year in overdraft fees. The average dollar amount for
overdrawing a bank account has come down in recent years. But in 2023,
the average fee was still more than $26. And those with the least ability to pay are the hardest hit.
In 2023, 34 percent of households making less than
$65,000 a year were charged with an overdraft or insufficient funds fee.
Cora Lewis is a business reporter for the Associated Press Corps.
Thank you for joining us. How is the Biden administration looking to tackle these fees?
CORA LEWIS: The Associated Press: The Biden administration is really using the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau to take aim at these fees, as well as the Federal Trade
Commission. But when it comes to overdraft fees, they're trying to use new rules and
regulations to limit the amount that banks can charge consumers when they overdraft.
What they're proposing is a new rule that would require banks to show what their costs are to
consumers when they enact these fees. Banks really aren't interested in doing that. So the CFPB is
giving them an alternative, which is to lower the fees to as little as $3, but possibly six, seven
or $14 as benchmark fees, which are still much, much lower than the fees as they currently stand.
ALI ROGIN: And why is the Biden administration taking on junk
fees writ large right now? Why is this the moment that they've decided to do all this?
CORA LEWIS: I think right now, a lot of the pandemic era stimulus is ending,
inflation has been high for a while, people are relying on credit cards.
The average consumer is really feeling the pinch and has spent
down their savings and junk fees really hit households who can least afford them.
Overdraft fees typically hit consumers who have less than $500 in a checking account.
And oftentimes the same households that experience overdraft fees will
experience them multiple times per year. They might be living
paycheck to paycheck or relying on Social Security or other benefits.
So $35, when you're already really working hard to budget is a significant amount.
ALI ROGIN: Absolutely. Now, you pointed out some really good reasons why this would be
happening now the pandemic among them. But of course, these fees have been around since the
1990s. Why have they been allowed to continue and to get so much bigger over so much time?
CORA LEWIS: Yeah, it's really been an insidious growth and they have come
down in recent years Bank of America in particular has reduced their fees.
I think partly because the banks were taking a reputational hit. And they were
finding it harder and harder to justify these increasingly punitive fees. But
regulation seems to be needed to bring them even more in line with what's reasonable.
ALI ROGIN: So now, what are banks saying about this?
CORA LEWIS: Well, the banks in recent years have started making huge amounts of money off of these
fees. And so as you can imagine, there's a strong lobbying effort against the proposed regulations.
And some smaller banks like credit unions, and community banks, in particular rely very
heavily on these fees and are not interested in them being reined in by the White House.
ALI ROGIN: Yeah, and that seems to be one of the lines that you hear a lot of
saying this could really detrimentally affect community banks, credit unions,
banks that support the military. So, how is that lending on the other
Aside of the issue among the people that want to get rid of these fees?
CORA LEWIS: I would say that consumer advocates would argue that if you are relying on these fees
to run your bank and to support your business model, then you're not operating as a bank,
you're really operating as a lender, and you're making these small loans with extremely
exorbitant rates. And you should be regulated as a lender in that case and not as a bank.
ALI ROGIN: And of course, these new rules are going into effect through
the CFPB through the administration not going
through Congress. How easily could they be undone by subsequent administration?
CORA LEWIS: That's, I believe, also a hope of the banking industry is that a Republican president
or a Republican Congress could really undo these regulations, and that if they stall long enough,
or if there's a different administration, they could be undone very easily.
ALI ROGIN: Cora Lewis, who's covering this issue for the Associated Press,
thank you so much for breaking it down.
CORA LEWIS: Thanks for having me.
JOHN YANG: In the 1960s, civil rights movement, some concluded
that non-violence and the focus on integration had failed. Rather than integrating society,
they wanted to fundamentally change it, and they didn't renounce violence
and self-defense. Their cry was Black Power, rather than we shall overcome.
One of the most prominent of these groups was the Black Panther Party. It was also
perhaps one of the most misunderstood and most vilified by the white establishment
for Black History Month. That's the topic of tonight's Hidden Histories.
JOHN YANG (voice-over): The Black Panther Party was revolutionary and both its goals and its
tactics. It began in 1966. In response to both the assassination of Malcolm X, a leading advocate of
black separatism, and the killing of an unarmed black 16-year-old named Matthew Johnson during
a San Francisco police stop. Founders Bobby Seale and Huey Newton were college students at the time.
HUEY P. NEWTON, Co-Founder, Black Panther Party: We have a Black Panther Party. As
long as the evil Tetra and corrupt officials,
as long as the oppressor makes the laws the people are not bound to respect them,
we are bound to transform society and erect a system where people will receive justice.
JOHN YANG (voice-over): Their 10 Point program leaned heavily on
Marxism. They saw black American struggles as part of a global liberation movement.
HUEY NEWTON: In America, Black people are treated very much as the Vietnamese
people are any other colonized people because where you were brutalized,
the police in our community occupy our area our community as a foreign troop occupies territory.
JOHN YANG (voice-over): They provided community services called Survival
Programs to promote self-determination, free food, especially breakfast for schoolchildren,
free health care and voter registration drives. They established schools in nine cities.
MAN: I cannot stand you these oppressor foreign troops in our community.
JOHN YANG (voice-over): Women made up roughly half of the Panther membership of about 2,000,
and they often held leadership roles. From 1974 until 1977,
Elaine Brown was the head of the National Party, but it was the
group's paramilitary displays that drew the white establishments, attention and alarm.
Members patrolled neighborhoods and black jackets and black berets,
openly and legally carrying weapons. For many white Americans, a photo of
stern looking Newton holding a rifle and a spear became their image of Black Panthers.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the party the
greatest threat to internal security in ordered surveillance to expose, disrupt,
misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the Black Panthers.
Tensions with local police led to deadly clashes. In Chicago a police raid killed
rising party star Fred Hampton and party member Mark Clark. In 1982, the federal government paid
$1.8 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that the FBI had a role in the Chicago raid.
Plagued by internal disputes and power struggles the party was essentially
defunct by the late 1970s. It was formally disbanded in 1982.
But many see parts of its legacy living on today in groups like Black Lives Matter.
JOHN YANG: Party members are among the first to openly challenged police violence often
converging on the scene when officers stopped young black men on the streets.
Donna Murch is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University and the author of "Living
For The City, Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California."
Donna, from your perspective, what is the greatest legacy of the Black Panther Party?
DONNA MURCH, Author, "Living For The City": I think the greatest legacy was a youth movement,
a young organization composed mainly of people in their late teens and early 20s
working class youth that had migrated from the south, who found themselves
having unprecedented access to high school and college in California.
And out of that, they helped form a study group and create a new type of organization
and youth movement that was focused on serving the community. It started with
confronting police violence, because that's what the community saw as its single biggest problem.
This is the era of the urban rebellions, you know, the party is formed a year after Watts, and they
were willing to perform a form of activism in order to empower others. But very quickly,
after the police patrols, the Panthers shifted into something called Survival Pending Revolution,
which meant founding free breakfast programs, Freedom Schools, and the longest running
institution of the Black Panther Party was a school in Oakland that ran for almost a decade.
JOHN YANG: Can you put the Black Panther Party in sort of the context of the civil
rights movement of where they stood, what role the organization filled what their contributions were?
DONNA MURCH: I think one of the best ways to understand the Panther Party
is to think about the Black Freedom Movement, as having a large geography
and time period. So the party is formed year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
But you know, the dismantling of legal segregation in the South did not dismantle the problems of
economics, and access in the north and in the West. And one of the central issues about this
was both police violence, and people not having equal access to the social welfare state.
So, I would describe the Panthers as emerging in this moment, post-civil
rights after the accomplishments of the civil rights movement of the successful
passage of the Civil Rights Act, and also the Voting Rights Act.
But I would be remiss to not talk about the global link to the Panthers. They're formed in 1966. And
this is after over a decade of decolonization of African countries winning their independence. And
also very importantly, they look to Asia. The Panthers are formed in Northern California,
and they were adamant in their opposition to the Vietnam War and American imperialism.
They identified with the Vietnamese, the Viet Men and with Hoochie Men,
and they actually looked a lot to Vietnam, to China, and to a vision of anti-colonialism and
a socialist state that would serve the people. So, I think that's one of the most important contexts.
The other thing I really want to stress because the popular representations of
the Panthers is wrong. So many people find out about the Panthers through Forrest Gump,
they're represented as anti-white black militants.
But the truth is, is that the party of all the 60s organizations, they had the
strongest ties to creating a multiracial coalition, what was called in this period,
the rainbow coalition that Jesse Jackson later picks up on. So they united with
white radical youth who they called Mother Country Radicals to oppose the Vietnam War.
And this was incredibly threatening to the government of the time, you know,
to J. Edgar Hoover in particular, because you basically saw multiracial coalition
uniting to stop anti-communism and violence in the global south. So I think that would
also be the Panthers legacy, a model of multiracial coalition building.
JOHN YANG: You mentioned the free breakfast program that they ran in communities,
which is not that far, apart from the federal free breakfast program
that's being run now. But there was also a political vision. And that wasn't there.
DONNA MURCH: Yes, that's such an important point. They were arguing that the social
welfare state as it existed was not serving the people and that they as teenagers could provide
free breakfast. And when they started their freedom schools, so many of the
low income children who went to Panther schools had not had breakfast, and they couldn't learn.
And so they were shaming the state. And although we don't have the direct
documentary evidence, it is thought by many scholars,
that that shaming of the state prompted the issuing of free school lunch.
JOHN YANG: Are there groups today that you see as direct descendants of the
Black Panther Party that can draw a direct line from them to today?
DONNA MURCH: Yeah, I would say, you know, my first book was about the party's Genesis
in Oakland. It's called Living For The City. But my second book is about the last 10 years,
and it's about the Black Lives Matter movement and why they chose Assata Shakur,
who was a rank and file Panther member from New York City.
So she's not from Oakland, where the Panthers were formed. She's from New York,
and she wasn't part of the traditional male leadership, and especially over
the last 10 years in the fight against state violence and murder and mass incarceration,
Assata has become the best known of the Panthers. And it's from a poem that she
wrote in Cuba in the 1980s that so many of these movement organizations opened their meetings.
It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.
We must love and protect one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
JOHN YANG: Donna Murch of Rutgers University. Thank you very much.
DONNA MURCH: Thank you. It's truly my pleasure.
JOHN YANG: And that is PBS News Weekend for this Sunday. I'm John Yang. For all
of my colleagues, thanks for joining us. Have a good week.