FAIR

  The New York Times (8/19/24) insinuated that Phil Donahue attributed to politics a cancellation that was really caused by low ratings. If I were teaching a class called “How to Slime People in a Subtle, Scuzzy Way in the New York Times,” this paragraph from the Times‘ obituary (8/19/24) of Phil Donahue—written by Clyde Haberman, Maggie’s father—would be part of the curriculum: In 2002, Mr. Donahue tried a comeback with a nightly talk show on MSNBC. Barely six months in, the program was canceled. He said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq. (In 2007, he co-produced and co-directed an antiwar documentary, Body of War.) It hardly helped that his ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN. Even now—more than 20 years after the New York Times was catastrophically wrong on the Iraq War—the paper cannot forgive anyone who was right. 1. Yes, Donahue “said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq.” Do you know who else said this? MSNBC‘s network executives, in a leaked memo. Get the fuck out of here with the “he said” bullshit. MSNBC executives said, in a leaked memo, that Donahue was “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war… because of guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush.” This was reported by CNN (3/5/03), among other outlets, at the time. Unfortunately, these outlets are so obscure that the Times cannot access them. 2. Yes, Donahue’s “ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.” It was also the top-rated show on MSNBC. Sadly, the Times does not know this, because the only place it was reported at the time was in such little-known publications as the New York Times (2/26/03).

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240823.mp3   This week on CounterSpin: One of many things wrong with corporate news media is the way they hammer home the idea that the current system is the only system. If you don’t see yourself and your interests reflected in either of the two dominant parties, the problem is you. Part of the value of independent media is that the people they listen to give us new questions to ask. For example: How do we acknowledge the fact that many people’s opinions are shaped by messages that are created and paid for by folks who work hard to hide their identity and their interests? If we’re in an open debate about what’s best for all of us, why can’t we see who pays you? We’ll talk about “dark money” with Steve Macek. He’s professor and chair of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois. His recent piece, “Dark Money Uncovered,” appeared on TheProgressive.org. Transcript: ‘They’re Trying to Pass Laws to Make Dark Money Even Darker’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240823Macek.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Phil Donahue. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240823Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240816.mp3   ExxonKnews (6/17/24) This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption is outpacing many scientists’ understanding of it, and it’s undeniably driving many harms we are facing: extreme heat, extreme cold, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes. News media are giving up pretending that these extreme weather events are just weird, and not provably driven by the continued use of fossil fuels. But fossil fuel companies are among the most powerful players in terms of telling lawmakers how to make the laws they want to see, public interest be damned. So the crickets you’re hearing about efforts to eviscerate the right to protest the impacts of climate disruption? That’s all intentional. We’ll hear about what you are very definitely not supposed to hear from reporter Emily Sanders from ExxonKnews. Transcript: ‘This Is a Push to Pass Laws Criminalizing Protest of Fossil Fuel Infrastructure’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240816Sanders.mp3   Inside Climate News (7/8/24) Also and related: Not everyone is lying down and accepting that, OK, we’re going to die from a climate crisis that is avoidable, but since companies don’t want to talk about it, let’s not. A county in Oregon is saying, deaths from high heat are in fact directly connected to conscious corporate decision-making, and we’ll address it that way. We’ll hear about that potentially emblematic story from Victoria St. Martin, longtime journalist and journalism educator, now reporting on health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. Transcript: ‘This Was Not Caused by God, But Caused by Climate Change’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240816Martin.mp3   Employing the law to silence dissent on life or death concerns, or using the law to engage those concerns head on—that’s this week on CounterSpin!

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240809.mp3   This week on CounterSpin: You don’t hear the phrase “free market capitalism” so much anymore, but the idea still tacitly undergirds much of what you do hear about why products and services are the way they are. We all know about corruption and cronyism, but we still accept that the company that “wins,” that “corners the market,” does so because people simply prefer what they sell. The anti-monopoly ruling against Google challenges that idea of how things work. We’ll hear about it from Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. Transcript: ‘Google Is Able to Profit Extraordinarily Off of Not Having Competition’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240809Hepner.mp3   Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay Also on the show: A recent news report offered the familiar construction that the attacks of September 11, 2001, “plunged the US” into decades of war. Of course that’s not right; choices were made, unpopular choices, about how to respond to the attacks. Choices were made to not bring assailants to trial for the crime, but instead to detain people without charge and hold them indefinitely in a prison designed to be outside US law. None of it was inevitable. Now the Defense secretary has stepped in to overturn plea agreements that, while they wouldn’t have closed Guantánamo, would’ve brought some measure of closure to the cases against the alleged directors of the September 11 attacks. We’ll get an update from Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Transcript: ‘Trying to Pull the Strings on a Prosecutor’s Judgment Is a Serious Problem’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240809Kadidal.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a look at recent press coverage of Sinclair Broadcasting. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240809Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240802.mp3   This week on CounterSpin: Dog whistles are supposed to be silent except for those they’re intended to reach. But as listeners know, the right wing has gotten much more overt and loud and yes, weird, about their intention to defeat the prospect of multiracial democracy. We unpack the latest weaponized trope—the “DEI hire”—with anti-racism educator and author Tim Wise. Transcript: ‘DEI Has Become the New N-Word’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240802Wise.mp3   (photo: Elvert Barnes) Also on the show: Trying to help unhoused people and trying to make them invisible are different things. Keith McHenry, cofounder of Food Not Bombs, joins us to talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling that gave state authorities more power to dismantle the encampments in which many people live, with no guarantee that they will land anywhere more safe. Transcript: ‘The Problem Is, There’s No Place for Anyone to Go’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240802McHenry.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240726.mp3   Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2024) This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump said, on Fox & Friends in 2020, that if voting access were expanded, meaning easing of barriers to voting for disabled people, poor people, rural people, working people…. If voting were made easier, Trump said, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Why wouldn’t news media label that stance anti-democratic, and shelve any so-called good-faith partisan debate? And call for the multiracial democracy we need? And illuminate the history that shows why we aren’t there yet? Ari Berman has been tracking voter rights, and why “one person, one vote” is not the thing to memorize as a definition of US democracy, for many years now. He’s national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and his new book is called Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. We’ll talk about that with him today. Transcript: ‘Our Most Important Democratic Document Was Intended to Make the Country Less Democratic’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240726Berman.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240719.mp3   Electronic Intifada (7/15/24) This week on CounterSpin: In March, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.” But as Greg Shupak writes, even as evidence accumulates, denial is becoming socially and journalistically acceptable. Soon after the UN special rapporteur on the right to food asserted that Israel’s forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza was genocidal, Jonah Goldberg took to the LA Times to assure readers that Israel’s actions do not “amount to genocide,” and such claims are based on “Soviet propaganda” and Holocaust denial. Years from now, we’ll hear about how everyone saw the nightmare and everyone opposed it. But history is now, and the world is watching. We’ll talk about real-time efforts to address the Israeli war on Palestinians with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Transcript: ‘We Have More People Supporting the Rights of Palestinians to Life; It’s Huge’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240719Bennis.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the shooting of Donald Trump. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240719Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240712.mp3   CNN (6/6/24) This week on CounterSpin: At some point, we will get tired of hearing news reports on “record heat”—because the “records” will continue to be broken, and “heat” will have stopped meaning what it once may have meant. Media play a role in moving us from questions about where to buy a good air conditioner to what stands in the way of addressing a public health catastrophe? One obstacle is utility companies. In February of last year, we spoke with Shelby Green at Energy and Policy Institute and Selah Goodson Bell at the Center for Biological Diversity, about their research on the topic. Transcript: ‘Everyone Has a Right to Electricity and Heat’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240712Green_Goodson.mp3   In These Times (12/27/17) Also on the show: Some listeners will know that veteran labor organizer and author Jane McAlevey died recently. The tributes are coming in, but I have little doubt in saying that McAlevey would care less for attention to her life in particular than to those of people she worked for, inside and outside of unions. CounterSpin spoke with her in 2018, when the #metoo campaign was coming to fore. We’ll hear some of that conversation this week on the show. Transcript: ‘When Women Have a Union, You Don’t Have to Walk In Alone’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240712McAlevey.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240705.mp3   University of California Press (2024) This week on CounterSpin: The power of the algorithm is ever clearer in our lives, even if we don’t understand it. You might see it as deciding what you see on social media sites, where maybe they get it wrong: You don’t actually want to see a lot of horror movies, or buy an air fryer; you just clicked on that once. But algorithms don’t only just guess at what you might like to buy; sometimes they’re determining whether you get a job, or keep it. Some 40 million people in the US use online platforms to find work, to find livelihood. The algorithms these platforms use create an environment where organizations enact rules for workers’ behavior, reward and sanction them based on that, but never allow workers to see these accountancies that make their lives unpredictable, much less work with them to develop measurements that would be meaningful. Hatim Rahman has been working on this question; he’s assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. And he’s author of a new book about it: Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, forthcoming in August from University of California Press. Transcript: ‘The Design of These Systems Keeps People in Opposition to Each Other’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240705Rahman.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of climate disruption. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240705Banter.mp3  

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628.mp3   Common Dreams (6/10/24) This week on CounterSpin: Headlined “The Cash Monster Was Insatiable,” a 2022 New York Times piece reported insurance companies gaming Medicare Advantage, presented as a “low-cost” alternative to traditional Medicare. One company pressed doctors to add additional illnesses to the records of patients they hadn’t seen for weeks: Dig up enough new diagnoses, and you could win a bottle of champagne. Some companies cherry-picked healthier seniors for enrollment with cynical tricks like locating their offices up flights of stairs. Such maneuvers don’t lead to good health outcomes, but they serve the real goal: netting private insurers more money. There is now new research on the problem, and the response. We hear from David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and co-author of this new analysis of Medicare Advantage. Transcript: ‘It’s Time to Take Medicare Advantage Off the Market’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628Himmelstein.mp3   (CC photo: Jim Naureckas) Also on the show: You may get the impression from media that marijuana is legal everywhere now, that it’s moved from blight to business, if you will. It’s not as simple as that, and many people harmed by decades of criminalization have yet to see any benefit from decriminalization. Tauhid Chappell has tracked the issue for years now; he teaches the country’s first graduate-level course on equity movements in the cannabis industry, at Thomas Jefferson University. We’ll get an update from him. Transcript: ‘You Have People Who Only Look at Marijuana Legalization as Another Way to Make Money’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628Chappell.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Julian Assange. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240621.mp3   Chicago Sun-Times (4/8/24) This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump told a Las Vegas crowd earlier this month that, if elected, the “first thing” he would do would be to end the IRS practice of taxing tips as part of workers’ regular income. “For those hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy,” he said. Labor advocates were quick to call it out as unserious pandering, particularly in the light of hostility toward efforts to provide those workers a livable basic wage. Unfortunately, Trump can count on a general haziness in the public mind on the impact of “tipped wages,” more helpfully labeled subminimum wages. And that’s partly due to a corporate press corps who, through the decades-long fight on the issue, always give pride of place to the industry narrative that, as a Chicago Sun-Times headline said, “Getting Rid of Tipped Wages in Illinois Would Be the Final Blow to Many Restaurants.” And often lead with customers, like one cited in a recent piece in Bon Appetit, who proudly states that he only tips 10%, half today’s norm, because it’s what he’s always done, and “if servers want more, then they should put the same effort in that I took to earn that money.” As president of the group One Fair Wage, Saru Jayaraman is a leading mythbuster on the history, practice and impact of tipping. CounterSpin talked with her in November 2015. We’ll hear that conversation again today, when much of what she shares is still widely unexplored and misunderstood. Transcript: ‘A Woman’s Ability to Pay Her Bills Should Not Be Dependent on the Whims of Customers’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240621Jayaraman.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of child labor. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240621Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240614.mp3   Rolling Stone (6/10/24) This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote dozens of pages justifying his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, stating the Constitution does not confer the right to determine whether or when to give birth. None of those pages mention his intention to make the United States “a place of godliness,” or his belief that there can be no compromise on such concerns, because “one side or the other is going to win.” Yet those are thoughts Alito freely expressed with a woman he thought was just a stranger at a public event. So: Will elite news media now suggest we just go back to considering the Supreme Court a neutral body, deserving of life terms because they’re above the fray of politics? How long until we see news media take on this pretend naivete, and how much it’s costing us? Jim Naureckas is editor of FAIR.org and the newsletter Extra!. We talk to him about that. Transcript: ‘They Are Not Applying Universal Principles as Philosopher Kings’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240614Naureckas.mp3   Institute for Local Self-Reliance (2/28/24) Also on the show: The news that “the economy” is doing great on paper doesn’t square with the tone-deaf messaging from food companies about mysteriously stubborn high prices: Kellogg’s says, sure, cereal’s weirdly expensive, so why not eat it for dinner! Chipotle’s head honcho says you are not, in fact, getting a smaller portion for the same price—but, you know, if you are, just nod your head a certain way. None of this indicates a media universe that takes seriously the widespread struggle to meet basic needs. Which may explain the failure to find the story in the upsurge in dollar stores, supposedly filling a void for low-income people, but actually just another avenue for ripping them off. We talk about that with Kennedy Smith from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Transcript: ‘These Stores Are Unhealthy for Our Communities’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240614Smith.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240607.mp3   Yahoo (5/31/24) This week on CounterSpin: Surprising no one, Donald Trump and his sycophants responded to his 34-count conviction on charges of lying in business records by claiming that the trial was “rigged,” the judge and jury corrupt, that it was somehow Joe Biden’s doing, and “you know who else was persecuted? Jesus Christ.” Trump publicly calling the judge a “devil,” and Bible-thumping House Speaker Mike Johnson and others showing up at the courthouse in Trump cosplay, were just some of the irregular, shall we say, elements of this trial. It is a moment to examine the right-wing media that have fomented this scary nonsense, but also to look to reporting from the so-called “mainstream” to go beyond the “some say, others differ” pablum we often see. We’ll talk with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, about press response to the trial and the verdict. Transcript: ‘The Press Has a Problem Being Forthright About Trump Where the Right Has Rallied Around Him’   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240607Gertz.mp3   New York Times (11/21/16) Also on the show: For some people the violent police crackdown on peaceful college students protesting their schools’ investments in Israel’s war on Palestinians has been eye-opening. For others, it’s one more example of the employment of law enforcement to brutally enforce corporate power. The fight led by Indigenous women against the Dakota Access pipeline is not long enough ago to have been forgotten. We’ll hear a bit from an August 2017 interview with North Dakota organizer Kandi Mossett. Transcript: ‘The Fight Doesn’t End Until We Stop It at the Source’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240607Mossett.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240531.mp3   The Lever (5/23/24) This week on CounterSpin: In 2023, the California legislature passed legislation that said that big corporations doing business in the state have to tell the public, investors, how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. It’s knowable information, and people have a right to know it, right? The same way restaurants here in New York City have to tell potential customers how they did on their last health inspection; you can eat there or not, but at least you’re making an informed decision. But no! This past January, the US Chamber of Commerce and a bunch of other industry groups challenged those laws, because, they said, making companies disclose the impact of their actions—in this case, their emissions—would force them to publicly express a “speculative, noncommercial, controversial and politically charged message.” That, they said, makes the laws a “pressure campaign” aimed at shaping company behavior. Unfortunately, some courts are indulging this bizarre notion that regulation should be illegal, essentially, because it forces companies to say stuff they’d rather not say. Fortunately, other courts are calling this self-serving nonsense self-serving nonsense. But it’s not just a legal matter; public information, our right to know, is also on the line here, so we should know what’s going on. Katherine Li addresses this issue in a recent piece for the Lever, where she is an editorial fellow. We hear from her this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘Their Effort to Avoid Accountability Is Very Thinly Veiled’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240531Li.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240524.mp3   Law enforcement at UCLA looks on as student peace protesters are attacked by a right-wing mob (CNN, 5/16/24). This week on CounterSpin: As an historic catastrophe, the deep and myriad impacts of Israel’s assault on Palestinians will not be fully understood until years from now, if then. That only adds urgency to present-day resistance to the collateral assault—on the ability to witness, to record and to remember. And of course to protest. The violent, state-sponsored attacks on college students and faculty across the country, who are standing in solidarity with Palestinians and opposed to colleges’ investment in the war and occupation, are showcasing many things—among them the abandonment by many educational institutions of their responsibility to protect not only students, but the space in which they can speak and learn freely. When we spoke with historian Ellen Schrecker in 2017, she noted that the power of the movement associated with Joseph McCarthy was not the man himself, but the “collaboration of the employers, of the mainstream media, of the legal system, you name it, to go along with this anti-Communist purge.” And while many people feel comforted that McCarthy the man was eventually censured by the Senate, the truth is “the American political spectrum narrowed [and] a whole bunch of ideas and causes kind of disappeared from American political discourse and American political life.” We hear again today from historian and author Ellen Schrecker, co-editor of the new book The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, from Beacon Press. Transcript: ‘We’re Seeing Universities Following a Corporate Agenda to Get Favor With Donors’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240524Schrecker_.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Amazon. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240524Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240517.mp3   (image: Voting Booth) This week on CounterSpin: You and I may know that the 2020 election was not stolen from Donald Trump through various mysterious sorts of skullduggery. That does not mean that we can whistle past the fact that many people who vote do believe that. Many of those people are activated in a way that goes beyond easily ignorable segments on OAN, and has meaning for November. Steven Rosenfeld reports on transparency, among other electoral issues, for Voting Booth. We’ll hear from him about kinds of election interference we ignore at our peril. Transcript: ‘The Best We Can Hope for Is To Nip Disinformation Rumors in the Bud’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240517Rosenfeld.mp3   (image: Brennan Center) Also on the show: You and I may believe that democracy means, at its core, something like “one person, one vote.” That doesn’t mean we can whistle past the fact that many voting people do not believe that. Indeed, some elite media–designated smart people have determined: “Citizens United, what? It’s folks who give ten bucks to a candidate that are really messing up the system.” We’ll explore that notion with Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel for the Elections & Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Transcript: ‘There’s a Uniquely American Way of Running Politics With Private Donors’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240517Vandewalker.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240510.mp3   This week on CounterSpin: CNN’s Jake Tapper is mad about college students protesting their institutions’ and their government’s support for Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza—because they’re preventing him, by his account, from covering Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Tapper whined recently: “We’re covering these protests and covering free speech versus security on campus. This is taking room from my show that I would normally be spending covering what is going on in Gaza, or what is going on with the International Criminal Court.” Tapper and CNN, we’re to understand, are powerless to decide what they cover, and incapable of understanding that the clear, core demand of students protesting is that government (and media) not just chat about, but act to change, US enabling of Israel’s genocidal assault. (photo: Jim Naureckas) “I don’t know that the protesters are, from a media perspective, accomplishing what they want to accomplish,” Tapper said. If you listen closely, you can hear him say, “We, as media, don’t want them to accomplish anything, except to be presented, as protestors have throughout US history, as a nuisance and an interference with grownup conversation. And we, as media, will use our actual power to sell that idea.” People, in media and elsewhere, who are used to unequivocal US support for Israel’s actions, used to summarily reducing any criticism of Israel to antisemitism, even when it comes from Jewish people, are seeing the ground shift, and they’re shook. What happens now is critical—first for Palestinians and Israelis, of course, but also for the US press and their handlers, who are so used to driving the narrative they don’t know what to do except yell “shut up shut up shut up” and send in the cops. In the name of, you know, principled debate. We talk about latest developments in Gaza with Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Transcript: ‘Are You Going to End the Genocide, President Biden? That’s the Central Question’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240510Abuznaid.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at protester/press relations, “outside agitators” and TikTok censorship. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240510Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240503.mp3   Media 2070 We’re now seeing the impacts of the reality that corporate media, as well as corporate-funded universities, will always side with official power—as they present students sitting quietly in tents in protest of genocide as violent terrorists. But the fact is, we’ve been seeing it for decades, as corporate media spin narratives about people of color as both violent and lazy, and the socio-economic status quo as the best possible option, even as millions of people increasingly recognize that it means a terrible life for them. Many people, at the same time, are deeply interested in how different media, telling different stories, can change our understanding of our past, our present and our future. Joseph Torres is currently senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press, and co-author with Juan Gonzalez of News for All the People. Writer, musician and communications strategist Collette Watson is with Black River Life. They both are part of the project Media 2070, which aims to highlight how media can serve as a lever for racial justice, and how that includes changing entrenched media narratives about Black people. Their co-authored article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm,” appears in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (5/23). Transcript: ‘When Hasn’t Journalism Been in Crisis for Black People?’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240503TorresWatson.mp3  

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240426.mp3   Columbia encampment (CC photo: Pamela Drew) This week on CounterSpin: Lots of college students, it would appear, think that learning about the world means not just gaining knowledge, but acting on it. Yale students went on a hunger strike, students at Washington University in St. Louis disrupted admitted students day, students and faculty are expressing outrage at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (emphasis added) canceling their valedictorian’s commencement speech out of professed concerns for “safety.” A Vanderbilt student is on TikTok noting that their chancellor has run away from offers to engage them, despite his claim to the New York Times that it’s protestors who are “not interested in dialogue”—and Columbia University students have set up an encampment seen around the world, holding steady as we record April 25, despite the college siccing the NYPD on them. Campuses across the country—Rutgers, MIT, Ohio State, Boston University, Emerson, Tufts, and on and on—are erupting in protest over their institutions’ material support for Israel’s war on Palestinians, and for the companies making the weapons. And the colleges’ official responses are gutting the notion that elite higher education entails respect for the free expression of ideas. Students for Justice in Palestine is working with many of these students. We’ll hear from Sam from National SJP about unfolding events. Transcript: ‘This Weaponization Is Meant to Shift Focus Away From Gaza’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240426Sam.mp3   (CC photo: Edenpictures) Also on the show: App-based companies, including Uber and DoorDash, are adding new service fees, and telling customers they have to, because of new rules calling on them to improve wages and conditions for workers. The rather transparent hope is that, with a lift from lazy media, happy to typey-type about the worry of more expensive coffee, folks will get mad and blame those greedy…bicycle deliverers. We asked Sally Dworak-Fisher, senior staff attorney at National Employment Law Project, to break that story down. Transcript: ‘This Is a Choice Companies Are Making to Raise Fees’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240426Dworak-Fisher.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the TikTok ban. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240426Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240419.mp3   Time (4/14/24) This week on CounterSpin: The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuse of Iraqi detainees during the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia, with Al-Shimari v. CACI. Since the case was first filed in 2008, military contractor CACI has pushed some 20 times to have it dismissed. Time magazine unwittingly told the tale with the recent headline: “Abu Ghraib Military Contractor Trial Set to Start 20 Years after Shocking Images of Abuse.” That’s the thing, people had been reporting the horrific treatment of Iraqi detainees at the Baghdad-area prison and elsewhere, but it was only when those photos were released—photos the Defense Department tried hard to suppress—that it was so undeniable it had to be acknowledged. But still: When Australian TV later broadcast new unseen images, the Washington Post officially sighed that they weren’t worth running because they did not depict “previously unknown” abuse. Post executive editor Len Downie had a different answer, saying in an online chat that the images were “so shocking and in such bad taste, especially the extensive nudity, that they are not publishable in our newspaper.” Because that what officially sanctioned torture is, above all, right? Distasteful. We got a reading on the case last year from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Transcript: ‘CACI Aided and Abetted the Torture of Our Clients’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240419Azmy.mp3   Prometheus Books (2024) Also on the show: Historians tell us that the Cold War is over, but the framing persists in news media that love a simple good guy vs. bad guy story, even as who the good and the bad guys are shifts over time. Telling history through actual human beings makes it harder to come up with slam-dunk answers, but can raise questions that are ultimately more useful for those seeking a peaceful planet. A new book provides a sort of case study; it’s about Ted Hall, who, as a young man, shared nuclear secrets from Los Alamos with the then–Soviet Union. Veteran investigative journalist Dave Lindorff has reported for numerous outlets and is author of Marketplace Medicine and This Can’t Be Happening, among other titles. We talked with him about his latest, Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World, which is out now from Prometheus Books. Transcript: ‘A Monopoly on the Bomb Would Be a Catastrophe for the World’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240419Lindorff.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240412.mp3   Washington Post (3/25/24) This week on CounterSpin: US corporate media’s story about Haiti is familiar. Haiti, according to various recent reports, has “whipped from one calamity to another.” The country is a “cataclysm of hunger and terror,” “teetering on the brink of collapse,” “spiraling deeper into chaos” or else “descending into gang-fueled anarchistic chaos.” It’s “become a dangerously rudderless country.” According to one Florida paper’s editorial: “Haiti’s unrest” is now “becoming our problem,” as Floridians and the US “struggle to help people in Haiti, although history suggests there are no answers.” Or, well, there is one answer: The Washington Post made space for a former ambassador to explain that 20 years ago in Haiti, “the worst outcomes were avoided through decisive American intervention. Today’s crisis might require it as well.” At this point, the Austin American-Statesman’s “Haiti Cannibalism Claims Unfounded” might pass for refreshing. AP had a piece that actually talked to Haitians amid what is indeed a deep and deepening crisis. A grandmother told the wire service, “We’re living day-by-day and hoping that something will change.” We talk about what has to change—including, importantly, Western media presentations that ignore or erase even recent history—with Chris Bernadel, from the Black Alliance for Peace‘s Haiti/Americas Team and Haitian grassroots group Moleghaf. Transcript: ‘Interventions Laid the Groundwork for the Crisis in Haiti Today’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240412Bernadel.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Elon Musk vs. Brazil. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240412Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240405.mp3   Popular Information (4/4/24) This week on CounterSpin: In the final quarter of 2023, after-tax corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion. As reported by Popular Information, corporate profit margins were at a level not seen since the 1950s, as increases in prices have outpaced increases in costs—which Capitalism 101 says shouldn’t happen, because competing companies are supposed to step in with lower prices and grab some market share, right? What’s different now? Well, abject greed, abetted by policy and whistled past by the press corps. As one economist put it, “If people are paying $3 for a dozen eggs last week, they’ll pay $3 this week. And firms take advantage of that.” One reason we have details on “greedflation” is the work of the Groundwork Collaborative. We spoke with their economist and managing director of policy and research, Rakeen Mabud, a few months back. We hear some of that conversation again this week. Transcript: ‘It’s Important to Focus on Big Companies Using the Cover of Inflation to Jack Up Prices’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240405Mabud.mp3   Photo: Elvert Barnes Also on the show: While much else is happening, we can’t lose sight of the ongoing assault on reproductive freedom, in other words basic human rights, being given tailwind by the Supreme Court. Advocates warned that overturning Roe v. Wade would not be the end, and it wasn’t. The court is now entertaining challenge to the legality of the abortion medication mifepristone, used safely and effectively for decades, including invoking the 1873 Comstock Act, about sending “obscene materials” through the mail. The Washington Post has described it as a “confusing legal battle,” but CounterSpin got clarity from the Guttmacher Institute’s Rachel K. Jones last year. We hear that this week as well. Transcript: ‘People Who Don’t Support Abortion Ignore the Science and the Safety’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240405Jones.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at NBC’s unhiring of Ronna McDaniel. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240405Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240329.mp3   BBC (3/28/24) This week on CounterSpin: A senior UN human rights official told the BBC that there is a “plausible” case that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, a war crime. Meanwhile, US citizens struggle to make sense of White House policy that seems to call for getting aid to Palestinians while pursuing a course of action that makes that aid necessary, if insufficient. Phyllis Bennis is senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, an international advisor with Jewish Voice for Peace and a longtime UN-watcher. She joins us with thoughts on the evolving situation. Transcript: ‘This Is About What Has to Happen to Stop This Genocide’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240329Bennis.mp3   American Prospect (10/31/19) Also on the show: As reporter Alex Sammon outlined five years ago in the American Prospect, the Boeing scandal is an exemplar of the corporate crisis of our age. Putting resources that should’ve been put into safety into shareholder dividends and stock buybacks, selling warning indicators that alert pilots to problems with flight-control software as optional extras, and outsourcing engineering to coders in India making $9 an hour—these weren’t accidents; they were choices, made consciously, over time. So why are media so excited about Boeing’s CEO stepping down, as though his “taking one for the team” means changing the playbook? We hear from Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. Transcript: ‘Punishments for Corporations and CEOs Are Just Paltry’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240329Weissman.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240322.mp3   KXAS (3/19/24) This week on CounterSpin: 2023 was the warmest year on record. The World Meteorological Organization announced records once again broken, “in some cases smashed” (their words), for greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea-level rise, Antarctic sea ice and glacier retreat. Climate disruption is the prime mover of a cascade of interrelated crises. At the same time, we’re told that basic journalism says that when it comes to problems that people need solved, yet somehow aren’t solved, rule No. 1 is “follow the money.” Yet even as elite media talk about the climate crisis they still…can’t… quite…connect images of floods or fires to the triumphant shareholder meetings of the fossil fuel companies. Narrating the nightmare is not enough. We’ll talk about the latest research on climate coverage with Evlondo Cooper, senior writer at Media Matters. Transcript: ‘In Even the Best Coverage There Is No Accountability for the Fossil Fuel Industry’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240322Cooper.mp3   Also on the show: Part of what FAIR’s been saying since our start in 1986—when it was a fringe idea, that meant you were either alarmist or benighted or both—is that there is an inescapable conflict between media as a business and journalism as a public service. For a while, it was mainly about “fear and favor”—the ways corporate owners and sponsors influence the content of coverage. It’s more bare-knuckled now: Mass layoffs and takeovers force us to see how what you may think of as your local newspaper is really just an “asset” in a megacorporation’s portfolio, and will be treated that way—with zero evidence that a source of vital news and information is any different from a soap factory. Rick Goldsmith’s new film is called Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. We’ll hear from him about the film and the change it hopes to part of. Transcript: ‘This Decline in Local Journalism Was Noticed First by Journalists Themselves’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240322Goldsmith.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent coverage of Israel’s flour massacre. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240322Banter.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240315.mp3   (image: Repair.org) This week on CounterSpin: About this time seven years ago, John Deere was arguing, with a straight face, that farmers shouldn’t really “own” their tractors, because if they had access to the software involved, they might pirate Taylor Swift music. Things have changed since then, though industry still gets up and goes to court to say that even though you bought a tractor or a washing machine or a cellphone, it’s not really “yours,” in the sense that you can’t fix it if it breaks. Even if you know how, even if you, frankly, can’t afford to buy a new one. More and more people, including lawmakers, are thinking that’s some anti-consumer, and anti-environment, nonsense. We get an update from Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association. Transcript: ‘They’re Marketing to Us That We’re Too Stupid to Fix Our Stuff’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240315Gordon-Byrne.mp3   Juan Orlando Hernández(photo: Alan SantosPR) Also on the show: “Former President of Honduras Convicted in US of Aiding Drug Traffickers” is the current headline. You’d never guess from the reporting that Juan Orlando Hernández was a US ally, that the US supported the 2009 coup that went a long way toward creating Honduras’ current political landscape. Instead, you’ll read US Attorney Jacob Gutwillig telling the jury that a corrupt Hernández “paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States.” Because Americans, you see, don’t want to use cocaine; they’re forced to by the wiles and witchery of Honduran kingpins—and, thankfully, one of them has been brought to justice by the US’s moral, as reflected in its judicial, superiority. That’s the narrative you get from a press corps uninterested in anything other than a rose-colored depiction of the US role in geopolitical history. We hear more from Suyapa Portillo Villeda, advocate, organizer and associate professor of Chicana/o–Latina/o transnational studies at Pitzer College, as well as author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras. Transcript: ‘The US State Department Is Complicit With Juan Orlando Hernández’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240315Portillo.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240308.mp3   Vox (3/4/24) This week on CounterSpin: Among the multitude of harms that could rain on this country should Donald Trump become president again, he could order the Department of Justice to drop any charges against him stemming from his fomenting of an insurrection aimed at overturning by violence the results of the 2020 election. Not to put too fine a point on it, Trump could declare himself above the law—and that’s just been enabled by the Supreme Court, which put off until April the legal case wherein Trump declares himself immune to criminal prosecution. The Court can move quickly; they hopped right to the decision that Trump can’t be removed from presidential ballots in the states. But this, we’re to understand, will take, huh, maybe until after the election, to mull. Vox Court-watcher Ian Millhiser says he tries to reserve his “this is an exceptionally alarming decision” voice, but this occasion calls for it. We hear from him this week. Transcript: ‘This Court Is Not Going to Protect Us From Donald Trump’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240308Millhiser.mp3   Also on the show: Corporate news media have an anti-elder narrative that’s as stupid as it is cruel. “Keep up or you’re in the way,” the line goes, “if you aren’t working 40 to 60 hours a week, you’re a societal drain.” It’s a weird position, erasing and marginalizing elderly people, given that the elderly are a sizable portion of the population, and a community we all get to join if we’re lucky. Alfredo Lopez is a longtime organizer and activist, and a founder of the new group Radical Elders. We talk with him about the space the group seeks to fill. Transcript: ‘That’s What US Capitalism Does Right Now. It Jettisons Its Elders.’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240308Lopez.mp3  

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240301.mp3   This week on CounterSpin: Years ago when media critics called attention to ways corporate media’s profit-driven nature negatively impacts the news, lots of people would say, “But what about the internet?” Nowadays, folks seem to see more clearly that constraints on a news outlet’s content have little to do with whether it’s on paper or online, but on who owns it, who resources it, to whom is it accountable. You’ll see the phrase “crisis of journalism” newly circulating these days, but one thing hasn’t changed: If we don’t ask different questions about what we need from journalism, we will arrive at the same old unsatisfactory responses. Victor Pickard is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, and author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society, from Oxford University Press. We talk to him about the crisis of journalism and its future. Transcript: ‘We Need to Separate Capitalism and Journalism’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240301Pickard.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of criminalizing journalism, gag rules and diversity data. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240301Banter.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240223.mp3   Reuters (2/20/24) This week on CounterSpin: International human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber told Electronic Intifada recently that the International Court of Justice hearings on the legality of Israel’s 56-year occupation of Palestinian land are the largest case in history—more than 50 countries are taking part in this, and the US is virtually alone…in defending the legality of Israel’s occupation. Most states are affirming its illegality and cataloging Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other gross violations of international law. Every day the US falls more out of step with the world in its support for Israel’s violent assault on Gaza. As Mokhiber said, US vetoes of ceasefires in the UN Security Council, after which thousands more were killed, mean the US is directly responsible for those deaths: “Complicity is a crime.” Many in the US press seem divorced from the idea of US responsibility, and somehow we’re seeing more of the opinions of random TV actors than of groups on the ground in Palestine, and international human rights and legal bodies. We get some update on this unfolding nightmare from author and activist Gregory Shupak, from the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and from Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Greg Shupak: Transcript: ‘Israeli Violence Is Legitimized and Palestinian Counter-Violence Is Delegitimized’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240223Shupak.mp3 Trita Parsi: Transcript: ‘What in the Slaughter of Palestinians Is So Important to the US?’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240223Parsi.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240216.mp3   CEPR (1/31/24) This week on CounterSpin: There’s an announcement on the New York City subway where a voice chirps: “Attention, everyone! There are 150 accessible subway stations!” One can imagine an alternate world where we’d hear, “Only 150 of New York City’s 472 subway stations are accessible, and that’s a problem!” But people with disabilities are meant to be grateful, excited even, for whatever access or accommodation is made available for them to participate in daily life. There’s often an implied corollary suggestion that any violation of the rights of disabled people is an individual matter, to be fought over in the courts, rather than something to be acknowledged and addressed societally. The overarching law we have, the Americans with Disabilities Act, is meant to be proactive; it is, the government website tells us, a law, “not a benefits program.” In reality, though, the ADA still meets resistance, confusion and various combinations thereof, 33 years after its passage. And news media, as a rule, don’t help. The Supreme Court recently dismissed, but did not do away with, a case that gets at the heart of enforcement of civil rights laws for people with disabilities—though not them alone. Acheson v. Laufer is an under-the-radar case that, our guest says, is “part of a pattern of far-right reactionaries weaponizing the courts to dismantle labor protections, housing rights and health guidelines.” Ariel Adelman is a disability rights advocate and policy analyst. Her piece, with Hayley Brown, appeared recently on CEPR.net, the website of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. She’ll tell us what’s going on and what’s at stake. Transcript: ‘Disenfranchised, Under-Resourced Populations Are Burdened With Enforcing Major Federal Regulation’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240216Adelman.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of the racist Charles Stuart murder hoax. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240216Banter.mp3  

  Chart: Washington Center for Equitable Growth (12/9/19) One of the defining features of contemporary US capitalism is rampant inequality. Though there is some scholarly debate about its precise extent, even conservative estimates suggest a rise in income inequality of 16% since 1979 (as measured by the Gini coefficient). Moreover, of the 38 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of mainly high-income countries, the US currently ranks dismally as the sixth-most unequal. In 2013, then–President Barack Obama described inequality, alongside a lack of upward mobility, as the “defining challenge of our time” (CBS, 12/4/13). This declaration spurred a brief moment of interest in inequality on cable news channels, which proved fleeting. During the two-month window of December 2013 through January 2014—Obama made his statement during a speech on December 4—the cable news channels Fox, CNN and MSNBC aired about a tenth of the total mentions of the term “inequality” that they would air from the start of 2010 through the beginning of 2024, a 14-year period. Overshadowed by a hypothetical problem The rapid rise in inequality over recent decades might have been expected to generate a deep sense of alarm in news media. But on cable news, there’s little sign of distress. Compare cable coverage of inequality to coverage of other economic topics, such as inflation, recession and government debt. The following chart shows the number of mentions of various terms across Fox, CNN and MSNBC over the course of 2023: Can you make out the bottom bar? That depicts combined coverage of four terms: “income inequality,” “wealth inequality,” “class inequality” and “economic inequality.” Those four together got less than 1% of the coverage of inflation during 2023. The skew was evident but less extreme at text-based outlets. Searches of the New York Times archives for the year of 2023 deliver 1.5 times as many articles for “debt ceiling” as for “income inequality,” 2.5 times for “recession” and 7 times for “inflation.” Searches of the Washington Post archives for the same period return a more disproportionate 18 times for “debt ceiling,” 14 times for “recession” and 34 times for “inflation.” Note that, although inflation and a debt ceiling battle were both issues in 2023, there was no recession. The reason there was so much coverage of the topic was that economists overwhelmingly forecast a recession—and utterly whiffed—and media signal-boosted their inaccurate predictions. Fears of recession, a fantasy problem, consequently overshadowed discussion of the very real problem of inequality. Redirecting the conversation Chart: Pew Research (1/9/20) For media outlets owned by the wealthy, there’s obvious utility in directing the conversation away from inequality and toward other concerns. For instance, if the public’s attention can be directed toward a debt ceiling battle, corporate media outlets can hype fears about unsustainable deficits. In turn, the public can be primed to see government debt as a leading challenge, whether or not this actually makes much sense. Public opinion data suggests that this has worked—53% of Americans see the federal budget deficit as a very big problem, whereas only 44% view economic inequality the same way. Media hyper-fixation on inflation and a potential recession over the last couple years, meanwhile, has persistently distorted the economic evaluations of the general population, whose satisfaction with the economy remained at historically low levels last year amidst the strongest economic recovery in decades (FAIR.org, 1/5/24). In a recent poll, asked whether wage growth outpaced inflation over the past year, a full 90% of Americans said that it hadn’t, when in reality it had. In each case, whether media are fearmongering about deficits, inflation or a potential recession, they have been able to steer the conversation away from progressive policies and toward a more centrist approach. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post, during last year’s debt ceiling battle, directed attention towards Social Security and Medicare, amplifying arguments for cutting these programs (FAIR.org, 5/17/23, 6/15/23). During the recent bout of inflation, both papers cheered on the Federal Reserve’s campaign to “cool” the labor market (read: reduce workers’ bargaining power) and potentially hike unemployment (FAIR.org, 1/25/23, 6/27/23). Promotion of recession fears likewise functioned to sow doubts about the sweeping stimulus packages implemented in response to the pandemic, legislation that produced the most rapid recovery in decades and a substantial reduction in inequality. After all, if the inevitable result of an enhanced safety net is inflation and a downturn, why bother? A focus on the fundamental issue of inequality, which has significantly exacerbated the effects of real but temporary issues like elevated inflation, would not serve these same ends. Rather, its likely

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240209.mp3   Other Words (1/31/24) This week on CounterSpin: CNN host Dana Bash asked a question in the Republican presidential debate (1/10/24) in Des Moines, Iowa: The rate of inflation is down. Prices, though, are still high, and Americans are struggling to afford food, cars and housing. What is the single most important policy that you would implement as president to make the essentials in Americans’ lives more [affordable]? Unfortunately, she asked the question of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who answered with word salad involving “wasteful spending on a Covid stimulus bill that expanded welfare, that’s now left us with 80 million Americans on Medicaid, 42 million Americans on food stamps.” Haley concluded with the admonition “quit borrowing. Cut up the credit cards.” “Cut up the credit cards” is interesting advice for people who are having trouble affording diapers, but it’s the sort of advice politicians and pundits dole out, and that corporate news media present as a respectable worldview, worthy of our attention. There is another view, that acknowledges that the same people who earn wages also buy groceries, and pretending that we’re pitted against one another is not just mis- but disinformation. Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. They have new work on what’s driving grocery prices, that doesn’t involve getting mad at people using food stamps. We’ll hear from her today on the show. Transcript: ‘It’s Important to Focus on Big Companies Using the Cover of Inflation to Jack Up Prices’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240209Mabud.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at analogies that encourage genocide. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240209Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240202.mp3   Texas Tribune (1/22/24) This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court ruled that federal agents can remove the razor wire that Texas state officials have set up along parts of the US/Mexico border. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Elite news media, for their part, suggest we seek a hallowed middle ground between those two worldviews. Corporate media are filled with debate about the best way to handle the “border crisis.” But what if there isn’t a border crisis so much as an absence of historical understanding, of empathy, of community resourcing, and of critical challenge to media and political narratives—including that reflected in President Joe Biden’s call to allow access for “those who deserve to be here”? We hear from Aron Thorn, senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program of the Texas Civil Rights Project. Transcript: ‘Texas Is Fighting for Its Right to Lay Concertina Wire’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240202Thorn.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent coverage of Gaza protest and the New Hampshire primary. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240202Banter.mp3  

  When I became a journalist over 15 years ago, I did so to highlight the voices of activists—not top city officials. But things took an unexpected turn in 2014, as the Washington Post sought to end DC Mayor Vincent Gray’s career. As his reelection bid neared, Gray comfortably led all polls—much to the chagrin of the Post, which hadn’t forgiven him for winning office four years earlier. In that prior 2010 contest, Gray, riding a wave of Black support, upended the incumbent DC mayor, Adrian Fenty. It was an act for which the Post never forgave Gray, as Fenty was the paper’s dream come true. Fenty had run as a progressive in 2006, and won in a landslide. But upon taking office, Fenty flipped and adopted the Post’s anti-labor, pro-gentrification agenda as his own. The shocking about-face earned Fenty the Post’s ever-lasting love, but cost him Black voters—and his reelection. While Fenty conceded to Gray in 2010, the Post had a harder time moving on. And the paper would spend the next four years attacking Gray, particularly on the eve of the 2014 election. Dog-whistling As the 2014 election neared, anti-Gray editorials, already commonplace, started running multiple times a week, and then nearly daily. In the nine days leading up to the start of early voting, the Post (3/9–17/14) ran an incredible seven editorials targeting Gray. And it wasn’t just the editorial page that was busy electioneering. To the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank (3/19/14), DC Mayor Vincent Gray “made a lamentable decision to stoke the city’s racial politics” by endorsing the statement that “Washington has become a city of the haves and have-nots.” Two days into early voting, Gray received the endorsement of Marion Barry, the former four-term DC mayor. In his column on the endorsement, the Post’s Dana Milbank (3/19/14) dismissed Barry, who came out of the civil rights movement, as an “old race warrior” who “has inflamed racial tensions for decades.” Milbank opened by taking advantage of the slurred speech of the ailing Barry (who’d live just eight more months): Embattled Washington Mayor Vincent Gray called in a notorious predecessor, Marion Barry, to prop up his reelection campaign Wednesday afternoon. Gray got exactly what he deserved. “Vince Gray,” Barry told a modest crowd in a church basement in Southeast Washington, “is a leader with a solid crack record.” The self-proclaimed mayor for life caught this Freudian slip. “Track record,” he corrected. Barry, now a 78-year-old City Council member in failing health, is, famously, the one with the crack record. As an example of Gray’s potential “subtle but divisive appeals to African American voters,” the Post‘s Mike DeBonis (3/13/14) offered, “To some in our city, I’m just another corrupt politician from the other side of town.” Milbank’s racialized attacks were not a one-off. A week earlier, Post columnist Mike DeBonis (3/13/14) gratuitously dropped Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s name into the mix, in an attempt to tie him to Gray: If Gray is engaging in tribal politics, he’s certainly doing it more subtly than the master of the trade, Marion Barry…[who] after his 1990 drug arrest…was not shy about sending signals to his African-American base—embracing the support of Louis Farrakhan and other controversial activists. Not only does Gray lack ties to Farrakhan—notorious for his history of antisemitism—but as a student at George Washington University, Gray joined a Jewish fraternity, where he was one of three Black students to integrate the school’s all-white fraternity system. DeBonis was too busy dog-whistling to white voters to mention this in his column, ironically headlined “Is Vincent Gray Dog-Whistling to Black Voters?” The day before DeBonis’ piece, Jonetta Rose Barras’ Post column (3/12/14) associated Gray with “some Third World dictatorship” and “snake-oil sellers.” ‘Growing ex-prisoner vote’ “Any taboo that previously muted politicking with prisoners, some of whom once preyed on city residents, has fallen away,” the Post‘s Aaron Davis (3/22/14) reported, and “no one is doing more to capture this vote than Gray.” Meanwhile, with early-voting underway, here’s how Post reporter Aaron Davis opened his story, “In DC Mayor’s Race, Embattled Gray May Have a Secret Weapon in Growing Ex-Prisoner Vote” (3/22/14): Above an official portrait of Mayor Vincent C. Gray, crisp silver lettering spells out a welcome to one of the shiniest new places in DC government—the Office on Returning Citizen Affairs. And on a flier lying nearby: “YOU CAN LEGALLY VOTE!” The bustling facility is designed solely for convicted criminals…a slice of the population growing by thousands each year. Ex-offenders account for at least one in 10 DC residents and perhaps many more…. Any taboo that previously muted politicking with prisoners, some of whom once preyed on city residen

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240126.mp3   Guardian (1/8/24) This week on CounterSpin: Elite media can give the impression that problems wax and wane along with their attention to them. And, not to put too fine a point on it, they’re done with police brutality. So if you think news media show you the world, you’ll be surprised to hear that 2023 saw killings by law enforcement up from the previous year, which was up from the year before that. More than 1,200 people were killed, roughly three people every day, including not just those shot dead, but those fatally shocked by a stun gun, beaten or restrained to death. Thirty-six percent of those killed were fleeing, and, yes, they were disproportionately Black. As far as corporate media are concerned, we’ve tried nothin’, and we’re all out of ideas. Communities, on the other hand, are hard at work reimagining public safety without punitive policing. There’s new work on those possibilities, and we hear about it from Monifa Bandele from the Movement for Black Lives. Transcript: ‘We Know What Keeps Us Safe: People Need Care and Not Punishment’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240126Bandele.mp3   Extra! (7–8/14) Also on the show: There is little research that is more important or less acknowledged than that from Princeton’s (now UCLA’s) Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page in 2014 on the translation of public opinion into public policy. They looked at more than 1700 policies over 20 years and concluded that where economic elite views diverged from those of the public—as they would—the public had “zero estimated impact upon policy change, while economic elites are still estimated to have a very large, positive, independent impact.” Awareness of that fundamental disconnect is always relevant—but maybe especially when it comes to election season, where corporate coverage suggests we have an array of choices, we’re able to vote for people to represent our interests and choose our way forward, and let the most popular candidate win! We know it’s not like this, but the reporting that could show us how and why elections don’t work the way we think they do, is just not there, in a vigorous, sustained way. Add that to amped-up efforts to impede voting, even in this imperfect system, and people get discouraged—they don’t vote at all, and problems are compounded. So how do we acknowledge flaws in the system while still encouraging people to participate, and to fight the roadblocks to voting that we’re seeing right now? We get at that with Svante Myrick, president of People For the American Way, as well as former mayor of Ithaca, New York. Transcript: ‘If You Can’t Choose Your Own Leaders, Nothing Else Matters’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240126Myrick.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240119.mp3   New York Times (10/14/23) This week on CounterSpin: US corporate news media’s initial response to Israel’s terror campaign against Palestinians, unleashed in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas, was characterized, broadly speaking, by legitimization, a rhetorical blank check for whatever Israel might do. Israel, the New York Times editorial board said, “is determined to break the power of Hamas, and in that effort it deserves the support of the United States and the rest of the world.” We’re more than three months into that “effort.” The death toll for Palestinians is, conservatively, as we record on January 18, over 24,000 people. The UN secretary general calls Gaza a “graveyard for children.” So how does the Times’ assertion that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law” stand up now? We’re talking this week with media critic, activist and teacher Gregory Shupak. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and is author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books. Transcript: ‘When You’re in a Colonial Situation, the Colonial Power Initiates Violence’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240119Shupak.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at some recent press coverage of immigration. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240119Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240112.mp3   Yahoo (1/4/24) This week on CounterSpin: The journalists at Yahoo Finance tell us that a Connecticut McDonald’s charging $18 for a combo meal has “sparked a nationwide debate” on escalating prices in the fast food industry. The outrage, readers are told, is “partly attributed” to a recent raise in the minimum wage—which has not yet gone into effect. Spoiler: We never hear about any other “parts” “attributed.” Businesses like McDonald’s, the story goes, “have already raised their prices in anticipation of the wage hike.” Were there any other responses available to them? Don’t ask! We’re moving on—to how it isn’t just that poor working Joes will have to pay more for a Big Mac, but also there will be layoffs…of fast-food employees. We meet Jose and Jim, who say they thought higher wages would be good, “considering the decline in tipping and increasing living costs.” Alas no, Yahoo explains: “The reality was harsher. The wage increase, while beneficial for some, has resulted in job losses for others, leading to a complex mix of gratitude and resentment among affected workers.” The takeaway: “The debate over the appropriate balance between fair wages and sustainable business practices remains unresolved.” The piece does go on to lament the mental stress associated with economic uncertainty—not for owners, evidently—and the wise counsel that those troubled might consider “establishing a substantial savings account and making smart investments.” Elite reporters seem so far removed from the daily reality of the bulk of the country that this doesn’t even ring weird to them. A raise in wages for fast food employees means fast food employees have to lose their jobs—that’s just, you know, “economics.” Union, what? Profiteering, who? The only operative question is, which low-wage workers need to suffer more? We get a different view on raising the minimum wage from Sebastian Martinez Hickey, researcher for the EARN (Economic Analysis and Research Network) team at the Economic Policy Institute. Transcript: ‘A Minimum-Wage Increase Can Benefit the Whole Economy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240112MartinezHickey.mp3   Tipped worker (cc photo: Daveblog) Also on the show: A largely unspoken part of media’s wage conversation is the whole sector of workers whose pay rates are based in…enslavement. Yeah. In 2015, CounterSpin learned about tipped wages from Saru Jayaraman, co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. We hear part of that relevant conversation this week. Transcript: ‘A Woman’s Ability to Pay Her Bills Should Not Be Dependent on the Whims of Customers’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240112Jayaraman.mp3  

  2023 is over, and with it, the great inflation surge of the last few years has essentially come to an end. As the progressive economist Dean Baker trumpeted shortly before Christmas, “This Economy Has Landed, We Are at the Fed’s Target” (Beat the Press, 12/22/23). Inflation is now at 2.6%, according to the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure, and is trending further downward. Remarkably, since the Fed began raising interest rates in the spring of 2022, unemployment has maintained a historically low level of below 4%. Contrast that with the US’s last experience with an extended period of elevated inflation. That was the double-digit inflation of the late 1970s/early 1980s, which the Fed fought by sending unemployment skyrocketing—from 6% in 1979 to a peak of nearly 11% in 1982. With inflation tamed in the fall of 1984—down to 4.3%—President Ronald Reagan declared “Morning in America.” At the time, the misery index, a rough gauge of societal suffering that sums inflation and unemployment, clocked in at nearly 12%. Today, the same index sits around 7%. If the fall of 1984 was morning, we’re well into the day. The dark, turbulent night is not only behind us; it’s been over for a while. Public not buying it That’s not how most of the American public seems to feel, though. People continue to rate the economy stunningly poorly, given its performance of late. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, for instance, most recently registered 61.3, versus 100.9 during “Morning in America.” In other words, consumer sentiment is currently 39% lower than it was at a time when the misery index was 41% higher. Meanwhile, Joe Biden has a lower approval rating than any president going back to Jimmy Carter at the equivalent stage of their presidencies (New York Times, 12/28/23). Biden is, in fact, 15 percentage points lower than Reagan, whose economy at the same period of his presidency was, in key respects, significantly worse—unemployment, for instance, was 8.3%. Joe Biden has lower approval ratings at this point in his first term than any president going back to Jimmy Carter (New York Times, 12/28/23). The gap between consumer sentiment and economic performance has sparked extensive pontification online, with a variety of reasons being proposed for the disconnect. Arguments have been made for everything from increases in grocery prices (Atlantic, 12/21/23), to real wage declines during much of 2021 and 2022 (Vox, 8/10/23), to social media misinformation (Washington Post, 11/24/23), to partisan polarization (CBS, 8/14/23), to lagging perceptions and a desire for outright deflation (Wall Street Journal, 10/18/23). It’s also possible there’s been a shift towards general disillusionment with the economic system. In this view, consumer sentiment is now driven more by justifiable anger towards the system rather than disappointment with the real-time performance of macroeconomic variables like unemployment, inflation and GDP that tend to get discussed by the corporate press. Inequality, after all, has steadily ticked up for decades, catapulting us into a new Gilded Age. The rising support for socialism among younger generations, as well as the salience of inequality in public discourse, could be carrying over into consumer sentiment, though this wouldn’t explain why sentiment is actually most positive among the 18–34 age group. Inflation coverage in overdrive At the end of the day, there’s probably some truth to all of these ideas. But there’s another fundamental cause of economic discontent that should be getting more attention: corporate media’s single-minded obsession with inflation, which has left the public with an objectively inaccurate view of the economy. Back in 2019, when asked what metric they considered the most representative of the health of the overall economy, only 30% of Americans selected “the prices of goods and services you buy.” By the summer of 2023, that number had shot up to 57%. As corporate media relentlessly covered inflation, consumers changed to seeing inflation as the best measure of economic health (YouGov, 7/14/23). What changed? Well, obviously, inflation spiked. But not only that: Concurrently, media went into absolute overdrive in their coverage of the phenomenon. Over the course of Biden’s presidency, as I’ve previously documented for FAIR (7/13/23), cable news outlets have been noticeably more focused on inflation than on a host of recovery indicators, such as GDP, job growth and consumer spending. Distracting from wage gains One particularly frustrating example has been that of wage growth, which has gotten about 20 times less coverage than inflation across CNN, Fox and MSNBC since the start of 2022. This imbalance has shown up at print outlets as well, though in somewhat less pronounced form. A search of the New York Times archives returns six times as many results for “inflation” as for “wage growth” for the year 2023. At the Washington Post archives, the r

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240105.mp3   (image: Jewish Voice for Peace) This week on CounterSpin: It was a big deal when Jewish Americans who oppose US support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza filled New York’s Grand Central Terminal. But not big enough to make the front page of the local paper, the New York Times. US journalists invoke the First Amendment a lot, but not so much when it extends to regular folks using their individual voices, sometimes at significant personal risk, to say NO to something the US government is doing in their name. Some listeners may remember marching with thousands of others in advance of the US war on Iraq, only to come home and find the paper or TV station ignored them utterly, or distorted their effort and their message—as when NBC’s Tom Brokaw reported a Washington, DC, anti-war march of at least 100,000 people, met with a couple hundred pro-war counter-protesters, as: “Opponents and supporters of the war marched in cities across the nation on Saturday.” “Protest is the voice of the people,” our guest’s organization states. Defending Rights & Dissent aims to invigorate the Bill of Rights and, crucially, to protect our right to political expression. We talk with Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘Protest Is the Tool by Which We Realize Our Democracy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240105Gibbons.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the media’s role in the recent Republican primary debates. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240105Banter.mp3  

Transcript: ‘We Have to Do the Hard Work of Looking at Context’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231229.mp3   Janine Jackson Every week, CounterSpin tries to bring you a look “behind the headlines” of the mainstream news. Not because headlines are false, necessarily, but because the full story is rarely reflected there—the voices, the communities and ideas that are not front and center in the discourse of the powerful, but could help us move toward a more equitable, peaceful, healthy communal life. Many—most—conversations we need to have, have to happen around corporate news media, while deconstructing and re-imagining the discourse that they’re pumping out day after day. Guests featured in this special “best of” episode include: Paul Hudson, president of FlyersRights, on air travel chaos; Kamau Franklin, founder of Community Movement Builders, on Atlanta’s Cop City; Eric Thurm, campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, on artificial intelligence; Emily Sanders, editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity, on oil company lies; Kehsi Iman Wilson, chief operating officer of New Disabled South, on the Americans With Disabilities Act; Rodrigo Camarena, director of Justicia Lab, on wage theft; Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines group, on Covid-19 price-gouging; Phyllis Bennis, director of IPS’s New Internationalism project, on Gaza context; Sonya Meyerson-Knox, communications director of Jewish Voice for Peace, on Jewish-American voices on Gaza. CounterSpin is thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They help us see the world more clearly, as well as the role we can play in changing it. This is just a small selection of some of them.

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231222.mp3   Middle East Eye (12/14/23) This week on CounterSpin: People in the US, the story goes, value few things more than individual freedom and money. So you’d think the way an individual uses their money would be sacrosanct. It’s a sign of where we’re at that there are currently congressional efforts to put people in prison, fine them millions of dollars, for choosing not to buy products from countries that are not declared “official enemies” by, well, presumably whoever’s in the White House at the moment. The anti-boycott measure the House Foreign Affairs Committee is pushing may never see daylight, of course, but it indicates a willingness by some in elected office to use state power to silence and sanction anyone using their voice in dissent of official actions—in this one case, lest it be confused, of people critical of Israel’s ongoing mass murder and displacement of Palestinians. The work to shut down opposition to the siege of Gaza, and US facilitation of it, is reminding Americans of what it means when powerful institutions, including in the media, combine a decidedly selective understanding of free expression with a vehement desire to enforce it. We talked about that with Wadie Said, professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, and author of the book Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions, from Oxford University Press. Transcript: ‘”Material Support” in the Form of Speech Can Be Criminalized’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231222Said.mp3  

Transcript: ‘The Only Way to Have Meaningful Climate Policy Is to Beat the Oil Guys’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231215.mp3   New York Times (12/13/23) This week on CounterSpin: UN Climate talks have ended with an agreement that, most importantly—New York Times headlines would suggest—”Strikes Deal to Transition Away From Fossil Fuels.” Headlines, all that many people read, are often misleading, and sometimes they aggressively deflect from the point of the story, which in this case is that everyone who wasn’t a polluting corporate entity came away from COP28 angry, worried and frustrated at the way that fossil fuel companies have been able to endanger everyone with their actions, but also hornswoggle their way into media debate such that we’re all supposed to consider how to balance the life of humanity on the planet with the profit margins of a handful of billionaires. Corporate news media have a lot to answer for here, in terms of public understanding of climate disruption, what needs to happen, why isn’t it happening? Few things call more for an open public conversation about how to best protect all of us. Why can’t we have it? Well, mystery solved: The entities that are to blame for the problem have their hands in the means we would use to debate and conceivably address it. Put simply: We cannot have a public conversation about how fossil fuels cause climate disruption within a corporate media moneyed by fossil fuel companies. We know that, and they know that, which is why one of the biggest outputs of polluting corporations is PR—is management of our understanding of what’s going on. CounterSpin discussed fossil fuel corporations’ brazen lie factory almost precisely a year ago with Richard Wiles, director of the Center for Climate Integrity. We hear some of that conversation again this week. Transcript: ‘The Oil Companies Are the Reason We Don’t Have Climate Policy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231215Wiles.mp3   Also: When you talk about climate, a lot of folks go in their head to a picture of clouds, butterflies and wolves. Climate policy is about money and profit and the meaninglessness of all those beautiful vistas you might imagine—at least, that’s how many politicians think of it. We addressed that with Matthew Cunningham-Cook from the Lever in August of this year. And we hear some of that this week as well. Transcript: ‘We Line Up Policy With Campaign Contributions From Oil and Gas’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231215Cunningham-Cook.mp3   Climate disruption reality as filtrated through corporate media, this week on CounterSpin. Featured image: Extinction Rebellion climate protest. Photo: VladimirMorozov/AKXmedia

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231208.mp3   (CC image: Jewish Voice for Peace) This week on CounterSpin: As we record on December 7, the news from Gaza continues horrific: The Washington Post is reporting, citing Gaza Health Ministry reports, that Israel’s continued assault throughout the region has killed at least 350 people in the past 24 hours, which brings the death toll of the Israeli military campaign, launched after the October 7 attack by Hamas that killed a reported 1,200 people, to more than 17,000. In this country, Columbia University has suspended two student groups protesting in support of Palestinian human rights and human beings, though the official message couldn’t specify which policies, exactly, had been violated. There are many important and terrible things happening in the world right now—from fossil fuel companies working to undo any democratic restraints on their ability to profit from planetary destruction; to drugmakers who’ve devastated the lives of millions using the legal system to say money, actually, can substitute for accountability; to an upcoming election that is almost too much to think about, and the Beltway press corps acting like it’s just another day. But the devastation of Gaza and the vehement efforts to silence anyone who wants to challenge it—and the failure of those efforts, as people nevertheless keep speaking up, keep protesting—is the story for today. Sonya Meyerson-Knox is communications director of Jewish Voice for Peace. We talk with her this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘”None of Us Are Free Unless All of Us Are Free” Is Not Just a Slogan’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231208Meyerson-Knox.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of climate change. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231208Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231201.mp3   ABC (6/22/23) This week on CounterSpin: “Abortion Politics Reveal Concerns” was the headline one paper gave a recent Associated Press story, language so bland it almost discourages reading the piece, which reports how right-wing politicians and anti-abortion activists are seeking to undermine or undo democratic processes when those processes accurately reflect the public desire to protect reproductive rights. Methods include “challenging election results, refusing to bring state laws into line with voter-backed changes, moving to strip state courts of their power to consider abortion-related laws, and challenging the citizen-led ballot initiative process itself.” So there is a way to cover abortion access as a political issue without reducing it to one. But too many outlets seem to have trouble shaking the framing of abortion as a “controversy,” or as posing problems for this or that politician, rather than presenting it as a matter of basic human rights that majorities in this country have long supported, and centering in their coverage the people who are being affected by its creeping criminalization. Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at the New Republic, and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work and of the forthcoming A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race and the Limits of Justice in America. She’s been reporting on abortion for years, and joins us this week to talk about it. Transcript: ‘The Reality of What It Is to Have an Abortion Has to Be Brought Into Every Story’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231201Grant.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of marriage and ideology. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231201banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231124.mp3   Washington Post (11/19/23) This week on CounterSpin: The new president of Argentina opposes abortion rights, casts doubt on the death toll of the country’s military dictatorship, would like it to be easier to access handguns and calls climate change a “lie of socialism.” Many were worried about what Javier Milei would bring, but, the Washington Post explained: “Anger won over fear. For many Argentines, the bigger risk was more of the same.” But if you want to dig down into the roots of that “same,” the economic and historic conditions that drove that deep dissatisfaction, US news media will be less helpful to you there. Milei is not a landslide popular president, and thoughtful, critical information and conversation could help clarify peoples’ problems and their sources, such that voters—in Argentina and elsewhere—might not be left to believe that the only way forward is a man wielding a literal chainsaw. We’ll learn about Javier Milei and what led to his election from Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the book Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy. Transcript: Milei Is ‘Really as Extreme as You Get in Right-Wing Libertarian Ideas’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231124Weisbrot.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at FAIR’s recent study on the Sunday shows’ Gaza guests. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231124Banter.mp3  

  Overflowing morgues. Packed hospitals. City blocks reduced to rubble. In response to Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, Israel has unleashed mass destruction on Gaza. Into a region the size of Las Vegas, with a population of 2.1 million, nearly half children, Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of bombs, the equivalent of nearly two Hiroshimas. It has killed journalists and doctors, wiped out dozens of members of a single family, massacred fleeing Palestinians, and even bombed a densely populated northern refugee camp. Repeatedly. As UNICEF spokesperson James Elder recently put it, “Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It’s a living hell for everyone else.” In its initial attack on Israel, Hamas killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped about 240 more. By the end of October, less than four weeks later, the Palestinian death toll in Gaza had reached a wholly disproportionate 8,805 people. (Since then, the number has surpassed 11,000.) This run-up in the death count was so rapid that prominent voices resorted to outright denialism. John Kirby, White House National Security Council spokesperson, labeled the Gaza Health Ministry, which is responsible for tallying the Palestinian dead, “a front for Hamas” (Fox, 10/27/23). (The ministry actually answers to the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority—Reuters, 11/6/23.) And President Joe Biden, much to Fox’s delight (10/25/23), declared: “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed…. I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” A Washington Post factcheck (11/1/23) diplomatically described this statement as an example of “excessive skepticism”: The State Department has regularly cited ministry statistics without caveats in its annual human rights reports. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which tracks deaths in the conflict, has found the ministry’s numbers to be reliable after conducting its own investigation. “Past experience indicated that tolls were reported with high accuracy,” an OCHA official told the Fact Checker. Some deaths count more For cable news, however, determining the precise number of Palestinian dead may not be all that relevant. Because for them, an important principle comes first: Some numbers don’t count as much as others. Whereas around seven times as many Palestinians died as Israelis during October, Palestinian victims appear to have received significantly less coverage on cable TV. A slew of searches on the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, which scours transcripts from MSNBC, CNN and Fox News to determine the frequency with which given words and phrases are mentioned on cable news, bears this out. Here’s the breakdown of the screen time awarded to various search terms related to Israeli and Palestinian deaths over the course of October 2023 (see note 1): In each instance above, coverage of Israeli victims outpaced coverage of Palestinian victims, often to a significant degree. Even if they had reached numeric parity, that would still have translated to about seven times the mentions of Israeli deaths per dead Israeli compared to Palestinian deaths per dead Palestinian. In their seminal study on media bias Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky make a distinction between worthy and unworthy victims. As far as the US media is concerned, the worthy include citizens of the US and allied nations, as well as people killed by state enemies. The unworthy include those killed by the US government and its friends. Herman and Chomsky argue that we can expect the worthy and unworthy to be treated far differently by US media. The former will be the recipients of sympathy and support. The latter will be further victimized by neglect and perhaps even disdain. It’s not hard to see who the media considers worthy in Israel and Palestine. Unnewsworthy war crimes Victims aren’t the only ones who receive different treatment according to group status. So do victimizers. Consider, for example, how often war crimes are covered when they are committed by Hamas versus when they are committed by the Israeli military. One war crime Hamas is often accused of is the use of civilians as “human shields.” As the Guardian (10/30/23) has reported: Anecdotal and other evidence does suggest that Hamas and other factions have used civilian objects, including hospitals and schools. Guardian journalists in 2014 encountered armed men inside one hospital, and sightings of senior Hamas leaders inside the Shifa hospital have been documented. However, the same article continues: Making the issue more complicated…is the nature of Gaza and conflict there. As the territory consists mostly of an extremely dense urban environment, it is perhaps not surprising that Hamas operates in civilian areas. International law also makes clear that even if an armed force is improperly using civilian objects to shield itself, its opponent is s

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231117.mp3   Time (11/6/23) This week on CounterSpin: Coverage of what is quite possibly not the most recent mass shooting, as we record the show, but the recent one in Lewiston, Maine, leaned heavily on a narrative of the assailant as a “textbook case” of a shooter, because he had some history of mental illness. FAIR’s Olivia Riggio wrote about how that storyline not only gets the relationship wrong—mental illness is not a predictor of gun violence, except in terms of suicide, but also underserves and even endangers those with mental illness, with at least one presidential candidate calling for a return to involuntary commitment. What isn’t served is the public conversation around reducing gun violence. The Supreme Court has just heard the case US v. Rahimi, which is specifically about whether those under domestic violence restraining orders should have access to guns. Most media did better than Time magazine’s thumbnail of Rahimi as pitting “the safety of domestic violence victims against the nation’s broad Second Amendment rights”—because, as our guest explains, Rahimi is much more about whether this Court’s conservative majority will be able to use their special brand of backwards-looking to determine this country’s future. Scott Burris is a professor at Temple Law School and the School of Public Health, and he directs Temple’s Center for Public Health Law Research. We hear from him this week on the case. Transcript: ‘Worship of the Holy Framers Offers Us Nothing to Deal With the Problems We Have Today’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231117Burris.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Gaza crisis, and at McCarthyism. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231117Banter.mp3  

  “A free press for free people” boldly champions the censorship of dangerous foreign ideas (Free Press, 11/1/23). Axios (10/31/23) reported that in a two-week period, TikTok saw “nearly four times the number of views to TikTok posts using the hashtag #StandwithPalestine globally compared to posts using the hashtag #StandwithIsrael.” As a result, the conservative outrage machine kicked into high gear. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wisc.), who serves on the House select committee investigating China’s Communist Party, took to the web publication Free Press (11/1/23) to sound the alarm: TikTok’s Chinese ownership meant that a dangerous foreign power was using social media to sway public opinion against Israel. His solution was clear: It’s “time for Congress to take action. Time to ban TikTok.” This is interesting for a few reasons, but chief among them is that the Free Press was started by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, one of a handful of conservative journalists who banded together to assert the federal government exerted too much control on Twitter before it was acquired by Elon Musk (NPR, 12/14/22). The company’s liberal corporate governance, they asserted, had suppressed conservative ideas (Washington Post, 12/13/22). Weiss even signed the Westminster Declaration, a vow to protect “free speech”: “Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices,” it said. These “large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Now the Free Press fears the internet is too free, and should be cleansed of ideas deemed hurtful to the Israeli government. Censorship by the wrong people Gallagher said that “TikTok is the top search engine for more than half of Gen Z, and about six in ten Americans are hooked on the app before their 17th birthday.” This is worrisome, he said, because TikTok “is controlled by America’s foremost adversary, one that does not share our interests or our values: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).” This brings Gallagher, and other GOP lawmakers, to the conclusion that the US must ban TikTok. “We are ceding the ability to censor Americans’ speech to a foreign adversary,” he said—suggesting that censorship isn’t altogether wrong, it’s just wrong when committed by an undesirable entity. He pointed out that “for a century, the Federal Communications Commission has blocked concentrated foreign ownership of radio and television assets on national security grounds.” This indicates that Gallagher, in the name of anti-Communism, doesn’t think the market should decide which media consumers can access. Instead, this must be highly regulated by a powerful federal agency. So much for his commitment to “get big government out of the way.” ‘Massively manipulating’ Critics call for banning TikTok because users are getting the “wrong information,” thus “undercutting support for Israel among young Americans,” which is “contrary to US foreign policy interests” (NBC, 11/1/23). He’s hardly alone. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.), who once blasted (10/20/20) what she saw as censorship against conservative voices at Facebook and Twitter, called for a ban (NBC, 11/1/23), saying “It would not be surprising that the Chinese-owned TikTok is pushing pro-Hamas content.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) concurred, saying in a statement, “For quite some time, I have been warning that Communist China is capable of using TikTok’s algorithm to manipulate and influence Americans.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) wants a ban (UPI, 11/7/23), and the New York Post editorial board (11/6/23) approvingly cited Gallagher’s Free Press piece. Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who has called for punitive action against Harvard University students who made pro-Palestine statements (Wall Street Journal, 10/11/23; Business Insider, 11/5/23), “said TikTok should ‘probably be banned’ for ‘massively manipulating public opinion’ in favor of Hamas and stoking anti-Israel animus,” the New York Post (11/1/23) reported. CNN (11/5/23) also insinuated that TikTok is skewing public opinion and reported that the Biden administration is monitoring the situation, saying the president’s aides “are also warily monitoring developments like how the Chinese government-controlled TikTok algorithm just happens to be prioritizing anti-Israel content.” If this freakout about TikTok seems selective, that’s because it is. Since Musk took over Twitter, hate speech and antisemitism have run amok on the platform (Washington Post, 3/20/23; LA Times, 4/27/23), but congressional Republicans and their journalistic allies on the social media beat aren’t clamoring for an intervention into the mogul’s extremist influence on US discourse. Republicans have been looking to ban TikTok, howling about its Chinese ownership, since the Trump admini

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231110.mp3   Truthout (11/9/23) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media use at least a couple of largely unexplored lenses through which to present US human rights violations. One is: The US does not commit human rights violations, except by accident, or as unavoidable collateral for an ultimately net-gain mission, be that international or domestic. The other is: They aren’t violations if the US does them, because we’re in a civilization war, a fight of good over evil, so all battles are holy, and you can’t commit human rights violations against non-humans, after all, so where’s the problem? Again, the narrative covers global and at-home violations. Elite media have trouble navigating the place of the US in a global context, and the media-consuming public suffers as a result. There’s a new report from the UN about this country and human rights. We’ll hear about it from Jamil Dakwar, director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU. Transcript: ‘You Cannot Preach on Human Rights When You Are Not Doing Enough at Home’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231110Dakwar.mp3   House Speaker Mike Johnson (CC photo: Gage Skidmore) Also on the show: Headlines tell us that the US public don’t know a lot about Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House of Representatives. That’s true as far as it goes, but isn’t it also a kind of admission of failure for a press corps that really should be actively involved in informing us about the person third in line for the presidency—like maybe his idea that some of the people he’s nominally representing should just burn in Hell? Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, will give us some things to consider as we see coverage of Mike Johnson unfold. Transcript: ‘A True Believer in Heinous Ideas’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231110Gertz.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231103.mp3   New York Times (6/5/22) This week on CounterSpin: Elite media are fond of saying that the US is resetting its Middle East policy. During the 2020 campaign, the New York Times explained, Joe Biden pledged, if elected, to stop coddling Saudi Arabia, after the brutal murder of prominent dissident and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. “We are not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them,” Biden said. “We’re going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.” When officials said Biden would visit the kingdom in July of last year and meet with Mohammed bin Salman, understood as the architect of Khashoggi’s murder, a New York Times headline explained that Biden had “‘only bad options’ for bringing down oil prices.” We talked at the time with Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at DAWN, Democracy for the Arab World Now, an organization founded by Khashoggi. We’ll hear that conversation again today. Transcript: ‘In the Middle East, We Are Hearing a New Set of Excuses to Justify the Same Old Policy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231103Jarrar.mp3   Aftermath of Tulsa Massacre (photo via bswise) Also on the show: “If you’re not careful,” Malcolm X famously warned, “the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” This is a problem of long standing, and in June 2021 we explored one case of it—the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma—with author and activist Joseph Torres. We hear that this week as well. Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231103Torres.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231027.mp3   Paxlovid tablets This week on CounterSpin: Advertising critics have long noted that a company’s PR tells you, inadvertently but reliably, exactly what their problems are. The ad features salmon splashing in crystalline waters? That company is for sure a massive polluter. That’s the lump of salt with which to take the recent announcement from the US Department of Health and Human Services that their new deal with Pfizer “extends patient access” to Covid treatment drug Paxlovid and “maximizes taxpayer investment”—as the HHS works with the drug company to “transition” Paxlovid “to the commercial market.” The announcement doesn’t note that this “transition” entails hiking the cost of the treatment to more than $1,300 for a five-day course, or 100 times the cost of production. We discuss this outrage, and what allows it, with Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines group at Public Citizen. Transcript: ‘Drug Corporations Have Really Been in the Driver’s Seat’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231027Maybarduk.mp3   (image: Truthout) Also on the show: CounterSpin listeners, more than many, recognize news media as a keystone issue—important not simply in their own right but to all of the other issues we care about. The media lens—the points of view that they show us day after day, those they obscure or ridicule—affects the way we understand the world, our neighbors and what’s politically possible. That’s why we see the fight for a thriving media ecosystem as bound up completely with the fights for social, racial, economic and environmental justice. We talked about that nexus with Maya Schenwar, author and editor at large of Truthout, and director of a new project, the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. Transcript: ‘Movement Media Has Really Emerged in Its Own Right’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231027Schenwar.mp3