FAIR

  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  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231020.mp3   (USDA, 1939) This week on CounterSpin: Government-supplied food assistance has been around in various forms since at least the Great Depression, but never with the straightforward goal of easing hunger. 1930s posters about food stamps declare, “We are helping the farmers of America move surplus foods”; that link between agriculture industry support and nutrition assistance continues to this day—which partly explains why the primary food aid program, SNAP, while the constant target of the anti-poor, racist, drown-government-in-the-bathtub crowd, keeps on keeping on. We talk with Christopher Bosso, professor of public policy and politics at Northeastern University, the author of a new book on that history, called Why SNAP Works: A Political History—and Defense—of the Food Stamp Program. Transcript: ‘Poverty in America Has Strong Structural Roots That Some People Profit From’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231020Bosso.mp3   Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911 Also on the show: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, in which 146 mainly immigrant women and girls died, many leaping from windows to escape the flames, horrified New Yorkers and galvanized the workers’ rights movement. The October 11 unveiling of a monument to those who didn’t just die, but were killed that day, put many in mind of how much still needs to change before we can think of things like Triangle Shirtwaist as relics of a crueler past. In 2015, CounterSpin spoke with Barbara Briggs of the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights about Rana Plaza, the 2013 catastrophe that killed more than a thousand workers in Bangladesh, in circumstances that in some ways echoed those of 102 years earlier. We’ll hear that interview again today. Transcript: ‘Workers Are the Best Guarantors of Their Own Safety When They’re Organized’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231020Briggs.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Net Neutrality. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231020Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231013.mp3   BBC (10/11/23) This week on CounterSpin: In the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas and the ensuing bombing campaign from Israel on the Gaza Strip, many people were surprised that CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria aired an interview with a Palestinian activist who frankly described the daily human rights violations in Gaza, the right of Palestinians to resist occupation and apartheid, and how any tools of resistance they choose are deemed violent and punishable. Such statements aren’t controversial from an international law or human rights perspective, but they stand out a mile in elite US media suffused with assumptions listeners will know: Palestinians attack, Israel responds; periods of “calm” are when only Palestinians are dying; stone-throwing is terrorism, but cutting off water is not. “War is not the time for context” still seems to be the mantra for many in the US press. But there is, around the edges, growing acknowledgement of the dead end this represents: showing hour after hour of shocking and heart-wrenching imagery, in a way that suggests violence is the only response to violence—when so many people are looking for another way forward. We’ll talk with Phyllis Bennis from the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Transcript: In Gaza, ‘We Have to Do the Hard Work of Looking at Context’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231013Bennis.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Saudi Arabia, Nicaragua, US political division and the Federal Reserve. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231013Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231006.mp3   This week on CounterSpin: The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik is one of vanishingly few national reporters to suggest that if media care about crime, if they care about people having things stolen from them—maybe they could care less about toasters and more about lives? As in, the billions of dollars that are snatched from working people’s pockets every payday by companies, in the form of wage theft—paying less than legal wages, not paying for overtime, stealing tips, denying breaks, demanding people work off the clock before and after shifts, and defining workers as “independent contractors” to deny them benefits. Home Depot just settled a class action lawsuit for $72.5 million, while their CEO went on Fox Business to talk about how shoplifting means we’re becoming a “lawless society.” There is legislative pushback; New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has added wage theft to the legal definition of larceny, allowing for stronger prosecutions. But such efforts face headwind from corporate media telling us to be mad about the rando taking toilet paper from the Walgreens, but not the executive who’s skimming your paycheck every two weeks. Not to be too poetic, but corporate thieves don’t need masks as long as corporate media provide them. We talk about wage theft with Rodrigo Camarena. He’s the director of the immigrant justice group Justicia Lab, and co-author, with Cristobal Gutierrez of Make the Road New York, of the article “How to End Wage Theft—and Advance Immigrant Justice” that appeared earlier this month on NonProfitQuarterly.org. He is co-creator of Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat wage theft. Transcript: ‘Wage Theft Is Built Into the Business Models of Many Industries’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231006Camarena.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of climate protests. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231006Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230929.mp3   New York Times (9/27/23) This week on CounterSpin: You can’t say elite US news media aren’t on the story of the federal indictment of Robert Menendez, Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But articles like the New York Times’ “As Menendez’s Star Rose, Fears of Corruption Cast a Persistent Shadow” represent media embrace of the “great man of history” theme: The story is mostly about the political fortunes of an individual; the huge numbers of less powerful people impacted by those compromised decisions are, at best, backdrop. When they try to tighten it into a “takeaway,” it can get weirder still: That Times piece’s headline included the idea that “the New Jersey Democrat broke barriers for Latinos. But prosecutors circled for decades before charging him with an explosive new bribery plot.” Come again? If elite media’s takeaway from the Menendez indictment is that some people over-favor their friends and like gold bars—that’s a storyline that leads nowhere, calls nothing into question beyond the individual actors themselves. Is that the coverage we need? What does it even have to do with foreign policy? Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book, co-authored with Jacob Mundy, is Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, out now in a revised, updated edition from Syracuse University Press. We talk with him about what’s at stake in the Menendez indictment beyond Menendez’s “political fortunes.” Transcript: ‘Most Americans Really Do Feel Pretty Strongly About Human Rights’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230929Zunes.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the FCC and the 1973 Chilean coup. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230929Banter.mp3  

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230922.mp3   Photo: UAW This week on CounterSpin: An unprecedented labor action is underway as thousands of Midwest autoworkers working for the Big 3—Ford, GM and Stellantis (which used to be Chrysler)—went on strike at the same time. Some things workers are calling for may sound familiar: a pay raise for workers that bears relation to raises that owners have generously given themselves; reinstatement of cost-of-living increases. Others—a shorter work week; the elimination of “tiered” jobs, where some folks are just never on the track for benefits; and a seat at the table for workers in any conversations about climate-related economic transitions—sound downright visionary. It would be a critical story at any time. But right now, every day brings news—like Australian real estate developer Tim Gurner’s declaring, out loud, in public, “We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40–50%, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy”—that tells us that the situation isn’t about “the economy working,” but about for whom the economy is supposed to work. Unionized autoworkers are saying that profits—like the $21 billion the Big 3 have declared in the first six months of 2023—have to mean better conditions for the people doing the work. “We can’t afford it” is a harder message for corporate media to support as unions grow in strength, and as people find other sources than major corporate outlets to look to for explanations about what’s happening. Lisa Xu, organizer with Labor Notes, is in Detroit right now. We talk with her about this historic UAW strike. Transcript: ‘These Are Demands for the Whole Working Class’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230922Xu.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of depleted uranium and RICO indictments. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230922Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230915.mp3   (Broadleaf Books, 2023) This week on CounterSpin: New Yorkers who were here 22 years ago remember the proliferation of signs and stickers reading “our grief is not a cry for war”—and then the way that voice was shouted over by corporate news media, calling for war crimes with US flags on their lapels. Hosting old general after old general, as peace and human rights activists and the overall public begged for an answer to violence that wasn’t just more violence, for a conversation that would allow us to see one another as human beings. Pretend-neutral news media have done crucial work in selling Islamophobia, in weaponizing centuries of misinformation and demonization for wartime purposes, with the war being the undefined, unending “war on terror.” Media’s job has involved lying to us about many things—but, crucially, about what we believed, what we were capable of, and what we wanted to see as the way forward. Key to that campaign has been the idea that Muslims are the enemy—violent, dangerous, irrational—if not now, soon; if not your friend, his friend. September 11, 2001, is the exemplar of a past that isn’t dead, or even past, and for no one more particularly than Muslims. We talk about that with Maha Hilal, author of the book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11. Transcript: ‘There’s This Notion That the “War on Terror” Was Just Something That Happened Abroad’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230915Hilal.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Ukraine, the UAW strike and Biden’s trip to Vietnam. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230915Banter.mp3   Featured Image: Texas Muslim Capitol Day, Austin, Texas, January 28, 2015 (Creative Commons photo: Manuel Garza)

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230908.mp3   Liberation (9/3/23) This week on CounterSpin: The White House has announced it’s extending the ban on people using US passports to go to North Korea. Corporate media seem to find it of little interest; who wants to go to North Korea? Which fairly reflects media’s disinterest in the tens of thousands of Korean Americans who might want to visit family in North Korea, along with their overarching, active disinterest in telling the story of the Korean peninsula in anything other than static, cartoonish terms—North Korea is a murderous dictatorship; South Korea is a client state, lucky for our support—terms that conveniently sidestep the US’s historic and ongoing role in the crisis. Amanda Yee is a writer and organizer, and an editor of Liberation News. We’ll talk with her about the role the travel ban plays in a bigger picture. Transcript: ‘Propaganda Against North Korea and the Travel Ban Go Hand in Hand’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230908Yee.mp3   We reference hidden history in that conversation. CounterSpin got some deeper understanding on that a couple years back from Hyun Lee, US national organizer for Women Cross DMZ, part of the coalition Korea Peace Now!. We’ll hear a little from that today as well. Transcript: ‘Washington Has Been Asking the Wrong Question on North Korea’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230908Lee.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230901.mp3   (CC photo: Paul Hart) This week on CounterSpin: It is back to school week in the US. Schools—pre-K to college—have been on the front burner for at least a year now, but education has always been a contested field in this country: Who has access? What does it teach? What is its purpose? Do my kids have to go to school with those kids? So while what’s happening right now is new, it has roots. And it does no disservice to the battles of the current day to connect them to previous battles and conversations, and that’s what we’re going to do this week on the show. We hear from three of the many education experts that have been our pleasure to speak with: Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro. Transcript: ‘Schools Have Always Been the Site of Struggle’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230901Kohn.mp3   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230901Ravitch.mp3   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230901Kumashiro.mp3  

    (image: New Disabled South) This week on CounterSpin: “We’ve come a long way but there’s a long way to go” is a familiar, facile framing that robs urgency from fights for justice. It’s the frame that tends to dominate annual journalistic acknowledgement of the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed 33 years ago in late July. Like Black history month, the ADA anniversary is a peg—an opportunity for journalists to offer information and insight on issues they might not have felt there was space for throughout the year. As depressing as that is, media coverage of the date often doesn’t even rise to the occasion. You wouldn’t guess from elite media’s afterthought approach that some 1 in 4 people in this country have some type of disability, or that it’s one group that any of us could join at any moment. Likewise, you might not understand that the ADA didn’t call for curb cuts at every corner, but for an end to “persistent discrimination in such critical areas as: employment, housing, public accommodations, education, transportation, communication, recreation, institutionalization, health services, voting and access to public services.” Nothing less than the maximal integration of disabled people into community and political life—you know, like people. And if that’s the story, it’s clear that it demands all kinds of attention, every day—not a once a year pat on the back about “how far we’ve come.” We talk about some of all of that with Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder and chief operating officer of New Disabled South. Transcript: ‘Disabled People Are Whole People; We Need to See Media Address That Reality’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230825Wilson.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Maui fires and the climate crisis. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230825Banter.mp3  

  Do Palestinians deserve to be free? “A complex and controversial issue,” says ChatGPT (Twitter, 5/8/23). Do Israelis deserve to be free? “Yes, like all people.” “This is quite something,” remarked Nadi Abusaada in a May 8 tweet. As many of us have done, the Palestinian academic found himself experimenting with the seemingly boundless powers of OpenAI’s ChatGPT software. But during this activity, he uncovered something disturbing. “I asked @OpenAI whether Palestinians deserve to be free,” he said. The natural-language processing tool responded to Abusaada’s query ambivalently: As an AI language model, I do not have personal opinions, feelings or beliefs. The question of whether Palestinians deserve to be free is a complex and controversial issue with many different perspectives and opinions…. But then he posed the same question about Israelis. This time, the chat box did not equivocate: Yes, like all people, Israelis deserve to be free. Freedom is a fundamental human right that should be protected and guaranteed for all individuals, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or religion. It is essential that Israelis, like all people, are able to live their lives free from violence, oppression and discrimination…. “Explanation?” demanded Abusaada. The explanation lies in the overarching attitudes of the 570 GB of data that ChatGPT scrapes from the internet. And, with news media being one of the primary sources of information that the bot is trained on, Abusaada’s experience is hardly surprising. To say that US news skews pro-Israel raises many an eyebrow, since the public has been conditioned to believe otherwise. With outlets like NPR vilified as “National Palestinian Radio” and papers like the New York Times castigated by pro-Israel watchdogs for lending “the Palestinian narrative” undue credence (CAMERA, 10/15/13), the myth of pro-Palestine bias appears plausible. Yet such claims have been litigated, and the verdict is plain: US corporate media lean in favor of Israel. As Abeer Al-Najjar (New Arab, 7/28/22) noted: “The framing, sourcing, selection of facts, and language choices used to report on Palestine…often reveal systematic biases which distort the Palestinian struggle.” Some trends are more ubiquitous than others, which is why it is vital that news readers become acquainted with the tropes that dominate coverage of the Israeli occupation. 1. Where Are the Palestinians? From 1970 to 2019, the New York Times and Washington Post ran 5,739 opinion pieces about Palestinians. Just 1.4% of these were by Palestinians (+972, 10/2/20). In 2018, 416Labs, a Canadian research firm, analyzed almost 100,000 news headlines published by five leading US publications between 1967 and 2017. The study revealed that major newspapers were four times more likely to run headlines from an Israeli government perspective, and 2.5 times more likely to cite Israeli sources over Palestinian ones. (This trend was further confirmed by Maha Nassar—+972, 10/2/20). Owais Zaheer, an author of 416Labs’ study told the Intercept (1/12/19) that his findings call attention to “the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the issue.” In its media resource guide, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) counseled reporters: “Former US diplomats, Israeli military analysts and non-Palestinian Middle East commentators are not replacements for Palestinian voices.” The exclusion of Palestinian voices from corporate media reporting does not stop at sourcing. For example, contrary to its pro-Israel critics, NPR’s correspondents are rarely Palestinian or Arab, and almost all reside in West Jerusalem or Israel proper (FAIR.org, 4/2/18). Editors also overlook obvious conflicts of interest, like when the son of the New York Times‘ then–Israel bureau chief Ethan Bronner joined the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) (Extra!, 4/10). When Times public editor Clark Hoyt (2/6/10) acknowledged that readers aware of the son’s role “could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father,” Times executive editor Bill Keller rejected this advice, saying that having a child fighting for Israel gave Bronner “a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack,” and might “make him even more tuned-in to the sensitivities of readers on both sides.” It’s hard to imagine Keller suggesting this if Bronner’s son had, say, signed up with Hamas. Hirsh Goodman, the Israeli spin doctor married to the New York Times‘ Jerusalem bureau chief. Isabel Kershner, the current Jerusalem correspondent for the Times, also had a son who enlisted in the IDF (Mondoweiss, 10/27/14). Moreover, her husband, Hirsh Goodman, has worked at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) (FAIR.or

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230818.mp3   Victim of US torture at Abu Ghraib, 2003 This week on CounterSpin: For corporate news media, every mention of the Iraq War is a chance to fuzz up or rewrite history a little more. This year, the New York Times honored the war’s anniversary with a friendly piece about how George W. Bush “doesn’t second guess himself on Iraq,” despite pesky people mentioning things like the torture of innocent prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema has just refused to dismiss a long standing case brought against Abu Ghraib torturers for hire, the company known as CACI. Unlike elite media’s misty memories, the case is a real-world, stubborn indication that what happened happened and those responsible have yet to be called to account. We can call the case, abstractly, “anti-torture” or “anti-war machine,” as though it were a litmus test on those things; but we can’t forget that it’s pro–Suhail al-Shimari, pro–Salah al-Ejaili, pro– all the other human beings horrifically abused in that prison in our name. We get an update on the still-ongoing case—despite some 18 attempts to dismiss it—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/CounterSpin230818Azmy.mp3   Gizmodo (8/9/23) Also on the show: The internet? Am i right? Thomas Germain is senior reporter at Gizmodo; he fills us in on some new developments in the online world most of us, like it or not, live in and rely on. Developments to do with ads, ads and still more ads, and also with the disappearing and potential disappearing of decades of archived information and reporting. Transcript: ‘Erasure of Content Can Be a Problem for the Public and for History’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230818Germain.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230811.mp3   New York Times (8/6/23) This week on CounterSpin: Why was Detroit mother Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, arrested and held 11 hours by police accusing her of robbery and carjacking? Because Woodruff was identified as a suspect based on facial recognition technology. The Wayne County prosecutor still contends that Woodruff’s charges—dismissed a month later—were “appropriate based upon the facts.” Those “facts” increasingly involve the use of technology that has been proven wrong; the New York Times report on Woodruff helpfully links to articles like “Another Arrest and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match,” and “Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm.” And it’s especially wrong when it comes to—get ready to be surprised—Black people. Facial recognition has been deemed harmful, in principle and in practice, for years now. We talked in February 2019 with Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU of Washington state. We hear that conversation this week. Transcript: ‘Face Surveillance Is a Uniquely Dangerous Technology’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230811Narayan.mp3   Newsweek (8/7/23) Also on the show: Listeners may know a federal court has at least for now blocked Biden administration efforts to forgive the debt of student borrowers whose colleges lied to them or suddenly disappeared. The White House seems to be looking for ways to ease student loan debt more broadly, but not really presenting an unapologetic, coherent picture of why, and what the impacts would be. We talked about that with Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective in March 2022. We’ll revisit that conversation today as well. Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230811Brewington.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trumpism.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230804.mp3   Washington Post (7/25/23) This week on CounterSpin: As contract negotiations went on between UPS and the Teamsters, against a backdrop of a country ever more reliant on package deliveries and the people who deliver them, the New York Times offered readers a lesson in almost-but-not-quite subtext, with a piece that included the priceless line: “By earning solid profits with a largely unionized workforce, UPS has proved that opposing unions isn’t the only path to financial success.” The tentative agreement that both the union and the company are calling a “win win win” presents a bit of a block for elite media, so deeply accustomed to calling any union action a harm, and any company acknowledgment of workers’ value a concession. Teddy Ostrow will bring us up to speed on Teamsters and UPS. He reports on labor and economic issues, and is host and lead producer of the podcast the Upsurge. Transcript: ‘The Narrative Here Is That Workers Fought and They Won’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230804Ostrow.mp3   Lever (7/25/23) Also on the show: Despite how it may feel, there’s no need for competition: You can be terribly worried about the devastating, galloping effects of climate disruption, and also be terribly confused and disturbed by the stubborn unwillingness of elected officials to react appropriately in the face of it. What are the obstacles between the global public’s dire needs, articulated wants, desperate demands—and the actual actions of so-called leaders supposedly positioned to represent and enforce those needs, wants and demands? Wouldn’t a free press in a democratic society be the place where we would see that conflict explained? Independent media have always tried to step into the space abandoned by corporate media; the job only gets more critical. Matthew Cunningham-Cook covers a range of issues for the Lever, which has the piece we’ll be talking about: “The GOP Is Quietly Adding Climate Denial to Government Spending Bills.” Transcript: ‘We Line Up Policy With Campaign Contributions From Oil and Gas’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230804Cunningham-Cook.mp3  

  Janine Jackson interviewed The Nation‘s Dave Zirin about the elimination of the New York Times‘ sports section for the July 28, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin3230728Zirin.mp3   New York Times (10/23/17) Janine Jackson: Earlier this month, the New York Times made an announcement: The paper has a plan, they said, to “become a global leader in sports journalism.” Weirdly, the statement accompanied the news that the Times is shutting down its sports page. Times sports coverage is now in the hands of something called the Athletic, a sports website and app that the Times purchased a year and a half ago. Athletic co-founder Alex Mather explained his outfit’s aspirations in a 2017 interview with, as it happens, the New York Times: We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last one standing. We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them. An Athletic editor tweeted a week or so ago, “Don’t be fooled by the cranky ‘sports journalism is dying’ tweets. The future has never been brighter.” The future of what, exactly, you might ask. Dave Zirin is sports editor at The Nation as well as host of the Edge of Sports podcast. He’s author of a number of books, most recently The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World, and he’s a writer/producer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL. He joins us now by phone from Takoma Park, Maryland. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dave Zirin. Dave Zirin: Oh, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. The Nation (7/14/23) JJ: Let me ask you, I guess, to start with what you see being lost. Not everything is worth preserving, of course, and not everything new is bad, but this decision represents more than, well, you might want to look somewhere else for box scores, yeah? DZ: Yeah. I mean, we’ve been losing local coverage all over the country in the world of sports. Now, what does that mean? It doesn’t just mean that your local high school doesn’t get the attention it deserves, although, frankly, that is something. It also means that all of the local scandals that invariably arrive through sports, whether it’s the public funding of stadiums and all the skullduggery that goes on with that, whether it’s the cozy relationships between political officials and team owners, whether it’s bad behavior by players in a public setting that in some way, shape or form endangers the public: All of these things are a product of local reporting, in terms of informing the public who these people are that we’re cheering for and what these teams represent that we’re cheering for. The ascension of the Athletic is the negation of that kind of local sports coverage. It’s basically, even though it has a lot of talented reporters, many of whom are my colleagues and friends, a hedge fund posing as a sports operation that aims to hurt local sports pages all over the country. And the issue here: It’s not just about the quality of the New York Times sports page historically, it’s not just about its Pulitzer Prizes and assorted awards or names that I grew up with, the Dave Andersons, the Harvey Aratons, the Red Smiths, for goodness’ sake, the Bob Lipsytes, these legendary names—Selena Roberts, Sonja Steptoe. It’s not just about that. It’s the fact that it’s the industry leader, the New York Times, it really signals how dire the situation is nationally. JJ: And it sounds like there’s things to know, you’ve started to tell us, that we need to know about the Athletic in particular, and the kind of rules by which they run their operation. DZ: Yeah, it’s a union-busting operation, and it’s about presenting itself as a possibility for outsourcing for your local media baron that is having union troubles. We just saw this in the New York Times, where the New York Times workers, they stood together strong. The journalists stood together. I believe it was a one-day strike. Correct me if I’m wrong. JJ: I believe so. Dave Zirin: “When you get rid of local coverage, what you also get rid of is the watchdog that is so important…. It’s not all fun and games.” DZ: And what it did was, it put the Sulzbergers and company back on their heels. What do they do in response to that? Oh gee, by sheer coincidence, hey, we’re shutting down a section of the newspaper, of course populated by Guild workers, union workers, and we’re replacing it with this non-union operation that, frankly, we’re already paying for. And we’re going to put it under the guise of, as Sulzberger said, this is going to make us the leader in sports. So these people live in Bizarro World, th

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230728.mp3   Houston Chronicle (7/11/23) This week on CounterSpin: Listeners may have heard that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott installed barrels wrapped in razor wire in some parts of the Rio Grande to block migrants from crossing and harm those that try. As revealed by the Houston Chronicle, Texas troopers have been ordered to push people back into the river, and to deny them water. The cruelty is obvious; the Department of Justice is talking about suing. But there are other ways for immigration policy to be inhumane. Advocates have long declared that Biden’s asylum restrictions (which look a lot like Trump’s asylum restrictions) are not just harmful but unlawful. And a federal judge has just agreed. We learn about that from a participant in the case, Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. Transcript: ‘People Have to Be Able to Access the Asylum Process, Regardless of Manner of Entry’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin3230728Crow.mp3   New York Times (10/23/17) Also on the show: In October 2017, the New York Times ran a story headlined “Why the Athletic Wants to Pillage Newspapers,” that began, “By the time you finish reading this article, the upstart sports news outlet called the Athletic probably will have hired another well-known sportswriter from your local newspaper.” In January 2022, the Times bought the Athletic for $550 million, saying that “as a stand-alone product…the Athletic is a great complement to the Times.” It’s now July 2023, and the New York Times has announced it’s shutting down its sports desk, outsourcing that reporting to…the Athletic. Dave Zirin joins us to talk about that; he’s sports editor at The Nation, host of the Edge of Sports podcast, and author of many books, including A People’s History of Sports in the United States. Transcript: ‘The Athletic Is the Negation of Local Sports Coverage’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin3230728Zirin.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Europe’s economy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin3230728Banter.mp3    

    Janine Jackson interviewed the African American Policy Forum’s Kevin Minofu about Say Her Name for the July 21, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230721Minofu.mp3   Janine Jackson: Like most powerful exercises, it’s a simple one. Professor and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw asks audience members to stand as she lists names of Black people killed by law enforcement in this country, and to sit when they hear a name that they don’t recognize. (Haymarket Books, 2023) For Eric Garner, George Floyd, Michael Brown, most of the crowd—whatever crowd it is, students, academics, the general public—stay standing. But when it gets to Sandra Bland, Atatiana Jefferson, it thins and thins. And by the time it gets to Rekia Boyd and Michelle Cusseaux, generally everyone is seated. Is that because Black women’s deaths via the same state-sanctioned violence that kills Black boys and men are less compelling? Are the victims less worthy? Or do they somehow not matter? It’s hard to tease out and to talk about what’s happening. But if we genuinely want to address racist police violence, and bring all of us into the imagined future, we have to have the conversation. The Say Her Name project from the African American Policy Forum, on whose board I serve, has worked to lift up the names of women, trans women and girls killed by law enforcement on and off duty, and to talk about how their murders are the same as, and different from, police murders of Black men and boys. That project is now reflected in a book, Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence, out this week from Haymarket Books. Joining us now is Kevin Minofu, senior researcher and writing fellow at the African American Policy Forum. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Kevin Minofu. Kevin Minofu: Hi, Janine. It’s a pleasure to be on. I’m very grateful for you making the time and, yeah, great to be on the show. JJ: Absolutely. Well, as you and I both know, the Say Her Name project encompasses activism, art, research and writing, and support for families. But the heart of it, the radiating center, is still this really simple thing: “Say her name.” Why is that so meaningful? KM: I think in describing that, it’s kind of useful to go back to the origins of the movement, because people are always interested in how it developed. People have probably heard about it, but oftentimes may be confused about its history. Atlantic (12/4/14) And so Say Her Name developed around December 2014, during the protests that were ignited in New York City after the acquittal of the police officer who had killed Eric Garner, at the march where thousands of protesters from across the country of all ages and all races joined together and were standing up against police violence against Black people, and mentioning the names of men who had been killed by police violence. In the context of that protest, the African American Policy Forum were, at the protest, trying to uplift the names of women who had been killed by police violence. And so in the process of being part of that activity, we were saying the names of these women, saying their names out loud, and looking at the looks of lack of recognition, of confusion, from the other participants at this protest. And I think that was emblematic of the erasure of these stories, and the ways in which by saying the names of these women, we were speaking them into existence in people’s minds, into people’s memories, and making them understand a problem that up until then they hadn’t been able to see. JJ: There’s a thing that we talk about, the loss of the loss, which is, there’s a horror that happens, obviously, when somebody is killed by police, and where you understand that it’s emblematic of the worthlessness of Black lives, in terms of law enforcement in this country. But when it’s a Black woman or a trans woman or a girl, and then it doesn’t get acknowledged, there’s a deeper level of loss there. And that’s kind of what this project is about. Kevin Minofu: “Not a lot of people would understand that Black women are often killed by the police when they actually ask for help.” KM: Exactly. As we’ve always described it, there’s the immense loss of what it means for a person to lose a daughter, a mother, a sister, a friend, in their families. These are women who all had incredibly full lives, lots of them had children, were all loved by family members and their communities. So there’s that loss that everyone who’s been through grief or has lost someone unexpectedly will suffer. And I think that loss is exacerbated by the fact that these are women who are killed by the same institutions that are designed to protect them. So the police officers t

  (Haymarket Books, 2023) This week on CounterSpin: If corporate news media didn’t matter, we wouldn’t talk about them. But elite, moneyed outlets do, of course, direct public attention to some issues and not to others, and suggest the possibility of some social responses, but not others. It’s that context that the African American Policy Forum hopes folks will bring to their new book, based on years of research, called Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence. It’s not, of course, about excluding Black men and boys from public conversation about police violence, but about the value of adding Black women to our understanding of the phenomenon—as a way to help make our response more meaningful and impactful. If, along the way, we highlight that ignoring the specific, intersectional meaning that policies and practices have for women who are also Black—well, that would improve journalism too. We’ll talk about Say Her Name with one of the key workers on that ongoing project, Kevin Minofu, senior research and writing fellow at African American Policy Forum. Transcript: ‘We Need a Gender-Inclusive Understanding of Police Violence’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230721Minofu.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of campaign town halls. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230721Banter.mp3  

  After its embarrassing town hall with Donald Trump, which helped precipitate the downfall of chair and CEO Chris Licht (FAIR.org, 6/8/23), CNN has doubled down on the format—at least for Republican candidates. Since Trump’s May 10 appearance, the network has featured GOP candidates Nikki Haley (6/4/23), Mike Pence (6/7/23) and Chris Christie (6/12/23), with more promised. Curiously, however, no offers to Democratic or third party candidates have been announced, which prompts the question: What purpose do these town halls serve? In the case of the Trump town hall, CNN‘s decision appeared to be entirely self-serving. Having worked to move the network rightward, Licht had led CNN to “its historic nadir,” as described in the Atlantic (6/2/23), in terms of both ratings and newsroom morale. The Trump town hall was meant to be the “big win” that would turn those things around. Of course, the plan backfired. Trump had a field day, spewing lies and trampling over and insulting host Kaitlan Collins to the wild cheers of the crowd. The entire affair read as a giant campaign rally sponsored by CNN, aided by the floor manager’s instructions to the audience that while applause was permitted, booing was not. While immediate ratings spiked (Axios, 5/11/23) they then plunged even further (TV Insider, 5/16/23), as the network’s reputation immediately suffered and morale hit rock bottom. Licht was soon given the boot (FAIR.org, 6/8/23). ‘In the public’s interest’ CNN‘s Anderson Cooper (5/11/23) suggested that critics of the Trump town hall were upset because “maybe you haven’t been paying attention to him since he left office.” But CNN anchor Anderson Cooper (5/11/23) would have you believe the network was actually putting democracy and the public interest first. He went on the air in a huff to accuse the network’s many critics of trying to stifle debate and refusing to face disagreeable realities. “Many of you felt CNN shouldn’t have given [Trump] any platform to speak,” he scolded. “Do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away?” Fellow anchor Jake Tapper agreed. Speaking on a New York magazine podcast (On With Kara Swisher, 7/10/23), Tapper argued that the town hall format for Trump was “in the public’s interest.” Some outside of CNN stepped in to defend the outlet’s decision as well. The New York Times‘ Maureen Dowd (5/13/23), for instance, wrote that “the task is to challenge Trump and expose him, not to put our fingers in our ears and sing ‘la, la, la.'” She approvingly quoted former Obama adviser David Axelrod: It strikes me as fundamentally wrong to deny voters a chance to see candidates, and particularly front-running candidates, answering challenging questions from journalists and citizens in open forums…. You can’t save democracy from people who would shred its norms by shredding democratic norms yourselves. But these specious arguments are easily dispensed with. What democratic norms require offering a serial liar a town hall stuffed full of supporters, in which the audience is instructed that applause is welcomed but booing is forbidden? In what way does that serve the public interest? After four years of the Trump presidency and the democracy-shaking transition out of it, CNN would be hard-pressed to find a living soul who doesn’t know exactly who Trump and his supporters are and how they can be expected to behave. That the town hall was devoid of thoughtful policy discussions but replete with insults and falsehoods should have surprised no one. And despite her efforts, CNN‘s Collins had no chance of pinning down Trump in any useful way on any of his lies or contradictions in such a format. Platform for falsehoods CNN.com (6/4/23) assured readers that former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley “correctly cited a variety of facts and figures”—as though this were a noteworthy thing for a politician to do. But the problem goes beyond Trump. Trump’s challengers have all broken with the former president to some degree, though few will risk alienating his followers by forcefully denouncing his lies. Still, they represent a slightly more reality-based GOP than Trump, such that their town hall appearances might be expected to meet the extremely low bar of not being as filled with disinformation as Trump’s. Yet CNN‘s own factchecks of its subsequent GOP town halls showed Haley, Pence and Christie were permitted numerous falsehoods without real-time challenge by their journalist hosts. Haley, for instance, claimed that crime is at “all-time highs” (judged by CNN factcheckers—6/4/23— to be “not even close to true”), that Roe v. Wade made “abortion anytime, anywhere for any reason” the law of the land (“not true

  Good Jobs First (7/6/23) This week on CounterSpin: Media talk about “the economy” as though it were an abstraction, somehow clinically removed from daily life, instead of being ingrained & entwined in every minute of it. So white supremacy and economic policy are completely different stories for the press, but not for the people. Our guest’s recent work names a simple, obvious way development incentives exacerbate racialized inequality: by transferring wealth from the public to companies led by white male executives. Arlene Martínez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First, which has issued a trenchant new report. Transcript: ‘You Are Exacerbating the Racial Wealth Gap Through the Use of Subsidies’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230714Martinez.mp3   Free Press Also on the show: CounterSpin listeners are well aware of the gutting of state and local journalism, connected to the corporate takeover of newspapers and their sell-off to venture—or, as some would say it, vulture—capitalists. Florín Nájera-Uresti is California campaign organizer for the advocacy group Free Press Action. We talk to her about better and worse ways to meet local news media needs. Transcript: ‘What Californians Really Need Is Community-Centered, Truly Local and Responsive Journalism’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230714Najera-Uresti.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Israel/Palestine and cluster bombs. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230714Banter.mp3  

  “Recession” and “inflation” have dominated headlines (Reuters, 12/7/22); “recovery,” “jobs,” not so much. By a wide range of metrics, the US is in the midst of a historic economic rebound. In January of this year, the unemployment rate hit a 53-year low of 3.4%. Two months later, prime-age (25–54) employment surpassed its pre-recession peak, putting to shame the sluggish job growth that followed the Great Recession of 2007–09, when it took a full 12 years for prime-age employment to return to its pre-recession level. Low-wage workers, meanwhile, have seen major gains, far outpacing their real (inflation-adjusted) wage growth during previous business cycles. The blight on this recovery has been a surge in inflation, though that hit its high point in the summer of 2022, and inflation has been falling ever since. As international data highlight, this problem has been globally shared, not US-specific. And even here, the US has not fared too poorly. Despite having at first higher inflation than other rich countries, the US now has the lowest inflation of any G7 country. All the while, its recovery, as measured by real GDP, has been the strongest. While the United States remains a deeply unequal country with relatively high levels of poverty, looking at key indicators valued by the media points to a remarkably strong recovery in the face of significant headwinds. As the progressive economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/10/23) recently put it: Everyone knows damn well that if Donald Trump was in the White House and we had the same economic situation, he would be boasting about the greatest economy ever all the time. Every Republican politician in the country would be touting the greatest economy ever. And all the political reporters would be writing stories about how the strong economy will make it difficult for the Democrats to beat Trump in the next election. What recovery? “It’s a total mystery,” snarks Mark Copelovitch (Twitter, 6/7/03), on “why does everyone think the economy is so terrible.” If you were a casual consumer of the news over the last couple years, you may not have heard much about these success stories. You may, in fact, think that everything has suddenly gone wrong all at once. And it would be hard to blame you. In the wake of a historically progressive response to an economic downturn, corporate media have been intently focused on the negative. News articles, for instance, have focused overwhelmingly on inflation. Mark Copelovitch, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been tracking this trend for the last couple years. His most recent update, which he posted in early June, shows that, since the start of 2022, the word “inflation” has appeared in the headline or subheading of more than 17 times as many articles as the words “unemployment” and “jobs” (both of which are metrics associated with the strong recovery) combined. Also notable: Over the same time period, the word “recession” has shown up in the headline or subheading of ten times as many articles as has the word “recovery.” Strange, considering there was no recession in 2022, and there has been no recession this year so far. Instead, the recovery has chugged along nicely. On television, the story has been much the same. According to data from the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, “inflation” (which has been unusually high during this period) has garnered more than six times as much attention as “unemployment” (which has been unusually low) across Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. Over the same period, “recession” and “recovery” have been mentioned roughly the same amount on these channels, a more balanced outcome than in the case of news articles, but still promoting a misleadingly dreary picture of the economy. Strikingly, recession was discussed far more in 2022 than in 2020—almost three times as much. The difference? In 2020, there actually was a recession. In 2022, there was none. If we look more broadly at the television coverage of positive aspects of the economy versus negative ones, we see that the negative has taken priority. Back in 2021, the liberal think tank Center for American Progress found that, over a one-month period, the terms “inflation” and “prices” garnered 50% more screen time on CNN and MSNBC than mentions of these terms: “unemployment,” “employment,” “wages,” “jobs,” “jobless,” “consumer spending,” “GDP,” “income,” “stock market,” “wage growth,” “job growth” and “economic growth” combined. Using this same framework, if we look at the Biden presidency so far, we see that “inflation” and “prices,” which point to troubles, have continued to draw more attention than the rest of the terms, which point to the strong recovery. Across Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, “inflation” and “prices” have gotten 32% more screen time than the other terms combined over this period. Economic d

  Common Dreams (7/5/23) This week on CounterSpin: The Earth recorded its hottest day ever July 3, with an average global temperature of 17.01°C. The record was broken the next day, with 17.18°C. Common Dreams‘ Jake Johnson (7/5/23) collected international responses, including a British scientist calling it a “death sentence for people and ecosystems”; and reported (7/5/23) IMF estimates that world governments dished out nearly $6 trillion in fossil fuel subsidies in 2020, and those giveaways are expected to grow. At Truthout (7/3/23), Victoria Law wrote about extreme heat’s impact on the incarcerated, including people in their 30s dropping dead in prisons with inadequate cooling systems. One source described his cell: “No air gets in and no air escapes.” Public Citizen (6/16/23) points to House Appropriations Republicans, larding spending bills with “poison pill” riders that fuel the crisis and block alternatives. And a database from the new climate group F Minus reveals how many state lobbyists hired by environmental groups also lobby for fossil fuel companies, entrenching those influence peddlers in state capitols with a veneer of respectability, even as public opinion of fossil fuels plummets. Orange skies burning over many parts of the US may not be the rockets’ red glare, but they’re signs of war nonetheless. The battle is less well understood as a fight between humans and climate change, as one between those who want to forcefully mitigate disastrous impacts and those who want them to continue, for the simple reason that it’s making them rich. There is no way to fight climate disruption without fighting climate disrupters—this week on the show. Emily Sanders watched appalled as CNBC‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin (6/26/23) “interviewed” Chevron’s Mike Wirth recently, leading her to write “How (Not) to Interview an Oil CEO” for ExxonKnews (6/29/23). She’s editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity; we’ll ask her about that. Transcript: ‘It Felt Like a Wasted Opportunity to Hold Oil Executives to Account’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230707Sanders.mp3   And: When media illustrate pushback against the fossil fuel industry, it generally looks like activists with signs; but there are myriad points of resistance, at different levels of community, offering multiple ways forward—but all of them in the same direction. In 2021, HuffPost reporter Alexander Kaufman discussed attempts of local representatives to have a say in building codes, and industry’s reaction. Democracy Collaborative‘s Johanna Bozuwa joined us during 2019’s California wildfires and power outages, to explain the potential role of public utilities in the climate crisis. Transcript: ‘The UN’s Report Laid Bare How Little Time Was Left’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230707KaufmanBozuwa.mp3  

  (CC photo: Ted Eytan ) This week on CounterSpin: The US public’s belief in and support for the Supreme Court has plummeted with the appointment of hyper-partisan justices whose unwillingness to answer basic questions, or answer them respectfully, would make them unqualified to work at many a Wendy’s, and the obviously outcome-determinative nature of their jurisprudence. Key to that drop in public support was last year’s Dobbs ruling, overturning something Americans overwhelmingly support and had come to see as a fundamental right—that of people to make their own decisions about when or whether to carry a pregnancy or to have a child. The impacts of that ruling are still reverberating, as is the organized pushback that we can learn about and support. We hear from Taryn Abbassian, associate research director at NARAL. Transcript: ‘Huge Majorities Vote in Favor of Abortion Access and Reproductive Freedom’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin063023Abbassian.mp3   Also on the show: Meaningful, lasting response to Dobbs requires more than “vote blue no matter who,” but actually understanding and addressing the differences and disparities of abortion rights and access before Dobbs, which requires an expansive understanding of reproductive justice. CounterSpin has listened many times over the years to advocates and authors working on this issue. We hear a little this week from FAIR’s Julie Hollar; from Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the group URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity; and from URGE’s policy director, Preston Mitchum. Transcript: ‘Huge Majorities Vote in Favor of Abortion Access and Reproductive Freedom’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230630DobbsDecision.mp3  

  New Republic (6/14/23) This week on CounterSpin: 70% of House Republicans belong to the Republican Study Committee, which just released a budget that calls for curtailing programs supporting racial equity and LGBTQ rights, natch—and also for increased cuts and access hurdles for Social Security and Medicare. It’s a tale as old as time, how some people want to take resources explicitly designated for seniors and disabled people and funnel them to rich people, in supposed service of “saving” those popular social programs. We’ve been asking for debunking of that storyline for years now from Nancy Altman, president of the group Social Security Works, and author of books, including The Battle for Social Security: From FDR’s Vision to Bush’s Gamble. We’ll get some more debunking this week, because when it comes to Social Security, it seems everything old will always be new again. Transcript: ‘The One Part of Our Retirement Income System That Works Is Social Security’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230623Altman.mp3   Daniel Ellsberg (CC photo: Christopher Michel) Also on the show: Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg died last week at the age of 92, and elite media did that thing they do, where they sort of honor someone they discredited in life, burnishing their own reputation as truth-tellers while still somehow dishonoring the practice of truth-telling—of the sort that afflicts the comfortable. CounterSpin spoke with Ellsberg many times over the years. We hear just some of those conversations this week on the show. Transcript: ‘What the Government Permits You to Know—That’s Not a Democracy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230623Ellsberg.mp3  

  Venezuela’s Maduro government has slowly and steadily regained its diplomatic standing in recent years, overcoming US endeavors to turn the country into a pariah state as part of its regime-change efforts. Reading coverage of Venezuela in outlets like the Washington Post (5/30/23), it’s good to remind yourself that Nicolás Maduro is president because he got the most votes. Nevertheless, Washington remains hell-bent on ousting the democratically elected Venezuelan authorities, and has kept its deadly sanctions program virtually intact. And Western media, which have cheered coup attempts at every step of the way (FAIR.org, 6/13/22, 5/2/22, 6/4/21, 4/15/20, 1/22/20), remain committed to endorsing US policies to the bitter end. This commitment was on full display recently when President Nicolás Maduro was hosted by Brazilian President Lula da Silva, in a major blow against the campaign to isolate Venezuela. Lula added insult to injury by condemning what he called the “narrative” of authoritarianism and lack of democracy that had been built around Venezuela to justify sanctions and regime change. The Western media establishment’s initial reaction was straight from the five stages of grief. The New York Times, with its unenviable Venezuela reporting record (FAIR.org, 3/26/19, 5/24/19), was in denial, not reporting on the meeting at all. The Financial Times (6/4/23) had a depressed tone, citing the fading hopes of a return to”free and fair elections” in the wake of the Brasilia meeting. The Washington Post (5/30/23) flared in anger, claiming that by hosting Maduro, Lula had betrayed his promise to “save democracy.” The reporting around the latest developments saw corporate pundits showcasing a full array of journalistic con artistry to defend their “narrative,” including dubious sources, inaccurate conclusions and dishonest context. Undemocratic references Corporate media’s effort to dismiss Maduro’s legitimacy is heavily built around the use of negative labels. For example, “authoritarian” appears almost like an auto-fill suggestion at this point, given its prevalence (Financial Times, 6/4/23; BBC, 5/30/23; Reuters, 5/29/23; AP, 5/30/23; Washington Post, 5/30/23; Bloomberg, 5/31/23). Outlets like the Economist (6/1/23) and the Miami Herald (6/3/23) go straight to “dictator.” The Economist (6/1/23) countered Lula’s defense of Maduro by pointing out that Venezuelan president “in 2020 had a $15 million bounty placed upon him by the United States government for ‘narco-terrorism'”—as though Donald Trump putting prices on foreign leaders’ heads discredits anyone but the United States. Another dishonest hallmark is casting aspersions on Maduro’s 2018 reelection, with a varied array of labels that go from “disputed” (Financial Times, 6/4/23) and “contested” (BBC, 5/30/23) to “condemned/regarded as a sham” (Le Monde, 5/30/23; Bloomberg, 5/29/23), all the way to “viewed/declared as fraudulent” (Washington Post, 5/30/23; Economist, 6/1/23). We have tackled the unsubstantiated “fraud” claims in previous posts (FAIR.org, 1/27/21, 5/2/22, 1/11/23). To challenge Maduro’s recognition as Venezuela’s democratically legitimate leader, Western outlets were willing to platform the most undemocratic voices. Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, for example, was used as a yardstick on Maduro’s legitimacy. Numerous sources repeated that the far-right leader had “banned” the Venezuelan president from entering the country (BBC, 5/30/23; Reuters, 5/29/23; Al Jazeera, 5/29/23; AP, 5/29/23). This framing is odd, given that Venezuela closed its border with Brazil in February 2019, six months before Bolsonaro’s “ban,” in anticipation of a large-scale operation to violate Venezuelan territory. It’s not as though Maduro had been eager, anyhow, to visit a country that didn’t recognize his government—to attend the Rio Carnival, maybe? What makes it more remarkable is that many of the same outlets have previously described Bolsonaro as a threat to democracy, given his attacks against the country’s elections and his supporters mimicking the “January 6” playbook in the Brazilian capital (Washington Post, 9/30/22; Financial Times, 9/28/21; BBC, 8/12/22). The Washington Post (5/30/23) saw no issue in quoting Bolsonaro’s son, a Brazilian senator, despite the numerous accusations of corruption against Flávio Bolsonaro, and Brazil’s electoral authorities fining him for spreading fake news in the 2022 presidential race. And if there is a character with arguably worse democratic credentials than the Bolsonaro clan, that is former judge and Bolsonaro Justice Minister Sergio Moro. His leading role in the “Operation Car Wash” judicial proceedings has been publicly exposed as unethical and politically motivated, designed to put Lula under arrest and bar him from running in 2018. Still, a number of outle

  (City Lights, 2023) This week on CounterSpin: The stories news media tell are something different than the facts they report. The facts may say what happened where; the stories tell us who’s the hero and who’s the villain, how important the fight is, and whether we should care about the ending. It’s not always easy to discern, but it’s critical—which is why narrative has been taken up as an important tool by folks looking to change the world for the better, in part by changing the stories we tell ourselves and one another. Sonali Kolhatkar is the host and executive producer of the daily radio and TV program Rising Up With Sonali, and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. Her new book, Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, will be published this month by City Lights. She joins us this week on the show. Transcript: ‘Intentional Storytelling Is a Way We Can Fight for a Better World’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230616Kolhatkar.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of work requirements. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230616Banter.mp3  

  (image: PCBA) This week on CounterSpin: This country has a long history of weaponizing drug laws against Black and brown communities. Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, ran an anti-marijuana crusade in the 1930s, saying, “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” Concerns are justified about what the legalization, and profitizing, of marijuana means for the people and communities most harmed by its criminalization. We hear about that from Tauhid Chappell, founder of the Philadelphia CannaBusiness Association and project manager for Free Press’s News Voices project. Transcript: ‘Despite Legalization, the People Harmed the Most Are Not Able to Benefit’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230609Chappell.mp3   (CC photo: Janine Jackson) Also on the show: Lots of people are concerned about what’s called the “digital well-being” of children—their safety and privacy online. So why did more than 90 human rights and LGBTQ groups sign a letter opposing the “Kids Online Safety Act”? Evan Greer is director of the group Fight for the Future. She tells us what’s going on there. Transcript: ‘These Bills Will Make Children Less Safe, Not More Safe’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230609Greer.mp3  

  NBC (11/2/22) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media have never been the right place to look for thoughtful, inclusive consideration of affirmative action. For them it’s an “issue,” a political football, rather than a long effort to address the real historical and ongoing discrimination against non-white, non-male people in multiple aspects of US life. But when it comes to the role that anti-discrimination, pro-equity efforts have had on Asian-American communities, there are particular layers of mis- and disinformation that benefit from exploring. Listeners will know that Asian-American students are being used as the face of attempts to eliminate affirmative action or race-consciousness in college admissions. It looks like the Supreme Court will rule on a watershed case this month. We talk about it with writer and cultural critic Jeff Chang, author of We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, among other titles. Transcript: ‘The History of Affirmative Action Has Asian-American Influence All Over It’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230602Chang.mp3   We also hear some of an earlier discussion of the case Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. vs. Harvard that CounterSpin had with Jeannie Park, founding president of the Asian American Journalists Association in New York, and co-founder of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard. Transcript: ‘This Case Was Never About Defending Asian Americans’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230602Park.mp3 Transcript: “This Case Was Never About Defending Asian Americans”

    GQ (5/5/23) This week on CounterSpin: Going on strike is something that people with no personal experience are comfortable depicting as frivolous and selfish. That extends to many corporate news reporters, who appear unable to present a labor action as other than, first and foremost, an unwonted interruption of a natural order. However else they explain the issues at stake, or humanistically portray individual strikers, the overarching narrative is that workers are pressing their luck, and that owners who make their money off the efforts of those workers are not to be questioned. It’s a weird presentation, whether it’s baristas or dockworkers or TV and movie writers. As we record on May 25, the Writers Guild strike is on its 23rd day, and having the intended effect of shutting down production on sets around the country. Eric Thurm wrote a useful explainer on the WGA strike for GQ. Thurm is campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project. We hear from him about some behind-the-scenes aspects of the strike affecting what you may see on screen. Transcript: ‘Studios Are Really Trying to Turn Writing Into Gig Work’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230526Thurm.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of San Francisco. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230526Banter.mp3  

  An earlier Daily News headline (5/2/23) was “Brawling NYC Subway Rider Dies After Chokehold, NYPD Says.” Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused Black man, appeared to be in the throes of a mental health crisis and asking for money on a New York City subway train when another passenger—a 24-year-old white man—put him in a chokehold for several minutes, killing him. The dozens of other passengers in the car of the northbound F-train did not stop the attack, although in a witness video, one bystander can be heard warning Penny he was “going to kill” Neely. The video also reveals some passengers cheering, while two other men stood above Neely, holding him down while Penny choked him for several minutes until he went limp. The death was ruled a homicide. The killer’s name, Daniel Penny, was not released to the media for four days. Penny was not charged until May 11, ten days after the killing, and after protests took place across the city demanding that he be arrested. He was charged with second-degree manslaughter, but released on $100,000 bond. A fundraiser on a right-wing Christian crowdfunding website called GiveSendGo has raised more than $2.5 million as of May 19. ‘A man in pain’ Roxane Gay (New York Times, 5/4/23) raises questions “about who gets to stand his ground, who doesn’t, and how, all too often, it’s people in the latter group who are buried beneath that ground by those who refuse to cede dominion over it.” Neely, who often busked as a Michael Jackson impersonator, had a history of mental illness and trauma. Before he was killed, he was reportedly yelling on the train, complaining of hunger and thirst and throwing his jacket down in a way some witnesses described as aggressive. “I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up,” a witness quoted Neely saying. “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.” No witness accounts suggested he was physically violent. Even so, much of the corporate press deliberately refrained from framing Neely as a victim, and far-right media outlets have gone even further to dehumanize him and excuse the killing. An opinion piece by Roxane Gay for the New York Times (5/4/23) rightly grouped this killing in with other recent wannabe vigilante–style assaults: 16-year-old Ralph Yarl shot for ringing the wrong doorbell in Kansas City; 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis fatally shot for pulling into the wrong driveway in upstate New York; competitive cheerleaders Heather Roth and Payton Washington shot after one got into the wrong car in a parking lot in Texas; a father and four members of his family—including an 8-year-old boy—fatally shot for asking his neighbor to stop firing an AR-15 assault rifle in his yard. Gay writes of Neely: Was he making people uncomfortable? I’m sure he was. But his were the words of a man in pain. He did not physically harm anyone. And the consequence for causing discomfort isn’t death, unless, of course, it is. Dehumanization The New York Daily News (5/2/23) announced Neely’s killing under the headline “NYC Man Threatening Strangers on Manhattan Subway Dies After Marine Corps Vet Put Him in Chokehold.” The lead made it clear that his killer was to be understood as the “good guy” in this story: A disturbed man threatening strangers on a Manhattan subway train died after getting into a brawl with the wrong passenger—a US Marine Corps veteran who put him in a chokehold. Of course, Neely didn’t “get into a brawl” with Penny, who by all accounts approached Neely from behind. But this framing of Neely as the instigator of violence was common. New York Times columnist David French (5/14/23), suggesting that Neely’s death was fundamentally a failure of the “rule of law”—not because of Penny’s vigilantism, but because of the city’s failure to keep Neely behind bars for more than 15 months after a 2021 assault charge—called Neely “reportedly aggressive and menacing.” French’s only evidence of this characterization was Neely’s yelling about needing food and water and being ready to die. As Neely’s killer knew nothing about his arrest record, Newsweek‘s headlining it (5/4/23) suggests the magazine thinks it should affect how sorry we should be that Neely is dead. Piling on the dehumanization, Newsweek (5/4/23) published an article centered on Neely’s prior criminal record: “Man Killed on Subway Had 42 Prior Arrests.” While quoting homeless advocates who condemned the ways poor and homeless people are demonized and dehumanized, Newsweek simultaneously framed the piece in a way that demonized and dehumanized Neely, relying on law enforcement accounts. Sara Newman, director of organizing at the housing justice group Open Hearts Initiative, told Newsweek: Jordan Neely’s murder is the direct result of efforts to dehumanize and demonize New Yorkers who are experiencing homelessness, living wi

  Time (5/4/23) This week on CounterSpin: Do you care about environmental degradation? Then you care about Cop City. Do you care about violent overpolicing of Black and brown communities? Then you care about Cop City. Do you care about purportedly democratic governance that overrides the actual voice of the people? Then you care about Cop City. But be aware: Your concern about Cop City, and its myriad impacts and implications, may get you labeled a domestic terrorist. The official response to popular resistance to the militarized policing facility being created on top of the forest in Atlanta, Georgia, is an exemplar of how some officials fully intend to bring all powers to which they have access, and to create new powers, to treat anyone who stands in opposition to whatever they decide they want to do as enemies of the state, deserving life-destroying prison sentences. So if your thoughts about Cop City don’t motivate you, think about your right to protest anything at all. We’ll talk about anti-activist terrorism charges with Cody Bloomfield, communications director at Defending Rights & Dissent. Transcript: ‘Charging Domestic Terrorism Is Intended to Make the Cost of Protesting Too High’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230519Bloomfield.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Israel’s “crisis of democracy.” https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230519Banter.mp3  

  In the early days of Lula’s presidency, the New York Times (2/10/23) stressed what he had in common with Joe Biden (attempts to overthrow their governments) over what divided them (the Ukraine War). A front-page article (4/30/23) in the Sunday, April 30, edition of the New York Times served as a hit job against Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST), one of the most important historic allies of President Lula da Silva’s Brazilian Workers Party. Two days later, the Times ran an op-ed piece (5/2/23) framed to damage Lula’s reputation. Together, these pieces represent a troubling narrative shift in the newspaper of record’s Brazil coverage. The Times published years of yellow journalism against Lula and the Workers Party, including 37 one-sided articles promoting the deceptions of the now-disgraced, US DoJ–backed Car Wash prosecutorial witch hunt. With the 2018 election of neofascist President Jair Bolsonaro, and his close relationships with Donald Trump and Steve Bannon’s far-right international network, the Times began to temper its approach. When Lula returned to office at the beginning of 2023, he got a honeymoon period in the paper, in which its coverage remained relatively neutral (e.g., 2/10/23, 4/14/23). Even after Lula’s April 2023 visit to China, the Times (4/20/23) published a more or less straightforward article, despite the Brazilian president pledging to stop using the dollar in trade between the two nations, and suggesting that the US and NATO were exacerbating the war in Ukraine. The Times remained neutral as Western news agencies Reuters and AP delivered a White House warning to the Lula administration (FAIR.org, 4/21/23). ‘Marxists May Take It’ The New York Times (4/30/23) waits 18 paragraphs before hinting that the reason “Marxists” may take unused land is that doing so is completely legal under the Brazilian constitution. This changed on April 30 with an article that appeared online under the Red Scare headline “If You Don’t Use Your Land, These Marxists May Take It.” (The print version, also April 30, had a more neutral headline, “Brazilian Group Occupies Land Unused by Rich.”) Superimposed over a photo of a poor village next to a tilled field, the subhead reads: “The Landless Workers Movement organizes Brazil’s poor to take land from the rich. It is perhaps the largest—and most polarizing—social movement in Latin America.” To a casual news reader, the article—by Times Brazil correspondent Jack Nicas—probably looks balanced. It features quotes from residents of a recent MST settlement as well as someone misleadingly introduced as a farmers’ “union” leader, a member of a new armed movement to keep people off unproductive land. It even correctly describes the MST as one of Latin American’s largest producers of organic food. It’s the facts that are left out of the article that expose it as the hit job that it is. The omissions could easily be interpreted by Brazil’s oligarchical rural elites as a green light to commit more violence against the nation’s peasant class—on the rise since Bolsonaro and his allies began encouraging it in 2019. ‘Communist and criminal’ “You defend what’s yours,” the New York Times (4/30/23) quotes a Brazilian cattle rancher—ignoring the fact that under Brazilian law, it’s those who fail to use their land, and not the beneficiaries of land reform, who are illegally squatting. The first thing missing from the piece is a proper explanation of the difference in land rights between Brazil and the US. It takes 18 paragraphs—ten paragraphs after telling readers that “many Brazilians view it as communist and criminal”—before it offers an incomplete admission that the MST works within the framework of Brazilian law: Despite the landless movement’s aggressive tactics, the Brazilian courts and government have recognized thousands of settlements as legal under laws that say farmland must be productive. Article V, section XXIII of Brazil’s 1988 Constitution stipulates that all property must serve a social function, which renders commonly practiced US real estate speculation tactics, such as land-banking, illegal in Brazil. As laid out in a series of laws based on this passage, any non-land owner has the right to occupy unproductive farmland and farm a modest plot—normally ranging between 10 and 40 hectares, depending on the biome. Furthermore, there is an entire government agrarian reform agency, INCRA, that is responsible for appropriating this land from its original owner at market rate, minus all back taxes owed plus interest, and providing a deed to the new owner. In many occupations coordinated by the MST, the ostensible owners of the unused land owe millions in taxes. Land-grabbing tradition A large percentage of them are unable to p

    USA Today (5/6/23) This week on CounterSpin: USA Today reported that, “as it heads into the final stretch of its current term, the Supreme Court is on defense following a series of revelations about gifts, property sales and disclosure.” That, you might say, is putting it mildly. The recent revelations are not about trinkets, but millions of dollars’ worth of benefits, vacations, jobs—and not from nowhere in particular, but from powerful parties with express interest in shaping the Court’s decision-making. “Disclosure,” in this instance, is another word for democracy—people’s right to know (and act upon the knowledge of) what, besides their votes, is influencing the laws that shape their lives. As details of Clarence Thomas’ secret-but-not-so-secret relationship with Republican billionaire Harlan Crow—and also with Federalist Society head Leonard Leo—roll out, the John Roberts–led Supreme Court has told congressional leaders they don’t believe any ethics rules really apply to them, and that’s not a problem. Whether that cravenly elitist, anti-democratic notion gets to carry the day will depend on many things, one of them being journalists’ willingness to stick with the stories, explore their structural and historical roots, demand transparency, and keep reporting faithfully to the public about what is learned and what is not—and why not. Even or especially if the Court is “on defense.” Because the information out of the Supreme Court has, as Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick has said, gone beyond an “ethics problem” to a “five-alarm fire” democracy-reform problem. And news media will be central to the response. We talk this week about the Supreme Court, where it’s going and where’s it taking all of us, with Ian Millhiser, who covers the Court for Vox, and is author of, most recently, The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America. Transcript: ‘The Court’s Position Is, No One Can Tell Them What to Do’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230512Millhiser.mp3  

  CT Mirror (2/2/23) Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont proposed on February 2 to purchase and forgive roughly $2 billion in medical debt owed by state residents. Along with similar proposals in other jurisdictions, the plan offers desperately needed relief from stress and fear to thousands of people who are struggling to pay their current outstanding medical bills. Unfortunately, these programs will do nothing to prevent millions more Americans from falling into the country’s healthcare financial meat grinder. Meanwhile, three major credit reporting agencies have decided to expunge paid-off medical debts and outstanding debt less than $500 from credit reports, and provide people a year’s grace period before adding new medical debt to credit reports. Like the debt forgiveness proposals, these credit decisions follow a wave of national publicity about the horrors of healthcare debt. In recent years, major news outlets, including the New York Times (e.g., 11/8/19, 9/24/22), Guardian (6/27/19), ProPublica (e.g., 6/14/21), National Public Radio (13/21/22), Kaiser Health News (9/10/19, 12/21/22) and CBS (4/28/21) have dug into the nightmares faced by tens of millions of Americans—both uninsured and with insurance—as they try to pay for the treatments and medicines they need to lead healthy lives. Compelling and consistent This New York Times headline (11/8/19) could have just as easily run in 2003 as in 2019. The stories are heartrending. Families’ lives wrecked financially by bill collectors and lawyers. Sick and injured patients’ health deteriorating due to mountains of debt and stress, with some providers even refusing follow up care until bills are paid. They highlight a set of corporate billing and collections policies and practices that turn a visit to a doctor or hospital into a years-long hell. Such investigations touch on common themes, including hospitals suing patients en masse: “Ballad, which operates the only hospital in Wise County and 20 others in Virginia and Tennessee, filed more than 6,700 medical debt lawsuits against patients last year.” (New York Times, 11/8/19) “The hospital that pursued Mr. Bushman, a 295-bed not-for-profit facility called Carle Foundation Hospital, is one of several that has at times employed debt collection tactics that are shunned by many other creditors. It has filed hundreds of lawsuits.” (Wall Street Journal, 10/30/03) Hospitals layering large interest payments on top of already crushing debt, and collecting through tactics like garnishing wages and seizing bank accounts: “Barrett, who has never made more than $12 an hour, doesn’t remember getting any notices to pay from the hospital. But…Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare sued her for the unpaid medical bills, plus attorney’s fees and court costs. “Since then, the nonprofit hospital system affiliated with the United Methodist Church has doggedly pursued her, adding interest to the debt seven times and garnishing money from her paycheck on 15 occasions.”Barrett, 63, now owes about $33,000, more than twice what she earned last year.” (Guardian, 6/27/19) “Tolson said she went to Yale-New Haven…to be treated for a staph infection. She had to stay at the hospital for eight days and got a bill for $9,000. She told the hospital she didn’t have a job or insurance and was told to seek welfare assistance. Because her husband had a small income, she didn’t qualify for state or federal assistance, she said.”She tried on several occasions to set up payment plans, but even with a job she wasn’t able to meet the payment schedule, she said. Her bank account was frozen, and when she called to discuss the problem the hospital’s agents were unwilling to budge on the issue, she claims.”‘I told them “I’m not working,” and they said “you should have thought about that then,”’ Tolson said. “Her bill is now $14,000.” (Connecticut Post, 12/17/03) Hospitals threatening and taking patients’ homes through liens and foreclosures: “Heather Waldron and John Hawley are losing their four-bedroom house in the hills above Blacksburg, Va. A teenage daughter, one of their five children, sold her clothes for spending money. They worried about paying the electric bill. Financial disaster, they say, contributed to their divorce, finalized in April.”Their money problems began when the University of Virginia Health System pursued the couple with a lawsuit and a lien on their home to recoup $164,000 in charges for Waldron’s emergency surgery.” (KHN, 9/10/19) “Still, the hospital administers strong legal medicine for cases of minor financial wounds. It presses for foreclosure for debts a fraction of a house’s worth. It pursued a $2,889.12 debt against a couple in Westville all the way to foreclosure, by which time fees and interest pushed the debt to $6,517.64.” (New Haven Advocate, 4/17/03). Nonprofit hospitals failing to offer patients charity care, sometimes in violation o

    (The Nation, 4/28/23) This week on CounterSpin: Economist James Galbraith wrote a few months ago: “It is in the nature of articles about the debt ceiling that no matter how often one tries to set the record straight, nothing ever gets through.” Elite media’s fundamental misrepresentation of the debt ceiling would be troubling enough if it were just a bad history lesson. But current Republican brinkmanship could have devastating impacts for millions of people—along with the harm to public understanding of what’s actually going on. We hear concerns about the process and the coverage from Chris Lehmann, DC bureau chief at The Nation, and contributing editor at the Baffler and the New Republic. Transcript: ‘The Debt Ceiling Is a Completely Pointless Contrivance’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230505Lehmann.mp3   IFixit.com Also on the show: The right to fix the things you buy is the sort of thing you wouldn’t think would be controversial here in “the land of the free.” Corporations’ attempts to prevent people from fixing their cellphone or tractor or wheelchair ought to be seen as the overreach it is. But for years, news media have presented the right to repair as a voice in the wilderness, up against benevolent companies’ efforts to do best by us all. That’s changing, with legislative moves around the country. Right to repair is having a “watershed moment,” one advocate says, adding that there are still “a lot of opportunities for mischief.” We get an update from Kyle Wiens, co-founder and CEO of the online repair community iFixit. Transcript: ‘We Have to Find a Way, for the Sake of the Planet, to Use Things Longer’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230505Wiens.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the New York Times‘ Iran error.

  Kansas City Star (4/20/23) This week on CounterSpin: The grandson of the elderly white man who shot a Black teenager in the head for ringing his doorbell told the Kansas City Star that their relationship had unraveled as his grandfather began watching “Fox News all day, every day,” and sank into a “24-hour news cycle of fear, of paranoia.” Those words had a poignant resonance for many people who feel they’ve lost family members and friends to a kind of cult, that’s not secret, but pumped into the airwaves every day. Hate-fueled and hate-fueling media have political and historical impacts—and interpersonal, familial ones as well. The Brainwashing of My Dad—the 2016 film and the book based on it—reflect filmmaker, activist and author Jen Senko’s effort to engage the multi-level effects of that yelling, punching down, reactionary media, as well as how we can respond. We hear from Jen Senko this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘This Media Is Meant to Change People, and It Does’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230428Senko.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of a potential UPS strike. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230428Banter.mp3  

    Washington Post (4/19/23) This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court has briefly punted their decision on restricting access to medication abortion drug mifepristone. The American Medical Association said that the recent ruling by a Texas federal judge revoking the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, which has been in widespread use for more than two decades, “flies in the face of science and evidence and threatens to upend access to a safe and effective drug.” For the Washington Post, that’s part of a “confusing legal battle“—but for the majority of people, including doctors, it’s not confusing, just frightening. We’ll hear from Rachel K. Jones, research scientist at Guttmacher Institute. Transcript: ‘People Who Don’t Support Abortion Ignore the Science and the Safety’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230421Jones.mp3   New York Times (4/10/23) Also on the show: “Rutgers University Faculty Members Strike, Halting Classes and Research.” That April 10 New York Times headline reflects standard operating procedure for corporate media: reporting labor actions in terms of their ostensible harms, rather than the harms that led to them. The strike by a range of differently situated Rutgers faculty, the Times said, “will affect roughly 67,000 students across the state”—presumably the same students affected by teachers, researchers and counselors working in circumstances so precarious and untenable they took the difficult, potentially life-altering step of withholding their labor. That go-to elite media frame—”those pesky workers, what are they up to this time?”—is just one more element making efforts to increase workers’ power in the workplace that much harder. Thing is: It doesn’t always work—lots of people see through and around it! The gains made by Rutgers faculty, and the example they set, are evidence. We’ll get an update from Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers, and New Brunswick chapter president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. Transcript: ‘The Thing That’s Made the Union Strong Is to Privilege the Lowest Paid’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230421Murch.mp3  

Fat cat pays a pittance in taxes to Uncle Sam in vintage cartoon. This week on CounterSpin: It is tax season in the US, when some of us wonder why the government, which knows how much we earn, requires us to guess, with the threat of prison if we guess wrong. And leads some of us to ponder what we get in return for our resources—streets and stop signs, to be sure, but also wars and wheelbarrows of money doled out those who already have plenty. We’ve talked about taxes and tax policy a lot on CounterSpin, enough to put together a walk-through of some of the issues, and the way news media explain them. You’ll hear from Steve Wamhoff, Dean Baker, Jeremie Greer and Michael Mechanic. Steve Wamhoff Transcript: ‘There Is a Different Set of Rules for Someone Like Donald Trump’ Dean Baker Transcript: ‘The Distribution of Income Depends on How We Structure the Economy’ Jeremie Greer Transcript: ‘1 Percent of Taxpayers Receive More Than the Bottom 80 Percent’ Michael Mechanic Transcript: ‘We Can Pay for What We Decide to Pay For’ Taxes, and how they’re not just an April 15 thing, this week on CounterSpin!

  Readers should have very low confidence in the Wall Street Journal‘s assumption (2/26/23) that classified intelligence reports are helpful gauges of scientific questions. The Wall Street Journal (2/26/23) broke the news that classified documents show the US Energy Department believes Covid emerged from a lab leak in China, which sent shockwaves through the rest of the media. Such a statement by the Energy Department “would be significant despite the fact that, as the report said, the agency made its updated judgment with ‘low confidence,’” according to the Guardian (2/26/23). “Low confidence” is a term intelligence agencies use to signify that “information’s credibility and/or plausibility is questionable, or that the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or that we have significant concerns or problems with the sources.” Speaking of low confidence, Michael Gordon, one of the Journal reporters on the byline, used to write for the New York Times. There he co-authored spurious articles with the infamous Judith Miller about imaginary Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify the US invasion of Iraq (New York Times, 9/8/02, 9/13/02; New York Review of Books, 2/26/04; Guardian, 5/27/04; FAIR.org, 3/20/13).* Nevertheless, this one article from a sketchy reporter, relaying a single government agency’s speculations that were self-labeled as dubious, managed to reignite the lab leak controversy, with virtually every major US news outlet returning to the story. Readers should be asking why so many in media find government talking points on a scientific question so newsworthy. There is a vast amount of scientific research that points to Covid spreading to humans from other animal hosts—“zoonotic jump” is the technical term—and pours serious cold water on the lab leak hypothesis, as well as some of the political actors who promote it. ‘Public-health groupthink’ “Officials would not disclose what the intelligence was”—but that’s good enough for the front page of the New York Times (2/26/23). After the Journal story broke, the New York Times (2/26/23) noted that the FBI “has also concluded, with moderate confidence, that the virus first emerged accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese lab that worked on coronaviruses.” Meanwhile, “four other intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council have concluded, with low confidence, that the virus most likely emerged through natural transmission.” Other outlets trumpeted the Journal’s report, giving the impression that new evidence about the pandemic’s origins had come to light (CNN, 2/27/23; NPR, 2/27/23; CBS, 2/28/23). While this reporting indicates that there is little consensus among government agencies about the virus’ origins, those who want to believe in the lab leak myth—like Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, to which the Journal belongs—used the report as definitive proof of Chinese carelessness, or even treachery. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (2/26/23) said the Energy Department declaration “doesn’t mean the case is definitive,” but that it adds “more evidence that the media and public-health groupthink about Covid was mistaken and destructive.” The Journal stressed that the “salient detail is that DoE’s judgment is based on ‘new’ but still secret intelligence”—which is known as the “trust us” school of journalism. In another Journal op-ed (3/6/23), Tim Trevan, a founder of CHROME Biosafety and Biosecurity Consulting, attempted to say that money, political liberalism, careerism and social pressure clouded the scientific community’s ability to accept the lab leak hypothesis. “I am not suggesting that scientists consciously decided to thwart the truth,” he said: You don’t have to posit conspiracy theories to explain the rush by the science establishment to exclude a lab-leak explanation to Covid. You merely have to admit that scientists are human. Trevan offers no evidence that a lab leak caused the pandemic, to back up his insistence that scientists have been blind to the truth. He does, however, indulge in low-brow anti-Communism and orientalism, saying the “transparency” necessary for adequate laboratory safety “runs against the grain of both Communism and China’s hierarchical traditional culture.” Which is it: Is China too egalitarian in its Maoist ways, or too stuck in its backward, pre-revolutionary past? Jonathan Turley opined at the New York Post (2/26/23) that the Journal’s scoop vindicated lab leak theorists who had been branded as racists or conspiracy nuts. Fox News (2/27/23) echoed Turley, and it gloated (2/27/23) that “reporters, pundits and media outlets” who had doubted the lab leak theory “were scolded and lampooned” as a result of the Journal report. ‘Intentionally manufactured’ You really can say anything on Fox News (2/28/23) as long as it makes the

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230407.mp3   (CC photo: Elliot Stoller) This week on CounterSpin: Former President Donald Trump was arrested this week, but we’re going to talk about another kind of crime: the slow, steady drip drip of crime that doesn’t leap out to reporters—the day-to-day crushing of workers’ attempts to organize themselves to have a voice in the workplace, not just about their pay, but their well-being and their dignity. Crushing those attempts to work together is against the law—but it’s not the sort of crime that elite media seem able to identify. And it’s much harder to fight when the law-breaking megacorporation is as media-savvy and faux progressive as Starbucks. Saurav Sarkar has been reporting Starbucks workers’ efforts—not to quit their workplaces, but to transform them into places where they can make a living and have some say in their lives, while, yes, also giving you your cappuccino. Sarkar writes for Jacobin, In These Times, The Progressive and FAIR.org, among other outlets. We hear from them this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: Starbucks ‘Workers and Consumers Have the Same Foe’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230407Sarkar.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of the Chicago mayoral election and the projected Antarctic current collapse. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230407Banter.mp3   Corrected audio file.

  Ciudad Juárez detention center fire This week on CounterSpin: There are a number of issues or realities where good-hearted people are overwhelmed and frankly misled about how isolated they are in their view, and what levers of power they may have to pull on. We can live in a better world! And we should interrogate those who say, “Oh no, you don’t get it; we’re smarter and we say you just can’t.” One such story is migration, or immigration—or, to be real, do Black and brown people have a right to move freely in the world? If not, why not? We’ll get some ideas of where to start this week with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network, about the Ciudad Juárez fire and what it tells us about immigration policy. Transcript: ‘The US Incarcerates More Immigrants Than Anywhere Else in the World’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230331Shah.mp3   Image: Health & Human Services And on healthcare: Do we really need to be making choices between seniors getting needed healthcare and other folks getting needed healthcare? Do we have to run our healthcare system on for-profit incentivizing? Is there truly no other way? We talk with Eagan Kemp, healthcare policy advocate at Public Citizen, about the fight around Medicare and Medicare Advantage, and what it says about concerns about seniors and about health, in the US. Transcript: ‘Medicare Advantage Has Never Delivered on the Promise’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230331Kemp.mp3  

  New York Times (3/18/23) This week on CounterSpin: In the immediate wake of the September 1, 2001, attacks, a military official told the Washington Post of the newly minted “war on terror”: “This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine. . . . We’re going to lie about things.” If reporters don’t evidence skepticism after a declaration like that, it says more about them than anyone or anything else. But US elite news media did the opposite of what you would hope for from an independent press corps in a country launching an illegal and baseless invasion, whose leaders had announced in advance they would lie to support it. You can dig out the reality if you read, but if you rely on the same media you were looking at 2003, you will be equally misled, and in the same, frankly, boring ways you were before: The US is great and only wants democracy; other countries are bad, and if our reasons for invading them and replacing their leadership with folks we like better, and killing anyone who doesn’t agree with that, don’t add up, well, we’ll come up with others later, and you’ll swallow those too. What passes for debate about why we must remain at some kind of war—cold, hot, corporate, stealth, acknowledged, denied—with Russia or China or whomever else is designated tomorrow, has roots worth studying in 2003. We’ll talk about it with author, critic and longtime friend of FAIR Norman Solomon. Transcript: ‘Media and Government Excuses Are Basically Intertwined’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230324Solomon.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at media coverage of ex-FCC nominee Gigi Sohn. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230324Banter.mp3  

    (CC photo: Chad Davis) This week on CounterSpin: If there are ideas, tools or tactics that are part of both this country’s horror-filled past, and some people’s vision for its dystopic future, they are at work in Cop City. Over-policing, racist policing, paramilitarization, the usurping of public resources, environmental racism, community voicelessness, and efforts to criminalize protest (that’s some kinds of protest)—it’s all here. Add to that a corporate press corps that, for one thing, disaggregates issues that are intertwined—Black people, for instance, are impacted not only by police brutality, but also by the environment, breathing air and drinking water as we do—and seems intent on forcing a vital, important situation into old, tired and harmful frames. Kamau Franklin is founder of Community Movement Builders, the national grassroots organization, and co-host of the podcast Renegade Culture. We’ll hear from him about Cop City and the fight against it. Transcript: ‘People Have Been Protesting Against Cop City Since We Found Out About It’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230317Franklin.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of DC’s crime bill. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230317Banter.mp3