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  Janine Jackson interviewed Friends of the Congo’s Maurice Carney about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba for the January 20, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230120Carney.mp3   Patrice Lumumba Janine Jackson: CounterSpin listeners will have heard a number of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. this past week—a few searching, many shallow. Importantly, the King holiday usually includes attention to his assassination, as well as to his life and work, though even the best reports, if we’re talking about corporate media, fail to draw the straightest lines between the two. This week also marks the anniversary of another assassination, that of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of the post-independence Democratic Republic of the Congo. Elite media appear to find that 1961 murder harder to pave over, and easier to just ignore. But thinking about it, learning about it, involves the same sort of challenges to the US role in the world, and how racism shapes that role—lessons that we very obviously still need to learn. We’re joined now by Maurice Carney, co-founder and executive director of the group Friends of the Congo. He joins us by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Maurice Carney. Maurice Carney: Thank you. Thank you, Janine. It’s my pleasure to be back with you. JJ: I will ask you to begin where we have in the past, with a reminder to listeners about January, 1961, and the circumstances of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination. How was the US involved, but also why was the US involved? (PublicAffairs, 2008) MC: Yes, the United States was directly involved. In fact, Janine, the United States State Department released declassified documents a number of years ago, in the last seven years or so, and those declassified documents revealed that the operation in the Congo on the part of the United States and its Central Intelligence Agency, the covert operation, was the largest in the world at that time, in terms of financing. And the chief of station, Larry Devlin, chief of station of the CIA in the Congo, he wrote a book entitled Chief of Station, Congo, and he laid out why that the United States felt that Congo was important, and that it remained in the sphere of influence of the United States. Larry Devlin said, in essence, that if we did not overthrow Lumumba, not only would we have lost the Congo, we would’ve lost all of Africa. So Devlin centered the Congo as a part of US overall foreign policy, strategic policy for the African continent. So the overthrow of Lumumba was vital to the United States. And we say “overthrow” because, in Devlin’s book, it’s really a playbook that he lays out for how the United States moves against democratically elected leaders who are not necessarily inclined to toe Washington’s line. And that was the problem that the United States had with Lumumba, that he was an African nationalist and a pan-Africanist, one who loved his people, loved the continent, and, as Malcolm X stated, he was the greatest African leader to ever walk the African continent. And the reason why Malcolm X said that is because he saw that the US couldn’t reach Lumumba, in the sense that they couldn’t corrupt him, they couldn’t entice him to sell out his people for trinkets, just like some of the other Congolese leaders had done. So the Congo was key, and it’s key for a whole host of reasons that we can share a little later. JJ: And the idea that the CIA chief of station, Larry Devlin, would use the pronoun “we”—”we” might lose Africa. This is so deeply meaningful in terms of policy narrative, and here’s where media come in to play their role of serving this narrative. And I know that you’ve spoken in the past about the role that US news media played in working with the CIA and Larry Devlin and other US foreign policymakers to destabilize Congo and Lumumba. Media storytelling carried a lot of weight here. A painting of Patrice Lumumba by Bernard Safran, commissioned by Time magazine but not published. MC: Absolutely, absolutely. The narrative is critical. It was a number of years ago we talked about, Time magazine at the time was portraying Lumumba as a monster, basically laying the groundwork to justify his liquidation and removal from power. We paint this picture of a monster to the global media when covert action is actually implemented by the Central Intelligence Agency, the US government, then folks are going to say, well, oh, he was a monster anyway. So it doesn’t matter if he was democratically elected. Doesn’t matter if he was a legitimate prime minister. He was a bad guy. And the United States and its media and its people see themselves as the good guy. So if the good guys move in and get rid of the bad guys, then it’s fine. And this

    Patrice Lumumba, 1960 (photo: Harry Pot) This week on CounterSpin: US media elites have gotten comfy with what writer Adam Johnson calls their “wall calendar version” of Martin Luther King, in which he represents the “good” left, unmoved by racial nationalism and Marxist ideology. With Patrice Lumumba, assassinated by the CIA on January 17, 1961, as newly elected leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the story is different. Look up Lumumba on the anniversary of his murder and you’ll find—nothing, really, except maybe a story about how street vendors in Kinshasa are being pushed off of Lumumba Boulevard to prepare for a visit by the Pope. Martin Luther King, corporate media would have it, offers a lesson about hopes and dreams and the slow but steady push toward progress. Lumumba’s assassination, judging by attention, has zero lessons for US citizens or the press corps to learn about the past, the present or the future. That’s how you know you should pay attention. Maurice Carney, co-founder and executive director of the group Friends of the Congo, has another story. And we hear about it this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230120Carney.mp3 Transcript: “‘The Cry is “Lumumba Lives”—His Ideas, His Principles'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the Signal app. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230120Banter.mp3  

  The New York Times (10/31/15) used to think taking away “the only tool citizens have to fight illegal or deceitful business practices” was a bad thing. “Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice” was a headline on a groundbreaking New York Times report (10/31/15) from 2015. Reporters Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Robert Gebeloff looked into the fine-print “agreements” that people sign, usually without reading them, as a requirement for obtaining credit card memberships or cellphone contracts or internet service—contracts that tell you that if there is any problem with your account, the company “may elect to resolve any claim by individual arbitration.” The Times reporters rightfully described those nine words as “the center of a far-reaching power play orchestrated by American corporations.” Because, as they explained and illustrated at length, “inserting individual-arbitration clauses into a soaring number of consumer and employment contracts” is a way to circumvent the courts and bar people from joining together in class-action lawsuits, realistically the only tool citizens have to fight illegal or deceitful business practices. That was vital, critical reporting. Fast forward to today, and another company silently snuck a forced arbitration clause into its terms of service—and that company is the New York Times. Public Citizen was among those unable to ignore the hypocrisy of a company that had called out a practice signing up to employ that same practice itself. In its letter to the Times‘ chief executive officer, Public Citizen noted the “ironic twist” of a paper that has told its readers that forced arbitration venues “bear little resemblance to court,” and are instead used “to create an alternate system of justice” by virtually privatizing the justice system, now characterizing those same arbitrators, in its updated terms of service, as “neutral.” We have long noted that media corporations that are themselves anti-union can hardly be trusted to report fairly on unions and organizing. This is just another reminder that while we pick up the paper looking for reporting that simply offers a clear-eyed view on important events, what we are in fact getting is the product of a profit-driven organization, beholden to advertisers and shareholders, that may not set out to harm its readers, but that simply does not have their interest as its first priority. It doesn’t mean don’t read the paper. It does mean read it carefully. And don’t believe everything you read. See “Workers Are Increasingly Required to Sign Away Their Rights,” transcript of CounterSpin show (2/19/21). ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at [email protected] (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

  Lever (1/8/23) This week on CounterSpin: US reporters used to talk, even brag, about telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may, and more acutely, about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable—in other words about using their special, constitutional power to look behind curtains most of us can’t, and bring us meaningful information we could gain no other way. Not stories that might amuse us, which are fine, but more centrally, the sort of stories that might help us actually change a society that few would describe as perfect. How did that morph into elite reporters cutting their evident conscience to fit, not just this year’s fashion, but the particular fashion of the particular power source they institutionally favor? And what’s the cost of that approach to the public, who, still today, look to news media, not to pre-chew their food for them, but to give them accurate, independently sourced and documented information to help them make their own decisions about the world and their place in it. Journalist David Sirota has thoughts on that, as well as a new outlet, the Lever, focused on what one would hope would be the fundaments of media institutions: power and accountability. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230113Sirota.mp3 Transcript: “‘We Live in a New World Where Accountability Barely Exists'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of forced arbitration. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230113Banter.mp3  

    (NBC News, 12/29/22) This week on CounterSpin: Media criticism is, at its heart, consumer advocacy. There’s an unarticulated underpinning to elite media conversation that goes: As a citizen you may have rights, but as a consumer, you don’t have anything called a “right”; the market is an arrangement—the best possible arrangement—but still, you can only hope you’re on the right side of it where it’s profitable to serve you. And if it isn’t, well, too bad. It’s a kind of caveat emptor, devil-take-the-hindmost situation, which would be bad enough if corporate media didn’t present it as though it were unproblematic, and as if we’d all agreed to it! Paul Hudson is president of the consumer group Flyers Rights. He’ll talk about what you did not, in fact, sign up for, in terms of air travel. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230106Hudson.mp3 Transcript: “‘The [Airline] Industry Pretty Much Has Veto Power Over Any Consumer Regulation'” (Center for Gender and Refugee Studies) Also on the show: Enacted under Trump, Title 42 instructed officials to turn away asylum seekers at US borders in purported protection of the country’s “public health” in the face of Covid-19. Officialspeak currently has it that Covid is over, so far as public regulations go…. Oh except for that exception about denying hearings to people fleeing violence and persecution in their home country. The Supreme Court has just furthered this injustice with a ruling that, according to one account, “does not overrule the lower court’s decision that Title 42 is illegal; it merely leaves the measure in place while the legal challenges play out in court.” We’ll hear from Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230106Crow.mp3 Transcript: “‘With This Delay of Vacating Title 42, the Death Toll Will Only Rise'”

All year long, CounterSpin brings you a look, as we say, behind the headlines of the mainstream news. We hope both to shine some light on aspects of news events—perspectives of those out of power, relevant but omitted history—important things that might be pushed to the side or off the page entirely in elite media reporting. But it’s also to remind us to be mindful of the practices and policies of corporate news media that make it an unlikely arena for an inclusive, vital debate on issues that matter—that we need. CounterSpin is thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They help us see the world more clearly as well as the role we can play in changing it. This is just a small selection of some of them. Rakeen Mabud “Supply Chain Mayhem Will Likely Muck Up 2022”—that New York Times headline (2/1/22) got us off to a start of a year of actual hardship, and a lot of obfuscation about that hardship’s sources. The pandemic threw into relief many concerns that it did not create—and offered an opportunity to address them in a serious and not a stopgap way. Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. We talked with her early in the year. Bryce Greene The ease with which US media step into saber-rattling mode, the confidence as they soberly suggest people other than themselves might just need to be sent off to a violent death in service of something they can only describe with vague platitudes, should be disturbing. Bryce Greene’s piece, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” got more than 3,000 shares on FAIR.org. The Peace Corps issued a press release warning that African Americans looking to support Ukrainians should accept that they might face racism—because, sooprise, sooprise, of how we’re portrayed in US media. Layla A. Jones We talked about the basic story the world and the US hears about Black people, thanks to journalism—with Layla A. Jones, reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. She’s part of the papers’ “A More Perfect Union” project, online at Inquirer.com. Helen Zia As US media showed there is no playbook too dusty to pull out with their anti-Asian Covid coverage, we talked with Helen Zia, co-founder of American Citizens for Justice, and author of, among other titles, Asian-American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, the 40th remembrance and rededication at VincentChin.org. Sumayyah Waheed In September of this year, CNN hired John Miller as “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst,”—a clear message to Muslim communities and anyone who cares about them—given that as deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism for the New York Police Department, Miller told a New York City Council meeting that “there is no evidence” that the NYPD surveilled Muslim communities in the wake of September 11, 2001—“based,” he said, “on every objective study that’s been done.” We listened, instead, to Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates. CounterSpin listeners understand that the news media situation in this country works against our democratic aspirations. There are so many problems crying out for open, inclusive conversation, in which those with the most power don’t get the biggest megaphone, leaving the vast majority outside of power to try and shout into the dominant noise, or try to find the space to talk around it. Corporate media work hard, will always work hard, to tell us that it’s their way or the highway….it’s just not true. Mike Rispoli One of many projects we should know about that show us a way forward is one in New Jersey—that didn’t talk about shoring up old media outlets, which are for sure suffering… but about instead about invigorating community information needs—a very different thing! The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium uses public funding to support more informed communities. We talked with an early mover on the project Mike Rispoli, senior director of journalism policy Mike Rispoli at Free Press.

    Image from January 6 Report (photo: Jon Cherry/Getty Images) This week on CounterSpin: The House committee on the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol heard more than 1,000 witness interviews and held multiple public hearings, resulting in criminal referrals to the Justice Department for Donald Trump, lawyer John Eastman and others involved in violent efforts to override the results of Trump’s electoral loss. The committee released transcripts showing some two dozen witnesses invoking their right against self-incrimination. Eastman, key advisor to Trump on how to overturn the election, cited his Fifth Amendment right 155 times. At one point, Democratic House member Jamie Raskin asked GOP operative Roger Stone if he believed “coups are allowed in our constitutional system.” To which Stone said, “I most definitely decline to respond to your question.” But the headwinds the Committee’s recommendations face are not just from the MAGA hatters, but also the Very Smart People who will tell us that our desire for justice is really just partisan or, worse, blood lust—and what we really ought to do, what the intelligent people would do, is, well, nothing. Let wiser heads prevail. We’re having none of that. We spoke with Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen and co-founder of the forged-for-purpose Not Above the Law Coalition, about what the hearings found and why it can’t end there. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221223Gilbert.mp3 Transcript: “‘There Is More Than One Solution Needed to the Problem of an Insurrection'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Elon Musk, inflation and deadly conservatism. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221223Banter.mp3  

    Truthout (11/12/22) This week on CounterSpin: Those listeners who have heard about Haaland v. Brackeen will know that that Supreme Court case is about considering the Indian Child Welfare Act—which is aimed at keeping Native communities together—to be “race-based,” and therefore unfair and unconstitutional. Opposing the actual mission of those who want to eliminate the Indian Child Welfare Act is just…reality: the reality that made the Act necessary in the first place, and the reality that will likely ensue if it is repealed. We’ll learn more from Jen Deerinwater, who writes for Truthout, among other outlets, and is founding executive director of Crushing Colonialism. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221209Deerinwater.mp3 Transcript: “‘A Crucial Part of Colonization Is Taking Our Children'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent media conflation of crime and homelessness. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221209Banter.mp3  

  For some time now, news media have been conflating crime, homelessness and mental illness, demonizing and dehumanizing people without homes while ignoring the structural causes leading people to sleep on subways and in other public spaces. With New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ latest announcement that he would hospitalize, against their will, unhoused people with mental health conditions—even those deemed to pose no risk to others—in the name of “public safety,” the local papers once again revealed a propensity to highlight official narratives and try to erase their own role in conjuring the crime hysteria that drives such ineffective and pernicious policies. Adams, who made fighting crime the centerpiece of his 2021 campaign, announced his latest plan on November 29, his latest in a series of pushes to clear unsheltered people from the streets and subways of New York City. It would loosen the current interpretation of state law, which allows police and other city workers to involuntarily hospitalize people with mental illness only when they pose a “serious threat” to themselves or others. Now, Adams declared, those also eligible would include: The man standing all day on the street across from the building he was evicted from 25 years ago waiting to be let in; the shadow boxer on the street corner in Midtown, mumbling to himself as he jabs at an invisible adversary; the unresponsive man unable to get off the train at the end of the line without assistance from our mobile crisis team. ‘A string of high-profile crimes’ New York Times (11/29/22) put the mayor’s plan to seize people for having a mental illness in the context of “a year that has seen a string of high-profile crimes involving homeless people.” The next day, the New York Times (11/29/22) put the story on its front page. The article, by Andy Newman and Emma Fitzsimmons, led by conflating homelessness and crime: Acting to address “a crisis we see all around us” toward the end of a year that has seen a string of high-profile crimes involving homeless people, Mayor Eric Adams announced a major push on Tuesday to remove people with severe, untreated mental illness from the city’s streets and subways. As FAIR’s Olivia Riggio (4/4/22) has pointed out, unhoused people are far more often “involved” as victims rather than perpetrators of crime, but most media coverage falsely suggests the reverse, scapegoating them for broader structural problems. Shortly after unquestioningly conflating homelessness and crime, the reporters offered their take on the political context: The mayor’s announcement comes at a heated moment in the national debate about rising crime and the role of the police, especially in dealing with people who are already in fragile mental health. Republicans, as well as tough-on-crime Democrats like Mr. Adams, a former police captain, have argued that growing disorder calls for more aggressive measures. Left-leaning advocates and officials who dominate New York politics say that deploying the police as auxiliary social workers may do more harm than good. It’s a crucial framing paragraph that does a lot of subtle work to establish the terms of the debate in a way that skews toward a pro-policing stance. First, by referring to the “national debate about rising crime and the role of the police,” it implies that crime is a major problem, and the debate is simply about how much and what kind of policing should be the solution. This implication is then reinforced in the next sentence describing the right-wing perspective, which refers to “growing disorder”—and isn’t countered in any way by the characterization of the “left-leaning” perspective offered by the Times, which challenges not the assumptions but only the proposed solution (and that with only a weak “may do more harm than good”). “Rising crime” itself is an extremely vague and context-free term. According to national FBI statistics, overall violent crime went down last year. While violent crime is up slightly since its recent low point in 2014, it’s roughly half what it was in 1991 (FAIR.org, 11/10/22). In New York City, some crimes, like robbery, have increased; other high-profile crimes, like murder, are dropping. Overall rates of major felonies are less than half that of their peak in the 1990s; the main driver of the current increase appears to be a spike in grand larceny offenses, which are by definition nonviolent and include all pickpocketing offenses. The next paragraph does more of this subtle framing work: “Other large cities have struggled with how to help homeless people, in particular those dealing with mental illness.” This sentence takes at face value Adams’ claim that he is making “every effort to assist those who are suffering from mental illness.” If Adams—and the leaders of other c

    Dissent (11/22/22) This week on CounterSpin: Former CIA director Mike Pompeo recently said with a straight face that Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was “the most dangerous person in the world.” “It’s not a close call,” he said. “If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teachers unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids.” More evidence, were it needed, that the current struggle for pay and dignity by teaching assistants and adjuncts and researchers at the University of California is really part of a bigger fight about whether educators, at whatever level, are actual workers—and who’s looking out for their rights. We hear from labor historian and UC Santa Barbara professor Nelson Lichtenstein about what’s happening at the University of California. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221202Lichtenstein.mp3 Transcript: “‘We Need to Transform What It Means to Be an Academic Worker; the Status Quo is Untenable'” Truthout (11/29/22) Also on the show: Some elite media are expressing concern that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito may have leaked the Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling ahead of time to evangelicals looking to make hay from it. But as Sarah Posner put it at MSNBC.com: While figuring that out matters, it won’t necessarily address the deeper problem, that the court’s conservative majority itself “was deliberately cultivated to expand religious freedom for conservative Christians at the expense of the rights of those deemed less worthy of protection.” We talk with legal expert and author Marjorie Cohn about that. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221202Cohn.mp3 Transcript: “‘The Supreme Court is Burying Its Head in the Sand'” CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post misattributed Mike Pompeo’s quote about Randi Weingarten to Mike Pence.

    New York Times (1/31/60) This week on CounterSpin: According to Techcrunch, before its ignominious flameout, the cryptocurrency firm FTX had acquired more than 100,000 customers in Africa. Evidently, FTX—led by wunderkind-turned-object lesson, with not much actual learning in evidence in-between, Sam Bankman-Fried—built a following in part by capitalizing on unstable banking access on the continent. Media like the New York Times and Bloomberg abetted Bankman-Fried’s scheming, with rose-colored stories describing him as a kind of “Robin Hood,” whose “ethical framework” called for “decisions calculated to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.” Well, the golden boy has now filed for bankruptcy, having disappeared some billion dollars in client funds, ho hum. Don’t look for FTX post-mortems to go deep on why Sub-Saharan Africa was specially targeted, or to plumb the implications of Bankman-Fried’s comments, made to Vox in 2021, that Africa is “where the most underserved globally are, and where there’s a whole lot of lowest-hanging fruit in terms of being able to make people’s lives better.” How’d that work out? The African continent as a playing field for white people to test their theories, extract resources and stage proxy wars is time-tested. As much fable as active framework, it’s a lens that requires constant challenge. We talked about this last fall with Milton Allimadi. He teaches African history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and publishes the Black Star News, a weekly newspaper in New York City. And he’s the author of the book Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in Western Media. We hear some of that conversation with Milton Allimadi, this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘The Demonization Was Meant to Pacify Readers to Accept the Brutality’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221125Allimadi.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Bill Gates. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221125Banter.mp3

  Today, you probably know who Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX are, and the details of why he and his company are front-page news are emerging at an amazing pace. Here’s the short version: Bankman-Fried—a boyish-looking cryptocurrency baron known commonly as SBF—announced that his lauded cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, had lost at least $1 billion in client funds, sending the crypto market into a tailspin (Fox Business, 11/16/22). The company, once the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange (AP, 11/16/22), has filed for bankruptcy. Lest one think this is a debacle that only affects crypto bros, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warns that “the sector’s links to the broader financial system could cause wider stability issues” (New York Times, 11/17/22). How could this happen? How could no one have seen this coming? These are the questions many people are asking. One problem is that in the months leading up to Bankman-Fried’s transition from financial genius to possible financial criminal (Yahoo Finance, 11/14/22), he received little scrutiny in the media. On the contrary, he was celebrated. ‘Pragmatic style’ The New York Times (5/14/22) largely embraced Sam Bankman-Fried’s self-presentation as “a straight-talking brainiac willing to embrace regulation of his nascent industry and criticize its worst excesses.” Among the silliest suck-ups came from the New York Times (5/14/22), in which David Yaffe-Bellany, the paper’s cryptocurrency correspondent, said that Bankman-Fried’s “pragmatic style” came from his parents, who “studied utilitarianism, an ethical framework that calls for decisions calculated to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.” Yaffe-Bellany added that “Bankman-Fried is also an admirer of Peter Singer, the Princeton University philosopher widely considered the intellectual father of ‘effective altruism.’” (Singer has been criticized for his eugenics-like approach to disability—FAIR.org, 1/20/21.) Yaffe-Bellany was also widely lambasted for providing media cover for Bankman-Fried even after his empire collapsed (New York Times, 11/14/22). As Gizmodo (11/15/22) put it: The new article in the New York Times by David Yaffe-Bellany lays out the facts in ways that are clearly beneficial to SBF’s version of the story and leaves many of his highly questionable assertions without proper context or even the most minimal amount of pushback. The result isn’t to illuminate the shadowy world of crypto. It reads like…the Times had conducted an interview with Bernie Madoff after his Ponzi scheme collapsed and ultimately suggested he just made some bad investments. Bloomberg (4/3/22) called Bankman-Fried “a kind of crypto Robin Hood, beating the rich at their own game to win money for capitalism’s losers.” The conservative New York Post (11/15/22) used Yaffe-Bellany’s reporting to tweak the establishment Times for its coziness with someone who may face criminal indictment. But the Post‘s sibling paper, the Wall Street Journal (10/30/22), had just weeks earlier given Bankman-Fried free, uncritical space to pump out optimism about cryptocurrencies, including the idea that value drops in crypto were just part of a general economic fluctuation: “It wasn’t just crypto…. By and large what we saw this year was a broad-based risk-asset selloff, as this monetary inflation reared its head, became noticeable enough to inspire policy change.” Bloomberg (4/3/22) likewise had painted Bankman-Fried as an eccentric financial whiz kid, whimsically frugal with a “Robin Hood–like philosophy,” while Reuters (7/6/22) ran with his claims that not only did he have “a ‘few billion’ on hand,” but that he would graciously use it to “shore up struggling firms.” An accompanying photo of Bankman-Fried with a T-shirt and disheveled hair made him look like the reincarnation of Abbie Hoffman. Barron’s reran an AFP story (2/12/22) that, again, highlighted Bankman-Fried’s “spartan lifestyle,” his vegan diet and his casual wardrobe. Matthew Yglesias (Slow Boring, 5/23/22), an economics commentator and a graduate of Slate and Vox, wrote, “I think [his] ideas, as I understand them, are pretty good.” None of these pieces really probed whether his business was sustainable. Shadowy sector How on Earth did this T-shirt-clad man charm American media into thinking that he could manage billions of dollars in wealth, based on an intangible commodity that has no intrinsic value? Analysts have long tried to get the media class to understand that crypto has many inherent problems (Jacobin, 12/26/17, 10/17/21), that the crypto market’s value has tanked (CNBC, 6/15/22), that Bitcoin wealth is highly concentrated (Time, 10/25/21) and that Bitcoin, despite being Internet-based, is highly environmentally destructive (Guardian, 9/29/22). One might think—or hope—that, after Enron, WorldCom, Bernie Madoff, Jordan Belfort and the 2008 financial crisis, that the business pre

    ABC World News Tonight (10/30/22) This week on CounterSpin: ABC World News Tonight told viewers what it thought they needed to know: “Bolsonaro Loses Brazilian Election, Leftist Former President Wins by Narrow Margin.” The victor of Brazil’s consequential presidential race has an actual name; it’s not “leftist former president”…or “former shoeshine boy,” as the New York Times had it–or even “savior,” as CNN suggests supporters view him. He’s a person, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, a popularly supported former president, whose program had, and has, more to do with helping poor people in Brazil than with securing the kind of extractive, profit-over-all, devil-take-the-hindmost international relationships that elite US media applaud. So just, get ready, is all we’re saying. For a Latin American president taking steps to protect the human life–supporting Amazon to be presented in the press as a flawed, corrupt self-server, which maybe suggests that uplifting the poor and saving humanity might just be too expensive a proposition. It’s hard not to imagine the use that a differently focused press corps might make of Brazil’s change of direction. We’ll talk about it with Brian Mier, of Brasil Wire and TeleSur‘s From the South, as well as co-author/editor, with Daniel Hunt, of Year of Lead: Washington, Wall Street and the New Imperialism in Brazil. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221118Mier.mp3 Transcript: “‘Lula’s Victory Is One of the Most Impressive Political Comebacks of the Last 100 Years'”

  For the Western press, the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party offered a number of signals which—if read in good faith—could have been perceived as reassuring. Instead, establishment outlets reverted to familiar narratives regarding China’s Covid mitigation strategy and tied these into renewed predictions of a long-prophesied economic disaster—one that would inevitably befall China as a result of its government’s decision to forsake the orthodoxy of open markets. More than anything else, corporate media fixated on Hu Jintao’s departure from the congress hall, engaging in tabloid-variety speculation around the fate of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s 79-year-old predecessor. Invoking the specter of a purge, outlets like the New York Times and CNN pushed the narrative that Xi manipulated events to consolidate his power. However, the “evidence” used by corporate media to suggest that Xi orchestrated Hu’s exit as part of a power grab was far from convincing. Substantive developments If establishment outlets covering the congress were on the lookout for substantive developments—rather than additional fodder to comport with their prefabricated narratives—they could have found them. Despite the Biden administration’s belligerent posture vis-à-vis Taiwan, demonstrated by escalations like Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island and Biden’s own promise to deploy US forces in the event of a forced reunification, Xi indicated that China would continue to approach cross-strait relations with restraint. SCMP (10/16/22): “Analysts said Xi’s remarks suggested that Beijing was exercising restraint on Taiwan, despite the soaring tensions.” Of Xi’s relatively measured statements on reunification, Sung Wen-ti, a political scientist at the Australian National University (Guardian, 10/16/22), said, “The lack of ‘hows’ is a sign he wants to preserve policy flexibility and doesn’t want to irreversibly commit to a particularly adversarial path.” Lim John Chuan-tiong, a former researcher at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica (SCMP, 10/16/22), deemed Xi’s message to the Taiwanese people “balanced and not combative.” This sounds like good news for everyone who wants to avoid a potential nuclear war. In addition, Xi’s opening report to the congress placed particular emphasis on the task of combating climate change. The section titled “Pursuing Green Development and Promoting Harmony between Humanity and Nature” presented a four-part framework to guide China’s policy efforts in this area. Even the avidly pro-Western Atlantic Council had to admit that “China is showing its leadership in green development in a number of ways.” Since China is home to one-fifth of the global population, and is currently the most prolific CO2-emitting country on Earth, its government’s decision to prioritize a comprehensive response to the climate crisis seems like an unambiguously positive development. The congress even provided some encouraging news for those who claim to care about human rights. In a surprise move, Chen Quanguo, who was hit with US sanctions for his hardline approach as party secretary in both Tibet and Xinjiang, was ousted from the central committee. But US corporate media generally failed to highlight these developments as positive news. In fact, with the exception of some coverage of Xi’s statements on Taiwan—which largely misrepresented China’s posture as more threatening than a good-faith reading would indicate—US news outlets had remarkably little to say about the substance of any news coming out of the congress. Recycled narratives As FAIR (3/24/20, 1/29/21, 9/9/22) has pointed out at various points in the pandemic, corporate media—seemingly disturbed by China’s unwillingness to sacrifice millions of lives at the altar of economic growth—have been almost uniformly critical of the Chinese government’s Covid mitigation strategy. The New York Times (10/16/22) refers to the “idea” that China’s zero Covid policies “have saved lives”—as though it’s possible that China could have allowed the coronavirus to spread throughout its population without killing anyone. Indeed, establishment outlets have persistently demonized the “zero-Covid” policy despite its successes—in terms of both lives saved and economic development. After Xi indicated to the congress that China would continue along this path, corporate media were predictably dismayed. Returning to its familiar line that, contrary to evidence, China’s decision to prioritize public health would ravage its economy, the New York Times (10/16/22) reported: Mr. Xi argued that the Communist Party had waged an “all out people’s war to stop the spread of the virus.” China’s leadership has done everything it can to protect people’s health, he said, putting “the people and their lives above all else.” He made no mention of how the stringent measures were holding back economic growth and frustrating residents. The article went on to quote

    New York Times (6/24/22) This week on CounterSpin: As Eric Horowitz noted at FAIR.org, a lot of elite media coverage of housing problems has focused on the idea that landlords of supposedly modest means are being squeezed; or that people living without homes pose a threat to the lives and property of homeowners, as well as to the careers of politicians who dare to defend them—besides, you know, dragging down the neighborhood aesthetics. New views are needed, not only about the impacts of the affordable housing crisis, but also about its causes. It’s not just capitalism run amok, because that doesn’t happen without government involvement. We’ll talk with longtime affordable housing advocate Gene Slater, founder and chair at CSG Advisors. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221111Slater.mp3 Transcript: “‘Who Do We Want to Own Our Neighborhoods?'” NBC Nightly News (11/12/21) Also on the show: Media continue to toss off the term “inflation” as the reason for higher prices, as if in hope that folks will stop their brains right there and blame an abstract entity. We have a quick listenback to our February conversation with Rakeen Mabud of Groundwork Collaborative, when media were working hard to tell the public that “supply chain disruptions” dropped from the sky like rain, rather than being connected to decades of conscious policy decision-making. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221111Mabud.mp3 Transcript: “‘Mega-Retailers Are Using Inflation as a Cover to Raise Prices and Turn Record Profits'” Combined corporate and government choices—and how they affect the rest of us, this week on CounterSpin.

  New York Times (10/21/19) This week on CounterSpin: In 2019, the New York Times reported on Haiti’s hardships with a story headlined “‘There Is No Hope’: Crisis Pushes Haiti to Brink of Collapse.” The “no hope” phrase was a real, partial quote from a source, a despairing young woman in one of Haiti’s most difficult areas. And the story wasn’t lying about babies dying in underserved hospitals or schools closed or people killed in protests, or people with jobs going unpaid, roadblocks, blackouts, hunger and deep, deep stress in a country in severe crisis. But further into the story was another quote, from that young woman’s mother, who told the Times, “It’s not only that we’re hungry for bread and water. We’re hungry for the development of Haiti.” As we noted at the time, there’s a difference between “there is no hope” and “there is no hope under this system”—and to the extent that US news media purposefully ignore that difference, and portray Haiti as a sort of outside-of-time tragic case, and ignore the role that US “intervention” has played throughout history in order to push for the same sort of intervention again—well, that’s where you see the difference between corporate media and the independent press corps we need. We’ll talk to Jake Johnston from the Center for Economic and Policy Research about what elite media are calling for right now as response to Haiti’s problems, versus what Haitians are calling for. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221104Johnston.mp3 Transcript: “‘Intervention Is Actively Destabilizing the Situation'” Time (10/27/22) Also on the show: Is racial discrimination over in the United States? Do universities and colleges already reflect the range of inclusion and diversity a democracy demands, such that they should stop even thinking about whether they’re admitting the sort of students they expressly excluded just decades ago? These questions are in consideration at the Supreme Court, though you might not know it from media coverage. Instead, you may have heard about a fair-minded white guy who just, in his heart, wants Asian Americans to get a fair shot at the Ivy League—against all those undeserving Black kids unfairly leveraged by affirmative action. We’ll talk about SFFA v. Harvard with Jeannie Park, founding president of the Asian American Journalists Association in New York and co-founder of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221104Park.mp3 Transcript: “‘This Case Was Never About Defending Asian Americans'”

  Janine Jackson interviewed Prison Radio‘s Noelle Hanrahan for a Mumia Abu-Jamal update for the October 28, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221028Hanrahan.mp3   Janine Jackson: TV snake oil salesman and Republican Pennsylvania candidate Mehmet Oz began a recent debate with opponent John Fetterman with reference to Maureen Faulkner, the widow of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Fetterman, Oz claimed, has been trying to get as many murderers convicted and sentenced to life in prison out of jail as possible, including people who are similar to the man who murdered her husband. Mumia Abu-Jamal You could live in a cave and understand what Oz was trying to do there, but not everyone may recognize the particular dog whistle that is the reference to Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of fatally shooting Daniel Faulkner in 1983. (That was the conviction.) Mumia Abu-Jamal’s conviction turned importantly on unreliable and conflicting testimony. It was significant that in taking up the case, elite news media went along for the ride, and sometimes drove the car—encouraging acceptance, for instance, of the fact that, though the guard assigned to Mumia immediately after his arrest reported “the negro male made no statements,” more to be believed was the other officer who subsequently came forward to say that, actually, from his hospital bed, Mumia had declared, “I shot the motherfucker and I hope he dies.” Neither witness recantations or shifting accounts or evidence of jury-purging in Mumia’s case, nor the ever-expanding evidence of the terrible harms and injustices of the US prison system generally, seem to be enough to shake some media from their investment in the narrative of the “convicted cop killer,” and the need to keep him not just behind bars, but also to keep him and people “similar to” him quiet, to keep their voices and their lives out of public conversation and consideration. Noelle Hanrahan is legal director at Prison Radio, where Mumia Abu-Jamal is lead correspondent. She joins us now by phone from Pennsylvania. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Noelle Hanrahan. Noelle Hanrahan: Thank you for having me. JJ: We can fill in context as we go, but please go ahead and start with what’s uppermost. What is the latest legal development here? Guardian (10/26/22) NH: When a defendant is trying to overturn their conviction—and Mumia has been in for 42 years—when they protest their innocence, they have to go to the local trial court. That, in Philadelphia, is the Common Pleas court. Mumia had fantastic new critical evidence that was just discovered two years ago. There was a note in the prosecutor’s files that said, “Where was my money?” from one of the key [witnesses], and this happened right after the trial, implying that he was paid for his testimony. There were also notes saying that the other key witness, their cases were being tracked, and that none of the outstanding charges pending against this witness were ever prosecuted. The most dramatic evidence was evidence of taking Blacks off of the jury, and marks on the prosecutor’s notes about the racial composition of the jury, and also what was good and bad about which juror was selected, a white or a Black juror. These were critical documents that many other people have gotten relief on. The jury notes are called Batson claims, the US constitutional claim. The suppression of evidence by the prosecution, burying evidence for 40 years, is called a Brady claim. These have gotten relief for many other defendants. So now 42 years later, Mumia Abu-Jamal was before Judge Lucretia Clemons in the Common Pleas court, and yesterday she denied all of his claims. She denied them procedurally. She refused to look at the merits of the body of evidence, and specifically this new evidence, and she denied it based on time bar waiver, due diligence. So I was Mumia’s producer. I’ve worked on Mumia with many of his books, including his latest trilogy, Murder Incorporated: Empire, Genocide and Manifest Destiny. We published those materials. About five years ago, I went to law school. I passed the bar in Pennsylvania, and it’s unbelievable to see the level of stiff-arming accountability to the Frank Rizzo, Ed Rendell, Ron Castille era of literal torture of defendants and witnesses—literally torture, not figuratively. Literally. Think Jon Burge in Chicago. Think of the types of torture that have happened. That is typically what happened in the cases that I now investigate. Innocence cases, prosecutorial misconduct cases, cases where this kind of information is available to these judges. I’ll give you one clear example. One of the key witnesses, Robert Chobert, was a cab driver who was driving without a license. He was on probation. He had thrown a Molotov cocktail into a school for pay. None of that material w

    This week on CounterSpin: A 1995 Washington Post story led with a macabre account from the widow of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, about how when her husband’s bloody shirt was held up in court, his accused killer Mumia Abu-Jamal turned in his chair and smiled at her. An evocatively sinister report, which the paper printed untroubled by the fact that the court record showed that Abu-Jamal wasn’t in court when the shirt was displayed. Mumia Abu-Jamal (BayView, 7/11/19) ABC‘s investigative news show 20/20 used all the techniques for their big 1998 piece on the conviction of Abu-Jamal for Faulkner’s killing—stating prosecution claims as fact, even when they were disputed by some of the prosecution’s own witnesses or the forensic record; stressing how a defense witness admitted being intoxicated, while omitting that prosecution witnesses said the same. At one point, actor and activist Ed Asner was quoted saying, “No ballistic tests were done, which is pretty stupid”—but then host ABC‘s Sam Donaldson’s voiceover cut him off, saying: “But ballistics test were done”—referring to tests that suggested that the bullet that killed Faulkner might have been the same caliber as Abu-Jamal’s gun, but refraining from noting that tests had not been done to determine whether that gun had fired the bullet, or whether it had been fired at all, or if there were gunpowder residues on Abu-Jamal’s hands. ABC used clips of Abu-Jamal from the independent People’s Video Network, without permission, and, as PVN told FAIR at the time, the network added layers of echo to the tape, making him sound “like a cave-dwelling animal.” No one paying attention was surprised when it was revealed that in a letter asking permission from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to interview Abu-Jamal (a request that was denied), ABC noted that “we are currently working in conjunction with Maureen Faulkner and the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police.” That kind of overt, proud-of-it bias has shaped coverage of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case from the outset; and current mentions suggest little has changed. Elite media will report without question a right-wing Senate candidate’s tossed-off reference to Mumia as the face of unrepentant criminality—while, out of the other side of their mouths, respectfully noting how Brown University is “acquiring the papers” of Mumia Abu-Jamal, as he’s an acknowledged representative of the very serious problem of mass incarceration, whose communications are “historically important.” Meanwhile, Abu-Jamal’s chances for a new trial, based on significant new evidence, were shot down summarily this week—but a glance at national media coverage, as we taped on October 27, would tell you, well, nothing about that. CounterSpin got an update, and a reminder of the real life vs. the media story of Mumia Abu-Jamal, from someone involved from early days: Noelle Hanrahan is legal director at Prison Radio. We spoke with her for this week’s show. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221028Hanrahan.mp3 Transcript: “‘This is America. That’s the Kind of Trial Mumia Abu-Jamal Had.'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Amazon‘s campaign contributions and FCC nominee Gigi Sohn. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221028Banter.mp3

    Guardian (10/20/22) This week on CounterSpin: This midterm is a big-picture election. It’s not just about the laws and policies and priorities governing our lives, not merely about whether we can control our own bodies or the environment has a future, the possibility of racial justice, or whether you can make rent with a full-time job. It’s about all of that, plus how we’re positioned to fight for the system that’s supposed to give each of us a say in those decisions. OK, but here are the elite media headlines: “Did Democrats Peak Too Early Before the Midterm Elections? Signs Suggest They May Have” “Will Inflation Boost Republicans’ Chances in the Midterm Elections?” “With Midterms Looming, Biden Isn’t Attending Big Campaign Rallies” What’s happening here? What’s not happening here? FAIR always says that news media work in election season should be judged not by how reporters “treat” Democrats or Republicans, but about how they inform and engage the public—including vast numbers of people who don’t even vote, because they can’t, or because they don’t see the connection between pulling that lever and their day-to-day life. Is it too much to say it’s journalism’s job to make those connections, and to err on the side of reflecting public needs to politicians, rather than presenting politicians as celebrities for people to muse about from a distance? CounterSpin talks about midterm election coverage with FAIR editor Jim Naureckas and FAIR managing editor Julie Hollar. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221021HollarNaureckas.mp3 Transcript: “‘It’s Extra Problematic When the Implications Are the End of Democracy'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Haiti. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221021Banter.mp3  

  Janine Jackson interviewed San Francisco State University’s John Logan about Amazon and Starbucks organizing for the October 7, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221007Logan.mp3   Janine Jackson: Between well-paid people telling you that the solution to high prices is unemployment, and the news of the latest weather catastrophe separated by several pages from the news about how fossil fuel profits are doing really well, and then the story of the latest outright violation of basic human rights by police or by the courts—it is very meaningful to see news about how another group of Starbucks baristas or of Amazon warehouse workers has got together and decided to fight for better working conditions and dignity for themselves, and to encourage, by extension, all who witness their example. Worker organizing—inside or outside of unions—is the counter-narrative, and the counter-reality, to the corporate control and co-optation we see everywhere around us. It matters very much how these efforts are portrayed in the press. Joining us now to talk about that is John Logan. He’s professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, and he’s been writing about organizing within the corporate world for Jacobin. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, John Logan. John Logan: Hi, very glad to be on. Thank you for inviting me. Jacobin (9/28/22) JJ: Listeners probably know that organizing has been happening, but we hear maybe less about the lengths—or depths, we might say—that super-powerful, successful company owners are going to to resist workers getting together to represent themselves. Meanwhile, we do see publicity for those companies all day and all night, in ads and social media promotions and supposedly “earned news” by outlets that present a “secret menu” or a “hidden deal” as a news event. So maybe let’s start with your recent piece for Jacobin on this. Starbucks and Amazon have been violating actual law, according to the National Labor Relations Board, in their fight against workplace organizing, yes? It’s not just distasteful, they’re actually violating the law. JL: Right. You know, an important thing to say straight off is the law itself is very weak, so there is so much that Starbucks and Amazon can do to fight unions that is legal under the National Labor Relations Act. All sorts of things that would not be legal in other advanced democracies, but are legal in the US. But they’re not just doing that. They’re doing things, and doing them again and again, that are clearly unlawful. And in the case of Starbucks, the National Labor Relations Board currently has over 350 open unfair labor practice charges against Starbucks. And that’s truly a stunning number within a relatively short period of time. We’re talking about a campaign that really only started in August of last year, in Buffalo and upstate New York, and for the first few months, really until December, January, was only in Buffalo, and then subsequently spread nationwide. The only comparable thing that I can think of is the UAW dispute with Caterpillar in the 1990s, where eventually there were over 400 unfair labor practice allegations against Caterpillar. But that campaign took place over a seven- or eight-year period. So Starbucks is really just operating as if the law does not apply to it. What happens is that Starbucks violates the law. The regional director in Buffalo issued a complaint against Starbucks in May, saying that Starbucks had committed almost 300 individual violations of federal labor law in Buffalo alone, in a three-month period leading up to the first elections in December. The company is alleged to have fired over 100 pro-union baristas. It has closed union stores in Buffalo and Ithaca, New York; in Seattle, in Portland and unionizing stores in other places. This is a remarkable union campaign that’s now spread to over 240 Starbucks stores around the country, [which] have voted to unionize. But there’s no question, if it were not for these rampant, unlawful union-busting practices, it would be 2,000 or 3,000. It would be far, far more stores. New York Times (8/25/22) The one thing that Starbucks did that had the greatest impact is in April, it announced that it was going to increase wages and benefits, but only for non-union stores. If you had voted to unionize or if you were engaged in organizing, you would not be getting these new benefits and wages. And finally it implemented these in August. Later in August, the NLRB said this was unlawful. This was clearly designed to create a chilling atmosphere and to discourage workers from becoming involved in the nationwide organizing campaign. What did Starbucks do? It said, we think that is wrong, we’re going t

  This week on CounterSpin: Media watchers may know that Katie Halper was fired from her job at Hill TV because she did a thing you can’t do in elite US news media, which is make a statement critical of the state of Israel. Halper described Israel as an apartheid state—a designation supported by the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, as well as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Classroom memorial for Rayyan Suleiman (Middle East Eye, 10/3/22; photo: Shatha Hammad). Her firing, along with others who’ve crossed the same policed line, is a loss for curious US viewers who want to hear a range of not just views on Israel and Palestine, but news: That would include stories like that of Rayyan Suleiman, a 7-year-old boy who died September 29 from a heart attack after Israeli occupation forces chased him home from school, because, they said, some of the group of kids he was with threw stones at them. Dialogue around Palestine and Israel is among the most formulaic that elite media maintain, but growing numbers of people have concerns, not just about uncritical US support for Israel, but also about the shutdown of critics and the conflation of debate with the real problem of antisemitism. CounterSpin talked about these questions in August with Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. We hear that conversation again this week. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221014Abuznaid.mp3 Transcript: “‘These Organizations Are Doing Critical Work to Advocate for Palestinian Rights'” Also on the show: Apparently cryptocurrency is going through a rough patch. Who would’ve guessed the thing that presented itself as a way for the little guy to go big in wheelin’ and dealin’ was not exactly as presented? CounterSpin spoke back in February with Chicago-based writer Sohale Mortazavi whose article, “Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme,” appeared at JacobinMag.com. We revisit that this week as well. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221014Mortazavi.mp3 Transcript: “‘The Entire Cryptocurrency Market is Basically a Ponzi Scheme'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the Nord Stream sabotage. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221014Banter.mp3  

  This week on CounterSpin: Amazon, the seemingly insatiable megacorporation, still refuses to acknowledge the union at its Staten Island facility known as JFK8, even as the National Labor Relations Board has rebuffed its attempt to overturn that union victory. Now Amazon has suspended dozens of JFK8 workers who refused to go to work after a fire that left the air smelling of chemicals and many feeling unsafe; 10 of those suspended were union workers. Jacobin (9/28/22) The reality that workers around the country are, first of all, simply suffering too much to not feel a need to fight, however scary that is, and then many of them taking to hand the existing tool of worker organizing—through unions and outside of them—is something that corporate media can’t plausibly deny. They can, however, underplay this movement, or patronize it, or try and confuse it by presenting it as “emotional” and irrational. But with tens of thousands of nurses, teachers, timber workers and nursing home attendants walking out around the country, the notion that this is somehow not meaningful, not about fundamental questions of human rights, and not worthy of the most serious, sustained, thoughtful attention journalists can provide, should be hard to maintain. We’ll talk with John Logan; he’s been reporting on organizing in media-friendly corporate behemoths like Amazon and Starbucks for Jacobin. He’s professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221007Logan.mp3 Transcript: “‘People Are Taking Inspiration From Union Victories at Amazon and Starbucks'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the Azov Battalion. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221007Banter.mp3  

  (New York, 9/22/22) This week on CounterSpin: As Puerto Rico struggles under another “natural” disaster, we’re seeing some recognition of what’s unnatural about the conditions the island faces, that determine its ability to protect its people. We’re even getting some critical mumblings about “finance bros”—people from the States who go to the island to exploit tax laws designed to reward them wildly. New York magazine described “a wave of mostly white mainlanders” that “has moved to Puerto Rico, buying real estate and being accused of pushing out locals who pay their full tax burden.” Gotta get that passive voice in there. But of course, it isn’t just that these tax giveaways favoring non–Puerto Ricans are gross and unfair; you have to acknowledge in the same breath that money going to them is money not going to Puerto Rico’s energy systems, schools, hospitals, housing. We talk about the harms inflicted on Puerto Rico that have nothing to do with hurricanes, with Julio López Varona, co-chief of campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220930Varona.mp3 Transcript: “‘Puerto Rico Has Become a Microcosm for the Worst Kind of Capitalist Ideas'” (AP via PBS, 9/24/21) Also on the show: Customs and Border Protection released findings from an internal investigation a few months back, declaring that no horse-riding Border Patrol agents actually hit any Haitian asylum seekers with their reins, as they chased them down on the Southern border last fall. That finding is disputed, but consider the premise: that people would need to create tales of horror about the treatment of Haitians at Del Rio, where people were shackled, left in cold cells, denied medicine, and separated from children as young as a few days old. Media subtly underscore that skepticism: AP ran a piece at the time telling readers that the appalling images shocked everyone: But to many Haitians and Black Americans, they’re merely confirmation of a deeply held belief: US immigration policies, they say, are and have long been anti-Black. The Border Patrol’s treatment of Haitian migrants, they say, is just the latest in a long history of discriminatory US policies and of indignities faced by Black people, sparking new anger among Haitian Americans, Black immigrant advocates and civil rights leaders. Understand, then: The racism in US immigration policy is a mere “belief,” held by Black people, and only they are upset about it. And this dismissive, divisive view is “good,” sympathetic reporting! We get another, grounded perspective from Guerline Jozef, founder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220930Jozef.mp3 Transcript: “‘The Moment Black People Showed Up, We Responded With Violence'”

    Newspaper ad from the Freedom on the Move database. This week on CounterSpin: If US news media never used the terms “wake-up call” or “racial reckoning” again, with regard to the latest instance of institutional white supremacy brought to light, that would be fine. Far better would be for them to do the work of not just acknowledging that US news media have supported and inflicted racist harms throughout this country’s history, but shedding critical light on the hows and whys of those harms—and taking seriously the idea of repairing them and replacing them with a media ecosystem that better serves us all. The Media 2070: Media Reparations Project encourages conversation and action around that vision. We’ll hear about the work from Alicia Bell, a co-creator and founding director of Media 2070 and current director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, housed within Borealis Philanthropy. And from Collette Watson, director of Media 2070 and vice president of cultural strategy at the group Free Press. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220923Bell_Watson.mp3 Transcript: “‘There’s a Lot of Jubilance and Healing in Reparations'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of student debt relief, China’s zero-Covid policy and Afghan sanctions. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220923Banter.mp3  

    CNN‘s John Miller This week on CounterSpin: Journalist-turned-cop-turned-journalist-turned-cop-turned-journalist John Miller makes a blur of the revolving door. For years, he’s been back and forth between the New York Police Department (and the FBI) and news media like ABC. And now he’s the new hire at CNN. Don’t miss the message: For corporate media, being a paid flack for the police in no way disqualifies you to offer what viewers will be assured is a dry-eyed analysis of law enforcement patterns and practices. The hire is part of CNN‘s rebranding under new leadership; the major stockholder cites Fox News as an exemplar. But while it’s tempting to say CNN is acting like the kid who imagines his bully will let up if he offers both his and his little brother’s lunch money, the harder truth is that CNN knows it won’t attract or appease Fox or Fox viewers. So we should focus less on how one network “counters” the other than on whom they’re both ready to throw under the bus—in this case, Muslims. We’ll talk about the Miller hire with Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy counsel at Muslim Advocates. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220916Waheed.mp3 Transcript: “John Miller ‘Chose to Lie About Something That’s Well Documented'” Atlantic (9/5/22) Also on the show: Listeners may have seen the “just asking questions, don’t get mad” Atlantic article about how it might make sense to keep pricing insulin out of the reach of diabetics because, wait, wait…hear me out. (The idea was that if insulin winds up cheaper than newer, better drugs, more people might die.) Other outlets are musing about how higher unemployment might be the best response to higher prices. Why are we doing thought experiments about hurting people? Implied scarcity—”obviously we can’t do all the things a society needs, so let’s discuss what to jettison”—is a whole vibe that major media could upend, but instead enable. We’ll talk about how that’s playing out in coverage of inflation with Chris Becker, associate director of policy and research and senior economist at the Groundwork Collaborative. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220916Becker.mp3 Transcript: “‘We’ve Incentivized Corporations to Go After This Price-Gouging Strategy'”

  In its latest move to the right, CNN recently hired former NYPD flack John Miller as its “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst.” As Josmar Trujillo observed more than five years ago (FAIR.org, 6/21/17), Miller “has spun the revolving door between law enforcement and media like perhaps no one else,” moving back and forth between jobs at the NYPD, FBI, ABC and CBS. Just last year, while working for the NYPD, Miller falsely testified that there was “no evidence” the department had spied on Muslims in mosques—when, in fact, AP had won a Pulitzer in 2012 for uncovering how after 9/11 the NYPD “systematically spied on Muslim neighborhoods, listened in on sermons, infiltrated colleges and photographed law-abiding residents” (Popular Information, 9/7/22). Shahana Hanif, the Muslim city council member who called out Miller’s lies, told Popular Information: John Miller had the audacity to lie under oath about the nature of this program to my face…. Someone like John Miller should not be in public service nor should they be given a platform on a mainstream cable news network. Predictably, within days of joining CNN, Miller offered up a healthy dose of dishonest copaganda to the network’s audience. Heads I win, tails you lose John Miller misexplains crime stats to CNN‘s audience (New Day, 9/7/22). On CNN New Day (9/7/22), anchor John Berman brought up the issue of crime in New York City, noting that murder and shooting rates had fallen over the past year, and asking Miller to explain “how…that was achieved.” Miller replied: Well, I know how it was achieved because I was there. And that was achieved by extraordinarily smart deployments, which is the Bronx was driving the shooting numbers for the city a year ago. They flooded the Bronx with police officers on overtime. They flooded the Bronx with police officers working a sixth or seventh day. They shifted tours around. They were very strategic, watching every shooting, every dot on the map and pushing resources there. And they were able to suppress that. Berman then asked Miller how to explain the seeming anomaly that “you can get the murder right and shootings down, but robbery, felony assaults and overall crime, all up?” Miller responded: When you take the larceny, burglary, auto theft, these are all covered under New York’s new bail reform laws, which is, criminals know — criminals have very good intelligence, as good as the police when it comes to collecting information and distributing that among each other—they know that there are certain charges where the judge in New York state, not just New York City, is legally prohibited, prohibited by law, from setting bail in that case. So they know I commit the crime, if I get caught, I’ll be out as soon as I get my hearing. Now, that has caused recidivism, which was always a problem, to skyrocket. So basically when you look at the larceny, the robberies—which are just larcenies where somebody tried to stop them—the burglaries, the auto thefts…. We have people, John, coming from New Jersey, where they have plenty of cars, to steal cars in New York City, because they know if they get caught, they will not go to jail. In sum: some crimes are down because police have flooded crime-ridden neighborhoods, but that same flood of police has nothing to do with an increase in other crimes, because bail reform. New York Post (7/8/20): “Most people released under the criminal justice reforms or amid the pandemic had no known ties to the bloodshed…. Cops should focus on the flow of illegal guns into the city.” Unsurprisingly, this is exactly the argument Miller’s former employer, and New York mayor and former cop Eric Adams, have been making recently, based on data they will not publicly release, and that contradicts all actually available data (City and State New York, 8/3/22; Crime and Justice, 2021; Quattrone Center, 8/16/22). Curiously, when shootings were up in 2020 (and other crimes were down), the NYPD’s argument had it that that was the result of bail reform. At the time, the total mendacity was called out by even the right-wing, cop-loving, Murdoch-owned New York Post (7/8/20). Now with the crime rates reversed, the NYPD and its allies are hoping the baseless bail reform blame will stick on a different target. Contrary to evidence In fact, murder and shooting rates are down slightly nationwide, after two years of increases. Criminal justice observers note that, while one should always be cautious in attempting to explain short-term changes in crime rates because of the many interacting factors involved, the nationwide shifts strongly point to national, rather than local, causes—foremost among them the major social and economic dislocations caused by the Covid-19 pandemic that have diminished as pandemic-related restrictions have lifted (Brennan Center, 7/12/22). Gun sales in

    Fox News (7/19/22) This week on CounterSpin: In May of this year, a white supremacist killed ten people in Buffalo, New York. He made clear that he wanted to kill Black people, because he believes there is a plot, run by Jews, to “replace” white people with Black and brown people. News media had an opportunity then to deeply interrogate the obvious spurs for the horrific act, including of course the media outlets and pundits and politicians who repeatedly invoke this white replacement idea, but it didn’t really happen. The Washington Post offered an inane tweet about how Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ But a racist massacre raises questions about that promise.” CounterSpin spoke at the time about the issues we hoped more media would be exploring, with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been following Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220909Gertz.mp3 Transcript: ‘The “Great Replacement” Builds on Those Long Hatreds’ And we spoke also with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Poverty Law Center and executive director at Western States Center, about ways forward. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220909Ward.mp3 Transcript: ‘The “Great Replacement” Builds on Those Long Hatreds’ We hear these conversations again this week. Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the assassination of Darya Durgina. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220909Banter.mp3

  From the film Powerlands. This week on CounterSpin: It is meaningful that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has formally apologized to Sacheen Littlefeather, the Apache and Yaqui actress and activist who in 1973 refused the best actor award on behalf of her friend Marlon Brando, because of Hollywood’s history of derogatory depiction of Native Americans. Some cheered, but a lot of the audience booed, some complete with “tomahawk chops,” and John Wayne evidently had to be physically restrained. Arriving at Brando’s house after the ceremony, Littlefeather was shot at. It’s good that the Academy is apologizing, but the proof of course is in the material acknowledgement of the message: that Native Americans have been treated poorly in US entertainment and, we could add, news media, and that that has impact. Things are changing, and we need to check what that change amounts to: not just visibility, but justice and redress and the improvement of lives. The film Powerlands explores the treatment of Indigenous people around the world—not in terms of media imagery, but in terms of the resource extraction that is stealing water, minerals and homelands. It talks not just about harm but about resistance, and so it also contributes to the seeing of Native communities in their full humanity. We’ll talk with Powerlands filmmaker Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220902ManybeadsTso.mp3 Transcript: ‘We Could Be Living in the Future We All Dream About’ Time (8/24/22) Also on the show: You might consider you’re making a misstep when even Time magazine calls you out. Hardly a progressive bastion, the outlet recently ran a piece critical of Joe Biden’s call for the hiring of 100,000 more police officers and some $13 billion to police budgets—calling it a part of a “manipulative message that if we feel unsafe, it is because we have not yet invested adequately in police, jails and prisons.” Contributor Eric Reinhart noted that using a more comprehensive understanding of safety including “factors like homelessness and eviction, overdose risk, financial insecurity, preventable disease, police violence and unsafe workplaces (which, statistically, present far greater preventable threats to everyday life than crime)—it is readily apparent America’s police-centric safety policies do not effectively promote shared safety.” This is not new knowledge, though it obviously needs resaying. We’ll revisit just a bit from CounterSpin‘s 2017 conversation with Alex Vitale, professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing & Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, and author of the book The End of Policing. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220902Vitale.mp3 Transcript: ‘We’ve Got to Break This Mindset That Policing Is the Only Tool’

Israeli soldiers raiding the offices of Defense for Children International/Palestine. This week on CounterSpin: Corporate news media have a particularly frozen narrative on Palestine and Israel. You could recite it: Palestinians act violently; Israel responds in self defense. There are “clashes” of implicitly equally empowered forces. Palestinians have squandered their opportunities for autonomy because they overreach. And, finally: if you have any problem with the actions of the state of Israel, you must hate Jewish people. That whole narrative not only summarily erases the millions of Jewish people who support the human rights of Palestinians, it also makes it hard for anyone to make sense of, for example, the recent assault by Israeli forces on the Gaza Strip, reported as by AP as a “flare up” that—passive voice—”left 49 Palestinians dead.” The account notes that “no one on the Israeli side was killed or seriously wounded,” but instructs us to see it as a “battle” between Israel and “militant” Palestinians, who remain “defiant.” Ahmad Abuznaid is executive director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. He joins us to talk about the reality that formulaic rhetoric obscures. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220826Abuznaid.mp3 Transcript: ‘These Organizations Are Doing Critical Work to Advocate for Palestinian Rights’ Billionaire Barre Seid Also on the show: Andrew Perez covers money and influence as senior editor and reporter at the Lever. He talks about what we should know about the unprecedentedly enormous donation—some $1.6 billion—that just went from a Chicago mogul to a deeply conservative group that is, among other things, reshaping the Supreme Court. It’s the sort of news that changes your life, whether you know it’s happening or not. Which, yeah, you would think would be where a free press would come in. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220826Perez.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Real Issue With Dark Money: We Don’t Know Who’s Influencing Policy’

  In These Times (8/2/22) This week on CounterSpin: The Biden administration says it’s making progress toward its goal to slow migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador by addressing the causes of that migration. The White House “Call to Action” foregrounds private sector “investments” as key to creating economic opportunity and to rooting out corruption in the region. And companies like Microsoft and PepsiCo have stepped up to do…well, what exactly? And how does this differ from the support for transnational corporations and their extractive, profit-driven policies that has misled US involvement for decades? Azadeh Shahshahani is legal and advocacy director at Project South. She joins us to raise some questions about the US government’s claim that this time, they’re really bringing stability and security to northern Central America. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220819Shashahani.mp3 Transcript: ‘The US Must Break Free of the Banana Republic Mentality’ Global Witness (8/15/22) Also on the show: Facebook would appear to be 0 for 4 in tests of its ability to detect and reject ads containing blatant election-related misinformation—in this case, ahead of important elections in Brazil. The group Global Witness found what they’re calling a “pattern” of the social media platform allowing ads on the site that violate the most basic of standards—including, for example, telling folks the wrong date to vote. At what point does “Oops! But please believe we take all of this very seriously!” stop being a plausible excuse? We talk with Jon Lloyd, senior advisor at Global Witness. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220819Lloyd.mp3 Transcript: ‘Bizarre Decisions From Facebook Call Into Question Moderation Systems’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at how NPR misremembers the Afghan invasion. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220819Banter.mp3  

CT Insider (7/14/22) This week on CounterSpin: A Texas court has told Alex Jones to pay some $49 million dollars in damages for his perverse, accusatory talk about the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre being a “big hoax”—the jury evidently not believing Jones’ tale that he was suffering a weird and weirdly profitable “psychosis” when he told his followers that no one died at Sandy Hook because none of the victims ever existed, nor were they evidently moved by his subsequent claim that he did it all “from a pure place.” Jones, as the Hearst Connecticut Media editorial board noted in a strong statement, is trying to keep any mention of his “white supremacy and right-wing extremism” out of the Sandy Hook case he’s facing in New Hampshire—because, his lawyer says, that discussion would be “unfairly prejudicial and inflammatory,” an “attack on [Jones’] character” that would “play to the emotions of the jury and distract from the main issues.” What should be the “main issues” when our vaunted elite press corps engage a figure like Alex Jones? We talk with Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220812Carusone.mp3 Transcript: ‘What Alex Jones Has Peddled Is Now Nearly Indistinguishable from Right-Wing Talking Points’ Also on the show: In 1991, on the fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident, an editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune concluded: “Despite Chernobyl, nuclear energy is the green alternative.” The Houston Post enjoined readers: “Let’s not learn the wrong lesson from Chernobyl and rule nukes out of our future.” Corporate media have been rehabilitating nuclear power for as long as the public has been terrified by its dangers—sometimes as heavy-handedly as NBC in 1987 running a documentary, Nuclear Power: In France It Works, that failed to mention that NBC’s then-owner, General Electric, was the country’s second-largest nuclear power entity—and third-largest producer of nuclear weapons. Now in Russia’s war on Ukraine, we’re seeing news media toss the possibility of nuclear war into the news you’re meant to read over your breakfast. Has something changed to make the unleashing of nuclear weaponry war less horrific? And if not, what can we be doing to push it back off the table and out of media’s parlor game chat? We hear from author and journalism professor Karl Grossman. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220812Grossman.mp3 Transcript: ‘This Treaty Could Put the Nuclear Weapons Genie Back in the Bottle’

This week on CounterSpin: The crises we face right now in the US—a nominally democratic political process that’s strangled by white supremacist values, a corporate profiteering system that mindlessly overrides human needs to treat the environment as just another “input”—are terrible, but not, precisely, new. People have fought against these ideas in various forms before; and some strategies have been useful, others less so. The front line for us now is the fact that we have powerful actors who don’t just want to argue for particular ideas to guide us forward, but want to shut down the spaces in which we can have the arguments. And where a vigorous free press should be, we have corporate, commercial media that don’t have defending those spaces as their foremost concern. Luke Harris One crucial thing we now know we need to pro-actively fight for: our right to learn and teach real US history. Listeners will have heard of the campaign against “critical race theory”—a set of ideas of which right-wing opponents gleefully acknowledge they know and care nothing, but are using as cover to attack any race-conscious, that’s to say accurate and appropriate, teaching. CounterSpin put that cynical but impactful campaign in context last July with Luke Harris, co-founder and deputy director of the African American Policy Forum. Joe Torres Late last June, we talked about just the kind of story we all would know if our learning was inclusive and unafraid, the kind of story that would play a role in our understanding of the country’s growth—the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which 300 overwhelmingly Black people were killed, and some 800 shot or wounded. It’s a part of a sort of “hidden history” that the press corps have a role in hiding, as we discussed with Joe Torres, senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press, and co-author, with Juan González, of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220805Harris.mp3 CounterSpin spoke with Luke Harris in July of 2021. Transcript: ‘We Can’t Fight for Racial Justice if We Can’t Learn About Racial Injustice’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220805Torres.mp3 We spoke with Joe Torres in June 2021. Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’

  NBC Nightly News (6/10/22) This week on CounterSpin: In what is being reported as an “abrupt” or “surprise” development, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, whose shtick relies heavily on legislative roadblocking, has agreed to sign on to a package that includes some $369 billion for “climate and energy proposals.” The New York Times reports that the deal represents “the most ambitious climate action ever taken by Congress”—a statement that cries out for context. The package is hundreds of pages long, and folks are only just going through it as we record on July 28, but already some are suggesting we not allow an evident, welcome break in Beltway inertia to lead to uncritical cheering for policy that may not, in fact, do what is necessary to check climate disruption, in part because it provides insufficient checks on fossil fuel production. But journalistic context doesn’t just mean comparing policy responses to real world needs; it means recognizing and reporting how the impacts of the climate crisis—like heat waves—differ depending on who we are and where we live. There’s a way to tell the story that connects to policy and planning, but that centers human beings. We talked about that during last year’s heat wave with Portland State University professor Vivek Shandas. Transcript: ‘That’s Lethal, Communities Completely Exposed to This Kind of Heat’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220729Shandas.mp3   Also on the show: Although it’s taken a media back seat to other scourges, the US reality of Black people being killed by law enforcement, their families’ and communities’ grief and outrage meeting no meaningful response, grinds on: Robert Langley in South Carolina, Roderick Brooks in Texas, Jayland Walker in Ohio. Anthony Guglielmi Major news media show little interest in lifting up non-punitive community responses, or in demanding action from lawmakers. So comfortable are they with state-sanctioned racist murder, the corporate press corps haven’t troubled to highlight the connections between outrages—and the system failure they betray. Exhibit A: Beltway media have twisted their pearls about the US Secret Service having deleted text messages relevant to the January 6 investigation. No one seems to be buying the claim from Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi that the messages were “erased as part of a device-replacement program” that just happened to take place after the inspector general’s office had requested them. Laquan McDonald Now, many people, but none in the corporate press, would think it relevant to point out that Guglielmi came to the Secret Service after his stint with the Chicago Police Department, during which he presided over that department’s lying about the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald. There, Guglielmi claimed that missing audio from five different police dashcam videos—audio that upended police’s story that McDonald had been lunging toward officer Jason Van Dyke, when in fact he’d been walking away—had disappeared due to “software issues or operator error.” As noted by Media Matters’ Matt Gertz, Chicago reporters following up on the story discovered that CPD dashcam videos habitually lacked audio—Guglielmi himself acknowledged that “more than 80% of the cameras have non-functioning audio ‘due to operator error or, in some cases, intentional destruction,’” the Chicago Sun-Times reported. A dry-eyed observer might conclude that Guglielmi was hired, was elevated to the Secret Service not despite but because of his vigorous efforts to mislead the public and lawmakers about reprehensible law enforcement behavior. But I think it’s not quite right to think this means the elite press corps aren’t sufficiently interested in Guglielmi; the point is that they aren’t sufficiently interested in Laquan McDonald. CounterSpin talked about the case with an important figure in it, writer and activist Jamie Kalven. We hear some of that conversation this week.   Transcript: ‘How Many Other Laquan MacDonalds Are There?’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220729Kalven.mp3  

Nora Benavidez This week on CounterSpin: The internet has changed the way we communicate, access information and even organize, which means concerns about digital privacy are concerns about privacy, period. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, allowing for the criminalization of abortion, our ability to safely access information and health care online is in danger. How are tech companies responding? We’ll hear from civil rights attorney Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin_Show220722Benavidez.mp3 Dorothee Benz Transcript: ‘Privacy Is the Entry Point for Our Civil and Basic Rights’ Also on the show: It’s good to be shocked by the news coming out of the January 6 committee; it’s shocking. But suggesting that ALL of this is new and revelatory is a narrative that serves us poorly. For media, the test isn’t so much how they are covering the hearings, but whether they are really incorporating the lessons into their regular coverage. That’s going forward, but today we’ll go back to the day after the insurrection, when we spoke with political scientist Dorothee Benz. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin_Show220722Benz.mp3 Transcript: ‘Being Neutral in the Face of a Fascist Threat Is Not an Acceptable Journalistic Value’ Plus, Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the Uvalde massacre footage, New York Times reporting on Ben & Jerry’s refusal to sell in the Israeli occupied West Bank, and the need for the new Office of Environmental Justice to take fossil fuel companies head-on. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin_Show220722Banter.mp3 Featured Image: Patcharin Saenlakon / EyeEm / Getty Images

This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court’s reversal on abortion rights is so actually and potentially devastating that it’s hard to know where to look. It’s worth tracing things back—Katherine Stewart in the Guardian, among others, walks us through how, at a time when most Protestant Republicans, including the Southern Baptist Convention, hailed the liberalization of abortion law represented by Roe, Christian nationalists, motivated by a desire to protect school segregation and tax exemptions for Christian schools, selected abortion as a way to united conservatives across denominational barriers, by providing a “focal point for anxieties about social change.” Phyllis Schlafly wrote a whole book (How the Republican Party Became Pro-Life) about the work involved in forcing the Republican party to center abortion as a cause—which then became the longer term effort to reframe “religious liberty” as exemption from law. The names Paul “I don’t want everybody to vote” Weyrich and Bob Jones Sr.—who called segregation “God’s established order”—may also mean something to you. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220715MasonPieklo.mp3 (photo: Austen Risolvato/Cage Rivera/Rewire News Group) Transcript: “They Will Find the Outcome That They Are Looking for and Work the Law Backwards to Make It Fit.” While we trace the roots—which disabuses us of the notion that this specious “pro-life” political stance is socially organic—we need to also be looking for the branches: the other obvious, growing harms to human rights and liberties that are encouraged and fully intended by this ruling. The Guttmacher Institute’s Elizabeth Nash and Lauren Cross reported the, as of last summer, 536 abortion restrictions, including 146 abortion bans, introduced across 46 states, as right-wing ideologues “engaging in a shock and awe campaign against abortion rights as part of a large and deliberate attack on basic rights that also includes a wave of voter suppression laws and attacks on LGBTQ people.” It’s important to see that, as Katherine Stewart writes, the Dobbs decision “marks the beginning rather than the endpoint of the agenda this movement has in mind.” In the face of this, those who believe in reproductive freedom will need better public arguments than what liberal media have tended to offer: that abortion is a horrible thing that should really never happen, but that nevertheless should be legal. There’s a hole in the middle of corporate mediaspeak on abortion, where we could be saying, as Katha Pollitt put it in her book PRO: that abortion is an “essential option” for all people, not just those in “dramatic, terrible, body-and-soul-destroying situations”—and that access to abortion “benefits society as a whole.” We’re going to make a start on the many, multi-level, multi-angle, post-Roe conversations we need to be having with Jessica Mason Pieklo, senior vice president and executive editor at Rewire News Group, who has been reporting reproductive rights for many years now. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220715Mitchum.mp3 (photo: Victoria Pickering) Transcript: ‘Roe Has Never Been Enough, and We Still Need It’ And we’ll also hear a bit of a conversation we had last May—when we knew the Court had Roe in its sights—with Preston Mitchum, director of policy at the group URGE, Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity. We talked with him about putting Roe—and court rulings in general —in a context of what else needs, and has always needed, to happen to make reproductive justice real.

Janine Jackson revisited CounterSpin‘s July 2005 interview with Adele Stan and Elliot Mincberg about John Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court for the July 8, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://fair.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/CounterSpin220708StanMincberg.mp3 Politico (6/25/22) lamented that Roberts’ “middle of the road” effort to allow states to ban abortions after 15 weeks failed to sway his ultra-conservative colleagues. Janine Jackson: “The Lonely Chief: How John Roberts Lost Control of the Court.” That was the plaintive headline of Politico’s June 25 report explaining that Roberts, along with his “middle of the road” approach on abortion, would likely be a casualty of the court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling. In July of 2005, on the occasion of Roberts’ nomination to the court, CounterSpin host Steve Rendall and I spoke with journalist Adele Stan and with People for the American Way’s Elliot Mincberg about what was known then about Roberts’ record and what he might mean for the court. We’re going to start with my introduction. *** JJ: Many in the news media seemed to breathe a sigh of relief at the news that George Bush was nominating conservative Washington insider John Roberts to the Supreme Court. And not just the folks you’d expect, like Brit Hume at Fox News, who shared a chuckle with congressional correspondent Brian Wilson and White House reporter Carl Cameron when he noted that Bush had named a white male “just like all of us.” Well, even while admitting that Roberts’ record is sketchy on some issues, many mainstream reporters seem to emphasize the reassurance that he is not a right wing trench dweller like some others who were thought to be on Bush’s short list of prospective nominees. The Times‘ Linda Greenhouse emphasized “no flame-throwing articles or speeches, no judicial opinions that threaten established precedent, no visible hard edges.” New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse assured readers that Roberts was “someone deeply anchored in the trajectory of modern constitutional law.” That’s as opposed to “someone who felt himself on the sidelines throwing brickbats, or who felt called to a mission to change the status quo.” Our guests think there’s more to the story, and point to some troubling signs in Roberts’ record that warrant serious scrutiny. We’re joined now by telephone by Elliot Mincberg, the legal director of People for the American Way, and by journalist Adele Stan, author of the article “Meet John Roberts” for the American Prospect Online. Welcome to CounterSpin, both of you. Elliot Mincberg: Pleasure to be here. Adele Stan: Good to be here. JJ: Well, Elliot Mincberg, let me start with you. In that July 20 New York Times piece, Linda Greenhouse emphasized “no flame-throwing articles or speeches, no judicial opinions that threaten established precedent, no visible hard edges.” There have been some exceptions, and of course the story is still growing, but I wonder what your general reaction is to this first wave of response, which seems to be kind of, “Phew. What a relief. He’s not so bad.” EM: I think it does underemphasize the very serious concerns that have been raised. Roberts is known well to reporters who cover the Supreme Court as an excellent advocate, someone who makes his legal points well, but if you look carefully at his record, there are a number of very troubling concerns. Probably the two that top the list are his participation as the top ranking political deputy in the solicitor general’s office in a case during the Bush One administration, that didn’t really even concern Roe v. Wade, where he wrote in the brief that Roe v. Wade is wrong and should be overturned. I think that’s a serious, serious subject of concern. Second, as a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, there was a case before the court that had to do with the constitutionality of the Endangered Species Act as applied to a development in California. The three judges who heard the case originally agreed that it should apply. All nine judges on the circuit were asked to reconsider. Seven of the nine of them agreed not to reconsider it, including some very conservative Republican appointees. Roberts was one of the only two who said, “Let’s take another look at that,” and strongly suggested he had serious doubts about the ability of Congress to pass that kind of law. And that kind of legal philosophy could seriously endanger not just the environment, but the ability of Congress to pass all sorts of laws protecting the environment, health, safety and civil rights. So those two aspects of his record alone raised very serious concern. Steve Rendall: Adele Stan, Elliot Mincberg just mentioned John Roberts’ record on Roe v. Wade. In your American Prospect Online piece “Meet John Roberts,” you wrot

  From the film’s website. WNET, the PBS station distributing the 2021 documentary feature Amen-Amen-Amen: A Story of Our Times, called it the story of the first Jewish community formed in a Muslim country in centuries (in Dubai), and a historic gift of a Torah scroll dedicated to the memory of an Arab-Muslim ruler, the late Sheikh Zayed, the founding father of the United Arab Emirates. The Boston Globe featured Amen-Amen-Amen in its documentary events program, GlobeDocs. The Globe hosted filmmaker Tom Gallagher of Religion Media Company in conversation with Loren King on March 14. The film has an attractive premise—that the United Arab Emirates is a champion of religious tolerance, exemplified by the establishment of a Jewish community in Dubai. This is presented as so historically significant (presumably because the Arab Muslim world is otherwise hostile to Jews) that the Jewish community decided to gift a Torah scroll in honor of Sheikh Zayed, the deceased founding father, to his son Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy supreme commander of the UAE armed forces. Despite the stamp of credibility provided by the Boston Globe and PBS, and the film’s ten international documentary awards, anyone familiar with current Israel/UAE relations will wonder how a film with such obvious political interests is seen as a documentary rather than pure propaganda. Dubious champion of tolerance “The United Arab Emirates is an oasis of tolerance,” announces a voiceover at the beginning of the film. Amen-Amen-Amen features the February 2019 visit by Pope Francis to the UAE for the much publicized Year of Tolerance, which attracted a diverse crowd of 180,000 people. This visit, and a signed document on human fraternity, are further presented as evidence of the UAE as a champion of religious tolerance. The crown prince is described on camera as “a humble man” with “exquisite” communication. One describes meeting him as “a spiritual experience.” The film also notes that the UAE is “very diverse,” as 90% of people in the UAE are not Emirati, and uses this fact to conclude that ““there is no way that the UAE cannot be inclusive.” It’s such a glowing portrait of the country that viewers might be surprised to know that the conservative nonprofit Freedom House rates it “not free,” ranking it below countries like Egypt, Russia and Qatar in terms of political rights and civil liberties. Human Rights Watch: “Many activists and dissidents…remain detained simply for exercising their rights to free expression and association.” The country’s diversity springs not from a commitment to tolerance but from the UAE’s dependence on imported workers. Human Rights Watch calls the “tolerance narrative” of the UAE a sham, and concludes: United Arab Emirates authorities continue to invest in a “soft power” strategy aimed at painting the country as progressive, tolerant and rights-respecting. Many activists and dissidents, some of whom have completed their sentences, remain detained simply for exercising their rights to free expression and association. Prisons across the UAE hold detainees in dismal and unhygienic conditions, where overcrowding and lack of adequate medical care are widespread. The UAE continues to block representatives of international human rights organizations and UN experts from independently conducting in-country research and visiting prisons and detention facilities. In 2020, Amnesty International and dozens of other human rights organizations issued an open letter (2/24/20) calling the UAE “a country that does not tolerate dissenting voices” and arguing that “the UAE government devotes more effort to concealing its human rights abuses than to addressing them and invests heavily in the funding and sponsorship of institutions, events and initiatives that are aimed at projecting a favorable image to the outside world.” A 2020 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explored whether, despite some reforms, the UAE migrant policy is akin to human trafficking. Of course, Amen-Amen-Amen doesn’t mention any of these critiques that contradict the image it wishes to portray. In fact, in the Boston Globe–sponsored discussion of the film, filmmaker Tom Gallagher squirmed out of an audience question about human rights violations in the UAE by saying the film sticks strictly to the issue of religious pluralism and intentionally stayed away from geopolitical analysis. Hidden political motivation Trita Parsi (Responsible Statecraft, 9/16/21): “The US is helping cement conflict under the guise of forging reconciliation between three countries that never have been at war.” But the relationship between the UAE and its Jewish residents can’t be fully understood without geopolitical context—including the country’s cha

    John Roberts This week on CounterSpin: When disastrous things happen, like the US invasion of Iraq or the Supreme Court dismissal of basic human rights, the undercurrent of a lot of news media is: Why didn’t we see this coming? How could we all have gotten it wrong? It’s—to use a maybe overused term—gaslighting, in which elite news media spin a tale that everyone, all of some presumed “us,” were blindsided by: in this case, a John Roberts–led Supreme Court gutting multiple legally and societally established precedents. Clarence Thomas is an obvious factor in today’s Court, as is Samuel Alito—but the man ABC News characterized as a “mensch” is at the center of the web. So if the 4th of July is an occasion to talk about US history and its relevance today, let’s go all the way back to July 2005, when the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court was just one day old. CounterSpin‘s Steve Rendall and Janine Jackson hosted a discussion with journalist Adele Stan, who’d just written a piece called “Meet John Roberts” for the American Prospect, and Elliot Mincberg, then legal director for the group People for the American Way. We hear that conversation again this week. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220708StanMincberg.mp3 Transcript: ‘Whether You’re on the Supreme Court Shouldn’t Depend on How Many People You Give Your Phone Number to’ Julian Assange (cc photo: Espen Moe) Also on the show: Former New York Times reporter James Risen wrote an op-ed for the paper in 2020, in which he said that he thought that governments—he was talking about Bolsonaro in Brazil, as well as Donald Trump—were testing unprecedented measures to silence and intimidate journalists, and that they “seem to have decided to experiment with such draconian anti-press tactics by trying them out first on aggressive and disagreeable figures.” He was referring to, preeminently, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who may now be extradited to the United States, where he stands accused of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. If you haven’t heard much lately about the case and its implications, that might be indication that the experiment Risen refers to is working. Researcher and journalist Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent. He brings us the latest on Assange and why it matters. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220708Gibbons.mp3 Transcript: ‘It Would Force the Government to Actually Prove Espionage, Not Whistleblowing’

  Coach Joseph Kennedy’s “private, personal prayer” (photo: Sotomayor dissent). This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion on Kennedy v. Bremerton that “the Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike.” The case was about whether there was a problem with a Washington state assistant football coach leading prayers—Christian prayers, lest you be confused—in the locker room before games and on the field. The Supreme Court that we have today, for reasons, determined that Kennedy was protected in his right to express his personal religious beliefs—by dropping a knee, on the 50-yard line of a public school playing field, and calling on players to join him—and that they presented no harm to anyone, or to the nominal separation of church and state. It’s another Supreme Court ruling that bases itself in a reality that doesn’t exist. This ruling in particular irritates meaningfully, because of course we know that “taking a knee” is the sort of gesture that is either a fresh wind of free expression, or a horrible affront to the values we hold dear, depending on who does it. So we’ll hear today from Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation and author of many books, including, most recently, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220701Zirin.mp3 Transcript: ‘They Painted a Narrative of This Coach Looking for a Quiet Corner to Pray’ Paul Robeson And we’ll get a little corrective background for corporate media’s current conversation, about the voices of athletes or performers who are mainly told to “shut up and sing,” and their actual historical role in social change, from journalist and author Howard Bryant. CounterSpin talked with him in June 2018, and we hear part of that conversation this week. Transcript: ‘The Black Athlete Has Been Involved in the Political Struggle From the Beginning’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220701Bryant.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of Supreme Court nominees. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220701Banter.mp3  

  (cc photo: Joe Flood) This week on CounterSpin: Elite news media are saying that Biden has to go to Saudi Arabia in July despite his pledges to make the country a “pariah” for abuses including the grisly murder of a Washington Post contributor, because…stability? Shaking hands with Mohammed bin Salman makes sense, even in the context of denying Cuba and Venezuela participation in the Americas Summit out of purported concerns about their human rights records, because…gas prices? It’s hard to parse corporate media coverage of Biden’s Saudi visit, because that coverage obscures rather than illuminates what’s going on behind the euphemism “US interests.” We talk about the upcoming trip with Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at DAWN—Democracy for the Arab World Now. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220624Jarrar.mp3 Transcript: ‘In the Middle East, We Are Hearing a New Set of Excuses to Justify the Same Old Policy’ Chart: National Priorities Project Also on the show: “Congressional Republicans Criticize Small Defense Increase in Biden’s Budget Blueprint,” read one headline; “Biden Faces Fire From Left on Increased Defense Spending,” read another. Sure sounds like media hosting a debate on an issue that divides the country. Except a real debate would be informed —we’d hear just how much the US spends on military weaponry compared to other countries; and a real debate would be humane—we’d hear discussion of alternatives, other ways of organizing a society besides around the business of killing. That sort of conversation isn’t pie in the sky; there’s actual legislation right now that could anchor it. We talk about the People Over Pentagon Act of 2022 with Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220624Koshgarian.mp3 Transcript: ‘This Country Would Want to See Money Taken From the Pentagon and Reallocated’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of gender therapy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220624Banter.mp3  

  Vincent Chin (1955-1982) This week on CounterSpin: The New York Times didn’t address the brutal 1982 murder of Chinese-American Vincent Chin until 1983, in response to ongoing protest centered in Detroit’s Asian-American community, about the killing and the lack of justice—at which point the paper ran a story with a lead claiming that when “two men were quickly charged and prosecuted…the incident faded from many memories.” One, the process was hardly that tidy. And two, whose memories, exactly? It’s 40 years since Vincent Chin’s murder, with a depressingly resonant context of anti-Asian hatred and scapegoating, that corporate media, with their thinly veiled drumbeating for “war” with China—over trade or Covid or presence in Africa—do little to dissuade. We’ll talk with activist and author Helen Zia, about the ongoing effort to remember Chin’s murder by rededicating to the work of resisting, not just anti-Chinese or anti-Asian ideas and actions, but also those separating us each from one another in the fight against those who, let’s face it, hate all of us. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220617Zia.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Miscarriage of Justice Catalyzed a Whole Movement Led by Asian Americans’ Chesa Boudin (cc photo: Lynn Friedman) Also on the show: We’re told not to “overanalyze”—which seems to mean to analyze at all—the language of reporting, and not to think about what’s behind the scenes; it’s official news from a neutral nowhere. But if the New York Times, for example, has enough intentionality to delete, without acknowledgement, declarative claims about “rising crime” in an article about how concerns about that are moving people to vote out reformist officials like San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, can we not imagine that they are likewise intentional about what they leave in? We’ll talk about coverage of that recall, of which elite media are making much conventional wisdom hay, with Alec Karakatsanis, founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220617Karakatsanis.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Times Is Telling You to Choose Between Rights and Safety’

  AP (6/2/22) reported that “the government seems intent on wiping the landscape clean of any organization it does not control.” President Daniel Ortega’s government in Nicaragua is “laying waste to civil society,” according to the Associated Press (6/2/22). The Guardian (6/2/22) called it a “sweeping purge of civil society,” while for the New York Times (2/14/22), Nicaragua is “inching toward dictatorship.” According to the Washington Post‘s Spanish edition (5/19/22), the country is already “a dictatorship laid bare.” In a call echoed by the BBC (5/5/22), the UN human rights commissioner urged Nicaragua to stop its “damaging crackdown on civil society.” What can possibly have provoked such widespread criticism? It turns out that the Nicaraguan National Assembly’s “sweeping purge” was the withdrawal of the tax-free legal status of a small proportion of the country’s nonprofit organizations: just 440 over a period of four years. In more than half the cases, these non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have simply ceased to function or no longer exist. In other cases, they have failed (or refused) to comply with legal requirements, such as producing annual accounts or declaring the sources of their funding. Modest legal steps that would go unnoticed in most countries are—in Nicaragua’s case—clear evidence that it is “inching toward dictatorship.” None of the media reports asked basic questions, such as what these nonprofits have done that led to the government taking this action, whether other countries follow similar practices, or what international requirements about the regulation of nonprofits Nicaragua is required to comply with. There is a much bigger story here that corporate media ignore. Let’s fill in some of the gaps. Three basic questions There are three basic questions. First, is Nicaragua exceptional in closing nonprofits on this scale? No, the practice is widespread in other nations. While figures are difficult to find, government agencies in the United States, Britain, Australia and elsewhere have closed tens of thousands of nonprofits in the last few years. For example, between 2006 and 2011, the IRS closed 279,000 nonprofits out of a US total of 1.7 million; it closed 28,000 more in 2020. The Charity Commission in Britain closes around 4,000 per year. And in Australia, some 10,000 nonprofits have been closed since 2014, one-sixth of the total. In Nicaragua, four years of closures have so far affected only 7% of a total of more than 6,000 nonprofits. Reprinting an AP story, the Guardian (6/2/22) used scare quotes to suggest that NGOs that took foreign money were not really “foreign agents.” When the paper (9/20/18) reported that “Washington has ordered two Chinese state-run media agencies to register as foreign agents,” quotation marks were not seen as necessary. Second, does Nicaragua impose tighter rules than other countries? Again, the answer is no. Rules introduced in 2020 required nonprofits to register as “foreign agents” if they receive funds from abroad: The AP report (6/2/22; picked up by the Guardian, 6/2/22) puts this in scare quotes, but the term is borrowed from the far heavier requirements that have applied in the US since 1938 under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The Financial Times (4/10/20) dubbed the Nicaraguan legislation “Putin’s Law,” erroneously linking it to Russia, not the United States. The US has some of the world’s strongest and most detailed powers, but they are not unique: The Library of Congress has examples of 13 countries with similar legislation. In Britain, the government consulted last year on the introduction of a “Foreign Influence Registration Scheme,” which is similar to FARA. Nicaragua’s law is not exceptional, and nor were its consequences in reducing NGO numbers; when Australia introduced similar laws in 2014, there were 5,000 nonprofit closures in the following year as a result. An important factor is that Nicaragua, like other countries, has to comply with international regulations that address the risks posed by unregulated nonprofits. These include widespread international concern that nonprofits are susceptible to money-laundering. Whether deliberately or out of ignorance, media ignore the fact that the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), set up in 1989 by the G7 governments, imposes rules that apply globally. In 2020, Nicaragua was praised by the FATF for “largely complying” with its requirements. FATF specifically endorsed the tougher controls and the sanctions for non-compliance that the government introduced, including the threat of withdrawing an organization’s legal status. Third, have nonprofits been given time to comply with the rules? According to the Guardian (6/2/22), “the government was not giving them an opportunity to get in line with new legal requirements,” yet I know this to be untrue. I have talked to leaders of several nonprofit organizations who have completed the

  AP (5/17/22) reported the US will “ease a few economic sanctions against Venezuela”… US sanctions, even by outdated estimates, have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans. The unilateral policies have been widely condemned by multilateral bodies and human rights experts for their deadly impact, as well as for violating international law (Venezuelanalysis, 9/18/21, 9/15/21, 3/25/21, 1/31/19). But corporate media readers/viewers in the Global North are completely oblivious to this reality, as establishment outlets have gone out of their way to endorse sanctions by whitewashing their effects altogether (FAIR.org, 6/4/21, 12/19/20)—writing for example, that Washington has “sanctioned the government” (AP, 5/21/22) rather than the people of Venezuela. A recent policy opening, microscopic to begin with and closed quickly enough, put all these dishonest traits on display, illustrating how free a rein US officials have to continue inflicting collective punishment on Venezuelans without challenge or scrutiny. Stenographers at ‘ease’ …while NBC (5/17/22) said the “US eases some sanctions” in the present tense… The US Treasury Department on May 17 allowed the US-based oil company Chevron to talk to PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company, to discuss its operations in the country. Officials made clear that the energy giant remained forbidden from drilling or dealing in Venezuelan crude (AP, 5/17/22). Two weeks later, the White House renewed Chevron’s current license, which only permits maintenance work, until November. Nevertheless, this brief opening revealed some clear trends. First off, all mainstream outlets had virtually the same headline, writing that the US “eases some sanctions” (NBC, 5/17/22), was “to ease a few economic sanctions” (AP, 5/17/22) or “begins easing restrictions” (Washington Post, 5/17/22) on Venezuela. And though the very narrow scope of the authorization left few word choice alternatives, it certainly did not force corporate journalists to stick to the information spoonfed by “anonymous officials.” Not a single establishment outlet mentioned that sanctions have an impact on ordinary Venezuelans. Instead, the privilege of “just talking” to oil execs was painted as an incentive for President Nicolás Maduro to resume talks with the opposition. …and the Washington Post (5/17/22) told readers that the US “begins easing restrictions.” The meager background/context provided in most pieces left room for plenty of representations. When referencing why government/opposition talks broke down last October, readers were told that Maduro walked away after the “extradition of a close/key ally” to the US (Washington Post, 5/17/22; AP, 5/17/22). However, there was no mention of the fact that, according to documents disclosed by Caracas, the “ally” in question (Alex Saab) has diplomatic immunity, and that Washington violated the Vienna convention by having him arrested overseas and extradited (FAIR.org, 7/21/21). Corporate outlets continued the habit of echoing unfounded charges against the Maduro administration as absolute truths, be they about electoral fraud (FAIR.org, 1/27/21), drug trafficking (FAIR.org, 9/24/19) or media censorship (FAIR.org, 5/20/19). The consequence is that by now no editor will flinch at a description of the Venezuelan government as “authoritarian” (Washington Post, 5/17/22), “autocratic” (CNN, 5/17/22) or “corrupt and repressive” (New York Times, 5/17/22). Establishment journalists were also happy enough to echo mobster-like threats from their anonymous sources, namely that the US will “calibrate” sanctions depending on whether progress in government/opposition talks is deemed acceptable (Reuters, 5/17/22; NBC, 5/17/22; AFP, 5/17/22; AP, 5/17/22). US officials refer to policies that are killing thousands of civilians as though they were a dial they can turn up or down at will, and their enablers in the media see no reason to be alarmed by this. The New York Times (5/17/22) more accurately headlined that the US was going “to offer minor sanctions relief.” For its part, the New York Times (5/17/22) described the steps as “minor sanctions relief” which despite the adjective still seems a bit overstated, considering that sanctions include an oil embargo and this was just an opportunity to talk to Chevron. The paper of record also tried to paint sanctions as having little to do with the collapse of Venezuela’s oil industry, writing that they only began in 2019. In fact, the first measures against PDVSA—cutting it off from international credit—are from mid-2017, after which output collapsed from nearly 2 million barrels a day to 350,000 in three years (Venezuelanalysis, 8/27/21). Simultaneously, Spain’s Repsol and Italy’s Eni got oil-for-debt licenses that “will not benefit [PDVSA] financially” (Reuters, 6/5/22). And no corporate journalist found any issue with the fact that somehow the US Treasury Department has

  A recent Politico article (5/20/22) had the headline, “How Gen X Became the Trumpiest Generation.” Yet the article’s focus seems to be mostly on Iowa state Rep. Cherielynn (“Cherie”) Westrich, a former rock singer who got into politics at age 50 as a solid supporter of Donald Trump. The strawman mystery that informs the story is: How in the world did a former rock singer become a “solidly conservative representative from blue-collar southeast Iowa who is pro-gun and anti–vaccine mandate”? Apparently, answering that question by just focusing on her “unusual trajectory” in life was not deemed sufficiently interesting for Politico. Suggesting that she is also representative of the “politics of people in her generation” apparently enhances, or perhaps justifies, her elevation into the national conversation. And yet… Coming of age…in 2016 If Cherielynn Westrich is your case study, Generation X supposedly became the “Trumpiest generation” Politico (5/20/22) by not paying much attention at all to politics until 2016. The irony in the story is that while Westrich, born in 1966, qualifies as Gen X (see chart below), she doesn’t really fit the profile of a Gen Xer. The assumption of Generational (or Cohort) Theory as it applies to politics is that most people become of age politically about the time when they first vote. Politico cites an article that holds that events when people are aged 14–24 have the most lasting impact, and suggests that 18–19 are the most impressionable ages. The Politico story relies on that theory when it describes Westrich’s coming of age: The first presidential election she would have been eligible to vote in was Reagan’s 1984 landslide, and she would have come of age at time in which there were few strong personalities defining the Democratic Party. But Westrich, by her own account, was oblivious to anything political for the first five decades of her life. She joined a rock band in her early 20s, and later became a “quasi-celebrity as a mechanic in Overhaulin’, a reality television show.” Her first introduction to politics, the article informs us, didn’t come until 2016, when “she was coaxed into volunteering for Trump’s general election campaign by a friend.” Thus, unlike most Gen Xers, her entry into political awareness was quite late and not at all in the glow of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” landslide. In fact, as reported, “she couldn’t even recall any candidate who had ever really inspired her before Trump.” Given her idiosyncratic, late-blooming political background, it’s a mystery why Politico tried to showcase Westrich as the poster child of her generation. But if that part of the article is dubious, its characterization of Gen X as the “Trumpiest generation” is even more questionable. Different ‘generation’ definitions According to the standard definition, Generation X is people born from 1965–80—whereas the study Politico relies on to deem them the “Trumpiest” looks at the voting records of people born from 1956–80. First, it’s important to note that Politico never defines “Trumpiest,” although it’s clear from the context that the author merely means “the most Republican.” Using Trump’s name may draw more readers, but it misleads about the actual political measure being used, which is essentially party identification. To substantiate its so-called “Trumpiest” claim, Politico refers to a 2019 article by Columbia University scholars that examines the changing party identification of voters among different generations. But the definition of “generation” in that article varies substantially from the standard definition noted earlier, and the names it uses for each generation are also different. The article classifies people born from 1956–1980 as Reagan Conservatives. That 25-year period overlaps 16 years with the standard definition of Gen X (people born in 1965–1980), plus nine additional years (1956–1964) of the 19 years commonly referred to as the Boomer generation. The scholars made a deliberate choice to expand their definition of “generation” so it could reflect the long period of Republican presidential dominance. Thus, it would not be surprising if the Reagan Conservatives had the highest percentage of Republican Party identifiers. It was designed to be just that. Yet, even then, the chart on page 17 of the article shows that Reagan Conservatives were only a little more Republican than Eisenhower Republicans—for about ten years (1990 to 2000). And by 2010 until the end of the study, it was the latter group that was a tad “Trumpier” than the Reagan Conservatives. The Politico article seems not to have noticed the difference between the standard definition of generation and the one used by the scholars, even referring to the latter as Gen X, when neither the name nor the time frame were what the scholars specified. Excluding people of color To make Gen X look “Trumpiest,” it helps to

  (photo: African Union) This week on CounterSpin: Some of the worst work that corporate news media do is convince us that simple things are actually, if you just ignore the role of power, more complicated than you could hope to understand. So, yes, Covid is killing millions of people, and yes, there are tests and treatments and vaccines for it, and yes, many countries in need of them—but no, we can’t put those things together, for reasons that you shouldn’t worry your head over. There are in fact people and policies, with names, preventing developing countries from accessing life-saving vaccines…. A story being ugly doesn’t mean it isn’t understandable. We talk about it with Lori Wallach, executive director of the group Rethink Trade. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220610Wallach.mp3 Transcript: ‘A Handful of Billionaire Companies Have Monopoly Control Over Life-Saving Medicines’ (cc photo: Mstyslav Chernov) At the same time, we are to understand that insurance companies exist to protect us from exorbitant expenses when we’re faced with healthcare crises. You might be mad paying in when you’re healthy, but oh boy just wait til you’re sick. So: Covid-19. Could hardly be a bigger public healthcare crisis—and where are insurance companies? Shouldn’t this be their shining hour? And if not—can we please revisit their purpose in our lives? We talk about insurance in a pandemic with physician and advocate Steffie Woolhandler. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220610Woolhandler.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Major Insurers Saw 2020 as a Giant Opportunity for Profiteering’

  Barry Lee Jones (left) and David Martinez Ramirez had appeals rejected by the Supreme Court. This week on CounterSpin: AP‘s May 23 headline told readers: “Supreme Court Rules Against Inmates in Right to Counsel Case.” Those who got past the idea of being interested in “inmates” were favored with a lead that explained that “the Supreme Court ruled along ideological lines Monday against two Arizona death row inmates who had argued that their lawyers did a poor job representing them in state court.” For which many readers might be excused for saying, essentially, “Boo hoo, people courts have said are guilty are upset with that fact, next story please.” Had AP headlined its story, “Supreme Court Rules Evidence of Innocence Is Not Enough to Avoid Execution by the State,” perhaps more readers might’ve read past the big letters. The truth is, while alternative and legal and human rights-oriented media are up in arms about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, corporate news media don’t seem to think there’s much to see there—which has everything to do with their relative disinterest in the human rights of humans at the wrong end of the criminal justice system—and how willing they are to allow any degree of complexity to obscure important truths and to blur outrage. We’ll talk about the new Supreme Court ruling about the so-called sanctity of life with Liliana Segura, reporter for the Intercept. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220603Segura.mp3 Transcript: ‘But for the Failures of His Attorneys, He Would Not Have Been Convicted’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of Republican congressional primaries. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220603Banter.mp3  

  CBS (5/26/22) This week on CounterSpin: CBS News‘ website featured a story about the “grim task” of planning funerals for 19 children—shot dead, along with two teachers, in a Texas elementary school on May 24—right next to a story about Oklahoma’s governor signing the country’s strictest abortion ban, the prominent sign behind him declaring “life is a human right.” Welcome, as they say, to America—where these ideas are presented as somehow of a piece, where news media tell us day after day how exceptionally good and worthy we are, the world’s policeman and a global beacon for human rights and the good life. Meanwhile, the rest of the world looks on in horror. BBC‘s North America editor explained to its audience that there is no expectation of anything being done to prevent things like the latest (as far as we know, as we record on May 26) mass murder in the US, because “the argument over guns has simply become too politically divisive and culturally entrenched to allow for meaningful change.” Flashpoint (5/26/22) Reporter Eoin Higgins interviewed teachers around the country, who reported the psychological toll of not only actual shootings, but constant drills and lockdowns, on children, who, they said, “have largely given up on a better future.” Teachers feel expendable and unvalued; it’s hardly lost on them that the same forces accusing them of poisoning children with curricula are also demanding they step between those children and a bullet. That powers that be in this country have responded to school shootings not by toughening gun laws, but by loosening them, and responded to the failure of law enforcement to prevent such shootings by calling for more police. It’s a particularly demoralizing combination of devastating and unsurprising—from a country that promotes and perpetrates violence around the globe. As a response to violence, we try violence time after time. There doesn’t seem to be anything new to say right now about gun violence in the US. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep saying the things we know—more loudly, more unapologetically and in more places. New Press (2019) As we record, we hear that students at schools across the country are walking out, in an effort to say simply, “We refuse to go on like this.” We owe them our action and effort, no matter how tired or disgusted or defeated we feel. We revisit some conversations about gun violence and gun culture this week on the show. In March of last year we spoke with Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, and author of the book Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns, about the possibility of passing common-sense legislation and misunderstandings about the power of the gun lobby. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220527Volsky.mp3 Transcript: ‘More Guns, More Gun Deaths—That’s Really It’ And then: There are always multiple issues involved in a mass murder; elite media use the complexity as an excuse to simply trade accusatory explanations, and determine that in the interest of balance, nothing can be done. But if we’re concerned about young people getting high-grade weaponry and thinking it’d be cool to use it, maybe one thing to consider would be the government-sponsored program that gives young people high-grade weapons and tells them it’d be cool to use it? We spoke in 2018 about Junior ROTC—a feature at my high school, and maybe yours too—with Pat Elder, director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, which resists the militarization of schools, and author of Military Recruiting in the United States. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220527Elder.mp3 Transcript: ‘More Guns, More Gun Deaths—That’s Really It’

  Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 4/12/21) This week on CounterSpin: Ten human beings were killed and three wounded in Buffalo, New York. By the killer’s own admission, he sought to kill Black people because they are Black, and he is a white supremacist who believes there’s a plot to “replace” white people with Black and brown people, a plot run by the Jews. If you’re news media, you could go all in on media outlets and pundits and political figures whose repeated invocations to this white replacement theory are the obvious spurs for this horrendous crime. Or you could be the Washington Post, and tweet that Joe Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ A racist massacre raises questions about that promise.” A press corps that wanted to go down in history as doing better than pretending to raise questions about the “soul of America” would be busy interrogating the structural, economic, political relationships that promote and platform white supremacy. They’d be using their immense and specific influence to interrupt business as usual, to demand—not just today, but tomorrow and the next day—meaningful response from powerful people. They would not be accepting that mass murder in the name of white supremacy and antisemitism is just another news story to report in 2022 America, film at 11. We’ll talk about what we ought to be talking about with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been tracking Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years now. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220520Gertz.mp3 Transcript: ‘The “Great Replacement” Builds on Those Long Hatreds’ And also with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Poverty Law Center and executive director at Western States Center—about ways upward and outward from this current, difficult place. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220520Ward.mp3 Transcript: ‘The “Great Replacement” Builds on Those Long Hatreds’

  Washington Post (5/11/22) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate news media want you to be alarmed about an “extraordinary breach” of privacy. It’s the privacy of the institution of the Supreme Court which, one CBS expert told viewers, had been dealt a “body blow” by the leak of a ruling overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision allowing the right to terminate a pregnancy to remain between the pregnant person and their doctor. And corporate media are in high dudgeon about protecting people from invasions of their right to privacy—but again, only if by that you mean protecting Supreme Court justices and their “right” to never be confronted by people who disagree with the life-altering decisions they make. You almost wouldn’t think the real news of the past week was the nation’s highest court declaring that more than half of the population no longer have bodily autonomy. That’s to say, no longer have the control over their own body that a corpse has—since people can refuse organ donation after their death, even if it would save another person’s life. Elite media are interested in abortion as an issue, as a thing people talk about, but that it is not understood as a human right is clear from reporting—years of reporting—that suggest that for them it’s most importantly a partisan football, and any fight over it needs equal and equally respectful attention to “both sides,” even if one of those sides is calling for human rights violations. We talked with FAIR’s Julie Hollar about that. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220513Hollar.mp3 Transcript: ‘The First Story They Tell Is About the Leak Itself’ Popular Information (5/12/22) Also on the show: In corporate media–land, it’s controversial that people be allowed to determine whether they give birth, because, after all, we care so much about the birthed. It sounds sarcastic, but that’s the underlying premise of coverage of the shortage of baby formula—which incorporates an implied shock at the denial of basic healthcare with another implied shock that somehow capitalism doesn’t allow for all infants to be treated the same. There’s really no time left for pretended surprise at system failure in this country. We can still talk about journalism that shines a light on it, rather than an obscuring shadow. We’ll talk with Tesnim Zekeria from Popular Information about applying a public interest prism to, in this case, the story on baby formula.   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220513Zekeria.mp3 Transcript: ‘We Live in an Economy That Provides Little Support to New Parents’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of murdered Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220513Banter.mp3  

  (illustration: The Forum) This week on CounterSpin: Listeners are aware of the no-less-destructive-for-being-baseless assault on critical race theory. Just like with affirmative action (where conservatives said, “steps toward racial equity really means unfair quotas”), media took this charge, “steps toward racial equity really means telling white children to hate themselves,” and made it into “something some folks are saying”—while, of course, out of fairness they’ll acknowledge, “others disagree.” (Media themselves, they suggest, occupy the intellectually and morally superior center.) A new website engages the attack more productively, by using critical race theory as a prism to explore the current range of threats to multi-racial democracy and our ability to fight for it. The site’s called The Forum; we’ll talk with editor-in-chief Chris Lehmann. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220506Lehmann.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Race Crisis and the Democracy Crisis Are Inseparable’ (photo: New Jersey Civic Information Consortium) Also on the show: Between Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk, who would you prefer preside over what information you can access? It’s kind of like being offered a choice between a poke in one eye or the other. If the problem is media outlets with priorities that poorly serve even our aspirations for democracy—and it is—the response is media with different priorities, which we know really only come from having a different bottom line. How can that work? We’ll talk about one model with Mike Rispoli of the group Free Press; he’s been working with the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium—a new way of thinking about and meeting local communities’ need for news. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220506Rispoli.mp3 Transcript: ‘What if We Use Public Money to Transform What Local Media Looks Like?’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look back at recent coverage of Roe v. Wade. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220506Banter.mp3