FAIR

(image: Copwatch Media) This week on CounterSpin: There are reasons that so much news media is consumed with crime. Not just any crime, not wage theft, not lethal pollution—but street crime, random, individual crime. “If it bleeds, it leads” journalism draws eyes to the set, doesn’t bother advertisers, is cheap to produce and lets news outlets look as though they’re tracking an important event in real time, and pretend as though they’re protecting real people…as they forcibly distract from actual humane efforts to respond to the ongoing crises—homelessness, poverty, addiction—that lead to crime, but are less cheap and easy to cover than cops and robbers. It’s a story old as journalism, but it’s still messed up. We’ll talk about that with activist and writer Josmar Trujillo, working now with Copwatch Media, a community-based project that reports on the effects of hyper-policing on communities. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220429Trujillo.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Core of Copaganda Is the Symbiotic Relationship Between Press and Police’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of inflation, immigration restriction and democracy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220429Banter.mp3  

  This week on CounterSpin: News media coverage of taxes falls broadly into two camps: There are, especially in April, lots of “news you can use”–type stories—like NBC‘s Today show on April 14 warning viewers to be mindful of typos and not be lazy about filing for extensions, or NBC Nightly News on April 18, noting that if you filed by mail, you might wait five to eight months for your return, due to backlogs at the IRS. Taxes as an “oh well, what are you gonna do” thing that all of us have to deal with. Then there are other stories, disconnected stories, about tax policy: Who pays, how much, and why? We’ve talked about that a fair amount on this show, and we’re going to revisit two of those conversations today. Last April, we spoke with Emory University law professor and author Dorothy A. Brown about how, though you can scour tax policy and find no mention of race, our tax system still affects Black people very differently, in ways most conversation obscures. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220422Brown.mp3 Trancript: ‘The System for Building Wealth Is Designed for White Wealth’ And in February 2019, we spoke with economist Dean Baker about why the idea of raising taxes on the superwealthy makes sense to many mainstream economists and to the general public, but still faces a perennial headwind in corporate media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220422Baker.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Distribution of Income Depends on How We Structure the Economy’ Two revelatory conversations about tax policy, this week on CounterSpin.

  Philadelphia Inquirer (3/29/22) This week on CounterSpin: A longtime reporter, at Philadelphia’s WPVI-TV since the 1960s, remembered spending shifts in his early days just listening to a police scanner, waiting for a crime to happen. The station’s decision to adopt a then-novel “Action News” format dictated that hyper-focus on crime. But, as detailed in a new report from the Philadelphia Inquirer, it also dictated that the scanner being monitored was in Kensington, a multi-racial, working-class neighborhood struggling with poverty and its attendant ills—and not someplace else. “Lights. Camera. Crime” is an early installment of the Inquirer‘s “A More Perfect Union” project, aimed at examining the roots and branches of racism in US institutions, including media institutions. The story was reported by Layla A. Jones. We’ll speak to Layla Jones today on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220415Jones.mp3 Transcript: ‘This Portrayal of Urban Environment Definitely Did Fuel Fear’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of FCC nominee Gigi Sohn, war coverage and “grooming.” https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220415Banter.mp3  

  Washington Post (4/7/22) This week on CounterSpin: He wanted to go to the Capitol on January 6, Donald Trump tells the Washington Post, but the Secret Service wouldn’t let him. He hated the violence, and was furious Nancy Pelosi wasn’t putting a stop to it. He doesn’t remember getting many phone calls, and he didn’t destroy any call logs. Trump would lie on credit when he could tell the truth for cash, so why are so many pundits invested in suggesting that he can never be legally brought to account? We’ll hear from Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, about the “stunning” new ruling that shows a way to do just that. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220408Cohn.mp3 Transcript: ‘There Is Plenty of Evidence to Request the Arrest of Trump’ (cc image: Don Goofy) Also on the show: Polls show 68% of people in the country think marijuana should be legal, the highest number since polling started in 1969. The tide is turning; it’s just a matter of who we let be lifted by it and who we allow to drown. Should some people get rich selling weed while others rot in jail for it? That’s what the MORE Act that just passed the House tries to address. We’ll catch up with an expert on marijuana legislation, Mike Liszewski from the Enact Group. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220408Liszewski.mp3 Transcript: ‘Once the Federal Government Legalizes, Many More States Would Follow Through’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and notes the passing of media critic Eric Boehlert. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220408Banter.mp3  

    Ginni and Clarence Thomas, 1991 (image: C-SPAN) This week on CounterSpin: Headlines right now are full of the conflict of interest represented by Ginni Thomas, spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and her non-trivial role in the January 6 insurrection aimed at overturning, violently, the last presidential election. Our question is: A week or a month from now, where will we be? Will we still have one of nine Supreme Court justices declaring himself “one being” with his spouse, who declares the 2020 election an “obvious fraud”? And will the corporate press corps have reduced that to yet another partisan spat that shouldn’t interfere with our belief that all is proceeding as it should, no deep fixes necessary? We speak with Sarah Lipton-Lubet from the Take Back the Court Action Fund, about how to respond to the Thomas scandal if we really don’t want it to happen again. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220401LiptonLubet.mp3 Transcript: ‘Someone Who Cared About Integrity Would Have Recused Himself’ (image: EFF) Also on the show: For many Americans, the word “journalist” calls up an image of scruffy firebrands, rooting through official documents to ferret out critical truth—defined as what those in power don’t want you to hear—and then broadcasting that truth to a public thirsty for a democracy more answerable to human needs. Many things stand in the way of that vision of the press corps we imagine and deserve. One is the stubborn and at times brazen opacity and secretiveness of government and other powerful agents. Dave Maass, director of investigations at Electronic Frontier Foundation and the driving force behind the Foilies, an annual award of sorts given to those who make the job of shining necessary sunlight particularly difficult. We talk with him about that. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220401Maass.mp3 Transcript: ‘You Have to Laugh at the Ways Agencies Will Evade Giving You Information’

    (cc photo: Don Sniegowski) This week on CounterSpin: We heard a cable TV commentator say recently that with the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is trying to “put an end to democracy as we know it.” We know we weren’t the only ones wondering, among other things, what “we” is being invoked here? And what’s the definition of the “democracy” we’re meant to be endorsing? Does it account for, say, the people who broke into the US Capitol last January trying to violently overturn a presidential election, and their supporters, explicit and implicit? Thing is: Corporate news media don’t define the “democracy” they invoke as shorthand justification for pretty much anything, including war. It’s a murky stand-in for “a good place, where people have a voice and…stuff.” Even when and where it demonstrably means anything but. With the ongoing horrific attack on Ukraine by Russia, you get the sense that war is a clarifier—proof that “Russia” as a country deserves pariah status, with all that entails (and media have a big box of what that entails). And as Americans, media suggest, we’re meant to see and celebrate and fight for our difference from an imperialist, racist nation. So it is, respectfully, a good time to recall that we had a war within this country, in which many people declared that they cared less about this country than about white supremacy. And that sentiment did not disappear. And those conversations have not finished. And ignoring them doesn’t erase them. Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African-American studies at Emory University, and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy and, most recently, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America We talked with her in November of last year about the historical and ongoing struggle between white supremacy and this country’s hopes for democracy. We revisit that conversation this week. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220325Anderson.mp3 Transcript: ‘White Supremacists Were Willing to Hold the United States Hostage’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the “no-fly zone” proposal. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220325Banter.mp3  

    Sanaa, Yemen (cc photo: Yahya Arhab/European Pressphoto Agency) This week on CounterSpin: It’s worth our while to think about why everyone we know is talking about Ukraine and Russia’s unlawful incursion—and equally worthwhile to ask why the same principles of concern don’t seem to apply in other cases. Those feelings don’t have to fight. But to hear Yemen put forward as just an example of an underconsidered concern is galling from the same people who underprioritized it in the first place. Yemen is not a rhetorical device. It’s a country of human beings in crisis. We talk about that with Yemeni activist and advocate Shireen Al-Adeimi, who is also assistant professor of education at Michigan State University. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220318Al-Adeimi.mp3 Transcript: ‘Just Pay Attention to What Our Own Government Is Doing in Yemen’ Sarah Bloom Raskin (cc photo: New America) Also on the show: Sarah Bloom Raskin was up for a job at the Federal Reserve. Everyone was for her nomination, including the bankers she would oversee. So why did she withdraw her nomination, and what does it tell us about the possibility of making any advances at all in facing the reality of climate change? Helping us see why issues media divide are completely related is David Arkush, managing director of the climate program at Public Citizen. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220318Arkush.mp3 Transcript: ‘She Intended Not to Ignore Things Related to Climate, as There Is Pressure to Do’

  Institute for Policy Studies (3/6/22) This week on CounterSpin: Russia’s horrendous invasion of Ukraine is providing yet another reminder that when elephants fight, it’s the grass that’s trampled. We see that not just in the front-page casualties; teenage soldiers dying fighting; civilian men, women and children killed by dropping bombs—but also in the measures we are told are meant to avert those harms: economic sanctions. Khury Petersen-Smith is Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He joins us to talk about the problem with seeing sanctions as an alternative to war. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220311PetersenSmith.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Most Vulnerable People Lose When the US Imposes Sanctions’ Good Jobs First (3/1/22) Also on the show: In March 2012, Amazon opened an office dedicated to ferreting out tax breaks and subsidies. In other words, the megacorporation making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit puts in time finding ways to avoid supporting the communities it operates in—and to push local governments to divest money from education, housing and healthcare—to give to a company that doesn’t need it. This March, the group Good Jobs First marked that anniversary with a call to #EndAmazonSubsidies. We talk with the group’s executive director, Greg LeRoy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220311LeRoy.mp3 Transcript: ‘Communities Should Not Pay Amazon. It Should Be the Other Way Around.’

  This week on CounterSpin: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently: “Whenever I go to community meetings, it always comes up. Young and middle-aged and even some elderly. It tortures them.” What was he talking about? Student loan debt. So is what we call “higher” education an individual investment or a public good? The way news media talk about it could be decisive. We’ll hear from Braxton Brewington, press secretary and organizer at the group Debt Collective. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220304Brewington.mp3 Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’ (cc photo: Ted Eytan) Also on the show: When media say there’s a debate about transgender peoples’ “right to exist,” remind yourself that trans people are going to exist; what’s on the table is whether they get to live free from persecution, oppression, exclusion and erasure. Texas state leadership is staking a position on that, but humans everywhere are pushing back, and we talk about that with Andy Marra, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220304Marra.mp3 Transcript: ‘These Attacks Are on Children and Their Families’

  The US government in 2020 declared five Chinese media entities to be “not independent news organizations” but rather “effectively controlled by the [Chinese] government” (Politico, 2/18/20). Most nations have some form of state media. These days, it’s pretty easy for Americans to access any number of foreign state media outlets, and many of them have journalists covering US affairs. Some of those journalists must register as “foreign agents” with the US government. But others don’t have to—a distinction that has more to do with geopolitics than with journalism. The Trump administration mandated “five Chinese state-run media organizations to register their personnel and property with the US government”: Xinhua News Agency, China Global Television Network, China Radio International and the parent companies of the China Daily and People’s Daily newspapers (Politico, 2/18/20). The administration also “limited to 100 the number of Chinese citizens who may work in the United States” for those organizations (New York Times, 3/2/20). The privately owned Hong Kong newspaper Sing Tao was forced to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act because it “is viewed as a pro-Beijing outlet” (South China Morning Post, 8/26/21). US state media organ Radio Free Asia (8/27/21) trumpeted the “foreign agent” designation for Sing Tao, quoting one Hong Kong journalist saying that it is “a fairly open secret that it is an underground CCP [Chinese Communist Party] organization.” Russia’s RT registered in 2017, as US intelligence agencies claimed it “contributed to the Kremlin’s campaign to interfere with [the 2016] presidential election in favor” of Donald Trump (Reuters, 11/13/17). Qatari-owned Al Jazeera was forced to register (New York Times, 9/15/20) because content “designed to influence American perceptions of a domestic policy issue or a foreign nation’s activities or its leadership qualifies as ‘political activities,’” according to one US official. Relations between Qatar and the US are complex, as they had strained during the Trump administration (NBC, 6/9/17) and have improved under President Joe Biden (NBC, 9/13/21), although the oil-rich nation is accused of funding Palestinian terror operations, adding to tensions (Washington Post, 12/15/20; Jerusalem Post, 2/17/22). But other state-owned outlets, like the BBC, CBC and Deutsche Welle, do not register as foreign agents in the US. Clearly, the standard is that the “foreign agent” label applies when an outlet’s government owner has rocky relations with Washington. And for many press advocates, that’s causing problems. Not just symbolic The US government is proposing to spend half a billion dollars on “independent” anti-China media (American Prospect, 2/9/22). The designation isn’t just symbolic: Through FARA enforcement, the government can keep a closer eye on these outlets’ activities. US state media network Voice of America (5/12/21) reported that CGTN “spent more than $50 million on its US operations last year, accounting for nearly 80% of total Chinese spending on influencing US public opinion and policy,” while China Daily “reported more than $3 million in spending last year, including expenses related to advertising in American newspapers.” VoA called this a “propaganda spending spree,” as China wanted to “burnish its global image,” but even if that’s true, there’s plenty of evidence suggesting the US does the same thing. The US has looked to invest half a billion dollars into media organizations that counter the Chinese narrative (American Prospect, 2/9/22), causing the South China Morning Post (4/28/21) to scoff: “When the Chinese do it, it’s propaganda. When Washington does it, it’s ‘investing in our values.’” Xinhua (2/23/22) went further, saying that America’s move to fund journalism in Asia for political purposes makes the world “wonder how the self-styled ‘beacon of press freedom’ dares to openly manipulate media in an attempt to squeeze China out of what it calls a ‘Great Power Competition.’” In a statement to the Department of Justice concerning the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the Committee to Protect Journalists (2/11/22) noted that not all state-owned media outlets are the same, but “the glaring difference in the way these media outlets are treated under FARA raises questions about the fairness of its implementation.” CPJ called for “the end of compelling media outlets to register, which impacts their operations and their ability to engage in journalism freely.” It went on: The inconsistent application of FARA has created the appearance that the act is a foreign policy tool, and has provided justification for foreign governments to use similar labeling against news organizations that receive funding from within the United States. Countries including Hungary, Israel, Russia and Ukraine have all cited the US use of FARA when they passed legislation requiring civil society organi

  Aftermath of Tulsa Massacre (photo via bswise) This week on CounterSpin: Black History Month has always been something of a double-edged sword: It implies that Black history is somehow not “history,” that it has to be shoehorned in, “artificially,” to garner any value, with the corollary implication that if you choose to ignore it, you aren’t missing anything crucial. The idea that Black Americans are somehow something other than (meaning “less than”) “real” Americans is stupid, toxic…and fully in play, as reflected in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s response to a reporter’s question about efforts to suppress Black people’s voting rights with the statement that “the concern is misplaced because, if you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” So: There’s a reason Black people feel a need to lift up our particular history–our efforts and accomplishments, in and despite the context of violent, systemic harm we live in–that distinguishes that from the bland and euphemistic vision that usually passes as “US history.” What matters is how the history of Black people is approached, discussed and integrated into what’s happening today. Journalists, of course, have an opportunity to do that work every month, not just the shortest. Last year, we saw some open media acknowledgement of an event previously shrouded in silence and ignorance: the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of 1921. The layers of that story, the roles played by various actors, make it especially relevant for news media, who, to fully tell it, need to reflect on their own role, then…and now. We talked about the Tulsa massacre around its anniversary last June, with Joseph Torres, senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press, and co-author with Juan González of the crucial book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. He works, as does CounterSpin‘s Janine Jackson, with Media 2070, a consortium of media-makers and activists that are detailing the history of US media participation in anti-Black racism, as well as collectively dreaming reparative policies, interventions and futures. We hear from Joseph Torres about Tulsa this week on the show. Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220225Torres.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look at media coverage of Ukraine. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220225Banter.mp3   Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’

  FAIR.org (1/28/22) This week on CounterSpin: You might think you’re not smart enough to talk about Ukraine. And, especially on US foreign policy, corporate media seem to suggest that any questions you have that fall outside their framework are not just dumb but traitorous, not earnest but dangerously naive. Peace? Diplomacy? The idea that US might have broken promises, might have material and not moral interests? Oh, so you love Putin then! There is an interesting, relevant history to the state of tension between the US and Russia over Ukraine; but understanding it involves letting go of the storyline in which the US equals benevolent democracy and Russia equals craven imperialism. We got some of that history from Bryce Greene, who wrote about Ukraine recently for FAIR.org. We’ll hear that conversation this week. Transcript: In Ukraine, ‘No One Hears That There Is a Diplomatic Solution’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220218Greene.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Afghanistan. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220218Banter.mp3

  American Prospect (1/31/22) This week on CounterSpin: You will have heard many things recently about the supply chain—as the reason you can’t find what you’re looking for on store shelves, or the reason it costs so much. But what’s behind it all? Why has the system broken down in this way? Here’s where thoughtful journalism could fill us in, could educate on a set of issues that affects us all, including discussing alternatives. But corporate news media aren’t good at covering economic issues from the ground up, or asking big questions about who is served by current structures. You could say media’s reluctance to critically break down systems is itself a system problem. Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. She’ll join us to talk about the ideas in the article she recently co-authored for American Prospect, “How We Broke the Supply Chain.” Transcript: ‘Mega-Retailers Are Using Inflation as a Cover to Raise Prices and Turn Record Profits’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220211Mabud.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of polling and Israeli apartheid. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220211Banter.mp3

    CNN (1/28/22) This week on CounterSpin: A New York Times opinion piece by editorial board member Jesse Wegman says that debunking Republicans’ baseless, self-serving claims of voter fraud “was always a fool’s game,” because “the professional vote-fraud crusaders are not in the fact business.” The suggestion seems to be that even addressing such claims is “giving them oxygen.” But there’s a difference between airing such claims and training a scrutinizing, disinfectant light on them—and it’s really journalists’ choice which of those they do. The spate of new election-meddling laws proposed in Arizona suggests that looking away is not the answer. But Trumpers’ loss in Arizona could also map a way forward, if you’re interested. Our guest is interested. Steven Rosenfeld is editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Transcript: ‘Big Lies Are Built From Lots of Little Lies’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220204Rosenfeld.mp3   (image: Jacobin, 1/21/22) Also on the show: If you think the “little guy” is left out of Wall Street deals, you’re not wrong. But is Bitcoin the answer? Is “cryptocurrency” a leveling force—or just a different flavor of grift that plays on that not-unfounded little guy frustration? Our guest gets at what’s new and what’s old in his description of cryptocurrency as “the people’s Ponzi.” Sohale Mortazavi is a writer based in Chicago; his recent piece on cryptocurrency appears in Jacobin. Transcript: ‘The Entire Cryptocurrency Market Is Basically a Ponzi Scheme’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220204Mortazavi.mp3

    New York Times depiction (1/18/22) of a Puerto Rican debt protest. This week on CounterSpin: A judge has approved a debt restructuring deal for Puerto Rico, and the deal’s architects are saying it means a “new day” for the territory. Natalia Renta is senior policy strategist at the Center for Popular Democracy. We’ll hear from her about what those outside of the deal-making, but nevertheless impacted by it, have to say. Transcript: ‘Puerto Rico Hasn’t Had the Opportunity to Develop Its Own Economic Future’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220128Renta.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of Ukraine. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220128Banter.mp3

  Flint, Michigan This week on CounterSpin: Search corporate news media for recent stories on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan—in which some of the city’s overwhelmingly Black residents were paying upwards of $300 a month for water they couldn’t drink, based on an infrastructure decision on the water’s source that their elected officials had no say in—and you’ll find a few stories on how yes, lead-leaching pipes endangered people’s health…but there’s been a multi-million dollar settlement, and a presidential commitment to address lead in water, so maybe it’s all over but the shouting. CNN hosted a Republican Michigan congressmember who explained that Flint was under an unelected austerity-minded emergency manager because their “city had essentially collapsed. They had no strong functioning government and the state had to step in and there was an error in shifting water sources.” That sounds lamentable, but not really blameworthy. So how do you square that “sorry but let’s move forward” line with the information that investigators looking into the crisis found that the cell phones of key health officials and other players, like then-Gov. Rick Snyder’s press secretary, had been wiped of messages for the key period? While corporate media have largely let Flint go, the story isn’t over, nor has justice been served. We’ll hear from a reporter still on the case: Jordan Chariton, from independent news network Status Coup News. Transcript: ‘The People of Flint Are Still Suffering’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220121Chariton.mp3   Patrice Lumumba Also on the show: You don’t need to put your ear to the ground to hear US news media drumbeats for war of some sort with official enemies China and/or Russia. With China, part of what we’re being told to two-minute hate is their involvement on the African continent, where we’re to understand they are nefariously trapping countries in debt—unlike the US involvement in the region, which has been about bringing joy and love and hope. Just because a playbook is old doesn’t mean it won’t be used again and again. The vision relies on amnesia and ignorance of what the US has done and is doing in Sub-Saharan Africa—a topic that, if news media wanted to explore it, they had a great chance this past week, with the 60th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Why was Lumumba killed? And what’s the living legacy of that undercovered murder? We’ll hear from Maurice Carney, co-founder and executive director of the group Friends of the Congo. Transcript: ‘The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba Is One of the Most Important Assassinations of the 20th Century’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220121Carney.mp3

  A New York Times article (1/12/22) assailed China for following a zero Covid policy, “no matter the human costs”—without ever mentioning the human costs of not containing the coronavirus. The New York Times report (1/12/22) on the response to an outbreak of Covid-19 in the Chinese city of Xi’an featured over-the-top hand-wringing about “authoritarianism” and a complete erasure of the dangers of the coronavirus. Had this article been about Covid-19 response in Europe or the United States, one could swear it was from InfoWars or some other far-right, Covid-denying fringe outlet. China’s “zero Covid” policy is indeed a major outlier in the world’s approach to the pandemic. The country, the most populous in the world, took pride in this fact when it announced that it had less than 200 reported positive cases for January 8, a slight increase from days before (Reuters, 1/9/22). This hasn’t come without its hardships; noncitizens of China should be advised not to plan a vacation to a country with closed borders (CNN, 11/15/21; Time, 12/1/21). And outbreaks are met with lockdowns that can upend daily life for millions, as the city of Xi’an is learning (Xinhua, 1/10/22). ‘Iron-fist, authoritarian policies’ The Times article by Li Yuan started off with some undeniable hardships, reflecting chaotic coordination of services. But it leaped from this to calling the Chinese Covid response a set of “iron-fist, authoritarian policies [that] emboldened its officials, seemingly giving them license to act with conviction and righteousness.” Chinese officials are striving to “ensure zero Covid infections”—not because it is the right thing to do, but because “it is the will of their top leader, Xi Jinping.” With language like “conviction and righteousness” and “the will of their top leader,” you can hear the Times attempting to parody the propagandistic style of CCP outlets for its own anti-China purposes. But by applying tems like “iron fist” and “authoritarian” to successful public health measures, the Times unironically echoed the framing of right-wing partisans (Breitbart, 8/3/21, Federalist, 9/9/21; Fox News, 9/29/21; Newsmax, 9/13/21; Telegraph, 11/22/21; Miami Herald, 12/20/21) when they attack less effective Western containment policies. The New York Times compared officials who enforced public health measures in Xi’an to Holocaust engineer Adolf Eichmann; like him, they are “willing to be the enablers of authoritarian policies.” It gets worse. When reporting on how low-level officials in the city comply with lockdown measures, Yuan quoted Chinese social media commentary to invoke philosopher Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” a concept Arendt applied (as Yuan noted) to high-ranking Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. Again, this is the same trope the far right (CNN, 7/7/21; Reuters, 12/15/21; NBC, 1/12/22) uses when they insist that vaccine cards and mandates are just a step away from the cattle cars, which is not just absurd but an offensive trivialization of Nazi terror. This invocation of Arendt sets up the rest of the piece: While there are some who don’t like the Xi’an lockdown, those that are going along with it aren’t an opposing viewpoint, but rather the brainwashed drones of a devious plot against humanity. “Chinese intellectuals,” Yuan wrote, are baffled that workers and civilians who enforce zero Covid policies are “driven by professional ambition or obedience…to be the enablers of authoritarian policies.” Such prose could have been lifted from Josh Mandel, the Republican senate candidate in Ohio who, in response to the idea of vaccine mandates, “compared [President Joe] Biden to the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police force” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 9/10/21). Them, not us The New York Times complained that lockdown rules in Xi’an hospitals “deprived…loved ones of a last chance to say goodbye.” The more than 30,000 people who would have been lost by their loved ones if Xi’an had the same Covid death rate as the US were not brought up. The Times spoke of social media censorship in China in relation to lockdowns. Such an issue isn’t nothing, but again, this is also true of the major US social media networks, like Facebook and Twitter (Bloomberg, 6/7/21). The Times wrote of “the hospitals that denied patients access to medical care and deprived their loved ones of the chance to say goodbye.” It noted that because of the lockdown, a man was denied care and died of a heart attack, and a pregnant woman who was turned away had a miscarriage. The part about dying alone suggests that in a normal country, it is standard procedure to allow visitors in to see patients who are dying from contagious diseases. This is of course not the case, as the Times (3/29/20) acknowledges in its non-China reporting. As for the denial of care, keep in mind that these were two tragedies in a city of 13 million. People being unable to ac

  Prisoners of Guantánamo (photo: Shane T. McCoy/US Navy) This week on CounterSpin: As we pass the grim milestone of 20 years of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, even Michael Lehnert, the Marine general who set the camp up, calls for it to close, says it shouldn’t have opened, that it’s an affront to US values. And yet here we are. The number of Muslim men and boys in Guantánamo has shrunk from some 800 to 39—that’s meaningful. But when you read an offhand reference to those men as “awaiting justice,” one wonders: What do reporters imagine “justice” might mean to people charged with no crime, deprived of liberty unlawfully for decades, in a place designed to keep them from accessing justice, and to keep anyone else from hearing about them, much less questioning the processes that put them there? We are a long way from understanding the full meaning of Guantánamo. But we can get the remaining detainees out. Our guest says that’s something that can happen and should happen, now. Pardiss Kebriaei is senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She’ll join us to talk abut how closing Guantánamo is not everything we can do, but it is something we can do, and should. Transcript: ‘It’s 20 Years of Detention and It Needs to End’   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220114Kebriaei.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Lani Guinier, Desmond Tutu, and Covid and disability.   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220114Banter.mp3  

(Image: Free Press) This week on CounterSpin: At FAIR, we say you can change the channel all you want, but you can’t turn on what isn’t there. The loss of an information source—a particular place for debate, for conversation, on issues relevant to you—is incalculable, but very real. We talked about the loss of local journalism, and why we can still be hopeful, with Craig Aaron of the group Free Press. Transcript: ‘The Commercial System Isn’t Providing the Local News We Need’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220107Aaron.mp3   Rana Plaza collapse Also on the show: Fashion is always a huge media story, but what goes into it is not. The “fashion” industry is a prime driver of structured exploitation, whether we’re talking about blocked fire exits or a piece-rate system that steals workers’ wages systematically. The Garment Worker Protection Act, passed in California late last year, aims to address some of those harms. In light of that undercovered victory, we’re going to remind ourselves of one of the spurs for it. Barbara Briggs, then associate director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, spoke with CounterSpin in 2015 about the 2013 collapse at Rana Plaza, which brought murder charges against Bangladeshi factory owners and government officials—but, we can say now, somehow didn’t convince corporate media to keep a critical eye trained on the human costs of “fast fashion.” Transcript: ‘Workers Are the Best Guarantors of Their Own Safety When They’re Organized’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220107Briggs.mp3

  Janine Jackson interviewed ID’s Suyapa Portillo Villeda about the Honduran election for the December 24, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211224Portillo.mp3   University of Texas Press (2022) Janine Jackson: Lots of excitement right now around Chile, where the election of Gabriel Boric indicates what the Wall Street Journal laments as a “hard left turn” for the country. Boric, who will be Chile’s youngest president at 35, defeated far-right candidate José Antonio Kast. But Honduras also had an election recently, and elected its first woman president, Democratic Socialist Xiomara Castro Sarmiento Zelaya. Notably, Castro’s National Party opponent acknowledged her victory immediately. And US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says he looks forward to working with her. Our guest says Castro’s victory does not signal the end of Honduras’ longstanding problems, but it does bring the Honduran people a new feeling of hope. Suyapa Portillo Villeda is an advocate and organizer, as well as associate professor of Chicana-Latina Transnational Studies at Pitzer College, and the author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras, out now from University of Texas Press. She joins us now by phone from California. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Suyapa Portillo. Suyapa Portillo Villeda: Thank you so much for having me. JJ: Context is very important here. People in the United States need to see the role the US played in shaping Honduras 2021 to see the meaning of this election. So if you would, please, just fill in some of the history from 2009 or before. SPV: Yeah, I think it’s important to think about the role of the United States in the region, not just Honduras but in Central America, for the last 200 years, right. First with capitalist enterprises such as United Fruit Company, the Standard Fruit Company, these banana companies that dominated, which still exist, Dole and Chiquita brands. And they may have different corporate owners now, but the legacy of what these companies left there was a legacy of expropriation of land, of land theft, of controlling elections. Because, for example, John Foster Dulles, who was secretary of state during Eisenhower, had been an attorney for the United Fruit Company, and so he had this reach and connection to the United Fruit Company that affected Guatemala, that affected Honduras. That’s the period I write about, in the mid-1950s, as a period of hope. Since the mid-1950s, Honduras has not had a period of hope, despite efforts and organizing, until after 2009. So it’s weird for me to talk about 2009 as a period of hope, because it was also the worst time in history for Honduras. It was the first coup in the 21st century executed by a Democratic president, Barack Obama, because, as we learned later, in 2011 with WikiLeaks, the United States and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were deeply involved in the support, execution of the coup and the support of the Nationalist Party, which had brought Juan Orlando Hernández. So for 12 years, the Nationalist Party, after the coup dominated Honduras, stole from public coffers, stole from public institutions, linked to narco trafficking, corruption. All of this was evident during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the hurricanes Iota and Eta in November 2021, where people were actually in the streets without any medication, without housing, without food. But I talk about 2009 also as a moment of hope, because a national resistance movement was born, kind of like the 2019 student movement in Chile, the Arab Spring in the Middle East. And it was this moment where Hondurans had had enough of military government. They wanted democracy, and they wanted the president, Mel Zelaya at the time, reinstated, to return to the rule of order. And, of course, these processes take a lot of organizing, that goes way beyond 2009, and comes from a long history of organizing in the region. But somehow, after the coup, it culminated in the National Resistance Front, which in 2011 became the Libertad y Refundación. Now, there’s a lot of controversy about how the party was founded, because there were people who believed in social movements bottom-up, and then there were people who thought the best way was to do an electoral movement. As the Hondurans wrestled with that response, I consider that a moment of hope, because we hadn’t seen that level of organizing since the late ’40s, early ’50s, which led to the 1954 Great Banana Strike, which is what my book is about. So we hadn’t seen that level of massive protest in Honduras, right? There were sporadic guerrilla movements in the ’70s and ’80s. There was a robust student movement in the ’80s. All of it crushed by Reagan’s politics of counterinsurgency, and the internal-enemy politics developed by the Honduran military.

  New York Times (10/8/21): “The Battle at Lake Changjin was made with government support and guidance, underscoring the lengths the authorities will go to shape popular culture.” To coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Communist Party, the powerful Chinese Central Propaganda Department commissioned a blockbuster film that depicts a US defeat in the Korean War. Under fire from US bombs, the heroic People’s Army fights a brutal ground battle and emerges victorious. Brave Chinese soldiers are caught in a hellish landscape as air attacks riddle the earth all around them. A villainous US Gen. Douglas MacArthur, shot Nazi-style from a low camera, shakes his fist and shouts into a microphone, “I believe we will succeed!” Spoiler: He doesn’t. This Chinese war entertainment opened the 11th Beijing International Film Festival and made audiences cheer as they flocked to theaters in China. The Battle at Lake Changjin has grossed more than $900 million to date at the box office, making it the second-highest-grossing film in the world in 2021 (beaten only by Spider-Man: No Way Home), and the highest-grossing non-English-language film of all time. The New York Times (10/8/21) didn’t think much of the movie. It called it “aggrieved, defiant and jingoistic,” and pointed out that depictions of the Korean War have long been a staple of Communist Party propaganda. Despite its big budget—the film came with a $200 million price tag, the most ever spent on a film in China—the film got “mixed reviews,” though the Times acknowledged it was at least better than the “usual agitprop.” The paper did worry that it was supported by the government, which helped with “script development, production and publicity,” and used “serving soldiers among the movie’s 70,000 extras.” Communist Party support for The Battle at Lake Changjin underscored “the lengths the authorities will go to shape popular culture.” Chinese authorities, that is. Them, not us Each aspect of Chinese propaganda the Times complains about is routinely employed by US media, and they have been for years. But such facts are not mentioned. There is no doubt that the film is propaganda. A piece pulled from CNN’s international wire (10/4/21) explained that for the 100th anniversary, Beijing ordered filmmakers to “spread propaganda celebrating the anniversary of the Communist Party.” Movies would have to focus on themes of “loving the Party, the country and socialism,” and “singing the praises of the Chinese Communist Party, the motherland, the people and its heroes.” But in the post-9/11 era, in which US popular culture has been dominated by the military, the main difference between China’s film industry and Hollywood’s is that the China Film Administration openly explains its propaganda goals. In the United States, filmmaking has been subsidized and guided by the Pentagon for years, but that influence is rarely identified as propaganda. Twenty years ago this month, on November 11, 2001, Bush Administration communications strategist Karl Rove called a conclave in Beverly Hills, and four dozen members of the media industry elite showed up. Rove asked these “dream makers” to help the White House promote the “war on terror.” The industry complied. Though military influence on film studios dates back to World War I (MRonline, 7/3/21), the military entertainment complex took off in the 21st century, and the long-time head of the Pentagon’s Film Liaison Office, Phillip Strub, became the most powerful man in Hollywood (SpyCulture, 12/11/18). The Pentagon’s Hollywood power Coming in 2022 from the Media Education Foundation. Roger Stahl’s latest film, Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood, an educational documentary to be released in 2022 by the Media Education Foundation, examines this media/military merger, and looks at Strub’s influence on hundreds of films. On-camera interviews with journalists, scholars, writers (of which I am one), and even filmmaker Oliver Stone, detail the rules and their consequences. Professor Trisha Jenkins explains: “The Pentagon is powerful in the film and TV industry because they have expensive toys. They have submarines, they have aircraft carriers,” not to mention helicopters, pilots and extras. Another UK scholar, Matthew Alford, follows with “that is going to give them rights, usually contracted in, to change the script.” Oliver Stone is featured saying, “You can call it censorship, you can call it propaganda—it’s all of these things.” But ultimately, as Canadian professor Tanner Mirrlees argues, “This is more insidious than actually state-controlled and state-produced propaganda, because it passes off as just entertainment.” Blockbuster films like Iron Man (2008), Captain Marvel (2019) and the 2013 Superman film Man of Steel are loaded with military hardware and influence. Indeed, the Air Force was very pleased that its personnel “came off l

  This week on CounterSpin: the best of CounterSpin for 2021. We call it the “best of,” but this annual round-up is just a reflection of the kinds of conversations we hope have offered a voice or context or information that might help you interpret the news you read. We’re thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They help us see the world more clearly and see the role we can play in changing it.   Mara Verheyden-Hilliard While it came in the midst of a calamitous time, the year’s beginning was still historically marked by an event we’re still accounting for. There are more than 700 arrests now, for crimes from misdemeanor trespassing to felony assault, connected to the January 6 Capitol insurrection, but that doesn’t mean we’ve reckoned with what went down. We talked with Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, activist, attorney and executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, on January 7.   Kimberly Inez McGuire There is rightful concern about whether the Supreme Court will overturn 1973’s Roe v. Wade, affirming abortion rights. But reproductive justice has always been about much more than Roe or abortion; that’s a “floor, not a ceiling,” as Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the group URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, explained.   Igor Volsky 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, talked about how, when it comes to gun violence, the US has tried nothing, and is all out of ideas. Dorothy A. Brown Oftentimes people think corporate media are liberal, or even left, because they acknowledge discrimination. The thing is, that blanket acknowledgment is meaningless if you don’t break it down—explain how, for instance, racial bias plays out. That’s just what Dorothy A. Brown, professor at Emory University School of Law, and author of the new book The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans—and How We Can Fix It, did for CounterSpin. Bianca Nozaki-Nasser The Covid pandemic highlighted many, many fault lines in US society, many aided and abetted by deficient media coverage. Anti-Asian reporting had predictable results, but as Bianca Nozaki-Nasser, media-maker and educator with the group 18 Million Rising, told CounterSpin, the actions and the response fed into existing, noxious narratives. Luke Harris It might seem like 2021 was a head-spinner, but don’t get distracted. You don’t have to have heard of, for example, critical race theory to see that the panic around it is brought to you by the same folks who want to keep people from voting, or deciding whether to give birth, or loving who they love. We asked for some context from Luke Harris, deputy director at the African American Policy Forum.   David Cooper “No one wants to work!” Are we over that yet? Things are shifting, but there’s still a media mountain to move about the very idea that workers choosing their conditions is something more than a “month” or a “moment”—and might just be a fundamental question of human rights. We spoke with David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, and deputy director of EARN, the Economic Analysis and Research Network.   Alec Karakatsanis Fear-mongering crime coverage is a hardy perennial for for-profit media. But they don’t just scare you, they offer a response to that fear: police. The New York Times covered a murder spike with reporting from Jeff Asher, without tipping readers to his work with the CIA and Palantir, and a consulting business with the New Orleans police department. If only that were the only problem, as Alec Karakatsanis is founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System explained.   Paul Paz y Mino Climate change was clearly a top story for 2021. But we’re past the point where reporters should be detailing what’s going wrong. We need to know who is standing in the way of response. And that’s where the “corporate” in corporate media kicks in. Look no further than coverage, or lack thereof, of Steven Donziger, the attorney who made the mistake of trying to Chevron responsible for its anti-human, anti-climate crimes. Paul Paz y Miño, associate director at Amazon Watch, discussed.   Michael K. Dorsey: Yes, but isn’t the US a world leader on climate? No. Michael K. Dorsey works on issues of global energy, environment, finance and sustainability. While calling for continued people power, which he named as the thing that’s going to carry the day, he suggested much, much, much more needs to be demanded of political leadership.   Transcript: ‘Part of

  AP (11/30/21) This week on CounterSpin: When Xiomara Castro won a historic victory in Honduras last month—the country’s first woman president, winning with the most votes in history, in a decisive rebuke to the many-years dominant National Party—Associated Press suggested that while that might “present opportunities” for the US, “there will be some painful history to overcome, primarily the US government’s initial sluggishness in calling the ouster of Castro’s husband Manuel Zelaya in 2009 what it was”—a coup. Well, huh. In September 2009, AP told its readers that Honduras’ legislature ousted Zelaya after he formed an alliance with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and tried to alter the nation’s constitution. Zelaya was arrested on orders of the Supreme Court on charges of treason for ignoring court orders against holding a referendum to extend his term. The Honduran constitution forbids a president from trying to obtain another term in office. Beyond the implication that “forming an alliance” with a leftist leader is somehow illegal, a later AP report underscored that “Zelaya was put on a plane by the military”—so OK, not the “legislature” anymore—”in June for trying to force a referendum to change the constitution’s limit of one term for presidents.” What’s not funny ha ha but funny peculiar is that before the coup, AP had told readers, accurately, that the referendum in question “has no legal effect: It merely asks people if they want to have a later vote on whether to convoke an assembly to rewrite the constitution.” A dry-eyed observer would see AP‘s “editorial” position shifting along with, not facts on the ground, but US state rhetoric. Which brings us back to the present, and the idea that the US government, and their media megaphones, earnestly welcome a new leftist government in Honduras, and share their interest in lifting up the country’s people. Let’s just say: We’ll see. Suyapa Portillo Villeda is an advocate, organizer and associate professor of Chicana/o–Latina/o transnational studies at Pitzer College, and author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras. She joins us this week to talk about the election, and signs of hard-won hope in Honduras. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211224Portillo.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of famine in Afghanistan. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211224Banter.mp3

    Truthout (11/10/21) This week on CounterSpin: Even if we don’t see a written-out master plan, the banning of books, the attacks on teaching real US history, the efforts to push out professors with views that transgress official US policy…. In their myriad forms, these tell us that it’s important to powerful people to restrict what ideas people can access. It’s the land of the free and home of the brave, except if you want to know what’s happened and happens here, or to tell people about it. It all shows us the power of ideas. As infuriating and sad and enervating as it all is, it also reminds us that knowledge is power. So if you are someone who wants to know about the world—and if you aren’t in a position to buy books online to read—you might, as many of us did and do, go to the library. That’s the place where you don’t have to pay to sit down, you don’t have to buy a book or a coffee in order to read…. Libraries aren’t just a meaningful reality, but a meaningful symbol of the fact that there is a thing called the public interest, and it is a thing that the state, the thing we all are part of, that we support with taxes (yes, even those of us who aren’t documented citizens, but human beings who work and contribute to others and pay taxes) have a say in. So it matters a lot that this critical, loved public institution is under threat of usurpation by the same folks who think that there should be nothing, nothing, that private-sector, profit-oriented rich people don’t own and control. Do you care about libraries, that let anyone in and support anyone’s interest in learning? Well, then get ready to fight, because that space, that idea, is on the ropes. Caleb Nichols is a librarian, writer, poet and musician, currently course reserves coordinator at Cal Poly/San Luis Obispo. His article, “Public/Private Partnerships Are Quietly Hollowing Out Our Public Libraries,” was published recently on Truthout.org. Transcript: ‘A For-Profit Company Is Trying to Privatize as Many Public Libraries as They Can’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211217Nichols.mp3    

    Harvard Institute of Politics (12/1/21) This week on CounterSpin: Research from Harvard’s Institute of Politics finds young people worried about the state of US democracy and even the possibility of civil war. Yet US corporate journalists seem to feel nothing truly new is needed beyond the same old counsel: The “system” basically works, the US leads the world in rights and liberties, and “centrism” between the two dominant political parties is the wisest course, regardless of the content of their policies. The Harvard project leader says young people still “seem as determined as ever to fight for the change they seek.” And in that, they have examples of folks who didn’t necessarily have odds in their favor, but who showed that even a small group of people, willing to confront entrenched ideas and power, really can make change in the public interest. One example is today’s guest: Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, author and radio host. We catch up with him this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211210Nader.mp3 Transcript: ‘Our Democracy Is in Perilous Decay, and We Can Turn It Around’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of Kyrsten Sinema and pharmacies’ opioid guilt. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211210Banter.mp3

  Washington Post (10/31/21) This week on CounterSpin, two archival interviews: As the year nears its end, it’s hard not to think back to how it started—with the violent assault on the Capitol by a crowd intent on preventing the declaration of Joe Biden as president. We spoke with organizer and strategist Dorothee Benz the next day about the import of the events of January 6. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211203Benz.mp3 Transcript: ‘This Violent Piece of Insurrection Was Planned Openly on Unencrypted Channels’ ABC News (8/13/17) Also on the show: While response to the insurrection came slowly, states have been cracking down on peaceful protests. We talked about that worrying trend with the ACLU’s Vera Eidelman around the Fourth of July. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211203Eidelman.mp3 Transcript: ‘They Are Taking Aim at Our Fundamental American Right to Protest’

Guardian (11/10/21) This week on CounterSpin: What do we want? Multiracial democracy. When do we want it? Now. What stands in the way? White supremacy that has disregarded, derailed and violently defied that democracy at multiple turns. Those anguished over the Rittenhouse acquittal, depressed by racist police brutality, unnerved by the failure to take seriously the January 6 insurrection, and worried about systemic predations on voting rights are sometimes led to say: “This isn’t America!” If you attend to actual US history (importantly different from what you might’ve read in your history textbook, or what you might someday be allowed to read in your history textbook), you will understand that this is America. But that still doesn’t mean it has to be. This can be a turning point, if more of us understand that history isn’t something that happens to us, but something we DO. Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African-American studies at Emory University, and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy. We talk with her about her recent Guardian column on the historical and ongoing struggle between white supremacy and this country’s hopes for democracy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211126Anderson.mp3 Transcript: ‘White Supremacists Were Willing to Hold the United States Hostage’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of protest in India. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211126Banter.mp3

“Oh please, dear? For your information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint,” a patriotic Walter Sobchak tells a diner waitress after she implores him to keep his voice down in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski. So iconic is this pop culture reference to American jurisprudence that it was actually cited by a Texas judge in a First Amendment case (Business Insider, 9/5/14). John Goodman as Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski: “Oh please, dear? For your information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint!” The NYT case shows his absolutism was overstated. Yet Sobchak’s absolutism was overstated. The line is a reference to the famous Pentagon Papers case of 1971, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not restrain the New York Times and the Washington Post ahead of time from publishing classified documents pertaining to the Vietnam War. But the court did not strike down prior restraint outright. As attorney Floyd Abrams, who represented the Times in the case, later wrote, “A majority of the Supreme Court not only left open the possibility of prior restraints in other cases, but of criminal sanctions being imposed on the press” (New York Times, 6/9/21). Indeed, Chief Justice Warren Burger said in his dissenting opinion that the court had given the press too much power over the state: But why should the United States government, from whom this information was illegally acquired by someone, along with all the counsel, trial judges and appellate judges, be placed under needless pressure? After these months of deferral, the alleged “right to know” has somehow and suddenly become a right that must be vindicated instanter. Would it have been unreasonable, since the newspaper could anticipate the government’s objections to release of secret material, to give the government an opportunity to review the entire collection and determine whether agreement could be reached on publication? Burger outlined the road not taken by the Supreme Court: one in which news outlets could be prevented from revealing the secrets of the state until “agreement could be reached” with the government about whether it wanted its secrets revealed. NYT under prior restraint That’s why it rang alarm bells among First Amendment advocates when Westchester County Judge Charles Wood ruled in favor of the right-wing organization Project Veritas against the New York Times, enjoining the paper from reporting on certain documents related to the group (New York Times, 11/18/21). New York Appellate Court Judge Leonard Austin refused to lift the block while the case makes its way through appeals (Reuters, 11/22/21), and the original judge extended the order “at least until December 1, a deadline for Project Veritas to respond in writing to the Times‘ bid to end it” (Reuters, 11/23/21). “We’re disappointed that the order remains in place, but we welcomed the opportunity to address the court directly on the serious First Amendment concerns raised by a prior restraint,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a Times spokesperson (New York Times, 11/23/21), who added, “No libel plaintiffs should be permitted to use their litigation as a tool to silence press coverage about them.” James O’Keefe is perhaps most famous for tricking corporate media—including the Times—into believing he went into ACORN offices dressed in this cartoonish pimp costume, leading to the community organizing group’s demise (FAIR.org, 3/11/10). For anyone who needs a reminder, Project Veritas is a video entrapment organization founded by right-wing activist James O’Keefe; it targets progressive organizations as well as media outlets, usually by offering deceptively edited undercover footage to suggest wrongdoing or corruption. The group has had its successes, including its 2009 hoax about the community activist group ACORN (FAIR.org, 3/11/10) that fatally hurt its reputation, even though O’Keefe ended up agreeing to pay $100,000 to a former ACORN employee for “misrepresenting him in a widely distributed video” (Guardian, 3/8/13). O’Keefe has also faced federal charges for attempting to tamper with the phone of then-Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu (Washington Post, 1/27/10), and his organization got caught trying to feed a false story about Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore to the Washington Post (11/27/17). O’Keefe similarly attempted to embarrass NPR; as FAIR pointed out, even when its misrepresentations are exposed, Project Veritas is able to insert enough innuendo into the discourse that its fake stories do real damage (FAIR.org, 8/26/11). The group experienced a boom in conservative financial support during the Trump administration (New York Times, 5/13/21). ‘To embarrass an adversary’ The recent court order against the Times is related to its coverage (11/11/21) of the legal advice Project Veritas gets on using undercover operations to embarrass liberal p

The Wall Street Journal (2/3/21) explains inflation. This week on CounterSpin: If you read a paper, you know that inflation is a dire, important thing right now, a problem for the Biden administration, for economic policymakers, and for…regular folks who want to buy milk? You don’t need to understand it, elite media seem to say, but you do need to be mad about it, and direct blame for it toward…yourself? Jon Schwarz writes about elite media’s confusing and conflicting instructions around inflation, among other things, at the Intercept; we’ll talk with him about the current economic reality—and storyline. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211119Schwarz.mp3 Transcript: ‘They Do Not Tell Both Sides of the Inflation Story’ Alex Jones Also on the show: Ethically deficient radio host Alex Jones‘ defamation case is a political story about the impact of energetic, intentional disinformation. It’s a media story about how the profitability of hateful BS seems to change the terms around whether things that call themselves news outlets should be held accountable for demonstrably harmful lies. And it’s a speech rights story about whether you can yell fire in a crowded theater and then say, Ha! any dummy would know I was just kidding (but I’m not kidding about these vitamin supplements, please buy them). We’ll ask, “How does the legal system solve a problem like Alex Jones?” with Enrique Armijo, professor of law at Elon University. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211119Armijo.mp3 Transcript: ‘Now I Can Say Anything About You and Not Be Sued for It’

  Janine Jackson interviewed the Black Alliance for Just Immigration’s Nekessa Opoti about Haitian refugees for the November 5, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211105Opoti.mp3   New York Times (9/21/21) Janine Jackson: People around the world were appalled to see pictures of US Border Patrol officers on horseback wielding reins like whips in the effort to corral and capture Haitian refugees along the Rio Grande. So alarming was the imagery that outlets like the New York Times took pains to clarify that there was no evidence that Border Patrol had actually whipped anyone. That rather encapsulates corporate media coverage of Haitian asylum seekers and the treatment they receive, so inhumane that not one, but two officials have resigned over it. It’s a sort of liberal tut-tutting that not only fails to challenge US policy, but that tacitly sanctions its harms and their racist rationales with inattention. Advocates, meanwhile, call for immigration policy that is rooted in human rights and dignity. Nekessa Opoti is communications director at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. She joins us now by phone from Los Angeles. Welcome to CounterSpin, Nekessa Opoti. Nekessa Opoti: Thank you so much for having me. JJ: Let’s leap right into why so many Haitians are being expelled from the US without an opportunity to present a case for asylum, and talk about Title 42, this public health services law. Because Homeland Security Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas has stated of the expulsions of Haitians, “We are doing this out of a public health need. It is not an immigration policy. It is not an immigration policy that we would embrace.” That’s a pretty confusing statement. Does that make sense to you? Nekessa Opoti: “Processing people and allowing them to come into the country is the best public health policy.” NO: No, it does not. And, in fact, we would argue that Title 42, because of its nature of sending people back, the images that people saw of Haitians—and it’s not actually just Haitians, Haitians and other Black asylum seekers—under a bridge in Texas, the camps that you see outside at the border between Mexico and the US: Those are the unsafe conditions. Processing people and allowing them to come into the country is the best public health policy. JJ: You wonder how forcing people to live under bridges would be more sanitary. NO: Right. JJ: And then, also, Haitians, many of whom are not coming from Haiti right now, but have been traveling through South and Central America for years, they aren’t any more likely to have Covid-19 than any other people who cross the border, right? Or than any other refugees, like, say, Afghans, who are being rightfully accepted right now. So it seems like an exception. NO: Right. And I’m glad you bring that up, because think about it. The US, at the moment, doesn’t have ways in which it screens people who are coming in from other parts of the country, whether it’s tourists or whoever else is traveling, business people. So not only is this measure anti-Black, it is also very, very classist. Title 42 disproportionately impacts Black asylum seekers. But it also impacts other asylum seekers. So these are the most vulnerable of any population of people who are seeking, for whatever reason, migrating to the US, because they’re desperate. Because no one leaves their home and crosses through multiple countries and the jungle for fun, right? It is very clear that these people are in crisis. And these are the very same people that the US government has decided to turn away, and expose them to even further harm and violence. BAJI (1/21) There is a report that BAJI did at the beginning of the year called There Is a Target on Us. And it looks at the condition of Black migrants, mostly asylum seekers, but Black migrants in general, and violence of their experience at the border on their way into the US and in Mexico, the incarceration rate, the rape of women and children, and the robberies, the exposure to the elements. And so it is very, very clear, the anti-Blackness of the US is very well-known. First, historically, we have known the treatment of Black people in this country is extending to Haitians and other Black asylum seekers and migrants. JJ: Maybe it’s quaint to contrast politicians’ actions with their promises. But Joe Biden did explicitly say that he would reverse Trump policy on Title 42, didn’t he, when he was running for office? NO: He did. He did. And, in fact, not just his promise, but there is a video of Vice President Kamala Harris criticizing the Trump administration for using Title 42 and turning people around. She specifically talks about how it’s inhumane, and yet here she is, part of an administration that is doing the very same thing. JJ: And, in fact, when a federal judge said that Title 42 should not be carried out, the Biden admini

  New York Times (11/9/21) This week on CounterSpin: We’ve talked on this show about how drugs and medicines are researched and developed by the government (on the public dime, if you will), and then pharmaceutical companies get patents on them and sell them back to the public at literally life-altering, or life-ending, prices. If you think, “But surely everything is different in a pandemic that’s killed 800,000 people in this country, one of every 400 people, and more than 5 million worldwide”—sadly, that means you don’t understand the nature of the game. Willie Sutton reportedly robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” Moderna is seeking a sole patent for the Covid-19 vaccine they created in partnership with the National Institutes of Health because, as a source told the New York Times, “that could help the company justify its prices and rebuff pressure to make its vaccine available to poorer countries.” We’ll hear about that, and better ways forward, from Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211112Maybarduk.mp3 Transcript: ‘Moderna Is Trying to Turn This People’s Vaccine Into a Rich People’s Vaccine’ Aaron Swartz (cc photo: Nick Gray) Also on the show: Aaron Swartz helped create the RSS protocol when he was 14; he was a founding figure behind SecureDrop, the Creative Commons licensing system, Open Library, Reddit and the civil liberties group Demand Progress, and he helped lead the fight against the censorious Stop Online Piracy Act. In the wake of his death in 2013, many groups vowed to push forward on his vision of citizens, regular people, unleashing data—with entailed access and communicability—in service of the public interest and the right to know. Tracy Rosenberg uses data to build bridges between those affected by policy and those that make it, particularly on questions of privacy, surveillance and private or state encroachment on civil liberties—in other words, things you might not even know you need to know about. She’s executive director at Media Alliance and co-coordinator at Oakland Privacy. We’ll catch up with her today on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211112Rosenberg.mp3 Transcript: ‘It’s About Giving People Tools So We Can Reach Transparency Critical Mass’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the latest elections. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211112Banter.mp3  

  (cc photo: Doug Peters/British government) This week on CounterSpin: The impacts of climate disruption are not theoretical; they are happening. Those already worst off are facing the worst of it, and those who profit from it continue to profit. There are finer points, but that’s reality. And it’s fair to measure journalism not by its cleverness, or by demonstrated balance between the voices of various power players—because when it comes to climate change, power players are the problem—but by the justice it does to that reality. As national leaders meet at COP26 in Glasgow to discuss ways to confront this already unfolding disaster, the Washington Post is suggesting US readers celebrate —what’s this?—the Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s decision to finalize a “rule extending federal pipeline safety standards to more than 400,000 miles of currently unregulated onshore gathering lines.” You can acknowledge that certain steps are good, without thereby suggesting that they are within shouting distance of “enough” when it comes to climate change. We talk about comparing what’s happening to what needs to happen with environmental scientist and advocate, and longtime climate conference participant and observer, Michael K. Dorsey. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211105Dorsey.mp3 Transcript: ‘We’re Several Days Late and Many Dollars Short in Getting Ahead of Climate Catastrophe’ New York Times (9/21/21) Also on the show: In the wake of the horrifying front-page photos from September, the Biden administration says that the US Border Patrol will no longer use horses to round up Haitian asylum seekers they are flushing out of a makeshift shelters to send back over the border into Mexico, without the opportunity to present their case about the dangers they have spent, in many cases, years trying to escape. That may cut down on horrifying front-page photos, which is why it’s all the more important to ask what’s actually changing with regard to US policy toward Haitian refugees. We talk about that with Nekessa Opoti, communications director at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211105Opoti.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Anti-Blackness of the US Is Extending to Black Asylum Seekers’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of the new climate denialism. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211105Banter.mp3  

  (cc photo: Adam Schultz / Biden for President) This week on CounterSpin: An early October survey showed that while 60% of those polled knew that the Build Back Better legislative package was “$3.5 trillion,” only 10% had any sense of what was in it. That is many things, but preeminently a failure of news media—the demonstrably harmful effect of months of reporting that never failed to note the presumed “costs” of a plan to address devastating national crises of healthcare, climate and infrastructure, but that only rarely troubled itself to explain in any detail what those plans would mean. Despite that, polls still show majorities of Americans supporting the plan. We talk about seeing and pushing through anti-democratic disinformation with Karen Dolan, director of the Criminalization of Race and Poverty project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Transcript: ‘There’s Still an Awful Lot of Good in This Package, but You Wouldn’t Know It From Headlines’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211029Dolan.mp3   New York Times (10/26/21) Also on the show: A New York Times column (by an editorial board member) begins: “Facebook has endured one of the most punishing stretches of corporate coverage in recent memory, exposing its immense power and blithe disregard for its deleterious impacts. But none of it really matters.” Headlined, “Face It, Facebook Won’t Change Unless Advertisers Demand It,” the piece is ostensibly meant as a sober assessment of the difficulty of exacting change from a company while it’s making money. But given the role of journalism in telling folks what is possible, the Times espousing the notion that Congress, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and the press are all “but bumps in the road” reads less as a dry-eyed evaluation than a call to throw up our hands in the face of an unwinnable contest. Our guest understands media structure, yet still advocates for policy change. We hear from Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the group Free Press. Transcript: Facebook ‘Puts Engagement and Growth Before the Health and Welfare of Democracy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211029Karr.mp3  

  USA Today‘s front-page obituary for Colin Powell (10/19/21) called him “a Warrior, Diplomat and ‘Great American.” Accompanying stories called him “A Man Trusted by Presidents and the Public Alike,” and “Always Willing to Stand Against Racism.” The only hint of criticism was a story that said that “Iraq Tarnished [His] Storied Career.” Former Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Colin Powell received virtually wall-to-wall adulation in corporate media coverage of his death last week. In the New York Times (10/19/21), Bret Stephens called Powell “an exemplary military leader and presidential adviser.” Stephens’ Times colleague Maureen Dowd (10/23/21) said Powell was “the best America had to offer” and a “great man.” Theodore R. Johnson wrote in the same paper (10/21/21) that “we should take inspiration from Mr. Powell’s accomplishments.” Powell led, as David Ignatius tells it in the Washington Post (10/18/21), an “extraordinary life of service,” characterized by “a sterling career of public service.” Like Ignatius, Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal (10/21/21) lacked a thesaurus, describing Powell as “a great man” and one of “the great ones.” In another Journal piece, Paula Dobriansky (10/20/21) called him “a true inspiration and a model not only for military leaders and diplomats but all Americans,” a “hero of our time.” This gratuitous fawning deflects readers from reckoning with Powell’s record. Consider the heinous acts the “great man” admitted to carrying out in Vietnam. (See Consortium News, 7/8/96.) In his memoir, My American Journey, Powell said of his unit in Vietnam: “We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters.” The “hero of our time” wrote: Why were we torching houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam…. We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death? Similarly, Powell’s “sterling career of public service” involved obstructing the truth of US war crimes in Vietnam. After the My Lai Massacre, when Powell was an Army major posted in Saigon, he was tasked with investigating a soldier’s letter describing US barbarism against the Vietnamese (Columbia Journalism Review, 4/3/09). Powell denied the charges, writing, “In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.” Selling the Iraq invasion AP‘s obituary (10/18/21) described Powell as a “trailblazing soldier and diplomat whose sterling reputation of service to Republican and Democratic presidents was stained by his faulty claims to justify the 2003 US war in Iraq.” The only aspect of Powell’s life that corporate media coverage of his death identified as a flaw with some consistency was the infamous 2003 speech to the United Nations, in which he helped sell the invasion of Iraq by falsely claiming the Iraqi government possessed weapons of mass destruction. Even on this issue, corporate media were soft on Powell. Ignatius said that the case Powell laid out “turned out later to have [been] based on flawed intelligence.” Stephens claimed that the so-called evidence Powell put forth “had the full confidence of the intelligence community.” Dowd wrote that “Powell naïvely thought that he and his pal George Tenet could scrub his speech of all the deceptions shoehorned in by Cheney’s co-conspirators.” These are lies about Powell’s lies, as a Jon Schwarz article for the Intercept (2/6/18) demonstrated three years back. The “flawed intelligence” behind what Powell told the UN wasn’t, as Ignatius wrote, something that “turned out later” to be wrong: Powell claimed that Iraq had bought aluminum tubes supposedly for their covert nuclear weapons program but, prior to the speech, his own intelligence staff prepared a memo that pointed out that this assertion was untrue. Powell said that the tubes were built “to a tolerance that far exceeds US requirements” for comparable conventional weapons, but the memo noted that this was false. Nor did what Powell alleged at the UN have, as Stephens wrote, “the full confidence of the intelligence community”: Powell told the UN that “weapons experts at one [Iraqi] facility were replaced by Iraqi intelligence agents” so as to “deceive [weapons] inspectors,” but another memo from his intelligence staff pointed out that this statement was “not credible.” That Powell kept these claims in his speech gives the lie to Dowd’s attempt to portray Powell as doing his best to “scrub his speech of . . . the deceptions,” as does Powell’s active fabrication of evidence: Powell played an intercepted conversation between Iraqi army officers talking about searching ammunition dumps to make sure they weren’t

  The Washington Post (8/10/21) editorializes that “experts are more certain than ever that dire consequences are coming” from climate change—but still allows its pundits to argue for inaction on the basis of uncertainty. Upon the release of the latest dire report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (8/9/21), the Washington Post (8/10/21) published a strongly worded editorial under the headline, “Climate Doubters Lose One of Their Last Remaining Arguments.” In it, the editorial board argued that those who say we shouldn’t “force economic disruption” because warming “might not be as bad as some fear” have lost “one of their last remaining arguments.” The IPCC report demonstrates that “experts are more certain than ever that dire consequences are coming,” the board noted, “ruling out the benign warming scenarios doubters insisted were still possible,” and concluding that governments must “eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century” to avoid the worst outcomes. It’s a clear and forceful statement, reflecting the global scientific consensus that the reality of the climate crisis can no longer be denied, and immediate, dramatic action must be taken. So why does the Post continue to publish columns that promote that debunked denialist argument? ‘Certainty melts away’ Not to worry, says George Will (Washington Post, 8/11/21)—sea levels “have been rising for 20,000 years,” and the climate has been changing for “4.5 billion years.” The day after the editorial, longtime Post columnist George Will (8/11/21) purported to cast doubt on the IPCC report and its conclusions (“With a Closer Look, Certainty About the ‘Existential’ Climate Threat Melts Away”), using variously misleading, nonsensical and factually incorrect arguments from the latest darling of climate deniers, Steve Koonin. Koonin, former BP chief scientist and undersecretary for science in Barack Obama’s Energy Department, featured in another recent climate denialist Post column (10/12/21), a guest essay by former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Daniels presented Koonin as the truth-teller (with his service in the Obama administration making him “impeccably credentialed” politically) being attacked by “anti-intellectual” critics who offer only “ad hominem epithets” against him. (In fact, his critics offer endless debunkings of his “facts.”) Koonin isn’t a “denier,” Daniels explained: “Koonin stipulates firmly that Earth’s climate is changing and becoming warmer, and that human influence is playing a role.” But, Daniels continued, Koonin uses government and academic reports’ own data to challenge the scientific “consensus”—about rising sea levels, droughts, extreme weather—now repeated endlessly and uncritically. In other words, now that denying climate change has lost any last shred of credibility, its proponents have largely abandoned it in favor of the new denialism, which says that climate change may be happening, but it’s no big deal. The policy conclusion, conveniently, is the same: We don’t need to make any drastic changes, like curbing fossil fuels. ‘Climate delay’ Steven Koonin (Wall Street Journal, 8/10/21) writes, “Refreshingly, the [IPCC] report deems its highest-emissions scenarios of the future unlikely”—but doesn’t note that’s because the IPCC thinks it’s unlikely that nations will follow the advice of people like Steven Koonin. Observers have labeled this pivot by fossil fuel companies and their supporters “climate delay,” which, among other things, falsely tries to paint new technologies, such as carbon capture, as more than sufficient to save us while they increase oil and gas production. Koonin is a leading voice of the new climate denialism, and his recent book on the subject, Unsettled, has become the movement’s Bible. But his arguments have been so thoroughly debunked by actual experts in the scientific and journalistic communities that other major news outlets haven’t given his views a platform. That is, except for the notoriously right-wing opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, where the editorial board approvingly cited Koonin to dismiss the IPCC report (8/9/21) and gave Koonin himself a column the next day to do the same (8/10/21), and Fox News, where he’s found a sympathetic ear in Tucker Carlson (6/6/21, 6/21/21). This is the company the Post finds itself in as it repeatedly publishes Koonin’s misinformation. In fact, yet another right-wing Post columnist, Marc Thiessen (5/14/21), has highlighted “climate facts” from the “Obama scientist,” approvingly repeating Koonin’s argument that “the idea that we can stop climate change&#82

  Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis about AT&T and OAN for the October 15, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211015Lewis.mp3   Reuters (10/6/21) Janine Jackson: Corporate owners tend to be conservative, we know. We know they support causes and projects, including media outlets, that further their goals. CBS and Viacom head Sumner Redstone told Time magazine, back in 2004, “I do believe that a Republican administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one.” But the relationship between AT&T and far-right network One America News is different. As revealed in a blockbuster Reuters report by John Shiffman, the inspiration for the network that now espouses the notion that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, among other things, came directly from AT&T executives. “They told us they wanted a conservative network,” OAN founder Robert Herring stated in a deposition Reuters saw. “When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.” Unpeeling how that happened and why we don’t know that’s how it happened and how it’s sustained, all of that is a lesson in the differences between corporate news media and journalism. As well as the fallacy that because something is on your TV, that means that it’s passed some sort of public interest, public integrity test. Our next guest has been tracking OAN for some time. Bobby Lewis is editorial writer and researcher for the group Media Matters. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Bobby Lewis. Bobby Lewis: Hi. Thank you for having me. Glad to be here. JJ: The revelation is the deal between AT&T and OAN. But first, for those listeners who have maintained a blissful ignorance of OAN, can you just first give us a sense of the flavor, if you will, of this network? What’s the kind of content that one can expect when they turn on OAN? BL: I think a good way to put it is a lot of people are familiar with, say, Fox News, that may not be familiar with OAN. And OAN feels very similar but very different from Fox. Obviously, as two conservative news networks, they cover similar topics from similar viewpoints. But OAN seems more eager to proudly embrace the cringiest, most obviously nonsense positions that, especially in the latter years of the Trump era, Fox decided to quietly ignore. One big example of this is the My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell. He’s been on a whole thing for months about how the election was stolen from Trump. And he has been very angry with Fox News that they won’t give him any time of day. OAN, however, has broadcast hours upon hours of his different events and documentaries and cyber symposiums. I think a good way to think of OAN is kind of like Fox, but more out there, more daring with the lies that it will serve as truth. JJ: What do we learn from this Reuters story about the relationship between OAN and AT&T, which is this very sort of bread-and-butter institution, as folks might think about it? Besides phone and internet, AT&T also owns Warner Media, which means HBO and CNN, among others, as well as DirecTV. Tell the story. What is the revelation about the relationship between OAN and AT&T? Bobby Lewis: “The spark of inspiration for OAN and its right-wing bent came from a meeting with AT&T executives.” BL: The big revelation is really the one you started with, that AT&T played an integral role in OAN’s very founding. There isn’t all that much reporting on One America News itself out there. There’s been more of it in the recent months. But it had been known for a while that the channel founder, Robert Herring, essentially founded it to make money. He’s never been particularly quiet about that aspect. But the Reuters article, revealing that the spark of inspiration for OAN and its right-wing bent came from a meeting with AT&T executives—in a sense, it basically shows that AT&T asked for this. Obviously, the media giant probably doesn’t assert control over day-to-day and hour-to-hour operations at OAN. But they asked for a conservative news channel. In the competitive market that exists, a conservative news channel is going to come out looking a lot like One America News. There were also some good details in that Reuters report that you could get a feel that something like that was true, but we didn’t exactly know, for instance, that as recently as 2020, AT&T provided about 90% of OAN’s revenues, presumably through all the carrier fees with DirecTV and, to a lesser extent, U-verse. That was another huge thing to learn. It really cements how involved AT&T is with the history and the continued existence of this network, even though the company is consistently trying to distance itself from OAN. JJ: We know this, at least in part, due to an unlawful firing lawsuit. A jury found that OAN had wrongly fired a producer for fili

    Steven Donziger (right) in Ecuador. This week on CounterSpin: When Steven Donziger and other attorneys sued Chevron for polluting the soil and water in Lago Agrio in Ecuador, Chevron moved to have the case held in Ecuador, where they don’t have jury trials. When that court ruled against them, they sued against the lawyers that won the verdict, and accused one, Steven Donziger, of corruption, including bribing the judge. When the judge later recanted his testimony, that was somehow not important, and Chevron moved the case back to the US, where they have not only managed to keep themselves from ever facing scrutiny for the original crime, which they don’t deny, but have ruined the personal and professional life of the lawyer who internal documents show they had an explicit plan to “demonize.” It sure sounds like a story reporters interested in David vs. Goliath or climate change or corporate power or the future of humanity would care about. But no, it looks more like a story of a case a major fossil fuel company wanted to see silenced that has in fact had that effect. We’ll talk about what media would really rather you not now about Steven Donziger and Chevron in Ecuador with Paul Paz y Miño, associate director of Amazon Watch. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211022PazyMino.mp3 Transcript: ‘Every Turn in This Case Has Been Another Brick Wall, and Behind It Is Chevron’

  Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen (9/30/21) says that Sen. Joe Manchin “correctly reads public opinion.” That’s more than you can say for Henry Olsen. Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen (9/30/21) lauded Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package being considered by Congress, because Manchin “correctly reads public opinion.” That opinion, Olsen asserted, does not support the “radical change” that the reconciliation package, known as the Build Back Better bill, entails. His assertion is contradicted by his own newspaper’s poll, conducted with ABC News (8/29/21–9/1/21), which reported that Americans support the reconciliation package 53% to 41%. That finding was similar to several other polls, as shown below. (To see results of the Pew poll, go here; for the other polls, go to PollingReport.com.)   Pollster (Date) Question Wording Favor % Oppose % Unsure %   Pew (9/13–19/21) A proposed reconciliation package contains about $3.5 trillion in funding over the next ten years for universal pre-K education, expanding Medicare, reducing carbon emissions, and other projects. From what you’ve seen and heard, do you favor or oppose this package?   49     25     26     Fox News (9/12–15/21)   Do you favor or oppose the bill being considered by the US House that would allocate an additional three and a half trillion dollars toward infrastructure, including spending to address climate change, healthcare and childcare?   56     39     5     WP/ABC (8/29/21–9/1/21) From what you’ve heard or read about it, do you support or oppose the federal government spending three and a half trillion dollars on new or expanded social programs, educational assistance, and programs to address climate change?   53     41     6   Suffolk University/ USA Today (8/19–23/21) As you may know, Congress is considering a $3.5 trillion bill intended to fund prekindergarten, community college tuition, expanded Medicare benefits, clean energy and other “soft” infrastructure. Do you support or oppose this bill?   52     39     9     The margins in favor of the reconciliation package vary from a low of 12 points in the WP/ABC poll, to 24 points in the Pew poll. (Pew finds a larger “unsure” percentage, because, unlike other polls, it does not press that group to make a decision.) Overall, the picture is uniformly favorable toward the bill. Wrote Gallup’s Frank Newport (8/13/21) in a review of public opinion: “Existing survey evidence shows majority support for the new bill, and this level of support appears to be fairly robust across samples and ways of asking about it.” Majority support is also shown when the public is asked about individual provisions of the plan. Evading the question Contrary to Henry Olsen, 2020 was not a “50/50 election.” (Graphic: Washington Post) But Olsen cited none of those polls. Instead, he argued that the 2020 election results were so close, they didn’t give Biden a mandate for the type of change he is seeking. “A 50/50 election never augurs radical change.” Aside from the fact that Biden won the popular vote by 7 million votes, or more than 4 percentage points, that’s a weak argument. Election results hardly produce clear indications of what policies the public prefers. The advantage of polls is that they ask people directly what they want. And, as shown above, the polls have shown widespread support for the $3.5 trillion bill. Olsen also contended that Biden’s approval rating had been declining recently. “This erosion,” he wrote, “began just as public discussion of the reconciliation bill started to grow,” implying that the rating decline occurred because people don’t like the reconciliation bill. However, the opposite conclusion can be drawn. CNN’s Harry Enten speculates that Biden’s falling ratings are caused by inaction on the reconciliation bill, not the provisions of the bill, which apparently most Americans like. Rather than speculate on what Americans might like based on presidential approval ratings, however, one can refer to polls that ask people directly about the policies themselves. Red herring argument Henry Olsen The only poll Olsen turns to that asked the public directly about the BBB package was an Echelon Insights poll, conducted August 13–18. And that poll also showed substantial public support for the reconciliation package. When asked, “Based on what you have heard, do you support or oppose the $3.5 trillion budget resolution currently being debated in Congress?” 45% said they were in favor, 29% opposed and 26% unsure. The margin in favor of the resolution was 16 percentage points (45%–29%), smaller than the margin found by Pew (24 points), but comparable to the margin found by Fox (17 points), and higher than the margins found by WP/ABC (12 points) and S

OAN logo This week on CounterSpin: “If you have 12 Americans being fed a diet of untruth, that’s 12 too many.” So says John Watson, an American University journalism professor specializing in ethics and media law. He’s talking about OAN, or One America News Network, and its audience, which has been told, among other things, that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election and that chemical cocktails are a better response to Covid-19 than government-authorized vaccines. We’ll talk about how we got here with Bobby Lewis, researcher and editorial writer from Media Matters. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211015Lewis.mp3 Transcript: ‘OAN Would Not and Could Not Exist Without AT&T’s Blessing’ (photo: Greenpeace USA) Also on the show: Thousands of people are out in the street this week, calling on lawmakers to not just acknowledge that climate change is happening, but to do something about it. Media have a role to play here. It has to go beyond noting that protesters spraypainted a statue of Andrew Jackson. What about the work of saving the planet, and facing up to the forces that call themselves harmed? We’ll talk about people vs. fossil fuels with Jean Su from the Center for Biological Diversity. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211015Su.mp3 Transcript: ‘People Right Now Are Absolutely Feeling the Climate Emergency’

    (image via BillMoyers.com) This week on CounterSpin: The thing about the US Postal Service: Low-income people get the same service as the rich; rural people get their prescriptions and paychecks and ballots in the same timeframe as those in big cities. The idea has always been that postal service is a public good, not to be mined for profit, and not tiered to give the wealthy yet another leg up. USPS is the second-largest employer in the country, traditionally offering opportunities for people of color—and unlike the number one employer, Walmart, it doesn’t subsidize itself by paying wages so low that employees have to also rely on public assistance. That’s why it’s so worrying that the current leaders of the Postal Service seem intent on driving it into the ground. We’ll talk about the fight for the post office with Lisa Graves, executive director and editor-in-chief at True North Research</a https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211008Graves.mp3 Transcript: ‘There’s a Lot the Postal Service Can Do to Be Present in the 21st Century’ (image: AAPF) Also on the show: Attorney General Merrick Garland has ordered the FBI to work with local leaders to help address the “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against educators and school board members over mask mandates, and also interpretations of critical race theory, which has been distorted by conservatives to mean any teaching about racism or systemic inequity in US society. If you didn’t know that K–12 teachers and college professors are under visceral attack simply for teaching the unvarnished truth of US history, it might be because somehow many free speech advocates, including in the press corps, haven’t taken on this disturbing encroachment on the rights of educators and students. Teachers, however, are fighting back, and a number of groups are planning a Day of Action on October 14 to shed light on that fight and what’s at stake. We’ll hear about that from Stevana Sims, public school counselor in Montclair, New Jersey, and a member of the steering committee of the group Black Lives Matter at School. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211008Sims.mp3 Transcript: ‘Threats Are Being Made Against Teachers Who Are Teaching the Truth’

    New York Times (9/22/21) This week on CounterSpin: “Crime wave” politics are a time-honored response to political movements that take on racist policing in this country, dating back at least to Barry Goldwater, as organizer Josmar Trujillo was reminding us back in 2015. But here we are again, as outlets like the New York Times announce a reported rise in the murder rate with coverage steeped in false presumptions about what that means and how to respond. Our guest says prepare to hear a lot about how cops need more resources because “crime is surging,” and offers antidote to that copaganda. We hear from Alec Karakatsanis, 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/CounterSpin211001Karakatsanis.mp3 Transcript: ‘Crime Is Defined and Constructed by Police and Other Elite Interests’   Larry Nassar Also on the show: While we’re to understand that police could prevent crime, if only they’re permitted, we’re also asked to accept that the most powerful law enforcement in the country just somehow couldn’t manage to prevent Olympic gymnast team doctor Larry Nassar from sexually assaulting dozens of young women, even after they’d been alerted. FBI actions around Nassar went well beyond mere negligence—falsifying testimony, pressuring witnesses—but to actually address that, we’ll need to acknowledge a systemic indifference to gender-based crime. Jane Manning, director of the Women’s Equal Justice Project, joins us to talk about that. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211001Manning.mp3 Transcript: ‘It’s the Demeaning Treatment, but Also the Failure to Take Action’

    Sludge (8/6/21) This week on CounterSpin: A recent New York Times story about Senate Energy Committee chair Joe Manchin’s conflicts of interest quoted a source saying, “It says something fascinating about our politics that we’re going to have a representative of fossil fuel interests crafting the policy that reduces our emissions from fossil fuels.” A lot of people would say that’s less fascinating than horrific, particularly in the context of a new global survey of people between 16 and 25 that found that more than half of them believe “humanity is doomed”—and that 58% of young people said their governments are betraying them. You can’t talk about why we can’t get to realistic climate policy without talking about that betrayal, and its roots. Which is why we talk about Joe Manchin with David Moore, co-founder of investigative news outlet Sludge. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210924Moore.mp3 Transcript: ‘Manchin Has Taken the Lead in Diluting Ethics Provisions’ Also on the show: We get an update on media coverage of Covid with FAIR’s editor, Jim Naureckas. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210924Naureckas.mp3 Transcript: ‘You Should Get the Vaccine Despite the Media Telling You You Should’   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Rahm Emanuel’s ambassadorial nomination. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210924Banter.mp3  

  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s response to Jake Tapper that her proposals would save far more than they cost was ruled to be not an answer at all by Tapper’s colleague Chris Cillizza (CNN, 9/18/18). Jake Tapper’s career is inextricably linked to America’s so-called longest-running war. His travels there, and book–turned–Hollywood film detailing his exploits, are how, more than any other beat, he polished his reputation as a Serious Journalist, and not just another pretty suit behind a desk. He’s reported dozens of stories on the conflict, done book events, tweeted nonstop for years about the war in Afghanistan, and done scores of segments on the conflict, including a two-hour primetime special earlier this month lamenting “what went wrong” in the war for the United States. The second-most essential beat to cementing his gravitas has been his Very Serious concern about debts and deficits—i.e. grilling liberals, leftists and progressives for over 20 years about “how they will pay for” broad social welfare programs. Suspiciously, these two primary Tapper beats have never crossed paths. Which is strange, because, as a new Brown University study shows, the post-9/11 wars have cost the Pentagon $14 trillion, one-third to one-half of which went to US military contractors. That’s between $4.6 trillion and $7 trillion, just on contractors for the post-9/11 wars. In one year alone—fiscal year 2020—the study finds that Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in contracts from the Pentagon. The Afghanistan War was itself a huge expense. A separate study from Brown University finds, “Since invading Afghanistan in 2001, the United States has spent $2.3 trillion on the war, which includes operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.” So what has Tapper highlighted to show the risks of runaway government spending? Let us examine items that have compelled Tapper to ask, “How will we pay for it?” Medicare for All Federal right to housing Federal jobs guarantee Tuition-free public college Canceling all student loan debt The Obama stimulus package Here he is grilling New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over several of the items, all in one clip: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defends an estimated $40 trillion price tag for progressive policy programs, including Medicare for all https://t.co/ZqR6WWpmI2 pic.twitter.com/JoDDeIq712 — CNN (@CNN) September 16, 2018   Sarah Lazare (In These Times, 3/2/20) noted that debate moderators “are saying we can afford policies that spread militarism—but not those that protect human life.” Tapper has used some of the biggest platforms possible to engage in this line of questioning. As Column contributor Sarah Lazare noted in March 2020, “Night one of the second democratic debate, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked four questions in close succession, grilling candidates on how Medicare for All would be paid for.” In just one example, he said to then-candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, “At the last debate, you said you’re, quote, ​‘with Bernie on Medicare for All’”: ​Now, Senator Sanders has said that people in the middle class will pay more in taxes to help pay for Medicare for all, though that will be offset by the elimination of insurance premiums and other costs. Are you also, quote, ​”with Bernie” on Medicare for All when it comes to raising taxes on middle-class Americans to pay for it? As Lazare noted in the piece, there were zero questions asked to the centrist Democrats on stage about how they planned on “paying for” their support for large military budgets and wars. Now, let us examine the items Tapper has never asked how they would pay for it (costs over 20 years): Annual 700+ billion defense budgets us (~$14 trillion) Iraq War ($2 trillion) Afghanistan War ($2.3 trillion) ISIS war ($14 billion) The CIA ($300 billion) An audit of transcripts, tweets and articles authored by Tapper reveals no questions over deficit concerns for these big ticket items. The reason for this glaring inconsistency is that high-profile media brands like Tapper simply do not view the expense of empire maintenance to be debatable, contestable or subject to critical analysis. This expense just is—like gravity or the universal constant. These institutions exist, always have existed, and are beyond the realm of politics. Whereas programs that house the homeless, feed the poor, combat climate chaos, provide childcare, educate people, build roads and schools, and provide jobs for the working class are “expensive” “progressive” “wishlists” with “price tags” that need to be constantly justified item by item to the half cent. Never mind that, year after year, the Pentagon can’t complete a basic audit and can’t account for $21 trillion in spending. The real drivers of our deficit are dreaded liberal programs. The banal and unremarkable war machine whose bloat and borderline criminal waste is rubber stamped every year by Congress and corporate media alike requires no such interrogation. Alo

    (Kendall Hunt, 2021) This week on CounterSpin: The primary “sense” of Sub-Saharan Africa in corporate media is absence. When Africa is discussed, it’s often been, to put it simply, as a material resource and as a staging ground for Great Nation politics and proxy war. Not as far removed as it ought to be from the Berlin conference in the late 19th century, when the European powers sat down to decide who got which slice of what the genocidal King Leopold II of Belgium called “this magnificent African cake.” Challenging and changing the frame requires seeing through the racist fables, the omissions and hypocrisy that have plagued US media’s Africa reporting through history and up to today. A new book takes that on, and we hear this week from its author. Milton Allimadi teaches African history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and publishes the Black Star News, a weekly newspaper in New York City. He’s the author of the new book Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in Western Media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210917Allimadi.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Demonization Was Meant to Pacify Readers to Accept the Brutality’

Remembering the Last US Retaliation Against Terror by Jeff Cohen (Column, 9/14/01) “Outrage is the natural and appropriate response to the mass murder of September 11. But media should not be glibly encouraging retaliatory violence without remembering that US retaliation has killed innocent civilians abroad, violated international law and done little to make us safer.” Nightly News Glosses Over Anti-Terrorism Act (Action Alert, 9/27/01) “The report—which ends by saying that ‘no one really knows how much authority the new security czar will really have’—suggests that to stay safe, Americans must surrender liberties without even pausing to ask which ones.” When Journalists Report for Duty by Norman Solomon (Extra! Update, 10/01) “Restrictive government edicts, clamping down on access to information and on-the-scene reports, would be bad enough if mainstream news organizations were striving to function independently. American journalism is sometimes known as the Fourth Estate—but Dan Rather is far from the only high-profile journalist who now appears eager to turn his profession into a fourth branch of government.” Retaliation: Reality vs. Pundit Fantasy by Jim Naureckas (Extra! Update, 10/01) “One non–Boy Scout the CIA worked with in the 1980s was none other than Osama bin Laden (MSNBC, 8/24/98; Atlantic, 7–8/91)—then considered a valuable asset in the fight against Communism, but now suspected of being the chief instigator of the September 11 attacks.” Why They Hate Us: Looking for a Flattering Answer by Jim Naureckas (Extra! Update, 10/01) “Even before investigators identified Arab militants as the apparent hijackers, the media assumption was that the terrorists had ties to the Mideast. But rather than a serious examination of what political realities might contribute to an anti-American climate there, many media commentators offered little more than self-congratulatory rhetoric.” Extra! (11-12/01) Patriotism and Censorship: Some Journalists Are Silenced, While Others Seem Happy to Muzzle Themselves by Seth Ackerman and Peter Hart (Extra!, 11–12/01) “War fever in the wake of the September 11 attacks has led to a wave of self-censorship as well as government pressure on the media. With American flags adorning networks’ on-screen logos, journalists are feeling rising pressure to exercise ‘patriotic’ news judgment, while even mild criticism of the military, George W. Bush and US foreign policy are coming to seem taboo.” Us vs. Them by Jim Naureckas (Extra!, 11–12/01) “It’s still ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ in other words, and we are told to care very much when ‘we’ are in danger and are explicitly warned not to worry too much about ‘their’ lives. Saying that it ‘seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardships in Afghanistan’ (Washington Post, 10/31/01), CNN chief Walter Isaacson even announced that the network would air some kind of disclaimer whenever footage of dead or wounded Afghans is shown.” Are You a Terrorist? by Rachel Coen (Extra!, 11–12/01) “The legal definition of ‘terrorism’ is crucial because the USA PATRIOT act gives law enforcement broad new powers to be used against ‘terrorist’ individuals and groups. The American Civil Liberties Union (10/23/01) warns that this new definition will ‘sweep in people who engage in acts of political protest’ if those acts could be deemed dangerous to human life.” ‘No Spin Zone’? by Peter Hart (Extra!, 11–12/01) “FAIR activists sent hundreds of letters to O’Reilly after his September 17 program, urging him to consider the ramifications of his rhetoric—and the fact that bombing civilian targets and using starvation as a weapon are war crimes.” As if Reality Wasn’t Bad Enough: Dan Rather Spread Alarmist Rumors on September 11 by Jim Naureckas in Extra!, 11–12/01) “But is it really inevitable that anchors will pass on uncorroborated stories to the public—and portray them as fact, not rumor? For days, New Yorkers expressed surprise that the George Washington Bridge story was not true—victims of a needless panic that Dan Rather had helped to spread.” Network of Insiders: TV News Relied Mainly on Officials to Discuss Policy by Seth Ackerman (Extra!, 11–12/01) “No experts on international law appeared, even though a lively debate among international jurists has been brewing since September 11 over how the United States could respond legally to the attacks. Very few university-based experts on the Middle East appeared. (The main exception was [Fouad] Ajami.) This absence contributed to the networks’ striking lack of explanation of what United States’ policies in the Middle East have been in recent years.” The Op-ed Echo Chamber: Little or No Space for Dissent From the Military Line by Steve Rendall (Extra!, 11–12/01) “Whether the mainstream daily op-ed page was ever a true forum for debate or for ‘nontraditional voices’ is questionabl

  (cc photo: Beth Wilson) This week on CounterSpin: Many people will know that the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade in 1973, enshrining women’s right to access abortion—to choose when and whether to have a child. It seemed to signal recognition that abortion is healthcare, that most women who have abortions are mothers (in other words, they don’t need to have an ultrasound to recognize what’s happening), that medical reality and theology are not the same, and that outlawing abortion doesn’t stop it, but just pushes women to have unsafe abortions. Less often considered is how immediately after Roe, Congress passed the Hyde amendment, taking this fundamental human right out of the hands of women who rely on government assistance—so low-income, overwhelmingly women of color. Hyde acknowledged that they wanted to outlaw abortion for all women, but poor women were the only ones they had legal standing to control. That cynical approach proved effective, as Americans watched the ability to access abortion chipped away, with wait times, parental notification rules, hospital credential requirements, clinic closings, funding cutoffs for international groups—all the while comforted by the notion that the “right” to abortion was somehow still legally protected. That narrative is exploding right now in the wake of the Supreme Court’s refusal to address, which amounts to an endorsement, what is overwhelmingly understood as an unconstitutional Texas law offering a bounty on anyone who “aids and abets” a woman seeking an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. We’ll talk with Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild and author of, among other titles, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210910Cohn.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Radical Right-Wing Majority of the Supreme Court May Well Overturn Roe v. Wade’ And we’ll revisit a conversation from January of this year about what law can and can’t do, with Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the group URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210910InezMcGuire.mp3 Transcript: ‘Restrictions on Abortion Are Invisible Because They Appear Based on Who You Are’

  Purdue heir David Sackler and wife Joss depicted in Vanity Fair (6/19/19) This week on CounterSpin: The engineers of the crack epidemic were never offered a deal to get out of the biz with impunity as long as they gave some money towards helping the families, communities and healthcare systems broken in the wake of the addiction epidemic they unleashed. Nor were any other neighborhood drug dealers you can think of, caught making money off drugs that, hey, they’re also very sorry if anyone used irresponsibly? Somehow that’s not the most relevant context for corporate media talking about the bankruptcy ruling shielding the Sackler family, profiteers via Purdue Pharma on the drug Oxycontin, responsible for, conservatively, half a million deaths by overdose. We’ll talk about that with Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210903Claypool.mp3 Transcript: ‘Where Are the Threads Dropped With the Criminal Investigation of the Sackler Family?’ CEPR (1/21/20) Also on the show: You’ve seen the graphic showing how the US minimum wage has become unhinged from other indicators it should connect to, like productivity—the value of the goods and services that, after all, workers produce. But how did that disconnect happen, and how would a true understanding of that help us push through foggy reportage toward a better world? We’ll get a breakdown of ideas elite media generally talk over from economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210903Baker.mp3 Transcript: ‘We’ve Structured Our Economy to Redistribute a Massive Amount of Income Upward’

Image: Charles C.J. Hoffbauer Anyone born before last week can see US news media lying about history as it’s happening. But fast forward to 10, 20 years from now, and those media stories will have hardened into narrative, into the unspoken “given” presented as context for the latest thing. That’s the power of history as told. A power well understood by James Loewen, the historian and author who died August 19 at the age of 79. Some US media are now lauding Jim Loewen, but without ceasing to generate the very sort of misty misinformation he fought against. CounterSpin spoke with James Loewen in July 2015. We listen again to that conversation this week.   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210827Loewen.mp3 Transcript: ‘That’s the Biggest Lie, That We Started Out Great and We’ve Been Getting Better Ever Since’   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of climate “terrorism” and “generous” unemployment benefits. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210827Banter.mp3

(LA Times, 8/16/21) This week on CounterSpin: US news media are full of armchair generals who talk about weapons of war like they’re Hot Wheels, and have lots of thoughts about how “we coulda got ’em” here and “we shoulda got ’em” there. The price of admission to elite media debate is acceptance that the US, alone among nations, has the right to force change in other countries’ governments; and when this results, as it always does, in death and destruction, elite media’s job entails telling the public that that’s not just necessary but somehow good. Not to put too fine a point on it. All of this and more is on display in coverage of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan—along with, as usual, some exceptional countervailing reporting. Ending the US occupation could mean a new day for the Afghan people, but with the anniversary of September 11 coming up, it looks like US media consumers may need not a broom but a shovel to deal with the self-aggrandizing, history-erasing misinformation headed our way. We’ll prepare ourselves with insights on Afghanistan from Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and from Matthew Hoh, senior fellow with the Center for International Policy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210820Bennis.mp3 https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210820Hoh.mp3 Transcript: ‘Accountability to the People of Afghanistan Should Remain Our Focal Point’ and ‘So Much of This War Has Got Almost Nothing to Do With the Afghans Themselves’

  Jeff Cohen co-founded FAIR in 1986 and is the author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. This week on CounterSpin: Listeners to this show may take it as a given that, if you care about social, racial, economic justice, you have to also care about media—because corporate news media promote narratives that shape public opinion, public policy and all of our lives. Now we understand that tales that mainstream news media tell every day—”Healthcare for everyone is too expensive,” “rich people contribute to the economy, while workers just take from it,” “the rest of the world sees the US as the exemplar of democracy”—are not demonstrable truths, but reflect the interests and priorities of media owners and sponsors. But it wasn’t always this way; there was a time—not long ago—when folks would tell you if it’s in the paper it must be true, and media’s idea of the limits of political debate and political possibility ought to be your limits too, if you’re sensible. Undoing that myth—with criticism and activism and promoting alternative sources of information—has been the project of FAIR, the worker collective media watch group that produces this show, for 35 years now. We’re celebrating that anniversary by working more, basically, but this week we take a look back at FAIR’s beginnings with founder Jeff Cohen. After starting FAIR with Martin Lee and Pia Gallegos in 1986, Jeff went on to be founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, and now co-founder and policy adviser at the online initiative RootsAction. In between, he was a pundit on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, and wrote the book Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210813Cohen.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Media Are an Arena for Struggle’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look at media coverage of the Olympics. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210813Banter.mp3