FAIR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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