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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Pro-government rally, Cuba (photo: AP/Eliana Aponte) This week on CounterSpin: Imagine if China used its power to cut off international trade to the US, including for things like medical equipment, because they didn’t like Joe Biden, and hoped that if enough Americans were made miserable, they would rise up against him, and install a leader China thought would better serve their interests. How would you think about Chinese media that said, “Well, we heard a lot of Americans say they were unhappy; they even marched in the street! Obviously, that was a call for foreign intervention from a country that understands democracy better than they do.” And then what if some Chinese people said, “Wait, you can’t immiserate ordinary Americans to push them to overthrow their government; that’s illegal and immoral,” and other Chinese people explained, “You don’t get it; US politics are very complicated”? We talk about the admitted complexities of the hardships facing Cubans—and the relatively uncomplicated actions the US could take to stop contributing to those hardships—with James Early, board member at the Institute for Policy Studies, and former assistant secretary for education and public service at the Smithsonian Institution. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210806Early.mp3 Transcript: ‘Economic Warfare [Is] Designed to Starve the Cuban People Into Rebellion’ Lincoln, Nebraska (image: Today, 7/13/21) Also on the show: David Cooper, senior research analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, joins us to parse the “we all quit” phenomenon currently coursing through the US wage labor workforce, and through US economic news media. Does media’s narrative really match what’s going on? https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210806Cooper.mp3 Transcript: ‘There Is a Fundamental Imbalance in the Power of Employers and Employees’

  In the wake of the Capitol Hill insurrection, FAIR (1/18/21) noted “a new and refreshing ability to apply accurate labels to people and their behaviors…and to apportion blame based on reality, not a wished-for fantasy of balance.” After January 6, we noted (FAIR.org, 1/18/21) that many in corporate media finally found the courage to cast aside their commitment to false equivalence. Presumably shocked by what they had witnessed, reporters began using words like “sedition” and “incitement” without having to put them in the mouth of a source who could then be balanced by an opposing view. News outlets directly stated that Donald Trump “set in motion” (New York Times, 1/6/21) or was responsible for “inciting” (CNN.com, 1/12/21) the deadly attack on democracy. Yet we also noted that Trump’s lack of support at the time from within the establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike, made that honesty easier for reporters—some of whom nevertheless couldn’t shake their old habits as a debate began over whether Trump should be impeached yet again for inciting the insurrection. Six months later, Trump has solidified his grip on the right, and elite journalists have largely returned to their perfunctory both-sides reporting. ‘Political chaos’ Because Republicans refused to participate in the January 6 hearings unless pro-insurrection members could be on the panel, the Washington Post (7/25/21) declared that “a cloud of controversy…threatens to compromise the investigation from the outset.” On Tuesday, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol began its inquiry into the right-wing insurrection. But investigations can lead to calls for accountability, so the Trumpist right, which has doubled down on its own innocence and its election fraud lie, is doing everything in its power to thwart it. Corporate journalists are handling it shockingly poorly. PressRun‘s Eric Boehlert (7/27/21) collected some choice lines: “January 6 Select Committee to Open Investigation Amid Political Chaos and Controversy” — Washington Post (7/25/21) “Congress’ effort to investigate the January 6th attack on the Capitol has turned into another political battle” — NBC News (Twitter, 7/22/21) “It was also the latest evidence of how poisonous relations have become between the two parties, especially in the House” — New York Times (7/21/21) What “battle” prompted such “political chaos”? House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi rejected two of the five Republican nominees to the committee: Jim Banks and Jim Jordan, both of whom had been vocal supporters of efforts to undermine the election and had condemned the inquiry itself, and whose nominations were clearly intended to subvert the committee’s work. (Banks had declared that the committee was created “solely to malign conservatives and to justify the left’s authoritarian agenda.”) Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy then announced a GOP boycott of the committee. Rather than report this obvious stunt for what it was, journalists happily played up the right’s fake shock and outrage. Pelosi “stunned the GOP” with the move, reported an embarrassingly credulous Politico piece (7/21/21). “Both parties have attacked the other as insincere and uninterested in conducting a fair-minded examination,” mused a Washington Post report (7/21/21). “Nancy Pelosi just doomed the already tiny chances of the 1/6 committee actually mattering,” lamented CNN‘s Chris Cillizza (7/21/21). ‘Two ways of viewing the world’ It’s not just Washington politics. The right’s strategy across the board depends on falsehood and bad faith, but too many reporters refuse to acknowledge that. The Washington Post‘s report (7/24/21) on racist incidents at a Michigan school highlighted “white parents’ growing conviction that their children are being taught to feel ashamed of their whiteness — and their country.” The Washington Post (7/24/21) recently published a report about “a war over critical race theory” in Traverse City, Michigan. In April, a group of local white students “held a mock slave auction” on Snapchat in which they “traded” their Black peers for money. Also featured in the Snapchat: messages such as “all Blacks should die” and “let’s start another Holocaust.” This prompted the school system in the overwhelmingly white town to fast-track an equity resolution to condemn and address racism. The Post‘s Hannah Natanson explained: But what happened over the next two months revealed how a town grappling with an undeniable incident of racism can serve as fertile ground for the ongoing national war over whether racism is embedded in American society. So the paper will admit that the isolated incident was undeniably ra

  Little Rock, 1957 This week on CounterSpin: You’ve almost certainly seen the documentary photographs; they’re emblematic: African Americans trying to walk to school or sit at a drugstore soda fountain, while white people yell and spit and scream at them. Should no one see those pictures or learn those stories—because some of them have skin the same color as those doing the screaming and the spitting? The most recent attack on anti-racist education is labeled as protective, as avoiding “division,” and as a specific assessment of critical race theory. To the extent that corporate media have bought into that labeling, they’ve misinformed the public—not just about critical race theory, but about a campaign whose own architects say is about disinforming, confusing and inflaming people into resisting any actual effort to understand or respond to persistent racial inequity. Luke Charles Harris is co-founder and deputy director of the African American Policy Forum. He joins us to talk about what’s at issue. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210730Harris.mp3 Transcript: ‘We Can’t Fight for Racial Justice if We Can’t Learn About Racial Injustice’ (image: EFF) Also on the show: Democracy & technology and digital rights groups around the world signed on to a letter in support of encryption: the ability of journalists, human rights defenders and everyone else to have private communication—to talk to one another without being spied on by governments, including their own. You’d think it’d be a big deal, but judging by US corporate media, it’s evidently a yawn. We talk about what’s going on and why it matters with Cindy Cohn, executive director at Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210730Cohn.mp3 Transcript: ‘Governments Are Spying on the People Who Bring Us the News’

      Janine Jackson interviewed Black Alliance for Peace’s Chris Bernadel about the Haitian presidential assassination for the July 16, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210716Bernadel.mp3   New York Times (7/8/21) Janine Jackson: As we record July 14, there is still uncertainty about what exactly happened in the early hours of last Wednesday, July 7, when Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was killed and his wife wounded. Reports have it that the assassins included 26 Colombians—some likely trained, as many Colombian military, are, by the US, and deployed as mercenaries around the world—and two Haitian Americans, possibly with ties to Haitian oligarchies, possibly misled about the nature of their mission. It’s also said that Moïse’s own guards had to have been involved. That the assailants yelled “DEA!” as they attacked. And that a Miami-based doctor might be at the core of it all. Much will be made in US news media about these particulars, and the murkiness around them. What we know more clearly is the century-old history of US intervention in Haiti, the reasons routinely offered for such intervention, and the results. That narrative is reflected in the New York Times July 8 report, with a thumbnail telling readers that Haiti’s “morass has for decades put it near the top of a list of nations, such as Afghanistan and Somalia, that have captured the world’s imagination for their levels of despair.” That’s coupled with a dramatic image: a shadowy silhouette of a woman “receiving a box of food aid,” as the caption tells us, “after the 2010 earthquake.” In case you missed it: The world gives; Haiti takes. And yet, despite being “propped up,” as the piece had it, by “vast amounts of humanitarian assistance,” Haiti continues to be a chaotic mess, explaining why, as the Miami Herald editorial board put it, the US “has no choice but to take the lead to stabilize Haiti.” The Washington Post called for a “swift and muscular” intervention. So far not in evidence in US media coverage: regular Haitian people, who might have something more complicated to say, outside of the acceptance of the brutish midnight murder of officials and acceptance of the brutish intervention of outside governments. Chris Bernadel works with the Black Alliance for Peace Haiti and the Americas Committee. He joins us now by phone from Los Angeles. Welcome to CounterSpin, Chris Bernadel. Chris Bernadel: Hi, thanks for having me today. Guardian (7/10/21) JJ: A Guardian piece describes fears that Haiti is now “lurching into a new phase of political and social upheaval.” Not that there can’t be ever-new flavors of upheaval, heaven knows, but it’s not a matter of things in Haiti suddenly taking a turn for the bad. I wonder if you could talk about what was going on in Haiti on July 6, before these events, that listeners might understand as context for what came after? CB: Yes, the Black Alliance for Peace released a press release on July 6 regarding the United States, the OAS and the UN support for unconstitutional actions that were being taken by the de facto government of Jovenel Moïse, the illegitimate government in Haiti at the time. We released that press release to shine a light on the US’s support for Jovenel Moïse, even though he had been ruling the country by decree since January 2020, and had been trying to push through with the referendum that had been rejected by every sector of Haitian civil society, and by the masses of people. The people in Haiti had been protesting consistently, starting in 2018 with protests against Jovenel Moïse because of the PetroCaribe scandal, which we can talk about, where billions of dollars were embezzled, dollars that were meant to go to the development of Haitian infrastructure—Haitian public health and public safety infrastructure. So the situation in Haiti on July 6, when we released that press release, was one where the United States had been supporting their ally, the de facto ruler Jovenel Moïse—who had been ruling by decree in a country where the parliament had been dismissed, where the supreme court or high court judges had been arrested, and where there had been numerous massacres and killings of human rights lawyers, activists. And over the days between June 25 to June 30, Haiti was subjected to increased state-sponsored violence, increased gang violence; there were killings in the capital city of Port-au-Prince of up to 60 people. A notable and prominent human rights activist and feminist, Antoinette Duclair, was murdered, as well as Diego Charles, who was a journalist. So the situation in Haiti, up until that point, was a volatile situation, and the people in Haiti were, up until that point, rising up and struggling against a de facto regime that had been acting unconstitutionally, and that had been sponsoring massacres throughout

    New York Times (6/22/21) This week on CounterSpin: A June New York Times article about female Asian-American and Pacific Islander golfers reacting to the recent spike in anti-Asian bias began inauspiciously: “Players of Asian descent have won eight of the past 10 Women’s PGA championships, but there is nothing cookie cutter about the winners.” It reads like a TikTok challenge: “Tell me you assume your readership is white without telling me you assume your readership is white.” In other words, it’s unclear who, exactly, the New York Times believes would, without their guidance, confuse a Chinese-American player with a South Korean player with a player from Taiwan. The piece goes on to talk about the concerns and fears of Asian-American golfers “at a time when Asians have been scapegoated in American communities for the spread of the coronavirus.” Locating the source of racist bias and violence in “American communities,” with no mention of powerful politicians or powerful media, is a neat way to sidestep the role of systemic, structural racism, and imply that bias or “hate” is an individual, emotional issue, rather than one we can and should address together, across community, as a society. Add in media’s frequent prescription of law enforcement as the primary response, and you have what a large number of Asian Americans are calling a problem presenting itself as a solution, and not a way forward that actually makes them safer. We’ll talk about anti-Asian bias and underexplored responses to it with Bianca Nozaki-Nasser, from the group 18 Million Rising. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210723Nozaki-Nasser.mp3 Transcript: ‘If Police Made Asian Americans Safe, We’d Already Be Safe’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of theft—retail and wholesale. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210723Banter.mp3   Featured image: Solidarity Against Hate Crimes march, March 20, 2021, Columbus, Ohio (cc photo: Paul Becker)  

Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Adm. Mike Mullen (center) with US troops in Haiti, 2010 (photo: Chad J. McNeeley/DoD) This week on CounterSpin: There are enough storylines in the July 7 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse to make you lose sight of the big picture. The thing is: US media consumers don’t have to puzzle out if the assassins were Colombian, or if a Florida doctor bankrolled the plan, or if Moïse’s own bodyguards had it in for him and his wife. The long history of the US using state force to kill Haitians and their aspirations is sufficient and appropriate context for current events. From George Washington to Woodrow Wilson to the Clintons, there’s enough for US citizens to know about not doing harm before we chinstroke over whether “the world’s policeman” should wade in again. We talk about Haiti with Chris Bernadel from the Black Alliance for Peace. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210716Bernadel.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Haitian People Aren’t Looking for Foreign Powers to Impose a New System’ Also on the show: Cronyism between pharmaceutical companies and their ostensible government regulators is an infuriating fact of US life, along with the unsurprisingly obscene cost of drugs. Yet somehow the story of aducanumab takes it to a new level. We talk about what pharma and the FDA call a breakthrough Alzheimer’s drug, and what public advocates call an example of all that’s wrong with the FDA, with Michael Carome, M.D., director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210716Carome.mp3 Transcript: ‘The FDA’s Decision Showed a Stunning Disregard for Science’    

Child chocolate worker in the Ivory Coast (Fortune, 3/1/16) (photo: Benjamin Lowy) This week on CounterSpin: Nestle CEO Mark Schneider told investors in February that “2020 was a year of hardship for so many,” yet he was “inspired by the way it has brought all of us closer together.” And also by an “improvement” in Nestle’s “profitability and return on invested capital.” “The global pandemic,” Schneider said, “did not slow us down.” You know what else didn’t slow them down? Ample evidence that their profitability relies on a supply chain that includes literal slave labor in the Ivory Coast. The US Supreme Court recently heard Nestle USA v. Doe, a long-running case that seemed to get at how much responsibility corporations have for international human rights violations, but in the end may have taught us more about what legal tools are useful in getting to that accountability. We got some clarity on the case from William Dodge, professor at University of California/Davis School of Law. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210709Dodge.mp3 Transcript: ‘US Companies Can Be Sued for Involvement in Child Slavery’ AP (6/30/21) Also on the show: Donald Rumsfeld launched wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and approved torture at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. But to hear elite media tell it, the former Defense secretary should be remembered as “complex and paradoxical.” The New York Times described his arrival in Washington as “like an All-American who had stepped off the Wheaties box,” and AP suggested that all those dead Iraqis were mainly a thorn in Rumsfeld’s side, with the headline, “Donald Rumsfeld, a Cunning Leader Undermined by the Iraq War.” Obituaries noted that Rumsfeld expressed no regrets about his decisions; media appear to have none of their own. CounterSpin talked about Rumsfeld’s media treatment back in 2008 with the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Michael Ratner, whose book The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld had just come out from the New Press. We’ll hear that conversation on today’s show. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210709Ratner.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Techniques Rumsfeld Was Using Were Designed to Get False Information’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the New Cold War. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210709Banter.mp3

  USA Today (7/1/20) This week on CounterSpin: For many US citizens the Fourth of July is really just a chance to barbecue with friends and family. But for US media, it’s also a chance to say or imply that there really is something to celebrate about the unique place of the United States in the world, the special democratic project that this country is supposedly engaged in. And that’s where the message gets complicated. Because while media give air time and column inches to where you can find the best holiday sales and celebrations, fewer will use the occasion to direct attention to the danger that the democratic project is facing, the energetic efforts to silence the voices of anyone who has something critical to say about this country, its practices and policies, or its history. Celebrate, don’t interrogate—is the takeaway from a press corps that wants to tell you how to protect your dog from fireworks, but not how to protect yourself and your society from well-funded, well-entrenched campaigns to stop people from voting or speaking or going into the street to protest things that are wrong. We’ll talk about that with Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210702Eidelman.mp3 Transcript: ‘We Have Seen the Deepening of the Anti-Democratic, Anti-Protest Legislative Trend’ Washington Post depiction (6/28/21) of Pacific heat dome (from earth.nullschool.net) Also on the show: As the West Coast deals with a historic heatwave and drought, some city officials are banning fireworks to help prevent wildfires. If that’s some folks’ first indication that climate disruption will actually disrupt their lives, well, media need to take some of the blame. A recent Washington Post piece on the unprecedented, punishing heat in the Pacific Northwest stressed how readers would be wrong to be shocked: Everybody saw this coming; there have been “40 years of warnings.” It had a breaker reading “Chickens Coming Home to Roost,” it used the phrase “human-caused.”… It’s just that the words “fossil fuels” appear nowhere. So climate disruption is a horrible thing that’s happening, and we’re all to blame for not acknowledging it…but who is to blame for doing it? Well, that’s unclear. Just know that you should be worried and upset. A CBS News piece did say: “This is only the beginning of the heating expected if humanity continues burning fossil fuels.” And it ended with Michael Mann calling for “rapidly decarboniz[ing] our civilization.” And that stripe of coverage is fine as far as it goes. But how far does it go? Where is the reporting that frankly identifies fossil fuels as the problem (rather than how long a shower I take), and incorporates that knowledge into all of the coverage—of Enbridge 3 and other pipelines, of extreme weather events, of how, as CNBC had it recently, “It’s not too late to buy oil and gas stocks.” Why won’t media move past narrating the nightmare of climate disruption, to using their powerful platforms to actually address it? We’ll talk about that with Vivek Shandas; he focuses on the particular implications of climate change on cities, and on different people within cities, as a professor at Portland State University. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210702Shandas.mp3 Transcript: ‘That’s Lethal, Communities Completely Exposed to This Kind of Heat’

  Protest in Union Square, New York (cc photo: Jim Naureckas) This week on CounterSpin: “Biden Administration Ousts Trump’s Border Patrol Chief,” announced the June 24 New York Times, explaining in the subhed that Rodney Scott “had become known for his support of President Donald J. Trump’s signature border wall, and had resisted a Biden initiative to stop using the phrase ‘illegal alien.”’ Ergo, we are to understand, his “forcing out” by the White House—suggesting a meaningful departure from the immigration policies of the previous administration. The message is undermined by the subsequent acknowledgement from the paper’s anonymous Homeland Security source that Scott “could remain in the department, reassigned to a new post.” The notion of real change is undermined more severely by a close look at Biden’s actual immigration policy, particularly with regard to Central America, which includes familiar promises to promote “the rule of law, security and economic development” in the region, and to fight corruption. Familiar because they’ve been used for decades as cover for policies that pour money into regional governments that agree to use it to protect the profits of foreign investors, by violence if necessary (and it’s always necessary), and even when it means communal and environmental devastation, which are also par for the course. So what’s new? We’ll talk about Central America policy and Honduras in particular with Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210625Carlsen.mp3 Transcript: US ‘Intervention Has Directly Led to the Conditions Migrants Are Fleeing’ (cc photo: Paul Lowry) Also on the show: Texas state Rep. Jim Murphy may wish he’d never called attention to Chapter 313—the state program that offers companies major tax breaks to locate in the state. The alarming price tag attached to Murphy’s proposal to expand the program led some to examine Chapter 313 carefully for the first time. The Houston Chronicle produced a groundbreaking investigative series on the program and its costs. A somewhat motley coalition of opposition was formed. And now—after being easily renewed three times since 2001—the program is set to expire. We’ll hear why that’s good news for Texas schools, taxpayers and the planet from Greg LeRoy, executive director of the group Good Jobs First. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210625LeRoy.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Tax Break Industrial Complex Has Not Been Challenged’