FAIR

    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’