CounterSpin

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240112.mp3   Yahoo (1/4/24) This week on CounterSpin: The journalists at Yahoo Finance tell us that a Connecticut McDonald’s charging $18 for a combo meal has “sparked a nationwide debate” on escalating prices in the fast food industry. The outrage, readers are told, is “partly attributed” to a recent raise in the minimum wage—which has not yet gone into effect. Spoiler: We never hear about any other “parts” “attributed.”  Businesses like McDonald’s, the story goes, “have already raised their prices in anticipation of the wage hike.” Were there any other responses available to them? Don’t ask! We’re moving on—to how it isn’t just that poor working Joes will have to pay more for a Big Mac, but also there will be layoffs…of fast-food employees. We meet Jose and Jim, who say they thought higher wages would be good, “considering the decline in tipping and increasing living costs.” Alas no, Yahoo explains: “The reality was harsher. The wage increase, while beneficial for some, has resulted in job losses for others, leading to a complex mix of gratitude and resentment among affected workers.” The takeaway: “The debate over the appropriate balance between fair wages and sustainable business practices remains unresolved.” The piece does go on to lament the mental stress associated with economic uncertainty—not for owners, evidently—and the wise counsel that those troubled might consider “establishing a substantial savings account and making smart investments.” Elite reporters seem so far removed from the daily reality of the bulk of the country that this doesn’t even ring weird to them. A raise in wages for fast food employees means fast food employees have to lose their jobs—that’s just, you know, “economics.” Union, what? Profiteering, who? The only operative question is, which low-wage workers need to suffer more? We get a different view on raising the minimum wage from Sebastian Martinez Hickey, researcher for the EARN (Economic Analysis and Research Network) team at the Economic Policy Institute. Transcript: ‘A Minimum-Wage Increase Can Benefit the Whole Economy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240112MartinezHickey.mp3   Tipped worker (cc photo: Daveblog) Also on the show: A largely unspoken part of media’s wage conversation is the whole sector of workers whose pay rates are based in…enslavement. Yeah. In 2015, CounterSpin learned about tipped wages from Saru Jayaraman, co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. We hear part of that relevant conversation this week. Transcript: ‘A Woman’s Ability to Pay Her Bills Should Not Be Dependent on the Whims of Customers’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240112Jayaraman.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240105.mp3   (image: Jewish Voice for Peace) This week on CounterSpin: It was a big deal when Jewish Americans who oppose US support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza filled New York’s Grand Central Terminal. But not big enough to make the front page of the local paper, the New York Times. US journalists invoke the First Amendment a lot, but not so much when it extends to regular folks using their individual voices, sometimes at significant personal risk, to say NO to something the US government is doing in their name. Some listeners may remember marching with thousands of others in advance of the US war on Iraq, only to come home and find the paper or TV station ignored them utterly, or distorted their effort and their message—as when NBC’s Tom Brokaw reported a Washington, DC, anti-war march of at least 100,000 people, met with a couple hundred pro-war counter-protesters, as: “Opponents and supporters of the war marched in cities across the nation on Saturday.” “Protest is the voice of the people,” our guest’s organization states. Defending Rights & Dissent aims to invigorate the Bill of Rights and, crucially, to protect our right to political expression. We talk with Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘Protest Is the Tool by Which We Realize Our Democracy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240105Gibbons.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the media’s role in the recent Republican primary debates. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240105Banter.mp3  

Transcript: ‘We Have to Do the Hard Work of Looking at Context’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231229.mp3   Janine Jackson Every week, CounterSpin tries to bring you a look “behind the headlines” of the mainstream news. Not because headlines are false, necessarily, but because the full story is rarely reflected there—the voices, the communities and ideas that are not front and center in the discourse of the powerful, but could help us move toward a more equitable, peaceful, healthy communal life. Many—most—conversations we need to have, have to happen around corporate news media, while deconstructing and re-imagining the discourse that they’re pumping out day after day. Guests featured in this special “best of” episode include: Paul Hudson, president of FlyersRights, on air travel chaos; Kamau Franklin, founder of Community Movement Builders, on Atlanta’s Cop City; Eric Thurm, campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, on artificial intelligence; Emily Sanders, editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity, on oil company lies; Kehsi Iman Wilson, chief operating officer of New Disabled South, on the Americans With Disabilities Act; Rodrigo Camarena, director of Justicia Lab, on wage theft; Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines group, on Covid-19 price-gouging; Phyllis Bennis, director of IPS’s New Internationalism project, on Gaza context; Sonya Meyerson-Knox, communications director of Jewish Voice for Peace, on Jewish-American voices on Gaza. CounterSpin is thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They help us see the world more clearly, as well as the role we can play in changing it. This is just a small selection of some of them.

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231222.mp3   Middle East Eye (12/14/23) This week on CounterSpin: People in the US, the story goes, value few things more than individual freedom and money. So you’d think the way an individual uses their money would be sacrosanct. It’s a sign of where we’re at that there are currently congressional efforts to put people in prison, fine them millions of dollars, for choosing not to buy products from countries that are not declared “official enemies” by, well, presumably whoever’s in the White House at the moment. The anti-boycott measure the House Foreign Affairs Committee is pushing may never see daylight, of course, but it indicates a willingness by some in elected office to use state power to silence and sanction anyone using their voice in dissent of official actions—in this one case, lest it be confused, of people critical of Israel’s ongoing mass murder and displacement of Palestinians. The work to shut down opposition to the siege of Gaza, and US facilitation of it, is reminding Americans of what it means when powerful institutions, including in the media, combine a decidedly selective understanding of free expression with a vehement desire to enforce it. We talked about that with Wadie Said, professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, and author of the book Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions, from Oxford University Press. Transcript: ‘”Material Support” in the Form of Speech Can Be Criminalized’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231222Said.mp3  

Transcript: ‘The Only Way to Have Meaningful Climate Policy Is to Beat the Oil Guys’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231215.mp3   New York Times (12/13/23) This week on CounterSpin: UN Climate talks have ended with an agreement that, most importantly—New York Times headlines would suggest—”Strikes Deal to Transition Away From Fossil Fuels.” Headlines, all that many people read, are often misleading, and sometimes they aggressively deflect from the point of the story, which in this case is that everyone who wasn’t a polluting corporate entity came away from COP28 angry, worried and frustrated at the way that fossil fuel companies have been able to endanger everyone with their actions, but also hornswoggle their way into media debate such that we’re all supposed to consider how to balance the life of humanity on the planet with the profit margins of a handful of billionaires. Corporate news media have a lot to answer for here, in terms of public understanding of climate disruption, what needs to happen, why isn’t it happening? Few things call more for an open public conversation about how to best protect all of us. Why can’t we have it? Well, mystery solved: The entities that are to blame for the problem have their hands in the means we would use to debate and conceivably address it. Put simply: We cannot have a public conversation about how fossil fuels cause climate disruption within a corporate media moneyed by fossil fuel companies. We know that, and they know that, which is why one of the biggest outputs of polluting corporations is PR—is management of our understanding of what’s going on. CounterSpin discussed fossil fuel corporations’ brazen lie factory almost precisely a year ago with Richard Wiles, director of the Center for Climate Integrity. We hear some of that conversation again this week. Transcript: ‘The Oil Companies Are the Reason We Don’t Have Climate Policy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231215Wiles.mp3   Also: When you talk about climate, a lot of folks go in their head to a picture of clouds, butterflies and wolves. Climate policy is about money and profit and the meaninglessness of all those beautiful vistas you might imagine—at least, that’s how many politicians think of it. We addressed that with Matthew Cunningham-Cook from the Lever in August of this year. And we hear some of that this week as well. Transcript: ‘We Line Up Policy With Campaign Contributions From Oil and Gas’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231215Cunningham-Cook.mp3   Climate disruption reality as filtrated through corporate media, this week on CounterSpin. Featured image:  Extinction Rebellion climate protest. Photo: VladimirMorozov/AKXmedia

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231208.mp3   (CC image: Jewish Voice for Peace) This week on CounterSpin: As we record on December 7, the news from Gaza continues horrific: The Washington Post is reporting, citing Gaza Health Ministry reports, that Israel’s continued assault throughout the region has killed at least 350 people in the past 24 hours, which brings the death toll of the Israeli military campaign, launched after the October 7 attack by Hamas that killed a reported 1,200 people, to more than 17,000. In this country, Columbia University has suspended two student groups protesting in support of Palestinian human rights and human beings, though the official message couldn’t specify which policies, exactly, had been violated. There are many important and terrible things happening in the world right now—from fossil fuel companies working to undo any democratic restraints on their ability to profit from planetary destruction; to drugmakers who’ve devastated the lives of millions using the legal system to say money, actually, can substitute for accountability; to an upcoming election that is almost too much to think about, and the Beltway press corps acting like it’s just another day. But the devastation of Gaza and the vehement efforts to silence anyone who wants to challenge it—and the failure of those efforts, as people nevertheless keep speaking up, keep protesting—is the story for today. Sonya Meyerson-Knox is communications director of Jewish Voice for Peace. We talk with her this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘”None of Us Are Free Unless All of Us Are Free” Is Not Just a Slogan’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231208Meyerson-Knox.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of climate change. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231208Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231201.mp3   ABC (6/22/23) This week on CounterSpin: “Abortion Politics Reveal Concerns” was the headline one paper gave a recent Associated Press story, language so bland it almost discourages reading the piece, which reports how right-wing politicians and anti-abortion activists are seeking to undermine or undo democratic processes when those processes accurately reflect the public desire to protect reproductive rights. Methods include “challenging election results, refusing to bring state laws into line with voter-backed changes, moving to strip state courts of their power to consider abortion-related laws, and challenging the citizen-led ballot initiative process itself.” So there is a way to cover abortion access as a political issue without reducing it to one. But too many outlets seem to have trouble shaking the framing of abortion as a “controversy,” or as posing problems for this or that politician, rather than presenting it as a matter of basic human rights that majorities in this country have long supported, and centering in their coverage the people who are being affected by its creeping criminalization. Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at the New Republic, and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work and of the forthcoming A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race and the Limits of Justice in America. She’s been reporting on abortion for years, and joins us this week to talk about it. Transcript: ‘The Reality of What It Is to Have an Abortion Has to Be Brought Into Every Story’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231201Grant.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of marriage and ideology. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231201banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231124.mp3   Washington Post (11/19/23) This week on CounterSpin: The new president of Argentina opposes abortion rights, casts doubt on the death toll of the country’s military dictatorship, would like it to be easier to access handguns and calls climate change a “lie of socialism.” Many were worried about what Javier Milei would bring, but, the Washington Post explained: “Anger won over fear. For many Argentines, the bigger risk was more of the same.” But if you want to dig down into the roots of that “same,” the economic and historic conditions that drove that deep dissatisfaction, US news media will be less helpful to you there. Milei is not a landslide popular president, and thoughtful, critical information and conversation could help clarify peoples’ problems and their sources, such that voters—in Argentina and elsewhere—might not be left to believe that the only way forward is a man wielding a literal chainsaw. We’ll learn about Javier Milei and what led to his election from Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the book Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy. Transcript: Milei Is ‘Really as Extreme as You Get in Right-Wing Libertarian Ideas’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231124Weisbrot.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at FAIR’s recent study on the Sunday shows’ Gaza guests. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231124Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231117.mp3   Time (11/6/23) This week on CounterSpin: Coverage of what is quite possibly not the most recent mass shooting, as we record the show, but the recent one in Lewiston, Maine, leaned heavily on a narrative of the assailant as a “textbook case” of a shooter, because he had some history of mental illness. FAIR’s Olivia Riggio wrote about how that storyline not only gets the relationship wrong—mental illness is not a predictor of gun violence, except in terms of suicide, but also underserves and even endangers those with mental illness, with at least one presidential candidate calling for a return to involuntary commitment.  What isn’t served is the public conversation around reducing gun violence. The Supreme Court has just heard the case US v. Rahimi, which is specifically about whether those under domestic violence restraining orders should have access to guns. Most media did better than Time magazine’s thumbnail of Rahimi as pitting “the safety of domestic violence victims against the nation’s broad Second Amendment rights”—because, as our guest explains, Rahimi is much more about whether this Court’s conservative majority will be able to use their special brand of backwards-looking to determine this country’s future. Scott Burris is a professor at Temple Law School and the School of Public Health, and he directs Temple’s Center for Public Health Law Research. We hear from him this week on the case. Transcript: ‘Worship of the Holy Framers Offers Us Nothing to Deal With the Problems We Have Today’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231117Burris.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Gaza crisis, and at McCarthyism. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231117Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231110.mp3   Truthout (11/9/23) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media use at least a couple of largely unexplored lenses through which to present US human rights violations. One is: The US does not commit human rights violations, except by accident, or as unavoidable collateral for an ultimately net-gain mission, be that international or domestic. The other is: They aren’t violations if the US does them, because we’re in a civilization war, a fight of good over evil, so all battles are holy, and you can’t commit human rights violations against non-humans, after all, so where’s the problem? Again, the narrative covers global and at-home violations. Elite media have trouble navigating the place of the US in a global context, and the media-consuming public suffers as a result. There’s a new report from the UN about this country and human rights. We’ll hear about it from Jamil Dakwar, director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU. Transcript: ‘You Cannot Preach on Human Rights When You Are Not Doing Enough at Home’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231110Dakwar.mp3   House Speaker Mike Johnson (CC photo: Gage Skidmore) Also on the show: Headlines tell us that the US public don’t know a lot about Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House of Representatives. That’s true as far as it goes, but isn’t it also a kind of admission of failure for a press corps that really should be actively involved in informing us about the person third in line for the presidency—like maybe his idea that some of the people he’s nominally representing should just burn in Hell? Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, will give us some things to consider as we see coverage of Mike Johnson unfold. Transcript: ‘A True Believer in Heinous Ideas’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231110Gertz.mp3