CounterSpin

  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  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231103.mp3   New York Times (6/5/22) This week on CounterSpin: Elite media are fond of saying that the US is resetting its Middle East policy. During the 2020 campaign, the New York Times explained, Joe Biden pledged, if elected, to stop coddling Saudi Arabia, after the brutal murder of prominent dissident and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. “We are not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them,” Biden said. “We’re going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.” When officials said Biden would visit the kingdom in July of last year and meet with Mohammed bin Salman, understood as the architect of Khashoggi’s murder, a New York Times headline explained that Biden had “‘only bad options’ for bringing down oil prices.” We talked at the time with Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at DAWN, Democracy for the Arab World Now, an organization founded by Khashoggi. We’ll hear that conversation again today. Transcript: ‘In the Middle East, We Are Hearing a New Set of Excuses to Justify the Same Old Policy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231103Jarrar.mp3   Aftermath of Tulsa Massacre (photo via bswise) Also on the show:  “If you’re not careful,” Malcolm X famously warned, “the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” This is a problem of long standing, and in June 2021 we explored one case of it—the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma—with author and activist Joseph Torres. We hear that this week as well. Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231103Torres.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231027.mp3   Paxlovid tablets This week on CounterSpin: Advertising critics have long noted that a company’s PR tells you, inadvertently but reliably, exactly what their problems are. The ad features salmon splashing in crystalline waters? That company is for sure a massive polluter. That’s the lump of salt with which to take the recent announcement from the US Department of Health and Human Services that their new deal with Pfizer “extends patient access” to Covid treatment drug Paxlovid and “maximizes taxpayer investment”—as the HHS works with the drug company to “transition” Paxlovid “to the commercial market.” The announcement doesn’t note that this “transition” entails hiking the cost of the treatment to more than $1,300 for a five-day course, or 100 times the cost of production. We discuss this outrage, and what allows it, with Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines group at Public Citizen. Transcript: ‘Drug Corporations Have Really Been in the Driver’s Seat’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231027Maybarduk.mp3   (image: Truthout) Also on the show: CounterSpin listeners, more than many, recognize news media as a keystone issue—important not simply in their own right but to all of the other issues we care about. The media lens—the points of view that they show us day after day, those they obscure or ridicule—affects the way we understand the world, our neighbors and what’s politically possible. That’s why we see the fight for a thriving media ecosystem as bound up completely with the fights for social, racial, economic and environmental justice. We talked about that nexus with Maya Schenwar, author and editor at large of Truthout, and director of a new project, the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. Transcript: ‘Movement Media Has Really Emerged in Its Own Right’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231027Schenwar.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231020.mp3   (USDA, 1939) This week on CounterSpin: Government-supplied food assistance has been around in various forms since at least the Great Depression, but never with the straightforward goal of easing hunger. 1930s posters about food stamps declare, “We are helping the farmers of America move surplus foods”; that link between agriculture industry support and nutrition assistance continues to this day—which partly explains why the primary food aid program, SNAP, while the constant target of the anti-poor, racist, drown-government-in-the-bathtub crowd, keeps on keeping on. We talk with Christopher Bosso, professor of public policy and politics at Northeastern University, the author of a new book on that history, called Why SNAP Works: A Political History—and Defense—of the Food Stamp Program. Transcript: ‘Poverty in America Has Strong Structural Roots That Some People Profit From’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231020Bosso.mp3   Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911 Also on the show: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, in which 146 mainly immigrant women and girls died, many leaping from windows to escape the flames, horrified New Yorkers and galvanized the workers’ rights movement. The October 11 unveiling of a monument to those who didn’t just die, but were killed that day, put many in mind of how much still needs to change before we can think of things like Triangle Shirtwaist as relics of a crueler past. In 2015, CounterSpin spoke with Barbara Briggs of the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights about Rana Plaza, the 2013 catastrophe that killed more than a thousand workers in Bangladesh, in circumstances that in some ways echoed those of 102 years earlier. We’ll hear that interview again today. Transcript: ‘Workers Are the Best Guarantors of Their Own Safety When They’re Organized’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231020Briggs.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Net Neutrality. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231020Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231013.mp3   BBC (10/11/23) This week on CounterSpin:  In the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas and the ensuing bombing campaign from Israel on the Gaza Strip, many people were surprised that CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria aired an interview with a Palestinian activist who frankly described the daily human rights violations in Gaza, the right of Palestinians to resist occupation and apartheid, and how any tools of resistance they choose are deemed violent and punishable. Such statements aren’t controversial from an international law or human rights perspective, but they stand out a mile in elite US media suffused with assumptions listeners will know: Palestinians attack, Israel responds; periods of “calm” are when only Palestinians are dying; stone-throwing is terrorism, but cutting off water is not. “War is not the time for context” still seems to be the mantra for many in the US press. But there is, around the edges, growing acknowledgement of the dead end this represents: showing hour after hour of shocking and heart-wrenching imagery, in a way that suggests violence is the only response to violence—when so many people are looking for another way forward. We’ll talk with Phyllis Bennis from the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Transcript: In Gaza, ‘We Have to Do the Hard Work of Looking at Context’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231013Bennis.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Saudi Arabia, Nicaragua, US political division and the Federal Reserve. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231013Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231006.mp3   This week on CounterSpin: The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik is one of vanishingly few national reporters to suggest that if media care about crime, if they care about people having things stolen from them—maybe they could care less about toasters and more about lives? As in, the billions of dollars that are snatched from working people’s pockets every payday by companies, in the form of wage theft—paying less than legal wages, not paying for overtime, stealing tips, denying breaks, demanding people work off the clock before and after shifts, and defining workers as “independent contractors” to deny them benefits. Home Depot just settled a class action lawsuit for $72.5 million, while their CEO went on Fox Business to talk about how shoplifting means we’re becoming a “lawless society.” There is legislative pushback; New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has added wage theft to the legal definition of larceny, allowing for stronger prosecutions. But such efforts face headwind from corporate media telling us to be mad about the rando taking toilet paper from the Walgreens, but not the executive who’s skimming your paycheck every two weeks. Not to be too poetic, but corporate thieves don’t need masks as long as corporate media provide them. We talk about wage theft with Rodrigo Camarena. He’s the director of the immigrant justice group Justicia Lab, and co-author, with Cristobal Gutierrez of Make the Road New York, of the article “How to End Wage Theft—and Advance Immigrant Justice” that appeared earlier this month on NonProfitQuarterly.org. He is co-creator of Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat wage theft. Transcript: ‘Wage Theft Is Built Into the Business Models of Many Industries’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231006Camarena.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of climate protests. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231006Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230929.mp3   New York Times (9/27/23) This week on CounterSpin: You can’t say elite US news media aren’t on the story of the federal indictment of Robert Menendez, Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But articles like the New York Times’ “As Menendez’s Star Rose, Fears of Corruption Cast a Persistent Shadow” represent media embrace of the “great man of history” theme: The story is mostly about the political fortunes of an individual; the huge numbers of less powerful people impacted by those compromised decisions are, at best, backdrop. When they try to tighten it into a “takeaway,” it can get weirder still: That Times piece’s headline included the idea that “the New Jersey Democrat broke barriers for Latinos. But prosecutors circled for decades before charging him with an explosive new bribery plot.” Come again? If elite media’s takeaway from the Menendez indictment is that some people over-favor their friends and like gold bars—that’s a storyline that leads nowhere, calls nothing into question beyond the individual actors themselves. Is that the coverage we need? What does it even have to do with foreign policy? Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book, co-authored with Jacob Mundy, is Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, out now in a revised, updated edition from Syracuse University Press. We talk with him about what’s at stake in the Menendez indictment beyond Menendez’s “political fortunes.” Transcript: ‘Most Americans Really Do Feel Pretty Strongly About Human Rights’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230929Zunes.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the FCC and the 1973 Chilean coup. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230929Banter.mp3  

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230922.mp3   Photo: UAW This week on CounterSpin: An unprecedented labor action is underway as thousands of Midwest autoworkers working for the Big 3—Ford, GM and Stellantis (which used to be Chrysler)—went on strike at the same time. Some things workers are calling for may sound familiar: a pay raise for workers that bears relation to raises that owners have generously given themselves; reinstatement of cost-of-living increases. Others—a shorter work week; the elimination of “tiered” jobs, where some folks are just never on the track for benefits; and a seat at the table for workers in any conversations about climate-related economic transitions—sound downright visionary. It would be a critical story at any time. But right now,  every day brings news—like Australian real estate developer Tim Gurner’s declaring, out loud, in public, “We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40–50%, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy”—that tells us that the situation isn’t about “the economy working,” but about for whom the economy is supposed to work. Unionized autoworkers are saying that profits—like the $21 billion the Big 3 have declared in the first six months of 2023—have to mean better conditions for the people doing the work. “We can’t afford it” is a harder message for corporate media to support as unions grow in strength, and as people find other sources than major corporate outlets to look to for explanations about what’s happening. Lisa Xu, organizer with Labor Notes, is in Detroit right now. We talk with her about this historic UAW strike. Transcript: ‘These Are Demands for the Whole Working Class’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230922Xu.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of depleted uranium and RICO indictments. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230922Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230915.mp3   (Broadleaf Books, 2023) This week on CounterSpin: New Yorkers who were here 22 years ago remember the proliferation of signs and stickers reading “our grief is not a cry for war”—and then the way that voice was shouted over by corporate news media, calling for war crimes with US flags on their lapels. Hosting old general after old general, as peace and human rights activists and the overall public begged for an answer to violence that wasn’t just more violence, for a conversation that would allow us to see one another as human beings. Pretend-neutral news media have done crucial work in selling Islamophobia, in weaponizing centuries of misinformation and demonization for wartime purposes, with the war being the undefined, unending “war on terror.” Media’s job has involved lying to us about many things—but, crucially, about what we believed, what we were capable of, and what we wanted to see as the way forward. Key to that campaign has been the idea that Muslims are the enemy—violent, dangerous, irrational—if not now, soon; if not your friend, his friend. September 11, 2001, is the exemplar of a past that isn’t dead, or even past, and for no one more particularly than Muslims. We talk about that with Maha Hilal, author of the book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11. Transcript: ‘There’s This Notion That the “War on Terror” Was Just Something That Happened Abroad’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230915Hilal.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Ukraine, the UAW strike and Biden’s trip to Vietnam. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230915Banter.mp3   Featured Image: Texas Muslim Capitol Day, Austin, Texas, January 28, 2015 (Creative Commons photo: Manuel Garza)

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230908.mp3   Liberation (9/3/23) This week on CounterSpin: The White House has announced it’s extending the ban on people using US passports to go to North Korea. Corporate media seem to find it of little interest; who wants to go to North Korea? Which fairly reflects media’s disinterest in the tens of thousands of Korean Americans who might want to visit family in North Korea, along with their overarching, active disinterest in telling the story of the Korean peninsula in anything other than static, cartoonish terms—North Korea is a murderous dictatorship; South Korea is a client state, lucky for our support—terms that conveniently sidestep the US’s historic and ongoing role in the crisis. Amanda Yee is a writer and organizer, and an editor of Liberation News. We’ll talk with her about the role the travel ban plays in a bigger picture. Transcript: ‘Propaganda Against North Korea and the Travel Ban Go Hand in Hand’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230908Yee.mp3   We reference hidden history in that conversation. CounterSpin got some deeper understanding on that a couple years back from Hyun Lee, US national organizer for Women Cross DMZ, part of the coalition Korea Peace Now!. We’ll hear a little from that today as well. Transcript: ‘Washington Has Been Asking the Wrong Question on North Korea’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230908Lee.mp3