CounterSpin

  New Republic (6/14/23) This week on CounterSpin: 70% of House Republicans belong to the Republican Study Committee, which just released a budget that calls for curtailing programs supporting racial equity and LGBTQ rights, natch—and also for increased cuts and access hurdles for Social Security and Medicare. It’s a tale as old as time, how some people want to take resources explicitly designated for seniors and disabled people and funnel them to rich people, in supposed service of “saving” those popular social programs. We’ve been asking for debunking of that storyline for years now from Nancy Altman, president of the group Social Security Works, and author of books, including The Battle for Social Security: From FDR’s Vision to Bush’s Gamble. We’ll get some more debunking this week, because when it comes to Social Security, it seems everything old will always be new again. Transcript: ‘The One Part of Our Retirement Income System That Works Is Social Security’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230623Altman.mp3   Daniel Ellsberg (CC photo: Christopher Michel) Also on the show: Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg died last week at the age of 92, and elite media did that thing they do, where they sort of honor someone they discredited in life, burnishing their own reputation as truth-tellers while still somehow dishonoring the practice of truth-telling—of the sort that afflicts the comfortable. CounterSpin spoke with Ellsberg many times over the years. We hear just some of those conversations this week on the show. Transcript: ‘What the Government Permits You to Know—That’s Not a Democracy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230623Ellsberg.mp3  

  (City Lights, 2023) This week on CounterSpin: The stories news media tell are something different than the facts they report. The facts may say what happened where; the stories tell us who’s the hero and who’s the villain, how important the fight is, and whether we should care about the ending. It’s not always easy to discern, but it’s critical—which is why narrative has been taken up as an important tool by folks looking to change the world for the better, in part by changing the stories we tell ourselves and one another. Sonali Kolhatkar is the host and executive producer of the daily radio and TV program Rising Up With Sonali, and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. Her new book, Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, will be published this month by City Lights. She joins us this week on the show. Transcript: ‘Intentional Storytelling Is a Way We Can Fight for a Better World’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230616Kolhatkar.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of work requirements. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230616Banter.mp3  

  (image: PCBA) This week on CounterSpin: This country has a long history of weaponizing drug laws against Black and brown communities. Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, ran an anti-marijuana crusade in the 1930s, saying, “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” Concerns are justified about what the legalization, and profitizing, of marijuana means for the people and communities most harmed by its criminalization. We hear about that from Tauhid Chappell, founder of the Philadelphia CannaBusiness Association and project manager for Free Press’s News Voices project. Transcript: ‘Despite Legalization, the People Harmed the Most Are Not Able to Benefit’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230609Chappell.mp3   (CC photo: Janine Jackson) Also on the show: Lots of people are concerned about what’s called the “digital well-being” of children—their safety and privacy online. So why did more than 90 human rights and LGBTQ groups sign a letter opposing the “Kids Online Safety Act”? Evan Greer is director of the group Fight for the Future. She tells us what’s going on there. Transcript: ‘These Bills Will Make Children Less Safe, Not More Safe’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230609Greer.mp3  

  NBC (11/2/22) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media have never been the right place to look for thoughtful, inclusive consideration of affirmative action. For them it’s an “issue,” a political football, rather than a long effort to address the real historical and ongoing discrimination against non-white, non-male people in multiple aspects of US life. But when it comes to the role that anti-discrimination, pro-equity efforts have had on Asian-American communities, there are particular layers of mis- and disinformation that benefit from exploring. Listeners will know that Asian-American students are being used as the face of attempts to eliminate affirmative action or race-consciousness in college admissions. It looks like the Supreme Court will rule on a watershed case this month. We talk about it with writer and cultural critic Jeff Chang, author of We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, among other titles. Transcript: ‘The History of Affirmative Action Has Asian-American Influence All Over It’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230602Chang.mp3   We also hear some of an earlier discussion of the case Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. vs. Harvard that CounterSpin had with Jeannie Park, founding president of the Asian American Journalists Association in New York, and co-founder of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard. Transcript: ‘This Case Was Never About Defending Asian Americans’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230602Park.mp3 Transcript: “This Case Was Never About Defending Asian Americans”

    GQ (5/5/23) This week on CounterSpin: Going on strike is something that people with no personal experience are comfortable depicting as frivolous and selfish. That extends to many corporate news reporters, who appear unable to present a labor action as other than, first and foremost, an unwonted interruption of a natural order. However else they explain the issues at stake, or humanistically portray individual strikers, the overarching narrative is that workers are pressing their luck, and that owners who make their money off the efforts of those workers are not to be questioned. It’s a weird presentation, whether it’s baristas or dockworkers or TV and movie writers. As we record on May 25, the Writers Guild strike is on its 23rd day, and having the intended effect of shutting down production on sets around the country. Eric Thurm wrote a useful explainer on the WGA strike for GQ. Thurm is campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project. We hear from him about some behind-the-scenes aspects of the strike affecting what you may see on screen. Transcript: ‘Studios Are Really Trying to Turn Writing Into Gig Work’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230526Thurm.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of San Francisco. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230526Banter.mp3  

  Time (5/4/23) This week on CounterSpin: Do you care about environmental degradation? Then you care about Cop City. Do you care about violent overpolicing of Black and brown communities? Then you care about Cop City. Do you care about purportedly democratic governance that overrides the actual voice of the people? Then you care about Cop City. But be aware: Your concern about Cop City, and its myriad impacts and implications, may get you labeled a domestic terrorist. The official response to popular resistance to the militarized policing facility being created on top of the forest in Atlanta, Georgia, is an exemplar of how some officials fully intend to bring all powers to which they have access, and to create new powers, to treat anyone who stands in opposition to whatever they decide they want to do as enemies of the state, deserving life-destroying prison sentences. So if your thoughts about Cop City don’t motivate you, think about your right to protest anything at all. We’ll talk about anti-activist terrorism charges with Cody Bloomfield, communications director at Defending Rights & Dissent. Transcript: ‘Charging Domestic Terrorism Is Intended to Make the Cost of Protesting Too High’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230519Bloomfield.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Israel’s “crisis of democracy.” https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230519Banter.mp3  

    USA Today (5/6/23) This week on CounterSpin: USA Today reported that, “as it heads into the final stretch of its current term, the Supreme Court is on defense following a series of revelations about gifts, property sales and disclosure.” That, you might say, is putting it mildly. The recent revelations are not about trinkets, but millions of dollars’ worth of benefits, vacations, jobs—and not from nowhere in particular, but from powerful parties with express interest in shaping the Court’s decision-making. “Disclosure,” in this instance, is another word for democracy—people’s right to know (and act upon the knowledge of) what, besides their votes, is influencing the laws that shape their lives. As details of Clarence Thomas’ secret-but-not-so-secret relationship with Republican billionaire Harlan Crow—and also with Federalist Society head Leonard Leo—roll out, the John Roberts–led Supreme Court has told congressional leaders they don’t believe any ethics rules really apply to them, and that’s not a problem. Whether that cravenly elitist, anti-democratic notion gets to carry the day will depend on many things, one of them being journalists’ willingness to stick with the stories, explore their structural and historical roots, demand transparency, and keep reporting faithfully to the public about what is learned and what is not—and why not. Even or especially if the Court is “on defense.” Because the information out of the Supreme Court has, as Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick has said, gone beyond an “ethics problem” to a “five-alarm fire” democracy-reform problem. And news media will be central to the response. We talk this week about the Supreme Court, where it’s going and where’s it taking all of us, with Ian Millhiser, who covers the Court for Vox, and is author of, most recently, The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America. Transcript: ‘The Court’s Position Is, No One Can Tell Them What to Do’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230512Millhiser.mp3  

    (The Nation, 4/28/23) This week on CounterSpin: Economist James Galbraith wrote a few months ago: “It is in the nature of articles about the debt ceiling that no matter how often one tries to set the record straight, nothing ever gets through.” Elite media’s fundamental misrepresentation of the debt ceiling would be troubling enough if it were just a bad history lesson. But current Republican brinkmanship could have devastating impacts for millions of people—along with the harm to public understanding of what’s actually going on. We hear concerns about the process and the coverage from Chris Lehmann, DC bureau chief at The Nation, and contributing editor at the Baffler and the New Republic. Transcript: ‘The Debt Ceiling Is a Completely Pointless Contrivance’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230505Lehmann.mp3   IFixit.com Also on the show: The right to fix the things you buy is the sort of thing you wouldn’t think would be controversial here in “the land of the free.”  Corporations’ attempts to prevent people from fixing their cellphone or tractor or wheelchair ought to be seen as the overreach it is. But for years, news media have presented the right to repair as a voice in the wilderness, up against benevolent companies’ efforts to do best by us all. That’s changing, with legislative moves around the country. Right to repair is having a “watershed moment,” one advocate says, adding that there are still “a lot of opportunities for mischief.” We get an update from Kyle Wiens, co-founder and CEO of the online repair community iFixit. Transcript: ‘We Have to Find a Way, for the Sake of the Planet, to Use Things Longer’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230505Wiens.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the New York Times‘ Iran error.

  Kansas City Star (4/20/23) This week on CounterSpin: The grandson of the elderly white man who shot a Black teenager in the head for ringing his doorbell told the Kansas City Star that their relationship had unraveled as his grandfather began watching “Fox News all day, every day,” and sank into a “24-hour news cycle of fear, of paranoia.” Those words had a poignant resonance for many people who feel they’ve lost family members and friends to a kind of cult, that’s not secret, but pumped into the airwaves every day. Hate-fueled and hate-fueling media have political and historical impacts—and interpersonal, familial ones as well. The Brainwashing of My Dad—the 2016 film and the book based on it—reflect filmmaker, activist and author Jen Senko’s effort to engage the  multi-level effects of that yelling, punching down, reactionary media, as well as how we can respond. We hear from Jen Senko this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘This Media Is Meant to Change People, and It Does’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230428Senko.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of a potential UPS strike. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230428Banter.mp3  

    Washington Post (4/19/23) This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court has briefly punted their decision on restricting access to medication abortion drug mifepristone. The American Medical Association said that the recent ruling by a Texas federal judge revoking the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, which has been in widespread use for more than two decades, “flies in the face of science and evidence and threatens to upend access to a safe and effective drug.” For the Washington Post, that’s part of a “confusing legal battle“—but for the majority of people, including doctors, it’s not confusing, just frightening. We’ll hear from Rachel K. Jones, research scientist at Guttmacher Institute. Transcript: ‘People Who Don’t Support Abortion Ignore the Science and the Safety’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230421Jones.mp3   New York Times (4/10/23) Also on the show: “Rutgers University Faculty Members Strike, Halting Classes and Research.” That April 10 New York Times headline reflects standard operating procedure for corporate media: reporting labor actions in terms of their ostensible harms, rather than the harms that led to them. The strike by a range of differently situated Rutgers faculty, the Times said, “will affect roughly 67,000 students across the state”—presumably the same students affected by teachers, researchers and counselors working in circumstances so precarious and untenable they took the difficult, potentially life-altering step of withholding their labor. That go-to elite media frame—”those pesky workers, what are they up to this time?”—is just one more element making efforts to increase workers’ power in the workplace that much harder. Thing is: It doesn’t always work—lots of people see through and around it! The gains made by Rutgers faculty, and the example they set, are evidence. We’ll get an update from Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers, and New Brunswick chapter president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. Transcript: ‘The Thing That’s Made the Union Strong Is to Privilege the Lowest Paid’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230421Murch.mp3