CounterSpin

    Bailout Watch et al. (1/30/23) This week on CounterSpin: Powerless in the United States: How Utilities Drive Shutoffs and Energy Injustice is an ongoing project from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Energy and Policy Institute and Bailout Watch. It tracks utility service disconnections and corporate profiteering—because, it turns out, they’re flip sides of a coin. You and I may think that in disastrous weather conditions (with no signs of stopping), and a pandemic and low wages and a hike in prices, it’s a time to acknowledge workers’ sacrifices and support them. Silly us. Actually, it’s a moment for powerful companies to raise prices on consumers—not to recoup losses, but just to raise profits, as their shareholder speeches will proudly reveal—and why would that gouging stop at life-saving vaccines or medicines? Why not also shut off the power to the homes of struggling families? Seriously, why not? If Wall Street will reward you for it, and corporate media won’t call you out or even seriously, humanistically report on what you’re doing? Or even easier, one might think, argue for the basic transparency that would allow that reporting? Electric utilities have disconnected US households more than 4 million times since the beginning of Covid, preceding the Russian war on Ukraine. At the same time, shareholder payouts went up by $1.9 billion, increases that could have paid those households’ bills five times over.  Our guests’ work illustrates how energy bills take up more and more of families’ earnings, and how the actions of corporations take a tough, in some cases life-threatening situation, make it worse, and then hand it off to their allies in the press corps, who they know will present it as “business as usual if regrettable,” but, above all, nothing worth looking in to or talking about seriously. Our guests aren’t just complaining; they have ideas about what’s needed to address the situation. Shelby Green is research fellow at the Energy and Policy Institute. Selah Goodson Bell is energy justice campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. We’ll hear from both of them this week on the show. Transcript: ‘Everyone Has a Right to Electricity and Heat’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230203Green_Bell.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the police killing of Tyre Nichols. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230203Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230127Mechanic.mp3   This week on CounterSpin: If repeated messaging about how we “can’t afford” public goods but we should always be “cutting taxes” isn’t discordant enough, corporate media’s guiding yet unspoken theory has some corollaries—one of which is that because wealthy people pay large (if not proportionate) amounts of money in taxes, they should get policies that reward them, including those allowing them to keep, and grow, their extreme wealth and its concomitant power. That’s how we wind up with congressional Republicans’ efforts to claw back the attempts the administration made to actually help the IRS start to audit the notoriously tax-avoiding wealthy. The message from many politicians and their media amplifiers: Cheating on taxes is a luxury only the rich can, or should be able to, afford. We know come April there will be a swell of “news you can use” stories about how to save a dime or two on your taxes. We get a bigger picture story this week from Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic, author of Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230127Mechanic.mp3 Transcript: “‘We Can Pay for What We Decide to Pay For'”

    Patrice Lumumba, 1960 (photo: Harry Pot) This week on CounterSpin: US media elites have gotten comfy with what writer Adam Johnson calls their “wall calendar version” of Martin Luther King, in which he represents the “good” left, unmoved by racial nationalism and Marxist ideology. With Patrice Lumumba, assassinated by the CIA on January 17, 1961, as newly elected leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the story is different. Look up Lumumba on the anniversary of his murder and you’ll find—nothing, really, except maybe a story about how street vendors in Kinshasa are being pushed off of Lumumba Boulevard to prepare for a visit by the Pope. Martin Luther King, corporate media would have it, offers a lesson about hopes and dreams and the slow but steady push toward progress. Lumumba’s assassination, judging by attention, has zero lessons for US citizens or the press corps to learn about the past, the present or the future. That’s how you know you should pay attention. Maurice Carney, co-founder and executive director of the group Friends of the Congo, has another story. And we hear about it this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230120Carney.mp3 Transcript: “‘The Cry is “Lumumba Lives”—His Ideas, His Principles'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the Signal app. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230120Banter.mp3  

  Lever (1/8/23) This week on CounterSpin: US reporters used to talk, even brag, about telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may, and more acutely, about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable—in other words about using their special, constitutional power to look behind curtains most of us can’t, and bring us meaningful information we could gain no other way. Not stories that might amuse us, which are fine, but more centrally, the sort of stories that might help us actually change a society that few would describe as perfect. How did that morph into elite reporters cutting their evident conscience to fit, not just this year’s fashion, but the particular fashion of the particular power source they institutionally favor? And what’s the cost of that approach to the public, who, still today, look to news media, not to pre-chew their food for them, but to give them accurate, independently sourced and documented information to help them make their own decisions about the world and their place in it. Journalist David Sirota has thoughts on that, as well as a new outlet, the Lever, focused on what one would hope would be the fundaments of media institutions: power and accountability. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230113Sirota.mp3 Transcript: “‘We Live in a New World Where Accountability Barely Exists'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of forced arbitration. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230113Banter.mp3  

    (NBC News, 12/29/22) This week on CounterSpin: Media criticism is, at its heart, consumer advocacy. There’s an unarticulated underpinning to elite media conversation that goes: As a citizen you may have rights, but as a consumer, you don’t have anything called a “right”; the market is an arrangement—the best possible arrangement—but still, you can only hope you’re on the right side of it where it’s profitable to serve you. And if it isn’t, well, too bad. It’s a kind of caveat emptor, devil-take-the-hindmost situation, which would be bad enough if corporate media didn’t present it as though it were unproblematic, and as if we’d all agreed to it! Paul Hudson is president of the consumer group Flyers Rights. He’ll talk about what you did not, in fact, sign up for, in terms of air travel. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230106Hudson.mp3 Transcript: “‘The [Airline] Industry Pretty Much Has Veto Power Over Any Consumer Regulation'” (Center for Gender and Refugee Studies) Also on the show: Enacted under Trump, Title 42 instructed officials to turn away asylum seekers at US borders in purported protection of the country’s “public health” in the face of Covid-19. Officialspeak currently has it that Covid is over, so far as public regulations go…. Oh except for that exception about denying  hearings to people fleeing violence and persecution in their home country. The Supreme Court has just furthered this injustice with a ruling that, according to one account, “does not overrule the lower court’s decision that Title 42 is illegal; it merely leaves the measure in place while the legal challenges play out in court.” We’ll hear from Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230106Crow.mp3 Transcript: “‘With This Delay of Vacating Title 42, the Death Toll Will Only Rise'”

All year long, CounterSpin brings you a look, as we say, behind the headlines of the mainstream news. We hope both to shine some light on aspects of news events—perspectives of those out of power, relevant but omitted history—important things that might be pushed to the side or off the page entirely in elite media reporting. But it’s also to remind us to be mindful of the practices and policies of corporate news media that make it an unlikely arena for an inclusive, vital debate on issues that matter—that we need. 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. Rakeen Mabud “Supply Chain Mayhem Will Likely Muck Up 2022”—that New York Times headline (2/1/22) got us off to a start of a year of actual hardship, and a lot of obfuscation about that hardship’s sources. The pandemic threw into relief many concerns that it did not create—and offered an opportunity to address them in a serious and not a stopgap way. Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. We talked with her early in the year. Bryce Greene The ease with which US media step into saber-rattling mode, the confidence as they soberly suggest people other than themselves might just need to be sent off to a violent death in service of something they can only describe with vague platitudes, should be disturbing. Bryce Greene’s piece, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” got more than 3,000 shares on FAIR.org. The Peace Corps issued a press release warning that African Americans looking to support Ukrainians should accept that they might face racism—because, sooprise, sooprise, of how we’re portrayed in US media. Layla A. Jones We talked about the basic story the world and the US hears about Black people, thanks to journalism—with Layla A. Jones, reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. She’s part of the papers’ “A More Perfect Union” project, online at Inquirer.com. Helen Zia As US media showed there is no playbook too dusty to pull out with their anti-Asian Covid coverage, we talked with Helen Zia, co-founder of American Citizens for Justice, and author of, among other titles,  Asian-American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People,  the 40th remembrance and rededication at VincentChin.org. Sumayyah Waheed In September of this year, CNN hired John Miller as “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst,”—a clear message to Muslim communities and anyone who cares about them—given that as deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism for the New York Police Department, Miller told a New York City Council meeting that “there is no evidence” that the NYPD surveilled Muslim communities in the wake of September 11, 2001—“based,” he said, “on every objective study that’s been done.” We listened, instead, to Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates. CounterSpin listeners understand that the news media situation in this country works against our democratic aspirations. There are so many problems crying out for open, inclusive conversation, in which those with the most power don’t get the biggest megaphone, leaving the vast majority outside of power to try and shout into the dominant noise, or try to find the space to talk around it. Corporate media work hard, will always work hard, to tell us that it’s their way or the highway….it’s just not true. Mike Rispoli One of many projects we should know about that show us a way forward is one in New Jersey—that didn’t talk about shoring up old media outlets, which are for sure suffering… but about instead about invigorating community information needs—a very different thing! The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium uses public funding to support more informed communities. We talked with an early mover on the project Mike Rispoli, senior director of journalism policy Mike Rispoli at Free Press. 

    Image from January 6 Report (photo: Jon Cherry/Getty Images) This week on CounterSpin: The House committee on the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol heard more than 1,000 witness interviews and held multiple public hearings, resulting in criminal referrals to the Justice Department for Donald Trump, lawyer John Eastman and others involved in violent efforts to override the results of Trump’s electoral loss. The committee released transcripts showing some two dozen witnesses invoking their right against self-incrimination. Eastman, key advisor to Trump on how to overturn the election, cited his Fifth Amendment right 155 times. At one point, Democratic House member Jamie Raskin asked GOP operative Roger Stone if he believed “coups are allowed in our constitutional system.” To which Stone said, “I most definitely decline to respond to your question.” But the headwinds the Committee’s recommendations face are not just from the MAGA hatters, but also the Very Smart People who will tell us that our desire for justice is really just partisan or, worse, blood lust—and what we really ought to do, what the intelligent people would do, is, well, nothing. Let wiser heads prevail. We’re having none of that. We spoke with Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen and co-founder of the forged-for-purpose Not Above the Law Coalition, about what the hearings found and why it can’t end there. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221223Gilbert.mp3 Transcript: “‘There Is More Than One Solution Needed to the Problem of an Insurrection'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Elon Musk, inflation and deadly conservatism. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221223Banter.mp3  

    Truthout (11/12/22) This week on CounterSpin: Those listeners who have heard about Haaland v. Brackeen will know that that Supreme Court case is about considering the Indian Child Welfare Act—which is aimed at keeping Native communities together—to be “race-based,” and therefore unfair and unconstitutional. Opposing the actual mission of those who want to eliminate the Indian Child Welfare Act is just…reality: the reality that made the Act necessary in the first place, and the reality that will likely ensue if it is repealed. We’ll learn more from Jen Deerinwater, who writes for Truthout, among other outlets, and is founding executive director of Crushing Colonialism. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221209Deerinwater.mp3 Transcript: “‘A Crucial Part of Colonization Is Taking Our Children'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent media conflation of crime and homelessness. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221209Banter.mp3  

    Dissent (11/22/22) This week on CounterSpin: Former CIA director Mike Pompeo recently said with a straight face that Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was “the most dangerous person in the world.” “It’s not a close call,” he said. “If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teachers unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids.” More evidence, were it needed, that the current struggle for pay and dignity by teaching assistants and adjuncts and researchers at the University of California is really part of a bigger fight about whether educators, at whatever level, are actual workers—and who’s looking out for their rights. We hear from labor historian and UC Santa Barbara professor Nelson Lichtenstein about what’s happening at the University of California. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221202Lichtenstein.mp3 Transcript: “‘We Need to Transform What It Means to Be an Academic Worker; the Status Quo is Untenable'” Truthout (11/29/22) Also on the show: Some elite media are expressing concern that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito may have leaked the Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling ahead of time to evangelicals looking to make hay from it. But as Sarah Posner put it at MSNBC.com: While figuring that out matters, it won’t necessarily address the deeper problem, that the court’s conservative majority itself “was deliberately cultivated to expand religious freedom for conservative Christians at the expense of the rights of those deemed less worthy of protection.” We talk with legal expert and author Marjorie Cohn about that. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221202Cohn.mp3 Transcript: “‘The Supreme Court is Burying Its Head in the Sand'” CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post misattributed Mike Pompeo’s quote about Randi Weingarten to Mike Pence.

    New York Times (1/31/60) This week on CounterSpin: According to Techcrunch, before its ignominious flameout, the cryptocurrency firm FTX had acquired more than 100,000 customers in Africa. Evidently, FTX—led by wunderkind-turned-object lesson, with not much actual learning in evidence in-between, Sam Bankman-Fried—built a following in part by capitalizing on unstable banking access on the continent. Media like the New York Times and Bloomberg abetted Bankman-Fried’s scheming, with rose-colored stories describing him as a kind of “Robin Hood,” whose “ethical framework” called for “decisions calculated to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.” Well, the golden boy has now filed for bankruptcy, having disappeared some billion dollars in client funds, ho hum. Don’t look for FTX post-mortems to go deep on why Sub-Saharan Africa was specially targeted, or to plumb the implications of Bankman-Fried’s comments, made to Vox in 2021, that Africa is “where the most underserved globally are, and where there’s a whole lot of lowest-hanging fruit in terms of being able to make people’s lives better.” How’d that work out? The African continent as a playing field for white people to test their theories, extract resources and stage proxy wars is time-tested. As much fable as active framework, it’s a lens that requires constant challenge. We talked about this last fall with Milton Allimadi. He teaches African history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and publishes the Black Star News, a weekly newspaper in New York City. And he’s the author of the book Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in Western Media. We hear some of that conversation with Milton Allimadi, this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘The Demonization Was Meant to Pacify Readers to Accept the Brutality’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221125Allimadi.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Bill Gates. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221125Banter.mp3