CounterSpin

    Fox News (7/19/22) This week on CounterSpin: In May of this year, a white supremacist killed ten people in Buffalo, New York. He made clear that he wanted to kill Black people, because he believes there is a plot, run by Jews, to “replace” white people with Black and brown people. News media had an opportunity then to deeply interrogate the obvious spurs for the horrific act, including of course the media outlets and pundits and politicians who repeatedly invoke this white replacement idea, but it didn’t really happen. The Washington Post offered an inane tweet about how Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ But a racist massacre raises questions about that promise.” CounterSpin spoke at the time about the issues we hoped more media would be exploring, with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been following Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220909Gertz.mp3 Transcript: ‘The “Great Replacement” Builds on Those Long Hatreds’ And we spoke also with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Poverty Law Center and executive director at Western States Center, about ways forward. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220909Ward.mp3 Transcript: ‘The “Great Replacement” Builds on Those Long Hatreds’ We hear these conversations again this week. Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the assassination of Darya Durgina. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220909Banter.mp3

  From the film Powerlands. This week on CounterSpin: It is meaningful that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has formally apologized to Sacheen Littlefeather, the Apache and Yaqui actress and activist who in 1973 refused the best actor award on behalf of her friend Marlon Brando, because of Hollywood’s history of derogatory depiction of Native Americans. Some cheered, but a lot of the audience booed, some complete with “tomahawk chops,” and John Wayne evidently had to be physically restrained. Arriving at Brando’s house after the ceremony, Littlefeather was shot at. It’s good that the Academy is apologizing, but the proof of course is in the material acknowledgement of the message: that Native Americans have been treated poorly in US entertainment and, we could add, news media, and that that has impact. Things are changing, and we need to check what that change amounts to: not just visibility, but justice and redress and the improvement of lives. The film Powerlands explores the treatment of Indigenous people around the world—not in terms of media imagery, but in terms of the resource extraction that is stealing water, minerals and homelands. It talks not just about harm but about resistance, and so it also contributes to the seeing of Native communities in their full humanity. We’ll talk with Powerlands filmmaker Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220902ManybeadsTso.mp3 Transcript: ‘We Could Be Living in the Future We All Dream About’ Time (8/24/22) Also on the show: You might consider you’re making a misstep when even Time magazine calls you out. Hardly a progressive bastion, the outlet recently ran a piece critical of Joe Biden’s call for the hiring of 100,000 more police officers and some $13 billion to police budgets—calling it a part of a “manipulative message that if we feel unsafe, it is because we have not yet invested adequately in police, jails and prisons.” Contributor Eric Reinhart noted that using a more comprehensive understanding of safety including “factors like homelessness and eviction, overdose risk, financial insecurity, preventable disease, police violence and unsafe workplaces (which, statistically, present far greater preventable threats to everyday life than crime)—it is readily apparent America’s police-centric safety policies do not effectively promote shared safety.” This is not new knowledge, though it obviously needs resaying. We’ll revisit just a bit from CounterSpin‘s 2017 conversation with Alex Vitale, professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing & Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, and author of the book The End of Policing. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220902Vitale.mp3 Transcript: ‘We’ve Got to Break This Mindset That Policing Is the Only Tool’

Israeli soldiers raiding the offices of Defense for Children International/Palestine. This week on CounterSpin:  Corporate news media have a particularly frozen narrative on Palestine and Israel. You could recite it: Palestinians act violently; Israel responds in self defense. There are “clashes” of implicitly equally empowered forces. Palestinians have squandered their opportunities for autonomy because they overreach. And, finally: if you have any problem with the actions of the state of Israel, you must hate Jewish people. That whole narrative not only summarily erases the millions of Jewish people who support the human rights of Palestinians, it also makes it hard for anyone to make sense of, for example, the recent assault by Israeli forces on the Gaza Strip, reported as by AP as a “flare up” that—passive voice—”left 49 Palestinians dead.” The account notes that “no one on the Israeli side was killed or seriously wounded,” but instructs us to see it as a “battle” between Israel and “militant” Palestinians, who remain “defiant.” Ahmad Abuznaid is executive director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. He joins us to talk about the reality that formulaic rhetoric obscures. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220826Abuznaid.mp3 Transcript: ‘These Organizations Are Doing Critical Work to Advocate for Palestinian Rights’ Billionaire Barre Seid Also on the show:  Andrew Perez covers money and influence as senior editor and reporter at the Lever. He talks about what we should know about the unprecedentedly enormous donation—some $1.6 billion—that just went from a Chicago mogul to a deeply conservative group that is, among other things, reshaping the Supreme Court. It’s the sort of news that changes your life, whether you know it’s happening or not. Which, yeah, you would think would be where a free press would come in. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220826Perez.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Real Issue With Dark Money: We Don’t Know Who’s Influencing Policy’

  In These Times (8/2/22) This week on CounterSpin: The Biden administration says it’s making progress toward its goal to slow migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador by addressing the causes of that migration. The White House “Call to Action” foregrounds private sector “investments” as key to creating economic opportunity and to rooting out corruption in the region. And companies like Microsoft and PepsiCo have stepped up to do…well, what exactly? And how does this differ from the support for transnational corporations and their extractive, profit-driven policies that has misled US involvement for decades? Azadeh Shahshahani is legal and advocacy director at Project South. She joins us to raise some questions about the US government’s claim that this time, they’re really bringing stability and security to northern Central America. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220819Shashahani.mp3 Transcript: ‘The US Must Break Free of the Banana Republic Mentality’ Global Witness (8/15/22) Also on the show: Facebook would appear to be 0 for 4 in tests of its ability to detect and reject ads containing blatant election-related misinformation—in this case, ahead of important elections in Brazil. The group Global Witness found what they’re calling a “pattern” of the social media platform allowing ads on the site that violate the most basic of standards—including, for example, telling folks the wrong date to vote. At what point does “Oops! But please believe we take all of this very seriously!” stop being a plausible excuse? We talk with Jon Lloyd, senior advisor at Global Witness. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220819Lloyd.mp3 Transcript: ‘Bizarre Decisions From Facebook Call Into Question Moderation Systems’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at how NPR misremembers the Afghan invasion. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220819Banter.mp3  

CT Insider (7/14/22) This week on CounterSpin: A Texas court has told Alex Jones to pay some $49 million dollars in damages for his perverse, accusatory talk about the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre being a “big hoax”—the jury evidently not believing Jones’ tale that he was suffering a weird and weirdly profitable “psychosis” when he told his followers that no one died at Sandy Hook because none of the victims ever existed, nor were they evidently moved by his subsequent claim that he did it all “from a pure place.” Jones, as the Hearst Connecticut Media editorial board noted in a strong statement, is trying to keep any mention of his “white supremacy and right-wing extremism” out of the Sandy Hook case he’s facing in New Hampshire—because, his lawyer says, that discussion would be “unfairly prejudicial and inflammatory,” an “attack on [Jones’] character” that would “play to the emotions of the jury and distract from the main issues.” What should be the “main issues” when our vaunted elite press corps engage a figure like Alex Jones? We talk with Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220812Carusone.mp3 Transcript: ‘What Alex Jones Has Peddled Is Now Nearly Indistinguishable from Right-Wing Talking Points’ Also on the show: In 1991, on the fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident, an editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune concluded: “Despite Chernobyl, nuclear energy is the green alternative.” The Houston Post enjoined readers: “Let’s not learn the wrong lesson from Chernobyl and rule nukes out of our future.” Corporate media have been rehabilitating nuclear power for as long as the public has been terrified by its dangers—sometimes as heavy-handedly as NBC in 1987 running a documentary, Nuclear Power: In France It Works, that failed to mention that NBC’s then-owner, General Electric, was the country’s second-largest nuclear power entity—and third-largest producer of nuclear weapons. Now in Russia’s war on Ukraine, we’re seeing news media toss the possibility of nuclear war into the news you’re meant to read over your breakfast. Has something changed to make the unleashing of nuclear weaponry war less horrific? And if not, what can we be doing to push it back off the table and out of media’s parlor game chat? We hear from author and journalism professor Karl Grossman. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220812Grossman.mp3 Transcript: ‘This Treaty Could Put the Nuclear Weapons Genie Back in the Bottle’

This week on CounterSpin: The crises we face right now in the US—a nominally democratic political process that’s strangled by white supremacist values, a corporate profiteering system that mindlessly overrides human needs to treat the environment as just another “input”—are terrible, but not, precisely, new. People have fought against these ideas in various forms before; and some strategies have been useful, others less so. The front line for us now is the fact that we have powerful actors who don’t just want to argue for particular ideas to guide us forward, but want to shut down the spaces in which we can have the arguments. And where a vigorous free press should be, we have corporate, commercial media that don’t have defending those spaces as their foremost concern. Luke Harris One crucial thing we now know we need to pro-actively fight for: our right to learn and teach real US history. Listeners will have heard of the campaign against “critical race theory”—a set of ideas of which right-wing opponents gleefully acknowledge they know and care nothing, but are using as cover to attack any race-conscious, that’s to say accurate and appropriate, teaching. CounterSpin put that cynical but impactful campaign in context last July with Luke Harris, co-founder and deputy director of the African American Policy Forum. Joe Torres Late last June, we talked about just the kind of story we all would know if our learning was inclusive and unafraid, the kind of story that would play a role in our understanding of the country’s growth—the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which 300 overwhelmingly Black people were killed, and some 800 shot or wounded. It’s a part of a sort of “hidden history” that the press corps have a role in hiding, as we discussed with Joe Torres, senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press, and co-author, with Juan González, of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220805Harris.mp3 CounterSpin spoke with Luke Harris in July of 2021. Transcript: ‘We Can’t Fight for Racial Justice if We Can’t Learn About Racial Injustice’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220805Torres.mp3 We spoke with Joe Torres in June 2021. Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’

  NBC Nightly News (6/10/22) This week on CounterSpin: In what is being reported as an “abrupt” or “surprise” development, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, whose shtick relies heavily on legislative roadblocking, has agreed to sign on to a package that includes some $369 billion for “climate and energy proposals.” The New York Times reports that the deal represents “the most ambitious climate action ever taken by Congress”—a statement that cries out for context. The package is hundreds of pages long, and folks are only just going through it as we record on July 28, but already some are suggesting we not allow an evident, welcome break in Beltway inertia to lead to uncritical cheering for policy that may not, in fact, do what is necessary to check climate disruption, in part because it provides insufficient checks on fossil fuel production. But journalistic context doesn’t just mean comparing policy responses to real world needs; it means recognizing and reporting how the impacts of the climate crisis—like heat waves—differ depending on who we are and where we live. There’s a way to tell the story that connects to policy and planning, but that centers human beings. We talked about that during last year’s heat wave with Portland State University professor Vivek Shandas. Transcript: ‘That’s Lethal, Communities Completely Exposed to This Kind of Heat’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220729Shandas.mp3   Also on the show: Although it’s taken a media back seat to other scourges, the US reality of Black people being killed by law enforcement, their families’ and communities’ grief and outrage meeting no meaningful response, grinds on: Robert Langley in South Carolina, Roderick Brooks in Texas, Jayland Walker in Ohio. Anthony Guglielmi Major news media show little interest in lifting up non-punitive community responses, or in demanding action from lawmakers. So comfortable are they with state-sanctioned racist murder, the corporate press corps haven’t troubled to highlight the connections between outrages—and the system failure they betray. Exhibit A: Beltway media have twisted their pearls about the US Secret Service having deleted text messages relevant to the January 6 investigation. No one seems to be buying the claim from Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi that the messages were  “erased as part of a device-replacement program” that just happened to take place after the inspector general’s office had requested them. Laquan McDonald Now, many people, but none in the corporate press, would think it relevant to point out that Guglielmi came to the Secret Service after his stint with the Chicago Police Department, during which he presided over that department’s lying about the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald. There, Guglielmi claimed that missing audio from five different police dashcam videos—audio that upended police’s story that McDonald had been lunging toward officer Jason Van Dyke, when in fact he’d been walking away—had disappeared due to “software issues or operator error.” As noted by Media Matters’ Matt Gertz, Chicago reporters following up on the story discovered that CPD dashcam videos habitually lacked audio—Guglielmi himself acknowledged that “more than 80% of the cameras have non-functioning audio ‘due to operator error or, in some cases, intentional destruction,’” the Chicago Sun-Times reported. A dry-eyed observer might conclude that Guglielmi was hired, was elevated to the Secret Service not despite but because of his vigorous efforts to mislead the public and lawmakers about reprehensible law enforcement behavior. But I think it’s not quite right to think this means the elite press corps aren’t sufficiently interested in Guglielmi; the point is that they aren’t sufficiently interested in Laquan McDonald. CounterSpin talked about the case with an important figure in it, writer and activist Jamie Kalven. We hear some of that conversation this week.   Transcript: ‘How Many Other Laquan MacDonalds Are There?’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220729Kalven.mp3  

Nora Benavidez This week on CounterSpin: The internet has changed the way we communicate, access information and even organize, which means concerns about digital privacy are concerns about privacy, period. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, allowing for the criminalization of abortion, our ability to safely access information and health care online is in danger. How are tech companies responding?  We’ll hear from civil rights attorney Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin_Show220722Benavidez.mp3 Dorothee Benz Transcript: ‘Privacy Is the Entry Point for Our Civil and Basic Rights’ Also on the show: It’s good to be shocked by the news coming out of the January 6 committee; it’s shocking. But suggesting that ALL of this is new and revelatory is a narrative that serves us poorly. For media, the test isn’t so much how they are covering the hearings, but whether they are really incorporating the lessons into their regular coverage. That’s going forward, but today we’ll go back to the day after the insurrection, when we spoke with political scientist Dorothee Benz. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin_Show220722Benz.mp3 Transcript: ‘Being Neutral in the Face of a Fascist Threat Is Not an Acceptable Journalistic Value’ Plus, Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the Uvalde massacre footage, New York Times reporting on Ben & Jerry’s refusal to sell in the Israeli occupied West Bank, and the need for the new Office of Environmental Justice to take fossil fuel companies head-on. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin_Show220722Banter.mp3 Featured Image: Patcharin Saenlakon / EyeEm / Getty Images

This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court’s reversal on abortion rights is so actually and potentially devastating that it’s hard to know where to look. It’s worth tracing things back—Katherine Stewart in the Guardian, among others, walks us through how, at a time when most Protestant Republicans, including the Southern Baptist Convention, hailed the liberalization of abortion law represented by Roe, Christian nationalists, motivated by a desire to protect school segregation and tax exemptions for Christian schools, selected abortion as a way to united conservatives across denominational barriers, by providing a “focal point for anxieties about social change.” Phyllis Schlafly wrote a whole book (How the Republican Party Became Pro-Life) about the work involved in forcing the Republican party to center abortion as a cause—which then became the  longer term effort to reframe “religious liberty” as exemption from law. The names Paul “I don’t want everybody to vote” Weyrich and Bob Jones Sr.—who called segregation “God’s established order”—may also mean something to you. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220715MasonPieklo.mp3 (photo: Austen Risolvato/Cage Rivera/Rewire News Group) Transcript: “They Will Find the Outcome That They Are Looking for and Work the Law Backwards to Make It Fit.” While we trace the roots—which disabuses us of the notion that this specious “pro-life” political stance is socially organic—we need to also be looking for the branches: the other obvious, growing harms to human rights and liberties that are encouraged and fully intended by this ruling. The Guttmacher Institute’s Elizabeth Nash and Lauren Cross reported the, as of last summer, 536 abortion restrictions, including 146 abortion bans, introduced across 46 states, as right-wing ideologues “engaging in a shock and awe campaign against abortion rights as part of a large and deliberate attack on basic rights that also includes a wave of voter suppression laws and attacks on LGBTQ people.” It’s important to see that, as Katherine Stewart writes, the Dobbs decision “marks the beginning rather than the endpoint of the agenda this movement has in mind.” In the face of this, those who believe in reproductive freedom will need better public arguments than what liberal media have tended to offer: that abortion is a horrible thing that should really never happen, but that nevertheless should be legal. There’s a hole in the middle of corporate mediaspeak on abortion, where we could be saying, as Katha Pollitt put it in her book PRO: that abortion is an “essential option” for all people, not just those in “dramatic, terrible, body-and-soul-destroying situations”—and that access to abortion “benefits society as a whole.” We’re going to make a start on the many, multi-level, multi-angle, post-Roe conversations we need to be having with Jessica Mason Pieklo, senior vice president and executive editor at Rewire News Group, who has been reporting reproductive rights for many years now. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220715Mitchum.mp3 (photo: Victoria Pickering) Transcript: ‘Roe Has Never Been Enough, and We Still Need It’ And we’ll also hear a bit of a conversation we had last May—when we knew the Court had Roe in its sights—with Preston Mitchum, director of policy at the group URGE, Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity. We talked with him about putting Roe—and court rulings in general —in a context of what else needs, and has always needed, to happen to make reproductive justice real.

    John Roberts This week on CounterSpin: When disastrous things happen, like the US invasion of Iraq or the Supreme Court dismissal of basic human rights, the undercurrent of a lot of news media is: Why didn’t we see this coming? How could we all have gotten it wrong? It’s—to use a maybe overused term—gaslighting, in which elite news media spin a tale that everyone, all of some presumed “us,” were blindsided by: in this case, a John Roberts–led Supreme Court gutting multiple legally and societally established precedents. Clarence Thomas is an obvious factor in today’s Court, as is Samuel Alito—but the man ABC News characterized as a “mensch” is at the center of the web. So if the 4th of July is an occasion to talk about US history and its relevance today, let’s go all the way back to July 2005, when the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court was just one day old. CounterSpin‘s Steve Rendall and Janine Jackson hosted a discussion with journalist Adele Stan, who’d just written a piece called “Meet John Roberts” for the American Prospect, and Elliot Mincberg, then legal director for the group People for the American Way. We hear that conversation again this week. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220708StanMincberg.mp3 Transcript: ‘Whether You’re on the Supreme Court Shouldn’t Depend on How Many People You Give Your Phone Number to’ Julian Assange (cc photo: Espen Moe) Also on the show: Former New York Times reporter James Risen wrote an op-ed for the paper in 2020, in which he said that he thought that governments—he was talking about Bolsonaro in Brazil, as well as Donald Trump—were testing unprecedented measures to silence and intimidate journalists, and that they “seem to have decided to experiment with such draconian anti-press tactics by trying them out first on aggressive and disagreeable figures.” He was referring to, preeminently, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who may now be extradited to the United States, where he stands accused of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. If you haven’t heard much lately about the case and its implications, that might be indication that the experiment Risen refers to is working. Researcher and journalist Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent. He brings us the latest on Assange and why it matters. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220708Gibbons.mp3 Transcript: ‘It Would Force the Government to Actually Prove Espionage, Not Whistleblowing’