CounterSpin

  Coach Joseph Kennedy’s “private, personal prayer” (photo: Sotomayor dissent). This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion on Kennedy v. Bremerton that “the Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike.” The case was about whether there was a problem with a Washington state assistant football coach leading prayers—Christian prayers, lest you be confused—in the locker room before games and on the field. The Supreme Court that we have today, for reasons, determined that Kennedy was protected in his right to express his personal religious beliefs—by dropping a knee, on the 50-yard line of a public school playing field, and calling on players to join him—and that they presented no harm to anyone, or to the nominal separation of church and state. It’s another Supreme Court ruling that bases itself in a reality that doesn’t exist. This ruling in particular irritates meaningfully, because of course we know that “taking a knee” is the sort of gesture that is either a fresh wind of free expression, or a horrible affront to the values we hold dear, depending on who does it. So we’ll hear today from Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation and author of many books, including, most recently, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220701Zirin.mp3 Transcript: ‘They Painted a Narrative of This Coach Looking for a Quiet Corner to Pray’ Paul Robeson And we’ll get a little corrective background for corporate media’s current conversation, about the voices of athletes or performers who are mainly told to “shut up and sing,” and their actual historical role in social change, from journalist and author Howard Bryant.  CounterSpin talked with him in June 2018, and we hear part of that conversation this week. Transcript: ‘The Black Athlete Has Been Involved in the Political Struggle From the Beginning’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220701Bryant.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of Supreme Court nominees. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220701Banter.mp3  

  (cc photo: Joe Flood) This week on CounterSpin: Elite news media are saying that Biden has to go to Saudi Arabia in July despite his pledges to make the country a “pariah” for abuses including the grisly murder of a Washington Post contributor, because…stability? Shaking hands with Mohammed bin Salman makes sense, even in the context of denying Cuba and Venezuela participation in the Americas Summit out of purported concerns about their human rights records, because…gas prices? It’s hard to parse corporate media coverage of Biden’s Saudi visit, because that coverage obscures rather than illuminates what’s going on behind the euphemism “US interests.” We talk about the upcoming trip with Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at DAWN—Democracy for the Arab World Now. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220624Jarrar.mp3 Transcript: ‘In the Middle East, We Are Hearing a New Set of Excuses to Justify the Same Old Policy’ Chart: National Priorities Project Also on the show: “Congressional Republicans Criticize Small Defense Increase in Biden’s Budget Blueprint,” read one headline; “Biden Faces Fire From Left on Increased Defense Spending,” read another. Sure sounds like media hosting a debate on an issue that divides the country. Except a real debate would be informed —we’d hear just how much the US spends on military weaponry compared to other countries; and a real debate would be humane—we’d hear discussion of alternatives, other ways of organizing a society besides around the business of killing. That sort of conversation isn’t pie in the sky; there’s actual legislation right now that could anchor it. We talk about the People Over Pentagon Act of 2022 with Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220624Koshgarian.mp3 Transcript: ‘This Country Would Want to See Money Taken From the Pentagon and Reallocated’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of gender therapy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220624Banter.mp3  

  Vincent Chin (1955-1982) This week on CounterSpin: The New York Times didn’t address the brutal 1982 murder of Chinese-American Vincent Chin until 1983, in response to ongoing protest centered in Detroit’s Asian-American community, about the killing and the lack of justice—at which point the paper ran a story with a lead claiming that when “two men were quickly charged and prosecuted…the incident faded from many memories.” One, the process was hardly that tidy. And two, whose memories, exactly? It’s 40 years since Vincent Chin’s murder, with a depressingly resonant context of anti-Asian hatred and scapegoating, that corporate media, with their thinly veiled drumbeating for “war” with China—over trade or Covid or presence in Africa—do little to dissuade. We’ll talk with activist and author Helen Zia, about the ongoing effort to remember Chin’s murder by rededicating to the work of resisting, not just anti-Chinese or anti-Asian ideas and actions, but also those separating us each from one another in the fight against those who, let’s face it, hate all of us. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220617Zia.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Miscarriage of Justice Catalyzed a Whole Movement Led by Asian Americans’ Chesa Boudin (cc photo: Lynn Friedman) Also on the show: We’re told not to “overanalyze”—which seems to mean to analyze at all—the language of reporting, and not to think about what’s  behind the scenes; it’s official news from a neutral nowhere.  But if the New York Times, for example, has enough intentionality to delete, without acknowledgement, declarative claims about “rising crime” in an article about how concerns about that are moving people to vote out reformist officials like San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, can we not imagine that they are likewise intentional about what they leave in? We’ll talk about coverage of that recall, of which elite media are making much conventional wisdom hay, with Alec Karakatsanis, founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220617Karakatsanis.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Times Is Telling You to Choose Between Rights and Safety’

  (photo: African Union) This week on CounterSpin: Some of the worst work that corporate news media do is convince us that simple things are actually, if you just ignore the role of power, more complicated than you could hope to understand. So, yes, Covid is killing millions of people, and yes, there are tests and treatments and vaccines for it, and yes, many countries in need of them—but no, we can’t put those things together, for reasons that you shouldn’t worry your head over. There are in fact people and policies, with names, preventing developing countries from accessing life-saving vaccines…. A story being ugly doesn’t mean it isn’t understandable. We talk about it with Lori Wallach, executive director of the group Rethink Trade. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220610Wallach.mp3 Transcript: ‘A Handful of Billionaire Companies Have Monopoly Control Over Life-Saving Medicines’ (cc photo: Mstyslav Chernov) At the same time, we are to understand that insurance companies exist to protect us from exorbitant expenses when we’re faced with healthcare crises. You might be mad paying in when you’re healthy, but oh boy just wait til you’re sick.  So: Covid-19. Could hardly be a bigger public healthcare crisis—and where are insurance companies? Shouldn’t this be their shining hour? And if not—can we please revisit their purpose in our lives? We talk about insurance in a pandemic with physician and advocate Steffie Woolhandler. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220610Woolhandler.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Major Insurers Saw 2020 as a Giant Opportunity for Profiteering’

  Barry Lee Jones (left) and David Martinez Ramirez had appeals rejected by the Supreme Court. This week on CounterSpin: AP‘s May 23 headline told readers: “Supreme Court Rules Against Inmates in Right to Counsel Case.” Those who got past the idea of being interested in “inmates” were favored with a lead that explained that “the Supreme Court ruled along ideological lines Monday against two Arizona death row inmates who had argued that their lawyers did a poor job representing them in state court.” For which many readers might be excused for saying, essentially, “Boo hoo, people courts have said are guilty are upset with that fact, next story please.” Had AP headlined its story, “Supreme Court Rules Evidence of Innocence Is Not Enough to Avoid Execution by the State,” perhaps more readers might’ve read past the big letters. The truth is, while alternative and legal and human rights-oriented media are up in arms about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, corporate news media don’t seem to think there’s much to see there—which has everything to do with their relative disinterest in the human rights of humans at the wrong end of the criminal justice system—and how willing they are to allow any degree of complexity to obscure important truths and to blur outrage. We’ll talk about the new Supreme Court ruling about the so-called sanctity of life with Liliana Segura, reporter for the Intercept. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220603Segura.mp3 Transcript: ‘But for the Failures of His Attorneys, He Would Not Have Been Convicted’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of Republican congressional primaries. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220603Banter.mp3  

  CBS (5/26/22) This week on CounterSpin: CBS News‘ website featured a story about the “grim task” of planning funerals for 19 children—shot dead, along with two teachers, in a Texas elementary school on May 24—right next to a story about Oklahoma’s governor signing the country’s strictest abortion ban, the prominent sign behind him declaring “life is a human right.” Welcome, as they say, to America—where these ideas are presented as somehow of a piece, where news media tell us day after day how exceptionally good and worthy we are, the world’s policeman and a global beacon for human rights and the good life. Meanwhile, the rest of the world looks on in horror. BBC‘s North America editor explained to its audience that there is no expectation of anything being done to prevent things like the latest (as far as we know, as we record on May 26) mass murder in the US, because “the  argument over guns has simply become too politically divisive and culturally entrenched to allow for meaningful change.” Flashpoint (5/26/22) Reporter Eoin Higgins interviewed teachers around the country, who reported the psychological toll of not only actual shootings, but constant drills and lockdowns, on children, who, they said, “have largely given up on a better future.”  Teachers feel expendable and unvalued; it’s hardly lost on them that the same forces accusing them of poisoning children with curricula are also demanding they step between those children and a bullet. That powers that be in this country have responded to school shootings not by toughening gun laws, but by loosening them, and responded to the failure of law enforcement to prevent such shootings by calling for more police. It’s a particularly demoralizing combination of devastating and unsurprising—from a country that promotes and perpetrates violence around the globe. As a response to violence, we try violence time after time. There doesn’t seem to be anything new to say right now about gun violence in the US. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep saying the things we know—more loudly, more unapologetically and in more places. New Press (2019) As we record, we hear that students at schools across the country are walking out, in an effort to say simply, “We refuse to go on like this.” We owe them our action and effort, no matter how tired or disgusted or defeated we feel. We revisit some conversations about gun violence and gun culture this week on the show. In March of last year we spoke with Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, and author of the book Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns, about the possibility of passing common-sense legislation and misunderstandings about the power of the gun lobby. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220527Volsky.mp3 Transcript: ‘More Guns, More Gun Deaths—That’s Really It’ And then: There are always multiple issues involved in a mass murder; elite media use the complexity as an excuse to simply trade accusatory explanations, and determine that in the interest of balance, nothing can be done. But if we’re concerned about young people getting high-grade weaponry and thinking it’d be cool to use it, maybe one thing to consider would be the government-sponsored program that gives young people high-grade weapons and tells them it’d be cool to use it? We spoke in 2018 about Junior ROTC—a feature at my high school, and maybe yours too—with Pat Elder, director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, which resists the militarization of schools, and author of Military Recruiting in the United States. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220527Elder.mp3 Transcript: ‘More Guns, More Gun Deaths—That’s Really It’

  Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 4/12/21) This week on CounterSpin: Ten human beings were killed and three wounded in Buffalo, New York. By the killer’s own admission, he sought to kill Black people because they are Black, and he is a white supremacist who believes there’s a plot to “replace” white people with Black and brown people, a plot run by the Jews. If you’re news media, you could go all in on media outlets and pundits and political figures whose repeated invocations to this white replacement theory are the obvious spurs for this horrendous crime. Or you could be the Washington Post, and tweet that Joe Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ A racist massacre raises questions about that promise.” A press corps that wanted to go down in history as doing better than pretending to raise questions about the “soul of America” would be busy interrogating the structural, economic, political relationships that promote and platform white supremacy. They’d be using their immense and specific influence to interrupt business as usual, to demand—not just today, but tomorrow and the next day—meaningful response from powerful people. They would not be accepting that mass murder in the name of white supremacy and antisemitism is just another news story to report in 2022 America, film at 11. We’ll talk about what we ought to be talking about with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been tracking Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years now. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220520Gertz.mp3 Transcript: ‘The “Great Replacement” Builds on Those Long Hatreds’ And also with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Poverty Law Center and executive director at Western States Center—about ways upward and outward from this current, difficult place. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220520Ward.mp3 Transcript: ‘The “Great Replacement” Builds on Those Long Hatreds’

  Washington Post (5/11/22) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate news media want you to be alarmed about an “extraordinary breach” of privacy. It’s the privacy of the institution of the Supreme Court which, one CBS expert told viewers, had been dealt a “body blow” by the leak of a ruling overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision allowing the right to terminate a pregnancy to remain between the pregnant person and their doctor. And corporate media are in high dudgeon about protecting people from invasions of their right to privacy—but again, only if by that you mean protecting Supreme Court justices and their “right” to never be confronted by people who disagree with the life-altering decisions they make. You almost wouldn’t think the real news of the past week was the nation’s highest court declaring that more than half of the population no longer have bodily autonomy. That’s to say, no longer have the control over their own body that a corpse has—since people can refuse organ donation after their death, even if it would save another person’s life. Elite media are interested in abortion as an issue, as a thing people talk about, but that it is not understood as a human right is clear from reporting—years of reporting—that suggest that for them it’s most importantly a partisan football, and any fight over it needs equal and equally respectful attention to “both sides,” even if one of those sides is calling for human rights violations. We talked with FAIR’s Julie Hollar about that. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220513Hollar.mp3 Transcript: ‘The First Story They Tell Is About the Leak Itself’ Popular Information (5/12/22) Also on the show: In corporate media–land, it’s controversial that people be allowed to determine whether they give birth, because, after all, we care so much about the birthed. It sounds sarcastic, but that’s the underlying premise of coverage of the shortage of baby formula—which incorporates an implied shock at the denial of basic healthcare with another implied shock that somehow capitalism doesn’t allow for all infants to be treated the same. There’s really no time left for pretended surprise at system failure in this country. We can still talk about journalism that shines a light on it, rather than an obscuring shadow. We’ll talk with Tesnim Zekeria from Popular Information about applying a public interest prism to, in this case, the story on baby formula.   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220513Zekeria.mp3 Transcript: ‘We Live in an Economy That Provides Little Support to New Parents’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of murdered Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220513Banter.mp3  

  (illustration: The Forum) This week on CounterSpin: Listeners are aware of the no-less-destructive-for-being-baseless assault on critical race theory. Just like with affirmative action (where conservatives said, “steps toward racial equity really means unfair quotas”), media took this charge, “steps toward racial equity really means telling white children to hate themselves,” and made it into “something some folks are saying”—while, of course, out of fairness they’ll acknowledge, “others disagree.”  (Media themselves, they suggest, occupy the intellectually and morally superior center.) A new website engages the attack more productively, by using critical race theory as a prism to explore the current range of threats to multi-racial democracy and our ability to fight for it. The site’s called The Forum; we’ll talk with editor-in-chief Chris Lehmann. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220506Lehmann.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Race Crisis and the Democracy Crisis Are Inseparable’ (photo: New Jersey Civic Information Consortium) Also on the show: Between Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk, who would you prefer preside over what information you can access? It’s kind of like being offered a choice between a poke in one eye or the other. If the problem is media outlets with priorities that poorly serve even our aspirations for democracy—and it is—the response is media with different priorities, which we know really only come from having a different bottom line. How can that work? We’ll talk about one model with Mike Rispoli of the group Free Press; he’s been working with the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium—a new way of thinking about and meeting local communities’ need for news. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220506Rispoli.mp3 Transcript: ‘What if We Use Public Money to Transform What Local Media Looks Like?’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look back at recent coverage of Roe v. Wade. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220506Banter.mp3  

(image: Copwatch Media) This week on CounterSpin: There are reasons that so much news media is consumed with crime. Not just any crime, not wage theft, not lethal pollution—but street crime, random, individual crime. “If it bleeds, it leads” journalism draws eyes to the set, doesn’t bother advertisers, is cheap to produce and lets news outlets look as though they’re tracking an important event in real time, and pretend as though they’re protecting real people…as they forcibly distract from actual humane efforts to respond to the ongoing crises—homelessness, poverty, addiction—that lead to crime, but are less cheap and easy to cover than cops and robbers. It’s a story old as journalism, but it’s still messed up. We’ll talk about that with activist and writer Josmar Trujillo, working now with Copwatch Media, a community-based project that reports on the effects of hyper-policing on communities. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220429Trujillo.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Core of Copaganda Is the Symbiotic Relationship Between Press and Police’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of inflation, immigration restriction and democracy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220429Banter.mp3