CounterSpin

  This week on CounterSpin: News media coverage of taxes falls broadly into two camps: There are, especially in April, lots of “news you can use”–type stories—like NBC‘s Today show on April 14 warning viewers to be mindful of typos and not be lazy about filing for extensions, or NBC Nightly News on April 18, noting that if you filed by mail, you might wait five to eight months for your return, due to backlogs at the IRS. Taxes as an “oh well, what are you gonna do” thing that all of us have to deal with. Then there are other stories, disconnected stories, about tax policy: Who pays, how much, and why? We’ve talked about that a fair amount on this show, and we’re going to revisit two of those conversations today. Last April, we spoke with Emory University law professor and author Dorothy A. Brown about how, though you can scour tax policy and find no mention of race, our tax system still affects Black people very differently, in ways most conversation obscures. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220422Brown.mp3 Trancript: ‘The System for Building Wealth Is Designed for White Wealth’ And in February 2019, we spoke with economist Dean Baker about why the idea of raising taxes on the superwealthy makes sense to many mainstream economists and to the general public, but still faces a perennial headwind in corporate media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220422Baker.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Distribution of Income Depends on How We Structure the Economy’ Two revelatory conversations about tax policy, this week on CounterSpin.

  Philadelphia Inquirer (3/29/22) This week on CounterSpin: A longtime reporter, at Philadelphia’s WPVI-TV since the 1960s, remembered spending shifts in his early days just listening to a police scanner, waiting for a crime to happen. The station’s decision to adopt a then-novel “Action News” format dictated that hyper-focus on crime. But, as detailed in a new report from the Philadelphia Inquirer, it also dictated that the scanner being monitored was in Kensington, a multi-racial, working-class neighborhood struggling with poverty and its attendant ills—and not someplace else. “Lights. Camera. Crime” is an early installment of the Inquirer‘s “A More Perfect Union” project, aimed at examining the roots and branches of racism in US institutions, including media institutions. The story was reported by Layla A. Jones. We’ll speak to Layla Jones today on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220415Jones.mp3 Transcript: ‘This Portrayal of Urban Environment Definitely Did Fuel Fear’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of FCC nominee Gigi Sohn, war coverage and “grooming.” https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220415Banter.mp3  

  Washington Post (4/7/22) This week on CounterSpin: He wanted to go to the Capitol on January 6, Donald Trump tells the Washington Post, but the Secret Service wouldn’t let him. He hated the violence, and was furious Nancy Pelosi wasn’t putting a stop to it. He doesn’t remember getting many phone calls, and he didn’t destroy any call logs. Trump would lie on credit when he could tell the truth for cash, so why are so many pundits invested in suggesting that he can never be legally brought to account? We’ll hear from Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, about the “stunning” new ruling that shows a way to do just that. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220408Cohn.mp3 Transcript: ‘There Is Plenty of Evidence to Request the Arrest of Trump’ (cc image: Don Goofy) Also on the show: Polls show 68% of people in the country think marijuana should be legal, the highest number since polling started in 1969. The tide is turning; it’s just a matter of who we let be lifted by it and who we allow to  drown. Should some people get rich selling weed while others rot in jail for it? That’s what the MORE Act that just passed the House tries to address. We’ll catch up with an expert on marijuana legislation, Mike Liszewski from the Enact Group. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220408Liszewski.mp3 Transcript: ‘Once the Federal Government Legalizes, Many More States Would Follow Through’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and notes the passing of media critic Eric Boehlert. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220408Banter.mp3  

    Ginni and Clarence Thomas, 1991 (image: C-SPAN) This week on CounterSpin: Headlines right now are full of the conflict of interest represented by Ginni Thomas, spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and her non-trivial role in the January 6 insurrection aimed at overturning, violently, the last presidential election. Our question is: A week or a month from now, where will we be? Will we still have one of nine Supreme Court justices declaring himself “one being” with his spouse, who declares the 2020 election an “obvious fraud”? And will the corporate press corps have reduced that to yet another partisan spat that shouldn’t interfere with our belief that all is proceeding as it should, no deep fixes necessary? We speak with Sarah Lipton-Lubet from the Take Back the Court Action Fund, about how to respond to the Thomas scandal if we really don’t want it to happen again. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220401LiptonLubet.mp3 Transcript: ‘Someone Who Cared About Integrity Would Have Recused Himself’ (image: EFF) Also on the show: For many Americans, the word “journalist” calls up an image of scruffy firebrands, rooting through official documents to ferret out critical truth—defined as what those in power don’t want you to hear—and then broadcasting that truth to a public thirsty for a democracy more answerable to human needs. Many things stand in the way of that vision of the press corps we imagine and deserve. One is the stubborn and at times brazen opacity and secretiveness of government and other powerful agents. Dave Maass, director of investigations at Electronic Frontier Foundation and the driving force behind the Foilies, an annual award of sorts given to those who make the job of shining necessary sunlight particularly difficult. We talk with him about that. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220401Maass.mp3 Transcript: ‘You Have to Laugh at the Ways Agencies Will Evade Giving You Information’

    (cc photo: Don Sniegowski) This week on CounterSpin:  We heard a cable TV commentator say recently that with the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is trying to “put an end to democracy as we know it.” We know we weren’t the only ones wondering, among other things, what “we” is being invoked here? And what’s the definition of the “democracy” we’re meant to be endorsing? Does it account for, say, the people who broke into the US Capitol last January trying to violently overturn a presidential election, and their supporters, explicit and implicit? Thing is: Corporate news media don’t define the “democracy” they invoke as shorthand justification for pretty much anything, including war. It’s a murky stand-in for “a good place, where people have a voice and…stuff.” Even when and where it demonstrably means anything but. With the ongoing horrific attack on Ukraine by Russia, you get the sense that war is a clarifier—proof that “Russia” as a country deserves pariah status, with all that entails (and media have a big box of what that entails). And as Americans, media suggest, we’re meant to see and celebrate and fight for our difference from an imperialist, racist nation. So it is, respectfully, a good time to recall that we had a war within this country, in which many people declared that they cared less about this country than about white supremacy. And that sentiment did not disappear. And those conversations have not finished. And ignoring them doesn’t erase them. Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African-American studies at Emory University, and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy and, most recently, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America We talked with her in November of last year about the historical and ongoing struggle between white supremacy and this country’s hopes for democracy. We revisit that conversation this week. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220325Anderson.mp3 Transcript: ‘White Supremacists Were Willing to Hold the United States Hostage’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the “no-fly zone” proposal. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220325Banter.mp3  

    Sanaa, Yemen (cc photo: Yahya Arhab/European Pressphoto Agency) This week on CounterSpin: It’s worth our while to think about why everyone we know is talking about Ukraine and Russia’s unlawful incursion—and equally worthwhile to ask why the same principles of concern don’t seem to apply in other cases. Those feelings don’t have to fight. But to hear Yemen put forward as just an example of an underconsidered concern is galling from the same people who underprioritized it in the first place. Yemen is not a rhetorical device. It’s a country of human beings in crisis. We talk about that with Yemeni activist and advocate Shireen Al-Adeimi, who is also assistant professor of education at Michigan State University. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220318Al-Adeimi.mp3 Transcript: ‘Just Pay Attention to What Our Own Government Is Doing in Yemen’ Sarah Bloom Raskin (cc photo: New America) Also on the show: Sarah Bloom Raskin was up for a job at the Federal Reserve. Everyone was for her nomination, including the bankers she would oversee. So why did she withdraw her nomination, and what does it tell us about the possibility of making any advances at all in facing the reality of climate change? Helping us see why issues media divide are completely related is David Arkush, managing director of the climate program at Public Citizen. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220318Arkush.mp3 Transcript: ‘She Intended Not to Ignore Things Related to Climate, as There Is Pressure to Do’

  Institute for Policy Studies (3/6/22) This week on CounterSpin: Russia’s horrendous invasion of Ukraine is providing yet another reminder that when elephants fight, it’s the grass that’s trampled. We see that not just in the front-page casualties; teenage soldiers dying fighting; civilian men, women and children killed by dropping bombs—but also in the measures we are told are meant to avert those harms: economic sanctions. Khury Petersen-Smith is Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He joins us to talk about the problem with seeing sanctions as an alternative to war. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220311PetersenSmith.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Most Vulnerable People Lose When the US Imposes Sanctions’ Good Jobs First (3/1/22) Also on the show: In March 2012, Amazon opened an office dedicated to ferreting out tax breaks and subsidies. In other words, the megacorporation making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit puts in time finding ways to avoid supporting the communities it operates in—and to push local governments to divest money from education, housing and healthcare—to give to a company that doesn’t need it. This March, the group Good Jobs First marked that anniversary with a call to #EndAmazonSubsidies. We talk with the group’s executive director, Greg LeRoy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220311LeRoy.mp3 Transcript: ‘Communities Should Not Pay Amazon. It Should Be the Other Way Around.’

  This week on CounterSpin: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently: “Whenever I go to community meetings, it always comes up. Young and middle-aged and even some elderly. It tortures them.” What was he talking about? Student loan debt. So is what we call “higher” education an individual investment or a public good? The way news media talk about it could be decisive. We’ll hear from Braxton Brewington, press secretary and organizer at the group Debt Collective. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220304Brewington.mp3 Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’ (cc photo: Ted Eytan) Also on the show: When media say there’s a debate about transgender peoples’ “right to exist,” remind yourself that trans people are going to exist; what’s on the table is whether they get to live free from persecution, oppression, exclusion and erasure. Texas state leadership is staking a position on that, but humans everywhere are pushing back, and we talk about that with Andy Marra, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220304Marra.mp3 Transcript: ‘These Attacks Are on Children and Their Families’

  Aftermath of Tulsa Massacre (photo via bswise) This week on CounterSpin: Black History Month has always been something of a double-edged sword: It implies that Black history is somehow not “history,” that it has to be shoehorned in, “artificially,” to garner any value, with the corollary implication that if you choose to ignore it, you aren’t missing anything crucial. The idea that Black Americans are somehow something other than (meaning “less than”) “real” Americans is stupid, toxic…and fully in play, as reflected in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s response to a reporter’s question about efforts to suppress Black people’s voting rights with the statement that “the concern is misplaced because, if you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” So: There’s a reason Black people feel a need to lift up our particular history–our efforts and accomplishments, in and despite the context of violent, systemic harm we live in–that distinguishes that from the bland and euphemistic vision that usually passes as “US history.” What matters is how the history of Black people is approached, discussed and integrated into what’s happening today. Journalists, of course, have an opportunity to do that work every month, not just the shortest. Last year, we saw some open media acknowledgement of an event previously shrouded in silence and ignorance: the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of 1921. The layers of that story, the roles played by various actors, make it especially relevant for news media, who, to fully tell it, need to reflect on their own role, then…and now. We talked about the Tulsa massacre around its anniversary last June, with Joseph Torres, senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press, and co-author with Juan González of the crucial book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. He works, as does CounterSpin‘s Janine Jackson, with Media 2070, a consortium of media-makers and activists that are detailing the history of US media participation in anti-Black racism, as well as collectively dreaming reparative policies, interventions and futures. We hear from Joseph Torres about Tulsa this week on the show. Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220225Torres.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look at media coverage of Ukraine. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220225Banter.mp3   Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’

  FAIR.org (1/28/22) This week on CounterSpin: You might think you’re not smart enough to talk about Ukraine. And, especially on US foreign policy, corporate media seem to suggest that any questions you have that fall outside their framework are not just dumb but traitorous, not earnest but dangerously naive. Peace? Diplomacy? The idea that US might have broken promises, might have material and not moral interests? Oh, so you love Putin then! There is an interesting, relevant history to the state of tension between the US and Russia over Ukraine; but understanding it involves letting go of the storyline in which the US equals benevolent democracy and Russia equals craven imperialism. We got some of that history from Bryce Greene, who wrote about Ukraine recently for FAIR.org.  We’ll hear that conversation this week. Transcript: In Ukraine, ‘No One Hears That There Is a Diplomatic Solution’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220218Greene.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Afghanistan. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220218Banter.mp3