CounterSpin

    Sludge (8/6/21) This week on CounterSpin: A recent New York Times story about Senate Energy Committee chair Joe Manchin’s conflicts of interest quoted a source saying, “It says something fascinating about our politics that we’re going to have a representative of fossil fuel interests crafting the policy that reduces our emissions from fossil fuels.” A lot of people would say that’s less fascinating than horrific, particularly in the context of a new global survey of people between 16 and 25 that found that more than half of them believe “humanity is doomed”—and that 58% of young people said their governments are betraying them. You can’t talk about why we can’t get to realistic climate policy without talking about that betrayal, and its roots. Which is why we talk about Joe Manchin with David Moore, co-founder of investigative news outlet Sludge. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210924Moore.mp3 Transcript: ‘Manchin Has Taken the Lead in Diluting Ethics Provisions’ Also on the show: We get an update on media coverage of Covid with FAIR’s editor, Jim Naureckas. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210924Naureckas.mp3 Transcript: ‘You Should Get the Vaccine Despite the Media Telling You You Should’   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Rahm Emanuel’s ambassadorial nomination. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210924Banter.mp3  

    (Kendall Hunt, 2021) This week on CounterSpin: The primary “sense” of Sub-Saharan Africa in corporate media is absence. When Africa is discussed, it’s often been, to put it simply, as a material resource and as a staging ground for Great Nation politics and proxy war. Not as far removed as it ought to be from the Berlin conference in the late 19th century, when the European powers sat down to decide who got which slice of what the genocidal King Leopold II of Belgium called “this magnificent African cake.” Challenging and changing the frame requires seeing through the racist fables, the omissions and hypocrisy that have plagued US media’s Africa reporting through history and up to today. A new book takes that on, and we hear this week from its author. Milton Allimadi teaches African history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and publishes the Black Star News, a weekly newspaper in New York City. He’s the author of the new book Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in Western Media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210917Allimadi.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Demonization Was Meant to Pacify Readers to Accept the Brutality’

  (cc photo: Beth Wilson) This week on CounterSpin: Many people will know that the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade in 1973, enshrining women’s right to access abortion—to choose when and whether to have a child. It seemed to signal recognition that abortion is healthcare, that most women who have abortions are mothers (in other words, they don’t need to have an ultrasound to recognize what’s happening), that medical reality and theology are not the same, and that outlawing abortion doesn’t stop it, but just pushes women to have unsafe abortions. Less often considered is how immediately after Roe, Congress passed the Hyde amendment, taking this fundamental human right out of the hands of women who rely on government assistance—so low-income, overwhelmingly women of color. Hyde acknowledged that they wanted to outlaw abortion for all women, but poor women were the only ones they had legal standing to control. That cynical approach proved effective, as Americans watched the ability to access abortion chipped away, with wait times, parental notification rules, hospital credential requirements, clinic closings, funding cutoffs for international groups—all the while comforted by the notion that the “right” to abortion was somehow still legally protected. That narrative is exploding right now in the wake of the Supreme Court’s refusal to address, which amounts to an endorsement, what is overwhelmingly understood as an unconstitutional Texas law offering a bounty on anyone who “aids and abets” a woman seeking an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. We’ll talk with Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild and author of, among other titles, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210910Cohn.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Radical Right-Wing Majority of the Supreme Court May Well Overturn Roe v. Wade’ And we’ll revisit a conversation from January of this year about what law can and can’t do, with Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the group URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210910InezMcGuire.mp3 Transcript: ‘Restrictions on Abortion Are Invisible Because They Appear Based on Who You Are’

  Purdue heir David Sackler and wife Joss depicted in Vanity Fair (6/19/19) This week on CounterSpin: The engineers of the crack epidemic were never offered a deal to get out of the biz with impunity as long as they gave some money towards helping the families, communities and healthcare systems broken in the wake of the addiction epidemic they unleashed. Nor were any other neighborhood drug dealers you can think of, caught making money off drugs that, hey, they’re also very sorry if anyone used irresponsibly? Somehow that’s not the most relevant  context for corporate media talking about the bankruptcy ruling shielding the Sackler family, profiteers via Purdue Pharma on the drug Oxycontin, responsible for, conservatively, half a million deaths by overdose. We’ll talk about that with Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210903Claypool.mp3 Transcript: ‘Where Are the Threads Dropped With the Criminal Investigation of the Sackler Family?’ CEPR (1/21/20) Also on the show: You’ve seen the graphic showing how the US minimum wage has become unhinged from other indicators it should connect to, like productivity—the value of the goods and services that, after all, workers produce.  But how did that disconnect happen, and how would a true understanding of that help us push through foggy reportage toward a better world? We’ll get a breakdown of ideas elite media generally talk over from economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210903Baker.mp3 Transcript: ‘We’ve Structured Our Economy to Redistribute a Massive Amount of Income Upward’

Image: Charles C.J. Hoffbauer Anyone born before last week can see US news media lying about history as it’s happening. But fast forward to 10, 20 years from now, and those media stories will have hardened into narrative, into the unspoken “given” presented as context for the latest thing. That’s the power of history as told. A power well understood by James Loewen, the historian and author who died August 19 at the age of 79. Some US media are now lauding Jim Loewen, but without ceasing to generate the very sort of misty misinformation he fought against. CounterSpin spoke with James Loewen in July 2015. We listen again to that conversation this week.   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210827Loewen.mp3 Transcript: ‘That’s the Biggest Lie, That We Started Out Great and We’ve Been Getting Better Ever Since’   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of climate “terrorism” and “generous” unemployment benefits. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210827Banter.mp3

(LA Times, 8/16/21) This week on CounterSpin: US news media are full of armchair generals who talk about weapons of war like they’re Hot Wheels, and have lots of thoughts about how “we coulda got ’em” here and “we shoulda got ’em” there. The price of admission to elite media debate is acceptance that the US, alone among nations, has the right to force change in other countries’ governments; and when this results, as it always does, in death and destruction, elite media’s job entails telling the public that that’s not just necessary but somehow good. Not to put too fine a point on it. All of this and more is on display in coverage of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan—along with, as usual, some exceptional countervailing reporting. Ending the US occupation could mean a new day for the Afghan people, but with the anniversary of September 11 coming up, it looks like US media consumers may need not a broom but a shovel to deal with the self-aggrandizing, history-erasing misinformation headed our way. We’ll prepare ourselves with insights on Afghanistan from Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and from Matthew Hoh, senior fellow with the Center for International Policy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210820Bennis.mp3 https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210820Hoh.mp3 Transcript: ‘Accountability to the People of Afghanistan Should Remain Our Focal Point’ and ‘So Much of This War Has Got Almost Nothing to Do With the Afghans Themselves’

  Jeff Cohen co-founded FAIR in 1986 and is the author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. This week on CounterSpin: Listeners to this show may take it as a given that, if you care about social, racial, economic justice, you have to also care about media—because corporate news media promote narratives that shape public opinion, public policy and all of our lives. Now we understand that tales that mainstream news media tell every day—”Healthcare for everyone is too expensive,” “rich people contribute to the economy, while workers just take from it,” “the rest of the world sees the US as the exemplar of democracy”—are not demonstrable truths, but reflect the interests and priorities of media owners and sponsors. But it wasn’t always this way; there was a time—not long ago—when folks would tell you if it’s in the paper it must be true, and media’s idea of the limits of political debate and political possibility ought to be your limits too, if you’re sensible. Undoing that myth—with criticism and activism and promoting alternative sources of information—has been the project of FAIR, the worker collective media watch group that produces this show, for 35 years now. We’re celebrating that anniversary by working more, basically, but this week we take a look back at FAIR’s beginnings with founder Jeff Cohen. After starting FAIR with Martin Lee and Pia Gallegos in 1986, Jeff went on to be founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, and now co-founder and policy adviser at the online initiative RootsAction. In between, he was a pundit on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, and wrote the book Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210813Cohen.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Media Are an Arena for Struggle’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look at media coverage of the Olympics. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210813Banter.mp3

    Pro-government rally, Cuba (photo: AP/Eliana Aponte) This week on CounterSpin: Imagine if China used its power to cut off international trade to the US, including for things like medical equipment, because they didn’t like Joe Biden, and hoped that if enough Americans were made miserable, they would rise up against him, and install a leader China thought would better serve their interests.  How would you think about Chinese media that said, “Well, we heard a lot of Americans say they were unhappy; they even marched in the street! Obviously, that was a call for foreign intervention from a country that understands democracy better than they do.” And then what if some Chinese people said, “Wait, you can’t immiserate ordinary Americans to push them to overthrow their government; that’s illegal and immoral,” and other Chinese people explained, “You don’t get it; US politics are very complicated”? We talk about the admitted complexities of the hardships facing Cubans—and the relatively uncomplicated actions the US could take to stop contributing to those hardships—with James Early, board member at the Institute for Policy Studies, and former assistant secretary for education and public service at the Smithsonian Institution. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210806Early.mp3 Transcript: ‘Economic Warfare [Is] Designed to Starve the Cuban People Into Rebellion’ Lincoln, Nebraska (image: Today, 7/13/21) Also on the show: David Cooper, senior research analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, joins us to parse the “we all quit” phenomenon currently coursing through the US wage labor workforce, and through US economic news media. Does media’s narrative really match what’s going on? https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210806Cooper.mp3 Transcript: ‘There Is a Fundamental Imbalance in the Power of Employers and Employees’

  Little Rock, 1957 This week on CounterSpin: You’ve almost certainly seen the documentary photographs; they’re emblematic: African Americans trying to walk to school or sit at a drugstore soda fountain, while white people yell and spit and scream at them. Should no one see those pictures or learn those stories—because some of them have skin the same color as those doing the screaming and the spitting? The most recent attack on anti-racist education is labeled as protective, as avoiding “division,” and as a specific assessment of critical race theory. To the extent that corporate media have bought into that labeling, they’ve misinformed the public—not just about critical race theory, but about a campaign whose own architects say is about disinforming, confusing and inflaming people into resisting any actual effort to understand or respond to persistent racial inequity. Luke Charles Harris is co-founder and deputy director of the African American Policy Forum. He joins us to talk about what’s at issue. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210730Harris.mp3 Transcript: ‘We Can’t Fight for Racial Justice if We Can’t Learn About Racial Injustice’ (image: EFF) Also on the show: Democracy & technology and digital rights groups around the world signed on to a letter in support of encryption: the ability of journalists, human rights defenders and everyone else to have private communication—to talk to one another without being spied on by governments, including their own. You’d think it’d be a big deal, but judging by US corporate media, it’s evidently a yawn. We talk about what’s going on and why it matters with Cindy Cohn, executive director at Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210730Cohn.mp3 Transcript: ‘Governments Are Spying on the People Who Bring Us the News’

    New York Times (6/22/21) This week on CounterSpin: A June New York Times article about female Asian-American and Pacific Islander golfers reacting to the recent spike in anti-Asian bias began inauspiciously: “Players of Asian descent have won eight of the past 10 Women’s PGA championships, but there is nothing cookie cutter about the winners.” It reads like a TikTok challenge: “Tell me you assume your readership is white without telling me you assume your readership is white.” In other words, it’s unclear who, exactly, the New York Times believes would, without their guidance, confuse a Chinese-American player with a South Korean player with a player from Taiwan. The piece goes on to talk about the concerns and fears of Asian-American golfers “at a time when Asians have been scapegoated in American communities for the spread of the coronavirus.” Locating the source of racist bias and violence in “American communities,” with no mention of powerful politicians or powerful media, is a neat way to sidestep the role of systemic, structural racism, and imply that bias or “hate” is an individual, emotional issue, rather than one we can and should address together, across community, as a society. Add in media’s frequent prescription of law enforcement as the primary response, and you have what a large number of Asian Americans are calling a problem presenting itself as a solution, and not a way forward that actually makes them safer. We’ll talk about anti-Asian bias and underexplored responses to it with Bianca Nozaki-Nasser, from the group 18 Million Rising. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210723Nozaki-Nasser.mp3 Transcript: ‘If Police Made Asian Americans Safe, We’d Already Be Safe’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of theft—retail and wholesale. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210723Banter.mp3   Featured image: Solidarity Against Hate Crimes march, March 20, 2021, Columbus, Ohio (cc photo: Paul Becker)