CounterSpin

Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Adm. Mike Mullen (center) with US troops in Haiti, 2010 (photo: Chad J. McNeeley/DoD) This week on CounterSpin: There are enough storylines in the July 7 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse to make you lose sight of the big picture. The thing is: US media consumers don’t have to puzzle out if the assassins were Colombian, or if a Florida doctor bankrolled the plan, or if Moïse’s own bodyguards had it in for him and his wife. The long history of the US using state force to kill Haitians and their aspirations is sufficient and appropriate context for current events. From George Washington to Woodrow Wilson to the Clintons, there’s enough for US citizens to know about not doing harm before we chinstroke over whether “the world’s policeman” should wade in again. We talk about Haiti with Chris Bernadel from the Black Alliance for Peace. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210716Bernadel.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Haitian People Aren’t Looking for Foreign Powers to Impose a New System’ Also on the show: Cronyism between pharmaceutical companies and their ostensible government regulators is an infuriating fact of US life, along with the unsurprisingly obscene cost of drugs. Yet somehow the story of aducanumab takes it to a new level. We talk about what pharma and the FDA call a breakthrough Alzheimer’s drug, and what public advocates call an example of all that’s wrong with the FDA, with Michael Carome, M.D., director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210716Carome.mp3 Transcript: ‘The FDA’s Decision Showed a Stunning Disregard for Science’    

Child chocolate worker in the Ivory Coast (Fortune, 3/1/16) (photo: Benjamin Lowy) This week on CounterSpin: Nestle CEO Mark Schneider told investors in February that “2020 was a year of hardship for so many,” yet he was “inspired by the way it has brought all of us closer together.” And also by an “improvement” in Nestle’s “profitability and return on invested capital.” “The global pandemic,” Schneider said, “did not slow us down.” You know what else didn’t slow them down? Ample evidence that their profitability relies on a supply chain that includes literal slave labor in the Ivory Coast.  The US Supreme Court recently heard Nestle USA v. Doe, a long-running case that seemed to get at how much responsibility corporations have for international human rights violations, but in the end may have taught us more about what legal tools are useful in getting to that accountability. We got some clarity on the case from William Dodge, professor at University of California/Davis School of Law. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210709Dodge.mp3 Transcript: ‘US Companies Can Be Sued for Involvement in Child Slavery’ AP (6/30/21) Also on the show: Donald Rumsfeld launched wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and approved torture at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. But to hear elite media tell it, the former Defense secretary should be remembered as “complex and paradoxical.” The New York Times described his arrival in Washington as “like an All-American who had stepped off the Wheaties box,” and AP suggested that all those dead Iraqis were mainly a thorn in Rumsfeld’s side, with the headline, “Donald Rumsfeld, a Cunning Leader Undermined by the Iraq War.” Obituaries noted that Rumsfeld expressed no regrets about his decisions; media appear to have none of their own. CounterSpin talked about Rumsfeld’s media treatment back in 2008 with the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Michael Ratner, whose book The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld had just come out from the New Press. We’ll hear that conversation on today’s show. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210709Ratner.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Techniques Rumsfeld Was Using Were Designed to Get False Information’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the New Cold War. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210709Banter.mp3

  USA Today (7/1/20) This week on CounterSpin: For many US citizens the Fourth of July is really just a chance to barbecue with friends and family. But for US media, it’s also a chance to say or imply that there really is something to celebrate about the unique place of the United States in the world, the special democratic project that this country is supposedly engaged in. And that’s where the message gets complicated. Because while media give air time and column inches to where you can find the best holiday sales and celebrations, fewer will use the occasion to direct attention to the danger that the democratic project is facing, the energetic efforts to silence the voices of anyone who has something critical to say about this country, its practices and policies, or its history. Celebrate, don’t interrogate—is the takeaway from a press corps that wants to tell you how to protect your dog from fireworks, but not how to protect yourself and your society from well-funded, well-entrenched campaigns to stop people from voting or speaking or going into the street to protest things that are wrong. We’ll talk about that with Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210702Eidelman.mp3 Transcript: ‘We Have Seen the Deepening of the Anti-Democratic, Anti-Protest Legislative Trend’ Washington Post depiction (6/28/21) of Pacific heat dome (from earth.nullschool.net) Also on the show: As the West Coast deals with a historic heatwave and drought, some city officials are banning fireworks to help prevent wildfires. If that’s some folks’ first indication that climate disruption will actually disrupt their lives, well, media need to take some of the blame. A recent Washington Post piece on the unprecedented, punishing heat in the Pacific Northwest stressed how readers would be wrong to be shocked: Everybody saw this coming; there have been “40 years of warnings.” It had a breaker reading “Chickens Coming Home to Roost,” it used the phrase “human-caused.”… It’s just that the words “fossil fuels” appear nowhere. So climate disruption is a horrible thing that’s happening, and we’re all to blame for not acknowledging it…but who is to blame for doing it? Well, that’s unclear. Just know that you should be worried and upset. A CBS News piece did say: “This is only the beginning of the heating expected if humanity continues burning fossil fuels.” And it ended with Michael Mann calling for “rapidly decarboniz[ing] our civilization.” And that stripe of coverage is fine as far as it goes. But how far does it go? Where is the reporting that frankly identifies fossil fuels as the problem (rather than how long a shower I take), and incorporates that knowledge into all of the coverage—of Enbridge 3 and other pipelines, of extreme weather events, of how, as CNBC had it recently, “It’s not too late to buy oil and gas stocks.” Why won’t media move past narrating the nightmare of climate disruption, to using their powerful platforms to actually address it? We’ll talk about that with Vivek Shandas; he focuses on the particular implications of climate change on cities, and on different people within cities, as a professor at Portland State University. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210702Shandas.mp3 Transcript: ‘That’s Lethal, Communities Completely Exposed to This Kind of Heat’

  Protest in Union Square, New York (cc photo: Jim Naureckas) This week on CounterSpin: “Biden Administration Ousts Trump’s Border Patrol Chief,” announced the June 24 New York Times, explaining in the subhed that Rodney Scott “had become known for his support of President Donald J. Trump’s signature border wall, and had resisted a Biden initiative to stop using the phrase ‘illegal alien.”’ Ergo, we are to understand, his “forcing out” by the White House—suggesting a meaningful departure from the immigration policies of the previous administration. The message is undermined by the subsequent acknowledgement from the paper’s anonymous Homeland Security source that Scott “could remain in the department, reassigned to a new post.” The notion of real change is undermined more severely by a close look at Biden’s actual immigration policy, particularly with regard to Central America, which includes familiar promises to promote “the rule of law, security and economic development” in the region, and to fight corruption. Familiar because they’ve been used for decades as cover for policies that pour money into regional governments that agree to use it to protect the profits of foreign investors, by violence if necessary (and it’s always necessary), and even when it means communal and environmental devastation, which are also par for the course. So what’s new? We’ll talk about Central America policy and Honduras in particular with Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210625Carlsen.mp3 Transcript: US ‘Intervention Has Directly Led to the Conditions Migrants Are Fleeing’ (cc photo: Paul Lowry) Also on the show: Texas state Rep. Jim Murphy may wish he’d never called attention to Chapter 313—the state program that offers companies major tax breaks to locate in the state. The alarming price tag attached to Murphy’s proposal to expand the program led some to examine Chapter 313 carefully for the first time. The Houston Chronicle produced a groundbreaking investigative series on the program and its costs. A somewhat motley coalition of opposition was formed. And now—after being easily renewed three times since 2001—the program is set to expire. We’ll hear why that’s good news for Texas schools, taxpayers and the planet from Greg LeRoy, executive director of the group Good Jobs First. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210625LeRoy.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Tax Break Industrial Complex Has Not Been Challenged’  

James Stewart filibustering in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. This week on CounterSpin: NBC News recently reported that “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said…he is ‘100%’ focused ‘on stopping’ President Joe Biden’s administration.” The statement is remarkable for the painful mockery it makes of Democrats’ and corporate media’s stubborn insistence that the most important value is “bipartisanship,” Democrats and Republicans getting along—over and against majorities of the US public getting the laws and policies they want and need, and have elected officials to enact. But then, wait a minute, the Senate minority leader is vowing to “stop” the dominant party’s legislative agenda? How’s that work? Listeners know the problem stems from a Senate where, to start with, Wyoming, with 578,000 people, has the same representation as California, population 39.5 million—and then there is the filibuster, the rule that allows Senate minorities to block legislation indefinitely unless the majority can get 60 votes. It’s the crucial backdrop to any conversation about the Biden agenda, though media don’t always bring that point home. We’ll talk about the filibuster with Andrew Perez, senior editor and reporter at the Daily Poster. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210618Perez.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Filibuster Functions as a General Block on All Legislation’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of racist facial recognition, Naomi Osaka and billionaire taxes.   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210618Banter.mp3

  ChiFresh Kitchen, a worker co-op This week on CounterSpin: In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, employees of Whole Foods—owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos—were asked to give their own accrued paid sick days to co-workers who had either contracted the virus or been forced to take time out of work.  Bezos could have given every single worker unlimited paid sick leave without his bank account even noticing. But the move shows, for those who miss the message, that corporate capitalists really mean it: This is the system they support all the time, even when it means wealthy companies saying that life-saving equipment just isn’t sufficiently profitable for them to distribute, or that, yes, they’ll take “paycheck protection” money from the state and then fire workers anyway, or that actually protecting workers’ health in a pandemic just doesn’t serve their “bottom line,” so, no, they won’t do it. Then if you’re confused or upset, here come corporate media saying, nope, that’s a completely valid point of view—and underscoring the idea that our “economy” means everyone is always on the edge of disaster, so you better show up for work, or else you’ll lose your healthcare, you won’t make your mortgage or your rent payments, you’ll be sick and on the street, and you know what? That’s just how it is. Such a deep, encompassing, anti-human narrative calls for not just debunking points nibbling at the ankles, but a full-frontal assault on a story about how workers are powerless and deserve to be. An important part of a counter-narrative is provided by worker co-operatives: the way they treat workers, and productivity, and the balance of worker health and company success, in a pandemic and every day.  We’ll talk about the complications co-ops pose to corporate media’s economic storyline with Jaisal Noor, senior reporter at the Real News Network. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210611Noor.mp3 Transcript: ‘Having a Say Can Be Transformative’ Source: Clean Creatives Also on the show: The Keystone XL pipeline has evidently just been killed; Enbridge’s Line 3 is, as we speak, the center of a huge gathering in Minnesota—the Treaty People Gathering—to call attention to the myriad harms it likewise poses to people and to the environment. Fossil fuel companies’ onward march is under threat—maybe not as much as many of us would like, but obviously much more than they would like. As companies get increasingly desperate—and let’s not fool ourselves; no one’s headed to the poorhouse; it’s an industry that wants to make every last penny before they close shop—we can only expect their greenwashing to get smarter and more subtle. They’ve been working on that greenwashing for a long time, with a lot of smart people. Part of their work right now is convincing you and me that fossil fuel companies are working hard to get to the net zero emissions standard that the Paris Accord calls for and, more broadly, to give us to understand that if we’re looking for a solution to climate disruption, we ought to honor and even privilege the participation of fossil fuel companies in that conversation. We’ll start to unpack that message, and shine a light on the messengers, with Duncan Meisel, campaign director at the climate-focused, behind-the-scenes ad group Clean Creatives. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210611Meisel.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Goal of These Ads Is to Distract From Their Actual Business Model’

  June 1, 2021, Tulsa, Oklahoma. This week on CounterSpin: The word is a number of proposed documentaries about the 1921 murderous assault on Tulsa, Oklahoma’s, prosperous Black community, and how the story was not just little-known but actively erased, were meeting general disinterest. Then the TV show Watchmen, adapted from Alan Moore’s graphic novel, proved that—not to put too fine a point on it—white people could handle hearing the history. A false accusation against a young Black man led to a lynch mob and the descent of hundreds of “deputized” white people on the part of town known as Black Wall Street. The assault left this area, which represented the success and the hopes of Tulsa’s Black community, a blasted ruin, with hundreds dead and hundreds more wounded and scattered. It’s no criticism of the show, generally credited with handling the harrowing events respectfully, to acknowledge that “what white people are comfortable with” can’t be the criterion for what history is allowed to enter public discourse and to shape it. So while the present reflection on the Tulsa nightmare is welcome and overdue, we might still think about who decides what lessons we take away, given that journalism has been central to public reckoning with Tulsa ever since that late May night 100 years ago. We’ll talk about journalism and the Tulsa massacre with Joseph Torres, co-author of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, and senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210604Torres.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at Amazon‘s “native” advertising and the US’s non-support for public media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210604Banter.mp3 Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’

    New York Times (5/25/21) This week on CounterSpin: A May 25 New York Times story reports that India’s leading Bharatiya Janata Party is pressuring Twitter to censor and sanction anyone posting critically about prime minister Narendra Modi. An after-dusk visit by “officers from India’s elite antiterrorism police unit” to Twitter‘s New Delhi offices wasn’t so much legally binding as symbolic, the Times explained, sending a “a clear message that India’s powerful ruling party is becoming increasingly upset with Twitter because of the perception that the company has sided with critics of the government.” In that effort to cow those calling attention to its failings, the Times said, Modi’s government is “following the path of some other countries trying to control how and where messages can spread on social media.” For first example, “the Russian government said it would slow access to Twitter, one of the few places where Russians openly criticize the government.” Lest you miss it, the subtext of this kind of storytelling is that it is a mark of an undemocratic society that you can’t access all kinds of perspectives—not just on your own country, but on any country—and freely, make up your own mind. It’s a misleading premise, and though India is just one example, it’s a powerful one: The country is the new epicenter of the Covid pandemic, a major vaccine exporter than can’t vaccinate its own people, a potential example of how and why austerity and disaster capitalist programs fail—yet US corporate media don’t seem to see a story worth telling, beyond how Modi might hold on to power despite some unfortunate “missteps.” We’ll talk around corporate media about current events in India with historian, author and journalist Vijay Prashad, executive director at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and author of, among other titles, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210528Prashad.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Pride and police. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210528Banter.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Modis, the Trumps, the Bolsonaros Come Out of the Wreckage of Neoliberal Policy’

  (cc photo: Charles Edward Miller) This week on CounterSpin: When Clyde Chambliss, Alabama senate sponsor of a 2019 law banning virtually all abortion—no exceptions for rape or incest—was asked whether the law would likewise criminalize in vitro fertilization clinics that discard embryos, his answer was: “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman.” Let that sit a minute. The Guttmacher Institute’s Elizabeth Nash and Lauren Cross described right-wing ideologues who have pushed, since January, 536 abortion restrictions, including 146 abortion bans, introduced across 46 states, as “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.” Anti-reproductive rights folks have been shooting their shot for a while, and they now have a Supreme Court majority to help. So who’s speaking for the actual majority of US citizens who support a person’s right to determine whether and when to have a child? (You know most women who have abortions already have children, right?) Where are the news media that will not just acknowledge, but build reporting around the fact that abortion opponents are demonstrably unconcerned about actual women or their actual children? Who will connect the dots from anti-choice to anti-immigrant, anti–poor people, anti-healthcare, etc., lest “pro-life” be mistaken for pro-life? We’ll talk about the Supreme Court’s potential overturning of Roe v. Wade with Preston Mitchum, director of policy at URGE: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, and adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210521Mitchum.mp3 Transcript: ‘Roe Has Never Been Enough, and We Still Need It’ (photo: NBC News/Getty) Also on the show: Arizona Republicans are insisting on an audit of one county’s votes in the 2020 election—just the presidential line on the ballot, not any others, but we’re not supposed to ask about that. Given that, if you’re playing along, the notion is that the recount is about transparency and accountability, it should be noteworthy that, as the Arizona Republic‘s Jen Fifield and Andrew Oxford reported, Arizona senate Republicans got the ballots, voting machines and voter information from the county through a court order, and then handed it all over to private contractors to do the audit, who have since studiously declined to name or specify the people who have access to that information, or who is paying for the work. As much as one might want to dismiss it as sour grapes, observers are calling the Arizona maneuver “a new, more dangerous front” in the voting wars that merits our attention. We’ll talk about the Arizona audit with Steven Rosenfeld, editor at Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210521Rosenfeld.mp3 Transcript: ‘They’ve Been Looking to Bolster the Claim the Election Was Stolen’

  (via Twitter) This week on CounterSpin: A report showing that fewer jobs were added in April than expected has some business owners and media minions shaking heads and pointing fingers about how people “don’t want to work!”  Listeners will have heard the trope, providing a scarcely needed opening for shopworn right-wing assertions about how government assistance to keep folks’ head above water robs people (some people, mind you, it’s always only some people) of their work ethic. At this point, the fact that data don’t support a connection between unemployment benefits and difficulty in hiring is beside the point. That work “ethic” equals the willingness to work in whatever conditions at whatever wage is an unchallenged, mostly unspoken pillar of corporate reporting. Trouble for them is, millions of people are hearkening to the idea—expressed in a popular meme—that if as an employer you “offer” wages less than unemployment, you are less a job creator than a poverty exploiter. And they’re less and less willing to accept the line that an insistence on a livable life will wreck what we’re told is “the” economy. Do elite media have space for people who don’t want to risk their lives for less money than they need to live? It’s a big conversation, but we’ll start by talking about breaking through false but hardy narratives with Michael Hiltzik, business columnist and blogger for the Los Angeles Times and author of, most recently, Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads and the Making of Modern America. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210514Hiltzik.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Israel/Palestine, Venezuela and voter suppression. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210514Banter.mp3 Transcript: ‘We Need to Stop Taking Employers’ Viewpoint as Gospel’