CounterSpin

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231222.mp3   Middle East Eye (12/14/23) This week on CounterSpin: People in the US, the story goes, value few things more than individual freedom and money. So you’d think the way an individual uses their money would be sacrosanct. It’s a sign of where we’re at that there are currently congressional efforts to put people in prison, fine them millions of dollars, for choosing not to buy products from countries that are not declared “official enemies” by, well, presumably whoever’s in the White House at the moment. The anti-boycott measure the House Foreign Affairs Committee is pushing may never see daylight, of course, but it indicates a willingness by some in elected office to use state power to silence and sanction anyone using their voice in dissent of official actions—in this one case, lest it be confused, of people critical of Israel’s ongoing mass murder and displacement of Palestinians. The work to shut down opposition to the siege of Gaza, and US facilitation of it, is reminding Americans of what it means when powerful institutions, including in the media, combine a decidedly selective understanding of free expression with a vehement desire to enforce it. We talked about that with Wadie Said, professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, and author of the book Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions, from Oxford University Press. Transcript: ‘”Material Support” in the Form of Speech Can Be Criminalized’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231222Said.mp3  

Transcript: ‘The Only Way to Have Meaningful Climate Policy Is to Beat the Oil Guys’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231215.mp3   New York Times (12/13/23) This week on CounterSpin: UN Climate talks have ended with an agreement that, most importantly—New York Times headlines would suggest—”Strikes Deal to Transition Away From Fossil Fuels.” Headlines, all that many people read, are often misleading, and sometimes they aggressively deflect from the point of the story, which in this case is that everyone who wasn’t a polluting corporate entity came away from COP28 angry, worried and frustrated at the way that fossil fuel companies have been able to endanger everyone with their actions, but also hornswoggle their way into media debate such that we’re all supposed to consider how to balance the life of humanity on the planet with the profit margins of a handful of billionaires. Corporate news media have a lot to answer for here, in terms of public understanding of climate disruption, what needs to happen, why isn’t it happening? Few things call more for an open public conversation about how to best protect all of us. Why can’t we have it? Well, mystery solved: The entities that are to blame for the problem have their hands in the means we would use to debate and conceivably address it. Put simply: We cannot have a public conversation about how fossil fuels cause climate disruption within a corporate media moneyed by fossil fuel companies. We know that, and they know that, which is why one of the biggest outputs of polluting corporations is PR—is management of our understanding of what’s going on. CounterSpin discussed fossil fuel corporations’ brazen lie factory almost precisely a year ago with Richard Wiles, director of the Center for Climate Integrity. We hear some of that conversation again this week. Transcript: ‘The Oil Companies Are the Reason We Don’t Have Climate Policy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231215Wiles.mp3   Also: When you talk about climate, a lot of folks go in their head to a picture of clouds, butterflies and wolves. Climate policy is about money and profit and the meaninglessness of all those beautiful vistas you might imagine—at least, that’s how many politicians think of it. We addressed that with Matthew Cunningham-Cook from the Lever in August of this year. And we hear some of that this week as well. Transcript: ‘We Line Up Policy With Campaign Contributions From Oil and Gas’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231215Cunningham-Cook.mp3   Climate disruption reality as filtrated through corporate media, this week on CounterSpin. Featured image:  Extinction Rebellion climate protest. Photo: VladimirMorozov/AKXmedia

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231208.mp3   (CC image: Jewish Voice for Peace) This week on CounterSpin: As we record on December 7, the news from Gaza continues horrific: The Washington Post is reporting, citing Gaza Health Ministry reports, that Israel’s continued assault throughout the region has killed at least 350 people in the past 24 hours, which brings the death toll of the Israeli military campaign, launched after the October 7 attack by Hamas that killed a reported 1,200 people, to more than 17,000. In this country, Columbia University has suspended two student groups protesting in support of Palestinian human rights and human beings, though the official message couldn’t specify which policies, exactly, had been violated. There are many important and terrible things happening in the world right now—from fossil fuel companies working to undo any democratic restraints on their ability to profit from planetary destruction; to drugmakers who’ve devastated the lives of millions using the legal system to say money, actually, can substitute for accountability; to an upcoming election that is almost too much to think about, and the Beltway press corps acting like it’s just another day. But the devastation of Gaza and the vehement efforts to silence anyone who wants to challenge it—and the failure of those efforts, as people nevertheless keep speaking up, keep protesting—is the story for today. Sonya Meyerson-Knox is communications director of Jewish Voice for Peace. We talk with her this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘”None of Us Are Free Unless All of Us Are Free” Is Not Just a Slogan’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231208Meyerson-Knox.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of climate change. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231208Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231201.mp3   ABC (6/22/23) This week on CounterSpin: “Abortion Politics Reveal Concerns” was the headline one paper gave a recent Associated Press story, language so bland it almost discourages reading the piece, which reports how right-wing politicians and anti-abortion activists are seeking to undermine or undo democratic processes when those processes accurately reflect the public desire to protect reproductive rights. Methods include “challenging election results, refusing to bring state laws into line with voter-backed changes, moving to strip state courts of their power to consider abortion-related laws, and challenging the citizen-led ballot initiative process itself.” So there is a way to cover abortion access as a political issue without reducing it to one. But too many outlets seem to have trouble shaking the framing of abortion as a “controversy,” or as posing problems for this or that politician, rather than presenting it as a matter of basic human rights that majorities in this country have long supported, and centering in their coverage the people who are being affected by its creeping criminalization. Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at the New Republic, and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work and of the forthcoming A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race and the Limits of Justice in America. She’s been reporting on abortion for years, and joins us this week to talk about it. Transcript: ‘The Reality of What It Is to Have an Abortion Has to Be Brought Into Every Story’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231201Grant.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of marriage and ideology. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231201banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231124.mp3   Washington Post (11/19/23) This week on CounterSpin: The new president of Argentina opposes abortion rights, casts doubt on the death toll of the country’s military dictatorship, would like it to be easier to access handguns and calls climate change a “lie of socialism.” Many were worried about what Javier Milei would bring, but, the Washington Post explained: “Anger won over fear. For many Argentines, the bigger risk was more of the same.” But if you want to dig down into the roots of that “same,” the economic and historic conditions that drove that deep dissatisfaction, US news media will be less helpful to you there. Milei is not a landslide popular president, and thoughtful, critical information and conversation could help clarify peoples’ problems and their sources, such that voters—in Argentina and elsewhere—might not be left to believe that the only way forward is a man wielding a literal chainsaw. We’ll learn about Javier Milei and what led to his election from Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the book Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy. Transcript: Milei Is ‘Really as Extreme as You Get in Right-Wing Libertarian Ideas’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231124Weisbrot.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at FAIR’s recent study on the Sunday shows’ Gaza guests. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231124Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231117.mp3   Time (11/6/23) This week on CounterSpin: Coverage of what is quite possibly not the most recent mass shooting, as we record the show, but the recent one in Lewiston, Maine, leaned heavily on a narrative of the assailant as a “textbook case” of a shooter, because he had some history of mental illness. FAIR’s Olivia Riggio wrote about how that storyline not only gets the relationship wrong—mental illness is not a predictor of gun violence, except in terms of suicide, but also underserves and even endangers those with mental illness, with at least one presidential candidate calling for a return to involuntary commitment.  What isn’t served is the public conversation around reducing gun violence. The Supreme Court has just heard the case US v. Rahimi, which is specifically about whether those under domestic violence restraining orders should have access to guns. Most media did better than Time magazine’s thumbnail of Rahimi as pitting “the safety of domestic violence victims against the nation’s broad Second Amendment rights”—because, as our guest explains, Rahimi is much more about whether this Court’s conservative majority will be able to use their special brand of backwards-looking to determine this country’s future. Scott Burris is a professor at Temple Law School and the School of Public Health, and he directs Temple’s Center for Public Health Law Research. We hear from him this week on the case. Transcript: ‘Worship of the Holy Framers Offers Us Nothing to Deal With the Problems We Have Today’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231117Burris.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Gaza crisis, and at McCarthyism. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231117Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231110.mp3   Truthout (11/9/23) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media use at least a couple of largely unexplored lenses through which to present US human rights violations. One is: The US does not commit human rights violations, except by accident, or as unavoidable collateral for an ultimately net-gain mission, be that international or domestic. The other is: They aren’t violations if the US does them, because we’re in a civilization war, a fight of good over evil, so all battles are holy, and you can’t commit human rights violations against non-humans, after all, so where’s the problem? Again, the narrative covers global and at-home violations. Elite media have trouble navigating the place of the US in a global context, and the media-consuming public suffers as a result. There’s a new report from the UN about this country and human rights. We’ll hear about it from Jamil Dakwar, director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU. Transcript: ‘You Cannot Preach on Human Rights When You Are Not Doing Enough at Home’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231110Dakwar.mp3   House Speaker Mike Johnson (CC photo: Gage Skidmore) Also on the show: Headlines tell us that the US public don’t know a lot about Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House of Representatives. That’s true as far as it goes, but isn’t it also a kind of admission of failure for a press corps that really should be actively involved in informing us about the person third in line for the presidency—like maybe his idea that some of the people he’s nominally representing should just burn in Hell? Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, will give us some things to consider as we see coverage of Mike Johnson unfold. Transcript: ‘A True Believer in Heinous Ideas’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231110Gertz.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231103.mp3   New York Times (6/5/22) This week on CounterSpin: Elite media are fond of saying that the US is resetting its Middle East policy. During the 2020 campaign, the New York Times explained, Joe Biden pledged, if elected, to stop coddling Saudi Arabia, after the brutal murder of prominent dissident and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. “We are not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them,” Biden said. “We’re going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.” When officials said Biden would visit the kingdom in July of last year and meet with Mohammed bin Salman, understood as the architect of Khashoggi’s murder, a New York Times headline explained that Biden had “‘only bad options’ for bringing down oil prices.” We talked at the time with Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at DAWN, Democracy for the Arab World Now, an organization founded by Khashoggi. We’ll hear that conversation again today. Transcript: ‘In the Middle East, We Are Hearing a New Set of Excuses to Justify the Same Old Policy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231103Jarrar.mp3   Aftermath of Tulsa Massacre (photo via bswise) Also on the show:  “If you’re not careful,” Malcolm X famously warned, “the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” This is a problem of long standing, and in June 2021 we explored one case of it—the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma—with author and activist Joseph Torres. We hear that this week as well. Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231103Torres.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231027.mp3   Paxlovid tablets This week on CounterSpin: Advertising critics have long noted that a company’s PR tells you, inadvertently but reliably, exactly what their problems are. The ad features salmon splashing in crystalline waters? That company is for sure a massive polluter. That’s the lump of salt with which to take the recent announcement from the US Department of Health and Human Services that their new deal with Pfizer “extends patient access” to Covid treatment drug Paxlovid and “maximizes taxpayer investment”—as the HHS works with the drug company to “transition” Paxlovid “to the commercial market.” The announcement doesn’t note that this “transition” entails hiking the cost of the treatment to more than $1,300 for a five-day course, or 100 times the cost of production. We discuss this outrage, and what allows it, with Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines group at Public Citizen. Transcript: ‘Drug Corporations Have Really Been in the Driver’s Seat’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231027Maybarduk.mp3   (image: Truthout) Also on the show: CounterSpin listeners, more than many, recognize news media as a keystone issue—important not simply in their own right but to all of the other issues we care about. The media lens—the points of view that they show us day after day, those they obscure or ridicule—affects the way we understand the world, our neighbors and what’s politically possible. That’s why we see the fight for a thriving media ecosystem as bound up completely with the fights for social, racial, economic and environmental justice. We talked about that nexus with Maya Schenwar, author and editor at large of Truthout, and director of a new project, the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. Transcript: ‘Movement Media Has Really Emerged in Its Own Right’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231027Schenwar.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231020.mp3   (USDA, 1939) This week on CounterSpin: Government-supplied food assistance has been around in various forms since at least the Great Depression, but never with the straightforward goal of easing hunger. 1930s posters about food stamps declare, “We are helping the farmers of America move surplus foods”; that link between agriculture industry support and nutrition assistance continues to this day—which partly explains why the primary food aid program, SNAP, while the constant target of the anti-poor, racist, drown-government-in-the-bathtub crowd, keeps on keeping on. We talk with Christopher Bosso, professor of public policy and politics at Northeastern University, the author of a new book on that history, called Why SNAP Works: A Political History—and Defense—of the Food Stamp Program. Transcript: ‘Poverty in America Has Strong Structural Roots That Some People Profit From’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231020Bosso.mp3   Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911 Also on the show: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, in which 146 mainly immigrant women and girls died, many leaping from windows to escape the flames, horrified New Yorkers and galvanized the workers’ rights movement. The October 11 unveiling of a monument to those who didn’t just die, but were killed that day, put many in mind of how much still needs to change before we can think of things like Triangle Shirtwaist as relics of a crueler past. In 2015, CounterSpin spoke with Barbara Briggs of the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights about Rana Plaza, the 2013 catastrophe that killed more than a thousand workers in Bangladesh, in circumstances that in some ways echoed those of 102 years earlier. We’ll hear that interview again today. Transcript: ‘Workers Are the Best Guarantors of Their Own Safety When They’re Organized’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231020Briggs.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Net Neutrality. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231020Banter.mp3