CounterSpin

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231013.mp3   BBC (10/11/23) This week on CounterSpin:  In the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas and the ensuing bombing campaign from Israel on the Gaza Strip, many people were surprised that CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria aired an interview with a Palestinian activist who frankly described the daily human rights violations in Gaza, the right of Palestinians to resist occupation and apartheid, and how any tools of resistance they choose are deemed violent and punishable. Such statements aren’t controversial from an international law or human rights perspective, but they stand out a mile in elite US media suffused with assumptions listeners will know: Palestinians attack, Israel responds; periods of “calm” are when only Palestinians are dying; stone-throwing is terrorism, but cutting off water is not. “War is not the time for context” still seems to be the mantra for many in the US press. But there is, around the edges, growing acknowledgement of the dead end this represents: showing hour after hour of shocking and heart-wrenching imagery, in a way that suggests violence is the only response to violence—when so many people are looking for another way forward. We’ll talk with Phyllis Bennis from the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Transcript: In Gaza, ‘We Have to Do the Hard Work of Looking at Context’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231013Bennis.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Saudi Arabia, Nicaragua, US political division and the Federal Reserve. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231013Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231006.mp3   This week on CounterSpin: The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik is one of vanishingly few national reporters to suggest that if media care about crime, if they care about people having things stolen from them—maybe they could care less about toasters and more about lives? As in, the billions of dollars that are snatched from working people’s pockets every payday by companies, in the form of wage theft—paying less than legal wages, not paying for overtime, stealing tips, denying breaks, demanding people work off the clock before and after shifts, and defining workers as “independent contractors” to deny them benefits. Home Depot just settled a class action lawsuit for $72.5 million, while their CEO went on Fox Business to talk about how shoplifting means we’re becoming a “lawless society.” There is legislative pushback; New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has added wage theft to the legal definition of larceny, allowing for stronger prosecutions. But such efforts face headwind from corporate media telling us to be mad about the rando taking toilet paper from the Walgreens, but not the executive who’s skimming your paycheck every two weeks. Not to be too poetic, but corporate thieves don’t need masks as long as corporate media provide them. We talk about wage theft with Rodrigo Camarena. He’s the director of the immigrant justice group Justicia Lab, and co-author, with Cristobal Gutierrez of Make the Road New York, of the article “How to End Wage Theft—and Advance Immigrant Justice” that appeared earlier this month on NonProfitQuarterly.org. He is co-creator of Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat wage theft. Transcript: ‘Wage Theft Is Built Into the Business Models of Many Industries’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231006Camarena.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of climate protests. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231006Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230929.mp3   New York Times (9/27/23) This week on CounterSpin: You can’t say elite US news media aren’t on the story of the federal indictment of Robert Menendez, Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But articles like the New York Times’ “As Menendez’s Star Rose, Fears of Corruption Cast a Persistent Shadow” represent media embrace of the “great man of history” theme: The story is mostly about the political fortunes of an individual; the huge numbers of less powerful people impacted by those compromised decisions are, at best, backdrop. When they try to tighten it into a “takeaway,” it can get weirder still: That Times piece’s headline included the idea that “the New Jersey Democrat broke barriers for Latinos. But prosecutors circled for decades before charging him with an explosive new bribery plot.” Come again? If elite media’s takeaway from the Menendez indictment is that some people over-favor their friends and like gold bars—that’s a storyline that leads nowhere, calls nothing into question beyond the individual actors themselves. Is that the coverage we need? What does it even have to do with foreign policy? Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book, co-authored with Jacob Mundy, is Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, out now in a revised, updated edition from Syracuse University Press. We talk with him about what’s at stake in the Menendez indictment beyond Menendez’s “political fortunes.” Transcript: ‘Most Americans Really Do Feel Pretty Strongly About Human Rights’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230929Zunes.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the FCC and the 1973 Chilean coup. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230929Banter.mp3  

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230922.mp3   Photo: UAW This week on CounterSpin: An unprecedented labor action is underway as thousands of Midwest autoworkers working for the Big 3—Ford, GM and Stellantis (which used to be Chrysler)—went on strike at the same time. Some things workers are calling for may sound familiar: a pay raise for workers that bears relation to raises that owners have generously given themselves; reinstatement of cost-of-living increases. Others—a shorter work week; the elimination of “tiered” jobs, where some folks are just never on the track for benefits; and a seat at the table for workers in any conversations about climate-related economic transitions—sound downright visionary. It would be a critical story at any time. But right now,  every day brings news—like Australian real estate developer Tim Gurner’s declaring, out loud, in public, “We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40–50%, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy”—that tells us that the situation isn’t about “the economy working,” but about for whom the economy is supposed to work. Unionized autoworkers are saying that profits—like the $21 billion the Big 3 have declared in the first six months of 2023—have to mean better conditions for the people doing the work. “We can’t afford it” is a harder message for corporate media to support as unions grow in strength, and as people find other sources than major corporate outlets to look to for explanations about what’s happening. Lisa Xu, organizer with Labor Notes, is in Detroit right now. We talk with her about this historic UAW strike. Transcript: ‘These Are Demands for the Whole Working Class’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230922Xu.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of depleted uranium and RICO indictments. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230922Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230915.mp3   (Broadleaf Books, 2023) This week on CounterSpin: New Yorkers who were here 22 years ago remember the proliferation of signs and stickers reading “our grief is not a cry for war”—and then the way that voice was shouted over by corporate news media, calling for war crimes with US flags on their lapels. Hosting old general after old general, as peace and human rights activists and the overall public begged for an answer to violence that wasn’t just more violence, for a conversation that would allow us to see one another as human beings. Pretend-neutral news media have done crucial work in selling Islamophobia, in weaponizing centuries of misinformation and demonization for wartime purposes, with the war being the undefined, unending “war on terror.” Media’s job has involved lying to us about many things—but, crucially, about what we believed, what we were capable of, and what we wanted to see as the way forward. Key to that campaign has been the idea that Muslims are the enemy—violent, dangerous, irrational—if not now, soon; if not your friend, his friend. September 11, 2001, is the exemplar of a past that isn’t dead, or even past, and for no one more particularly than Muslims. We talk about that with Maha Hilal, author of the book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11. Transcript: ‘There’s This Notion That the “War on Terror” Was Just Something That Happened Abroad’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230915Hilal.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Ukraine, the UAW strike and Biden’s trip to Vietnam. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230915Banter.mp3   Featured Image: Texas Muslim Capitol Day, Austin, Texas, January 28, 2015 (Creative Commons photo: Manuel Garza)

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230908.mp3   Liberation (9/3/23) This week on CounterSpin: The White House has announced it’s extending the ban on people using US passports to go to North Korea. Corporate media seem to find it of little interest; who wants to go to North Korea? Which fairly reflects media’s disinterest in the tens of thousands of Korean Americans who might want to visit family in North Korea, along with their overarching, active disinterest in telling the story of the Korean peninsula in anything other than static, cartoonish terms—North Korea is a murderous dictatorship; South Korea is a client state, lucky for our support—terms that conveniently sidestep the US’s historic and ongoing role in the crisis. Amanda Yee is a writer and organizer, and an editor of Liberation News. We’ll talk with her about the role the travel ban plays in a bigger picture. Transcript: ‘Propaganda Against North Korea and the Travel Ban Go Hand in Hand’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230908Yee.mp3   We reference hidden history in that conversation. CounterSpin got some deeper understanding on that a couple years back from Hyun Lee, US national organizer for Women Cross DMZ, part of the coalition Korea Peace Now!. We’ll hear a little from that today as well. Transcript: ‘Washington Has Been Asking the Wrong Question on North Korea’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230908Lee.mp3  

Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch, and Kevin Kumashiro discuss the challenges and controversies surrounding education in the US. They debate conventional wisdom about children and parenting, critique privatization in education, and highlight the negative effects of charter schools and attacks on teachers. They also touch on student debt relief and the misplaced national priorities surrounding education funding.

    (image: New Disabled South) This week on CounterSpin: “We’ve come a long way but there’s a long way to go” is a familiar, facile framing that robs urgency from fights for justice. It’s the frame that tends to dominate annual journalistic acknowledgement of the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed 33 years ago in late July. Like Black history month, the ADA anniversary is a peg—an opportunity for journalists to offer information and insight on issues they might not have felt there was space for throughout the year. As depressing as that is, media coverage of the date often doesn’t even rise to the occasion. You wouldn’t guess from elite media’s afterthought approach that some 1 in 4 people in this country have some type of disability, or that it’s one group that any of us could join at any moment. Likewise, you might not understand that the ADA didn’t call for curb cuts at every corner, but for an end to “persistent discrimination in such critical areas as: employment, housing, public accommodations, education, transportation, communication, recreation, institutionalization, health services, voting and access to public services.” Nothing less than the maximal integration of disabled people into community and political life—you know, like people. And if that’s the story, it’s clear that it demands all kinds of attention, every day—not a once a year pat on the back about “how far we’ve come.” We talk about some of all of that with Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder and chief operating officer of New Disabled South. Transcript: ‘Disabled People Are Whole People; We Need to See Media Address That Reality’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230825Wilson.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Maui fires and the climate crisis. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230825Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230818.mp3   Victim of US torture at Abu Ghraib, 2003 This week on CounterSpin: For corporate news media, every mention of the Iraq War is a chance to fuzz up or rewrite history a little more. This year, the New York Times honored the war’s anniversary with a friendly piece about how George W. Bush “doesn’t second guess himself on Iraq,” despite pesky people mentioning things like the torture of innocent prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema has just refused to dismiss a long standing case brought against Abu Ghraib torturers for hire, the company known as CACI.  Unlike elite media’s misty memories, the case is a real-world, stubborn indication that what happened happened and those responsible have yet to be called to account. We can call the case, abstractly, “anti-torture” or “anti-war machine,” as though it were a litmus test on those things; but we can’t forget that it’s pro–Suhail al-Shimari, pro–Salah al-Ejaili,   pro– all the other human beings horrifically abused in that prison in our name.  We get an update on the still-ongoing case—despite some 18 attempts to dismiss it—from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Transcript: ‘CACI Aided and Abetted the Torture of Our Clients’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230818Azmy.mp3   Gizmodo (8/9/23) Also on the show: The internet? Am i right? Thomas Germain is senior reporter at Gizmodo; he fills us in on some new developments in the online world most of us, like it or not, live in and rely on. Developments to do with ads, ads and still more ads, and also with the disappearing and potential disappearing of decades of archived information and reporting. Transcript: ‘Erasure of Content Can Be a Problem for the Public and for History’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230818Germain.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230811.mp3   New York Times (8/6/23) This week on CounterSpin: Why was Detroit mother Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, arrested and held 11 hours by police accusing her of robbery and carjacking? Because Woodruff was identified as a suspect based on facial recognition technology. The Wayne County prosecutor still contends that Woodruff’s charges—dismissed a month later—were “appropriate based upon the facts.” Those “facts” increasingly involve the use of technology that has been proven wrong; the New York Times report on Woodruff helpfully links to articles like “Another Arrest and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match,” and “Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm.” And it’s especially wrong when it comes to—get ready to be surprised—Black people. Facial recognition has been deemed harmful, in principle and in practice, for years now. We talked in February 2019 with Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU of Washington state.  We hear that conversation this week. Transcript:  ‘Face Surveillance Is a Uniquely Dangerous Technology’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230811Narayan.mp3   Newsweek (8/7/23) Also on the show: Listeners may know a federal court has at least for now blocked Biden administration efforts to forgive the debt of student borrowers whose colleges lied to them or suddenly disappeared. The White House seems to be looking for ways to ease student loan debt more broadly, but not really presenting an unapologetic, coherent picture of why, and what the impacts would be. We talked about that with Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective in March 2022. We’ll revisit that conversation today as well. Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230811Brewington.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trumpism.