CounterSpin

    GQ (5/5/23) This week on CounterSpin: Going on strike is something that people with no personal experience are comfortable depicting as frivolous and selfish. That extends to many corporate news reporters, who appear unable to present a labor action as other than, first and foremost, an unwonted interruption of a natural order. However else they explain the issues at stake, or humanistically portray individual strikers, the overarching narrative is that workers are pressing their luck, and that owners who make their money off the efforts of those workers are not to be questioned. It’s a weird presentation, whether it’s baristas or dockworkers or TV and movie writers. As we record on May 25, the Writers Guild strike is on its 23rd day, and having the intended effect of shutting down production on sets around the country. Eric Thurm wrote a useful explainer on the WGA strike for GQ. Thurm is campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project. We hear from him about some behind-the-scenes aspects of the strike affecting what you may see on screen. Transcript: ‘Studios Are Really Trying to Turn Writing Into Gig Work’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230526Thurm.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of San Francisco. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230526Banter.mp3  

  Time (5/4/23) This week on CounterSpin: Do you care about environmental degradation? Then you care about Cop City. Do you care about violent overpolicing of Black and brown communities? Then you care about Cop City. Do you care about purportedly democratic governance that overrides the actual voice of the people? Then you care about Cop City. But be aware: Your concern about Cop City, and its myriad impacts and implications, may get you labeled a domestic terrorist. The official response to popular resistance to the militarized policing facility being created on top of the forest in Atlanta, Georgia, is an exemplar of how some officials fully intend to bring all powers to which they have access, and to create new powers, to treat anyone who stands in opposition to whatever they decide they want to do as enemies of the state, deserving life-destroying prison sentences. So if your thoughts about Cop City don’t motivate you, think about your right to protest anything at all. We’ll talk about anti-activist terrorism charges with Cody Bloomfield, communications director at Defending Rights & Dissent. Transcript: ‘Charging Domestic Terrorism Is Intended to Make the Cost of Protesting Too High’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230519Bloomfield.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Israel’s “crisis of democracy.” https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230519Banter.mp3  

    USA Today (5/6/23) This week on CounterSpin: USA Today reported that, “as it heads into the final stretch of its current term, the Supreme Court is on defense following a series of revelations about gifts, property sales and disclosure.” That, you might say, is putting it mildly. The recent revelations are not about trinkets, but millions of dollars’ worth of benefits, vacations, jobs—and not from nowhere in particular, but from powerful parties with express interest in shaping the Court’s decision-making. “Disclosure,” in this instance, is another word for democracy—people’s right to know (and act upon the knowledge of) what, besides their votes, is influencing the laws that shape their lives. As details of Clarence Thomas’ secret-but-not-so-secret relationship with Republican billionaire Harlan Crow—and also with Federalist Society head Leonard Leo—roll out, the John Roberts–led Supreme Court has told congressional leaders they don’t believe any ethics rules really apply to them, and that’s not a problem. Whether that cravenly elitist, anti-democratic notion gets to carry the day will depend on many things, one of them being journalists’ willingness to stick with the stories, explore their structural and historical roots, demand transparency, and keep reporting faithfully to the public about what is learned and what is not—and why not. Even or especially if the Court is “on defense.” Because the information out of the Supreme Court has, as Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick has said, gone beyond an “ethics problem” to a “five-alarm fire” democracy-reform problem. And news media will be central to the response. We talk this week about the Supreme Court, where it’s going and where’s it taking all of us, with Ian Millhiser, who covers the Court for Vox, and is author of, most recently, The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America. Transcript: ‘The Court’s Position Is, No One Can Tell Them What to Do’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230512Millhiser.mp3  

    (The Nation, 4/28/23) This week on CounterSpin: Economist James Galbraith wrote a few months ago: “It is in the nature of articles about the debt ceiling that no matter how often one tries to set the record straight, nothing ever gets through.” Elite media’s fundamental misrepresentation of the debt ceiling would be troubling enough if it were just a bad history lesson. But current Republican brinkmanship could have devastating impacts for millions of people—along with the harm to public understanding of what’s actually going on. We hear concerns about the process and the coverage from Chris Lehmann, DC bureau chief at The Nation, and contributing editor at the Baffler and the New Republic. Transcript: ‘The Debt Ceiling Is a Completely Pointless Contrivance’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230505Lehmann.mp3   IFixit.com Also on the show: The right to fix the things you buy is the sort of thing you wouldn’t think would be controversial here in “the land of the free.”  Corporations’ attempts to prevent people from fixing their cellphone or tractor or wheelchair ought to be seen as the overreach it is. But for years, news media have presented the right to repair as a voice in the wilderness, up against benevolent companies’ efforts to do best by us all. That’s changing, with legislative moves around the country. Right to repair is having a “watershed moment,” one advocate says, adding that there are still “a lot of opportunities for mischief.” We get an update from Kyle Wiens, co-founder and CEO of the online repair community iFixit. Transcript: ‘We Have to Find a Way, for the Sake of the Planet, to Use Things Longer’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230505Wiens.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the New York Times‘ Iran error.

  Kansas City Star (4/20/23) This week on CounterSpin: The grandson of the elderly white man who shot a Black teenager in the head for ringing his doorbell told the Kansas City Star that their relationship had unraveled as his grandfather began watching “Fox News all day, every day,” and sank into a “24-hour news cycle of fear, of paranoia.” Those words had a poignant resonance for many people who feel they’ve lost family members and friends to a kind of cult, that’s not secret, but pumped into the airwaves every day. Hate-fueled and hate-fueling media have political and historical impacts—and interpersonal, familial ones as well. The Brainwashing of My Dad—the 2016 film and the book based on it—reflect filmmaker, activist and author Jen Senko’s effort to engage the  multi-level effects of that yelling, punching down, reactionary media, as well as how we can respond. We hear from Jen Senko this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘This Media Is Meant to Change People, and It Does’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230428Senko.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of a potential UPS strike. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230428Banter.mp3  

    Washington Post (4/19/23) This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court has briefly punted their decision on restricting access to medication abortion drug mifepristone. The American Medical Association said that the recent ruling by a Texas federal judge revoking the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, which has been in widespread use for more than two decades, “flies in the face of science and evidence and threatens to upend access to a safe and effective drug.” For the Washington Post, that’s part of a “confusing legal battle“—but for the majority of people, including doctors, it’s not confusing, just frightening. We’ll hear from Rachel K. Jones, research scientist at Guttmacher Institute. Transcript: ‘People Who Don’t Support Abortion Ignore the Science and the Safety’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230421Jones.mp3   New York Times (4/10/23) Also on the show: “Rutgers University Faculty Members Strike, Halting Classes and Research.” That April 10 New York Times headline reflects standard operating procedure for corporate media: reporting labor actions in terms of their ostensible harms, rather than the harms that led to them. The strike by a range of differently situated Rutgers faculty, the Times said, “will affect roughly 67,000 students across the state”—presumably the same students affected by teachers, researchers and counselors working in circumstances so precarious and untenable they took the difficult, potentially life-altering step of withholding their labor. That go-to elite media frame—”those pesky workers, what are they up to this time?”—is just one more element making efforts to increase workers’ power in the workplace that much harder. Thing is: It doesn’t always work—lots of people see through and around it! The gains made by Rutgers faculty, and the example they set, are evidence. We’ll get an update from Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers, and New Brunswick chapter president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. Transcript: ‘The Thing That’s Made the Union Strong Is to Privilege the Lowest Paid’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230421Murch.mp3  

Fat cat pays a pittance in taxes to Uncle Sam in vintage cartoon. This week on CounterSpin: It is tax season in the US,  when some of us wonder why the government, which knows how much we earn, requires us to guess, with the threat of prison if we guess wrong. And leads some of us to ponder what we get in return for our resources—streets and stop signs, to be sure, but also wars and wheelbarrows of money doled out those who already have plenty. We’ve talked about taxes and tax policy a lot on CounterSpin, enough to put together a walk-through of some of the issues, and the way news media explain them. You’ll hear from Steve Wamhoff, Dean Baker, Jeremie Greer and Michael Mechanic. Steve Wamhoff Transcript: ‘There Is a Different Set of Rules for Someone Like Donald Trump’ Dean Baker Transcript: ‘The Distribution of Income Depends on How We Structure the Economy’ Jeremie Greer Transcript: ‘1 Percent of Taxpayers Receive More Than the Bottom 80 Percent’ Michael Mechanic Transcript: ‘We Can Pay for What We Decide to Pay For’ Taxes, and how they’re not just an April 15 thing, this week on CounterSpin!

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230407.mp3   (CC photo: Elliot Stoller) This week on CounterSpin: Former President Donald Trump was arrested this week, but we’re going to talk about another kind of crime: the slow, steady drip drip of crime that doesn’t leap out to reporters—the day-to-day crushing of workers’ attempts to organize themselves to have a voice in the workplace, not just about their pay, but their well-being and their dignity. Crushing those attempts to work together is against the law—but it’s not the sort of crime that elite media seem able to identify. And it’s much harder to fight  when the law-breaking megacorporation is as media-savvy and faux progressive as Starbucks. Saurav Sarkar has been reporting Starbucks workers’ efforts—not to quit their workplaces, but to transform them into places where they can make a living and have some say in their lives, while, yes, also giving you your cappuccino. Sarkar writes for Jacobin, In These Times, The Progressive and FAIR.org, among other outlets. We hear from them this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: Starbucks ‘Workers and Consumers Have the Same Foe’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230407Sarkar.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of the Chicago mayoral election and the projected Antarctic current collapse. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230407Banter.mp3   Corrected audio file.

  Ciudad Juárez detention center fire This week on CounterSpin: There are a number of issues or realities where good-hearted people are overwhelmed and frankly misled about how isolated they are in their view, and what levers of power they may have to pull on. We can live in a better world! And we should interrogate those who say, “Oh no, you don’t get it; we’re smarter and we say you just can’t.” One such story is migration, or immigration—or, to be real, do Black and brown people have a right to move freely in the world? If not, why not? We’ll get some ideas of where to start this week with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network, about the Ciudad Juárez fire and what it tells us about immigration policy. Transcript: ‘The US Incarcerates More Immigrants Than Anywhere Else in the World’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230331Shah.mp3   Image: Health & Human Services And on healthcare: Do we really need to be making choices between seniors getting needed healthcare and other folks getting needed healthcare? Do we have to run our healthcare system on for-profit incentivizing? Is there truly no other way? We talk with Eagan Kemp, healthcare policy advocate at Public Citizen, about the fight around Medicare and Medicare Advantage, and what it says about concerns about seniors and about health, in the US. Transcript: ‘Medicare Advantage Has Never Delivered on the Promise’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230331Kemp.mp3  

  New York Times (3/18/23) This week on CounterSpin: In the immediate wake of the September 1, 2001, attacks, a military official told the Washington Post of the newly minted “war on terror”: “This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine. . . . We’re going to lie about things.” If reporters don’t evidence skepticism after a declaration like that, it says more about them than anyone or anything else. But US elite news media did the opposite of what you would hope for from an independent press corps in a country launching an illegal and baseless invasion, whose leaders had announced in advance they would lie to support it. You can dig out the reality if you read, but if you rely on the same media you were looking at 2003, you will be equally misled, and in the same, frankly, boring ways you were before: The US is great and only wants democracy; other countries are bad, and if our reasons for invading them and replacing their leadership with folks we like better, and killing anyone who doesn’t agree with that, don’t add up, well, we’ll come up with others later, and you’ll swallow those too. What passes for debate about why we must remain at some kind of war—cold, hot, corporate, stealth, acknowledged, denied—with Russia or China or whomever else is designated tomorrow, has roots worth studying in 2003. We’ll talk about it with author, critic and longtime friend of FAIR Norman Solomon. Transcript: ‘Media and Government Excuses Are Basically Intertwined’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230324Solomon.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at media coverage of ex-FCC nominee Gigi Sohn. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230324Banter.mp3