CounterSpin

CT Insider (7/14/22) This week on CounterSpin: A Texas court has told Alex Jones to pay some $49 million dollars in damages for his perverse, accusatory talk about the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre being a “big hoax”—the jury evidently not believing Jones’ tale that he was suffering a weird and weirdly profitable “psychosis” when he told his followers that no one died at Sandy Hook because none of the victims ever existed, nor were they evidently moved by his subsequent claim that he did it all “from a pure place.” Jones, as the Hearst Connecticut Media editorial board noted in a strong statement, is trying to keep any mention of his “white supremacy and right-wing extremism” out of the Sandy Hook case he’s facing in New Hampshire—because, his lawyer says, that discussion would be “unfairly prejudicial and inflammatory,” an “attack on [Jones’] character” that would “play to the emotions of the jury and distract from the main issues.” What should be the “main issues” when our vaunted elite press corps engage a figure like Alex Jones? We talk with Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220812Carusone.mp3 Transcript: ‘What Alex Jones Has Peddled Is Now Nearly Indistinguishable from Right-Wing Talking Points’ Also on the show: In 1991, on the fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident, an editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune concluded: “Despite Chernobyl, nuclear energy is the green alternative.” The Houston Post enjoined readers: “Let’s not learn the wrong lesson from Chernobyl and rule nukes out of our future.” Corporate media have been rehabilitating nuclear power for as long as the public has been terrified by its dangers—sometimes as heavy-handedly as NBC in 1987 running a documentary, Nuclear Power: In France It Works, that failed to mention that NBC’s then-owner, General Electric, was the country’s second-largest nuclear power entity—and third-largest producer of nuclear weapons. Now in Russia’s war on Ukraine, we’re seeing news media toss the possibility of nuclear war into the news you’re meant to read over your breakfast. Has something changed to make the unleashing of nuclear weaponry war less horrific? And if not, what can we be doing to push it back off the table and out of media’s parlor game chat? We hear from author and journalism professor Karl Grossman. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220812Grossman.mp3 Transcript: ‘This Treaty Could Put the Nuclear Weapons Genie Back in the Bottle’

This week on CounterSpin: The crises we face right now in the US—a nominally democratic political process that’s strangled by white supremacist values, a corporate profiteering system that mindlessly overrides human needs to treat the environment as just another “input”—are terrible, but not, precisely, new. People have fought against these ideas in various forms before; and some strategies have been useful, others less so. The front line for us now is the fact that we have powerful actors who don’t just want to argue for particular ideas to guide us forward, but want to shut down the spaces in which we can have the arguments. And where a vigorous free press should be, we have corporate, commercial media that don’t have defending those spaces as their foremost concern. Luke Harris One crucial thing we now know we need to pro-actively fight for: our right to learn and teach real US history. Listeners will have heard of the campaign against “critical race theory”—a set of ideas of which right-wing opponents gleefully acknowledge they know and care nothing, but are using as cover to attack any race-conscious, that’s to say accurate and appropriate, teaching. CounterSpin put that cynical but impactful campaign in context last July with Luke Harris, co-founder and deputy director of the African American Policy Forum. Joe Torres Late last June, we talked about just the kind of story we all would know if our learning was inclusive and unafraid, the kind of story that would play a role in our understanding of the country’s growth—the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which 300 overwhelmingly Black people were killed, and some 800 shot or wounded. It’s a part of a sort of “hidden history” that the press corps have a role in hiding, as we discussed with Joe Torres, senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press, and co-author, with Juan González, of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220805Harris.mp3 CounterSpin spoke with Luke Harris in July of 2021. Transcript: ‘We Can’t Fight for Racial Justice if We Can’t Learn About Racial Injustice’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220805Torres.mp3 We spoke with Joe Torres in June 2021. Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’

  NBC Nightly News (6/10/22) This week on CounterSpin: In what is being reported as an “abrupt” or “surprise” development, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, whose shtick relies heavily on legislative roadblocking, has agreed to sign on to a package that includes some $369 billion for “climate and energy proposals.” The New York Times reports that the deal represents “the most ambitious climate action ever taken by Congress”—a statement that cries out for context. The package is hundreds of pages long, and folks are only just going through it as we record on July 28, but already some are suggesting we not allow an evident, welcome break in Beltway inertia to lead to uncritical cheering for policy that may not, in fact, do what is necessary to check climate disruption, in part because it provides insufficient checks on fossil fuel production. But journalistic context doesn’t just mean comparing policy responses to real world needs; it means recognizing and reporting how the impacts of the climate crisis—like heat waves—differ depending on who we are and where we live. There’s a way to tell the story that connects to policy and planning, but that centers human beings. We talked about that during last year’s heat wave with Portland State University professor Vivek Shandas. Transcript: ‘That’s Lethal, Communities Completely Exposed to This Kind of Heat’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220729Shandas.mp3   Also on the show: Although it’s taken a media back seat to other scourges, the US reality of Black people being killed by law enforcement, their families’ and communities’ grief and outrage meeting no meaningful response, grinds on: Robert Langley in South Carolina, Roderick Brooks in Texas, Jayland Walker in Ohio. Anthony Guglielmi Major news media show little interest in lifting up non-punitive community responses, or in demanding action from lawmakers. So comfortable are they with state-sanctioned racist murder, the corporate press corps haven’t troubled to highlight the connections between outrages—and the system failure they betray. Exhibit A: Beltway media have twisted their pearls about the US Secret Service having deleted text messages relevant to the January 6 investigation. No one seems to be buying the claim from Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi that the messages were  “erased as part of a device-replacement program” that just happened to take place after the inspector general’s office had requested them. Laquan McDonald Now, many people, but none in the corporate press, would think it relevant to point out that Guglielmi came to the Secret Service after his stint with the Chicago Police Department, during which he presided over that department’s lying about the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald. There, Guglielmi claimed that missing audio from five different police dashcam videos—audio that upended police’s story that McDonald had been lunging toward officer Jason Van Dyke, when in fact he’d been walking away—had disappeared due to “software issues or operator error.” As noted by Media Matters’ Matt Gertz, Chicago reporters following up on the story discovered that CPD dashcam videos habitually lacked audio—Guglielmi himself acknowledged that “more than 80% of the cameras have non-functioning audio ‘due to operator error or, in some cases, intentional destruction,’” the Chicago Sun-Times reported. A dry-eyed observer might conclude that Guglielmi was hired, was elevated to the Secret Service not despite but because of his vigorous efforts to mislead the public and lawmakers about reprehensible law enforcement behavior. But I think it’s not quite right to think this means the elite press corps aren’t sufficiently interested in Guglielmi; the point is that they aren’t sufficiently interested in Laquan McDonald. CounterSpin talked about the case with an important figure in it, writer and activist Jamie Kalven. We hear some of that conversation this week.   Transcript: ‘How Many Other Laquan MacDonalds Are There?’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220729Kalven.mp3  

Nora Benavidez This week on CounterSpin: The internet has changed the way we communicate, access information and even organize, which means concerns about digital privacy are concerns about privacy, period. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, allowing for the criminalization of abortion, our ability to safely access information and health care online is in danger. How are tech companies responding?  We’ll hear from civil rights attorney Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin_Show220722Benavidez.mp3 Dorothee Benz Transcript: ‘Privacy Is the Entry Point for Our Civil and Basic Rights’ Also on the show: It’s good to be shocked by the news coming out of the January 6 committee; it’s shocking. But suggesting that ALL of this is new and revelatory is a narrative that serves us poorly. For media, the test isn’t so much how they are covering the hearings, but whether they are really incorporating the lessons into their regular coverage. That’s going forward, but today we’ll go back to the day after the insurrection, when we spoke with political scientist Dorothee Benz. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin_Show220722Benz.mp3 Transcript: ‘Being Neutral in the Face of a Fascist Threat Is Not an Acceptable Journalistic Value’ Plus, Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the Uvalde massacre footage, New York Times reporting on Ben & Jerry’s refusal to sell in the Israeli occupied West Bank, and the need for the new Office of Environmental Justice to take fossil fuel companies head-on. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin_Show220722Banter.mp3 Featured Image: Patcharin Saenlakon / EyeEm / Getty Images

This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court’s reversal on abortion rights is so actually and potentially devastating that it’s hard to know where to look. It’s worth tracing things back—Katherine Stewart in the Guardian, among others, walks us through how, at a time when most Protestant Republicans, including the Southern Baptist Convention, hailed the liberalization of abortion law represented by Roe, Christian nationalists, motivated by a desire to protect school segregation and tax exemptions for Christian schools, selected abortion as a way to united conservatives across denominational barriers, by providing a “focal point for anxieties about social change.” Phyllis Schlafly wrote a whole book (How the Republican Party Became Pro-Life) about the work involved in forcing the Republican party to center abortion as a cause—which then became the  longer term effort to reframe “religious liberty” as exemption from law. The names Paul “I don’t want everybody to vote” Weyrich and Bob Jones Sr.—who called segregation “God’s established order”—may also mean something to you. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220715MasonPieklo.mp3 (photo: Austen Risolvato/Cage Rivera/Rewire News Group) Transcript: “They Will Find the Outcome That They Are Looking for and Work the Law Backwards to Make It Fit.” While we trace the roots—which disabuses us of the notion that this specious “pro-life” political stance is socially organic—we need to also be looking for the branches: the other obvious, growing harms to human rights and liberties that are encouraged and fully intended by this ruling. The Guttmacher Institute’s Elizabeth Nash and Lauren Cross reported the, as of last summer, 536 abortion restrictions, including 146 abortion bans, introduced across 46 states, as right-wing ideologues “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.” It’s important to see that, as Katherine Stewart writes, the Dobbs decision “marks the beginning rather than the endpoint of the agenda this movement has in mind.” In the face of this, those who believe in reproductive freedom will need better public arguments than what liberal media have tended to offer: that abortion is a horrible thing that should really never happen, but that nevertheless should be legal. There’s a hole in the middle of corporate mediaspeak on abortion, where we could be saying, as Katha Pollitt put it in her book PRO: that abortion is an “essential option” for all people, not just those in “dramatic, terrible, body-and-soul-destroying situations”—and that access to abortion “benefits society as a whole.” We’re going to make a start on the many, multi-level, multi-angle, post-Roe conversations we need to be having with Jessica Mason Pieklo, senior vice president and executive editor at Rewire News Group, who has been reporting reproductive rights for many years now. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220715Mitchum.mp3 (photo: Victoria Pickering) Transcript: ‘Roe Has Never Been Enough, and We Still Need It’ And we’ll also hear a bit of a conversation we had last May—when we knew the Court had Roe in its sights—with Preston Mitchum, director of policy at the group URGE, Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity. We talked with him about putting Roe—and court rulings in general —in a context of what else needs, and has always needed, to happen to make reproductive justice real.

    John Roberts This week on CounterSpin: When disastrous things happen, like the US invasion of Iraq or the Supreme Court dismissal of basic human rights, the undercurrent of a lot of news media is: Why didn’t we see this coming? How could we all have gotten it wrong? It’s—to use a maybe overused term—gaslighting, in which elite news media spin a tale that everyone, all of some presumed “us,” were blindsided by: in this case, a John Roberts–led Supreme Court gutting multiple legally and societally established precedents. Clarence Thomas is an obvious factor in today’s Court, as is Samuel Alito—but the man ABC News characterized as a “mensch” is at the center of the web. So if the 4th of July is an occasion to talk about US history and its relevance today, let’s go all the way back to July 2005, when the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court was just one day old. CounterSpin‘s Steve Rendall and Janine Jackson hosted a discussion with journalist Adele Stan, who’d just written a piece called “Meet John Roberts” for the American Prospect, and Elliot Mincberg, then legal director for the group People for the American Way. We hear that conversation again this week. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220708StanMincberg.mp3 Transcript: ‘Whether You’re on the Supreme Court Shouldn’t Depend on How Many People You Give Your Phone Number to’ Julian Assange (cc photo: Espen Moe) Also on the show: Former New York Times reporter James Risen wrote an op-ed for the paper in 2020, in which he said that he thought that governments—he was talking about Bolsonaro in Brazil, as well as Donald Trump—were testing unprecedented measures to silence and intimidate journalists, and that they “seem to have decided to experiment with such draconian anti-press tactics by trying them out first on aggressive and disagreeable figures.” He was referring to, preeminently, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who may now be extradited to the United States, where he stands accused of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. If you haven’t heard much lately about the case and its implications, that might be indication that the experiment Risen refers to is working. Researcher and journalist Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent. He brings us the latest on Assange and why it matters. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220708Gibbons.mp3 Transcript: ‘It Would Force the Government to Actually Prove Espionage, Not Whistleblowing’

  Coach Joseph Kennedy’s “private, personal prayer” (photo: Sotomayor dissent). This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion on Kennedy v. Bremerton that “the Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike.” The case was about whether there was a problem with a Washington state assistant football coach leading prayers—Christian prayers, lest you be confused—in the locker room before games and on the field. The Supreme Court that we have today, for reasons, determined that Kennedy was protected in his right to express his personal religious beliefs—by dropping a knee, on the 50-yard line of a public school playing field, and calling on players to join him—and that they presented no harm to anyone, or to the nominal separation of church and state. It’s another Supreme Court ruling that bases itself in a reality that doesn’t exist. This ruling in particular irritates meaningfully, because of course we know that “taking a knee” is the sort of gesture that is either a fresh wind of free expression, or a horrible affront to the values we hold dear, depending on who does it. So we’ll hear today from Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation and author of many books, including, most recently, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220701Zirin.mp3 Transcript: ‘They Painted a Narrative of This Coach Looking for a Quiet Corner to Pray’ Paul Robeson And we’ll get a little corrective background for corporate media’s current conversation, about the voices of athletes or performers who are mainly told to “shut up and sing,” and their actual historical role in social change, from journalist and author Howard Bryant.  CounterSpin talked with him in June 2018, and we hear part of that conversation this week. Transcript: ‘The Black Athlete Has Been Involved in the Political Struggle From the Beginning’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220701Bryant.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of Supreme Court nominees. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220701Banter.mp3  

  (cc photo: Joe Flood) This week on CounterSpin: Elite news media are saying that Biden has to go to Saudi Arabia in July despite his pledges to make the country a “pariah” for abuses including the grisly murder of a Washington Post contributor, because…stability? Shaking hands with Mohammed bin Salman makes sense, even in the context of denying Cuba and Venezuela participation in the Americas Summit out of purported concerns about their human rights records, because…gas prices? It’s hard to parse corporate media coverage of Biden’s Saudi visit, because that coverage obscures rather than illuminates what’s going on behind the euphemism “US interests.” We talk about the upcoming trip with Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at DAWN—Democracy for the Arab World Now. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220624Jarrar.mp3 Transcript: ‘In the Middle East, We Are Hearing a New Set of Excuses to Justify the Same Old Policy’ Chart: National Priorities Project Also on the show: “Congressional Republicans Criticize Small Defense Increase in Biden’s Budget Blueprint,” read one headline; “Biden Faces Fire From Left on Increased Defense Spending,” read another. Sure sounds like media hosting a debate on an issue that divides the country. Except a real debate would be informed —we’d hear just how much the US spends on military weaponry compared to other countries; and a real debate would be humane—we’d hear discussion of alternatives, other ways of organizing a society besides around the business of killing. That sort of conversation isn’t pie in the sky; there’s actual legislation right now that could anchor it. We talk about the People Over Pentagon Act of 2022 with Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220624Koshgarian.mp3 Transcript: ‘This Country Would Want to See Money Taken From the Pentagon and Reallocated’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of gender therapy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220624Banter.mp3  

  Vincent Chin (1955-1982) This week on CounterSpin: The New York Times didn’t address the brutal 1982 murder of Chinese-American Vincent Chin until 1983, in response to ongoing protest centered in Detroit’s Asian-American community, about the killing and the lack of justice—at which point the paper ran a story with a lead claiming that when “two men were quickly charged and prosecuted…the incident faded from many memories.” One, the process was hardly that tidy. And two, whose memories, exactly? It’s 40 years since Vincent Chin’s murder, with a depressingly resonant context of anti-Asian hatred and scapegoating, that corporate media, with their thinly veiled drumbeating for “war” with China—over trade or Covid or presence in Africa—do little to dissuade. We’ll talk with activist and author Helen Zia, about the ongoing effort to remember Chin’s murder by rededicating to the work of resisting, not just anti-Chinese or anti-Asian ideas and actions, but also those separating us each from one another in the fight against those who, let’s face it, hate all of us. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220617Zia.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Miscarriage of Justice Catalyzed a Whole Movement Led by Asian Americans’ Chesa Boudin (cc photo: Lynn Friedman) Also on the show: We’re told not to “overanalyze”—which seems to mean to analyze at all—the language of reporting, and not to think about what’s  behind the scenes; it’s official news from a neutral nowhere.  But if the New York Times, for example, has enough intentionality to delete, without acknowledgement, declarative claims about “rising crime” in an article about how concerns about that are moving people to vote out reformist officials like San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, can we not imagine that they are likewise intentional about what they leave in? We’ll talk about coverage of that recall, of which elite media are making much conventional wisdom hay, with Alec Karakatsanis, founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220617Karakatsanis.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Times Is Telling You to Choose Between Rights and Safety’

  (photo: African Union) This week on CounterSpin: Some of the worst work that corporate news media do is convince us that simple things are actually, if you just ignore the role of power, more complicated than you could hope to understand. So, yes, Covid is killing millions of people, and yes, there are tests and treatments and vaccines for it, and yes, many countries in need of them—but no, we can’t put those things together, for reasons that you shouldn’t worry your head over. There are in fact people and policies, with names, preventing developing countries from accessing life-saving vaccines…. A story being ugly doesn’t mean it isn’t understandable. We talk about it with Lori Wallach, executive director of the group Rethink Trade. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220610Wallach.mp3 Transcript: ‘A Handful of Billionaire Companies Have Monopoly Control Over Life-Saving Medicines’ (cc photo: Mstyslav Chernov) At the same time, we are to understand that insurance companies exist to protect us from exorbitant expenses when we’re faced with healthcare crises. You might be mad paying in when you’re healthy, but oh boy just wait til you’re sick.  So: Covid-19. Could hardly be a bigger public healthcare crisis—and where are insurance companies? Shouldn’t this be their shining hour? And if not—can we please revisit their purpose in our lives? We talk about insurance in a pandemic with physician and advocate Steffie Woolhandler. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220610Woolhandler.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Major Insurers Saw 2020 as a Giant Opportunity for Profiteering’