CounterSpin

  Barry Lee Jones (left) and David Martinez Ramirez had appeals rejected by the Supreme Court. This week on CounterSpin: AP‘s May 23 headline told readers: “Supreme Court Rules Against Inmates in Right to Counsel Case.” Those who got past the idea of being interested in “inmates” were favored with a lead that explained that “the Supreme Court ruled along ideological lines Monday against two Arizona death row inmates who had argued that their lawyers did a poor job representing them in state court.” For which many readers might be excused for saying, essentially, “Boo hoo, people courts have said are guilty are upset with that fact, next story please.” Had AP headlined its story, “Supreme Court Rules Evidence of Innocence Is Not Enough to Avoid Execution by the State,” perhaps more readers might’ve read past the big letters. The truth is, while alternative and legal and human rights-oriented media are up in arms about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, corporate news media don’t seem to think there’s much to see there—which has everything to do with their relative disinterest in the human rights of humans at the wrong end of the criminal justice system—and how willing they are to allow any degree of complexity to obscure important truths and to blur outrage. We’ll talk about the new Supreme Court ruling about the so-called sanctity of life with Liliana Segura, reporter for the Intercept. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220603Segura.mp3 Transcript: ‘But for the Failures of His Attorneys, He Would Not Have Been Convicted’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of Republican congressional primaries. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220603Banter.mp3  

  CBS (5/26/22) This week on CounterSpin: CBS News‘ website featured a story about the “grim task” of planning funerals for 19 children—shot dead, along with two teachers, in a Texas elementary school on May 24—right next to a story about Oklahoma’s governor signing the country’s strictest abortion ban, the prominent sign behind him declaring “life is a human right.” Welcome, as they say, to America—where these ideas are presented as somehow of a piece, where news media tell us day after day how exceptionally good and worthy we are, the world’s policeman and a global beacon for human rights and the good life. Meanwhile, the rest of the world looks on in horror. BBC‘s North America editor explained to its audience that there is no expectation of anything being done to prevent things like the latest (as far as we know, as we record on May 26) mass murder in the US, because “the  argument over guns has simply become too politically divisive and culturally entrenched to allow for meaningful change.” Flashpoint (5/26/22) Reporter Eoin Higgins interviewed teachers around the country, who reported the psychological toll of not only actual shootings, but constant drills and lockdowns, on children, who, they said, “have largely given up on a better future.”  Teachers feel expendable and unvalued; it’s hardly lost on them that the same forces accusing them of poisoning children with curricula are also demanding they step between those children and a bullet. That powers that be in this country have responded to school shootings not by toughening gun laws, but by loosening them, and responded to the failure of law enforcement to prevent such shootings by calling for more police. It’s a particularly demoralizing combination of devastating and unsurprising—from a country that promotes and perpetrates violence around the globe. As a response to violence, we try violence time after time. There doesn’t seem to be anything new to say right now about gun violence in the US. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep saying the things we know—more loudly, more unapologetically and in more places. New Press (2019) As we record, we hear that students at schools across the country are walking out, in an effort to say simply, “We refuse to go on like this.” We owe them our action and effort, no matter how tired or disgusted or defeated we feel. We revisit some conversations about gun violence and gun culture this week on the show. In March of last year we spoke with Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, and author of the book Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns, about the possibility of passing common-sense legislation and misunderstandings about the power of the gun lobby. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220527Volsky.mp3 Transcript: ‘More Guns, More Gun Deaths—That’s Really It’ And then: There are always multiple issues involved in a mass murder; elite media use the complexity as an excuse to simply trade accusatory explanations, and determine that in the interest of balance, nothing can be done. But if we’re concerned about young people getting high-grade weaponry and thinking it’d be cool to use it, maybe one thing to consider would be the government-sponsored program that gives young people high-grade weapons and tells them it’d be cool to use it? We spoke in 2018 about Junior ROTC—a feature at my high school, and maybe yours too—with Pat Elder, director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, which resists the militarization of schools, and author of Military Recruiting in the United States. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220527Elder.mp3 Transcript: ‘More Guns, More Gun Deaths—That’s Really It’

  Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 4/12/21) This week on CounterSpin: Ten human beings were killed and three wounded in Buffalo, New York. By the killer’s own admission, he sought to kill Black people because they are Black, and he is a white supremacist who believes there’s a plot to “replace” white people with Black and brown people, a plot run by the Jews. If you’re news media, you could go all in on media outlets and pundits and political figures whose repeated invocations to this white replacement theory are the obvious spurs for this horrendous crime. Or you could be the Washington Post, and tweet that Joe Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ A racist massacre raises questions about that promise.” A press corps that wanted to go down in history as doing better than pretending to raise questions about the “soul of America” would be busy interrogating the structural, economic, political relationships that promote and platform white supremacy. They’d be using their immense and specific influence to interrupt business as usual, to demand—not just today, but tomorrow and the next day—meaningful response from powerful people. They would not be accepting that mass murder in the name of white supremacy and antisemitism is just another news story to report in 2022 America, film at 11. We’ll talk about what we ought to be talking about with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been tracking Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years now. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220520Gertz.mp3 Transcript: ‘The “Great Replacement” Builds on Those Long Hatreds’ And also with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Poverty Law Center and executive director at Western States Center—about ways upward and outward from this current, difficult place. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220520Ward.mp3 Transcript: ‘The “Great Replacement” Builds on Those Long Hatreds’

  Washington Post (5/11/22) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate news media want you to be alarmed about an “extraordinary breach” of privacy. It’s the privacy of the institution of the Supreme Court which, one CBS expert told viewers, had been dealt a “body blow” by the leak of a ruling overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision allowing the right to terminate a pregnancy to remain between the pregnant person and their doctor. And corporate media are in high dudgeon about protecting people from invasions of their right to privacy—but again, only if by that you mean protecting Supreme Court justices and their “right” to never be confronted by people who disagree with the life-altering decisions they make. You almost wouldn’t think the real news of the past week was the nation’s highest court declaring that more than half of the population no longer have bodily autonomy. That’s to say, no longer have the control over their own body that a corpse has—since people can refuse organ donation after their death, even if it would save another person’s life. Elite media are interested in abortion as an issue, as a thing people talk about, but that it is not understood as a human right is clear from reporting—years of reporting—that suggest that for them it’s most importantly a partisan football, and any fight over it needs equal and equally respectful attention to “both sides,” even if one of those sides is calling for human rights violations. We talked with FAIR’s Julie Hollar about that. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220513Hollar.mp3 Transcript: ‘The First Story They Tell Is About the Leak Itself’ Popular Information (5/12/22) Also on the show: In corporate media–land, it’s controversial that people be allowed to determine whether they give birth, because, after all, we care so much about the birthed. It sounds sarcastic, but that’s the underlying premise of coverage of the shortage of baby formula—which incorporates an implied shock at the denial of basic healthcare with another implied shock that somehow capitalism doesn’t allow for all infants to be treated the same. There’s really no time left for pretended surprise at system failure in this country. We can still talk about journalism that shines a light on it, rather than an obscuring shadow. We’ll talk with Tesnim Zekeria from Popular Information about applying a public interest prism to, in this case, the story on baby formula.   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220513Zekeria.mp3 Transcript: ‘We Live in an Economy That Provides Little Support to New Parents’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of murdered Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220513Banter.mp3  

  (illustration: The Forum) This week on CounterSpin: Listeners are aware of the no-less-destructive-for-being-baseless assault on critical race theory. Just like with affirmative action (where conservatives said, “steps toward racial equity really means unfair quotas”), media took this charge, “steps toward racial equity really means telling white children to hate themselves,” and made it into “something some folks are saying”—while, of course, out of fairness they’ll acknowledge, “others disagree.”  (Media themselves, they suggest, occupy the intellectually and morally superior center.) A new website engages the attack more productively, by using critical race theory as a prism to explore the current range of threats to multi-racial democracy and our ability to fight for it. The site’s called The Forum; we’ll talk with editor-in-chief Chris Lehmann. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220506Lehmann.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Race Crisis and the Democracy Crisis Are Inseparable’ (photo: New Jersey Civic Information Consortium) Also on the show: Between Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk, who would you prefer preside over what information you can access? It’s kind of like being offered a choice between a poke in one eye or the other. If the problem is media outlets with priorities that poorly serve even our aspirations for democracy—and it is—the response is media with different priorities, which we know really only come from having a different bottom line. How can that work? We’ll talk about one model with Mike Rispoli of the group Free Press; he’s been working with the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium—a new way of thinking about and meeting local communities’ need for news. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220506Rispoli.mp3 Transcript: ‘What if We Use Public Money to Transform What Local Media Looks Like?’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look back at recent coverage of Roe v. Wade. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220506Banter.mp3  

(image: Copwatch Media) This week on CounterSpin: There are reasons that so much news media is consumed with crime. Not just any crime, not wage theft, not lethal pollution—but street crime, random, individual crime. “If it bleeds, it leads” journalism draws eyes to the set, doesn’t bother advertisers, is cheap to produce and lets news outlets look as though they’re tracking an important event in real time, and pretend as though they’re protecting real people…as they forcibly distract from actual humane efforts to respond to the ongoing crises—homelessness, poverty, addiction—that lead to crime, but are less cheap and easy to cover than cops and robbers. It’s a story old as journalism, but it’s still messed up. We’ll talk about that with activist and writer Josmar Trujillo, working now with Copwatch Media, a community-based project that reports on the effects of hyper-policing on communities. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220429Trujillo.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Core of Copaganda Is the Symbiotic Relationship Between Press and Police’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of inflation, immigration restriction and democracy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220429Banter.mp3  

  This week on CounterSpin: News media coverage of taxes falls broadly into two camps: There are, especially in April, lots of “news you can use”–type stories—like NBC‘s Today show on April 14 warning viewers to be mindful of typos and not be lazy about filing for extensions, or NBC Nightly News on April 18, noting that if you filed by mail, you might wait five to eight months for your return, due to backlogs at the IRS. Taxes as an “oh well, what are you gonna do” thing that all of us have to deal with. Then there are other stories, disconnected stories, about tax policy: Who pays, how much, and why? We’ve talked about that a fair amount on this show, and we’re going to revisit two of those conversations today. Last April, we spoke with Emory University law professor and author Dorothy A. Brown about how, though you can scour tax policy and find no mention of race, our tax system still affects Black people very differently, in ways most conversation obscures. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220422Brown.mp3 Trancript: ‘The System for Building Wealth Is Designed for White Wealth’ And in February 2019, we spoke with economist Dean Baker about why the idea of raising taxes on the superwealthy makes sense to many mainstream economists and to the general public, but still faces a perennial headwind in corporate media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220422Baker.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Distribution of Income Depends on How We Structure the Economy’ Two revelatory conversations about tax policy, this week on CounterSpin.

  Philadelphia Inquirer (3/29/22) This week on CounterSpin: A longtime reporter, at Philadelphia’s WPVI-TV since the 1960s, remembered spending shifts in his early days just listening to a police scanner, waiting for a crime to happen. The station’s decision to adopt a then-novel “Action News” format dictated that hyper-focus on crime. But, as detailed in a new report from the Philadelphia Inquirer, it also dictated that the scanner being monitored was in Kensington, a multi-racial, working-class neighborhood struggling with poverty and its attendant ills—and not someplace else. “Lights. Camera. Crime” is an early installment of the Inquirer‘s “A More Perfect Union” project, aimed at examining the roots and branches of racism in US institutions, including media institutions. The story was reported by Layla A. Jones. We’ll speak to Layla Jones today on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220415Jones.mp3 Transcript: ‘This Portrayal of Urban Environment Definitely Did Fuel Fear’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of FCC nominee Gigi Sohn, war coverage and “grooming.” https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220415Banter.mp3  

  Washington Post (4/7/22) This week on CounterSpin: He wanted to go to the Capitol on January 6, Donald Trump tells the Washington Post, but the Secret Service wouldn’t let him. He hated the violence, and was furious Nancy Pelosi wasn’t putting a stop to it. He doesn’t remember getting many phone calls, and he didn’t destroy any call logs. Trump would lie on credit when he could tell the truth for cash, so why are so many pundits invested in suggesting that he can never be legally brought to account? We’ll hear from Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, about the “stunning” new ruling that shows a way to do just that. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220408Cohn.mp3 Transcript: ‘There Is Plenty of Evidence to Request the Arrest of Trump’ (cc image: Don Goofy) Also on the show: Polls show 68% of people in the country think marijuana should be legal, the highest number since polling started in 1969. The tide is turning; it’s just a matter of who we let be lifted by it and who we allow to  drown. Should some people get rich selling weed while others rot in jail for it? That’s what the MORE Act that just passed the House tries to address. We’ll catch up with an expert on marijuana legislation, Mike Liszewski from the Enact Group. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220408Liszewski.mp3 Transcript: ‘Once the Federal Government Legalizes, Many More States Would Follow Through’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and notes the passing of media critic Eric Boehlert. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220408Banter.mp3  

    Ginni and Clarence Thomas, 1991 (image: C-SPAN) This week on CounterSpin: Headlines right now are full of the conflict of interest represented by Ginni Thomas, spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and her non-trivial role in the January 6 insurrection aimed at overturning, violently, the last presidential election. Our question is: A week or a month from now, where will we be? Will we still have one of nine Supreme Court justices declaring himself “one being” with his spouse, who declares the 2020 election an “obvious fraud”? And will the corporate press corps have reduced that to yet another partisan spat that shouldn’t interfere with our belief that all is proceeding as it should, no deep fixes necessary? We speak with Sarah Lipton-Lubet from the Take Back the Court Action Fund, about how to respond to the Thomas scandal if we really don’t want it to happen again. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220401LiptonLubet.mp3 Transcript: ‘Someone Who Cared About Integrity Would Have Recused Himself’ (image: EFF) Also on the show: For many Americans, the word “journalist” calls up an image of scruffy firebrands, rooting through official documents to ferret out critical truth—defined as what those in power don’t want you to hear—and then broadcasting that truth to a public thirsty for a democracy more answerable to human needs. Many things stand in the way of that vision of the press corps we imagine and deserve. One is the stubborn and at times brazen opacity and secretiveness of government and other powerful agents. Dave Maass, director of investigations at Electronic Frontier Foundation and the driving force behind the Foilies, an annual award of sorts given to those who make the job of shining necessary sunlight particularly difficult. We talk with him about that. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220401Maass.mp3 Transcript: ‘You Have to Laugh at the Ways Agencies Will Evade Giving You Information’