CounterSpin

  (cc photo: Doug Peters/British government) This week on CounterSpin: The impacts of climate disruption are not theoretical; they are happening. Those already worst off are facing the worst of it, and those who profit from it continue to profit. There are finer points, but that’s reality. And it’s fair to measure journalism not by its cleverness, or by demonstrated balance between the voices of various power players—because when it comes to climate change, power players are the problem—but by the justice it does to that reality. As national leaders meet at COP26 in Glasgow to discuss ways to confront this already unfolding disaster, the Washington Post is suggesting US readers celebrate —what’s this?—the Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s decision to finalize a “rule extending federal pipeline safety standards to more than 400,000 miles of currently unregulated onshore gathering lines.” You can acknowledge that certain steps are good, without thereby suggesting that they are within shouting distance of “enough” when it comes to climate change. We talk about comparing what’s happening to what needs to happen with environmental scientist and advocate, and longtime climate conference participant and observer, Michael K. Dorsey. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211105Dorsey.mp3 Transcript: ‘We’re Several Days Late and Many Dollars Short in Getting Ahead of Climate Catastrophe’ New York Times (9/21/21) Also on the show: In the wake of the horrifying front-page photos from September, the Biden administration says that the US Border Patrol will no longer use horses to round up Haitian asylum seekers they are flushing out of a makeshift shelters to send back over the border into Mexico, without the opportunity to present their case about the dangers they have spent, in many cases, years trying to escape. That may cut down on horrifying front-page photos, which is why it’s all the more important to ask what’s actually changing with regard to US policy toward Haitian refugees. We talk about that with Nekessa Opoti, communications director at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211105Opoti.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Anti-Blackness of the US Is Extending to Black Asylum Seekers’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of the new climate denialism. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211105Banter.mp3  

  (cc photo: Adam Schultz / Biden for President) This week on CounterSpin: An early October survey showed that while 60% of those polled knew that the Build Back Better legislative package was “$3.5 trillion,” only 10% had any sense of what was in it. That is many things, but preeminently a failure of news media—the demonstrably harmful effect of months of reporting that never failed to note the presumed “costs” of a plan to address devastating national crises of healthcare, climate and infrastructure, but that only rarely troubled itself to explain in any detail what those plans would mean. Despite that, polls still show majorities of Americans supporting the plan. We talk about seeing and pushing through anti-democratic disinformation with Karen Dolan, director of the Criminalization of Race and Poverty project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Transcript: ‘There’s Still an Awful Lot of Good in This Package, but You Wouldn’t Know It From Headlines’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211029Dolan.mp3   New York Times (10/26/21) Also on the show: A New York Times column (by an editorial board member) begins: “Facebook has endured one of the most punishing stretches of corporate coverage in recent memory, exposing its immense power and blithe disregard for its deleterious impacts. But none of it really matters.” Headlined, “Face It, Facebook Won’t Change Unless Advertisers Demand It,” the piece is ostensibly meant as a sober assessment of the difficulty of exacting change from a company while it’s making money. But given the role of journalism in telling folks what is possible, the Times espousing the notion that Congress, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and the press are all “but bumps in the road” reads less as a dry-eyed evaluation than a call to throw up our hands in the face of an unwinnable contest. Our guest understands media structure, yet still advocates for policy change. We hear from Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the group Free Press. Transcript: Facebook ‘Puts Engagement and Growth Before the Health and Welfare of Democracy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211029Karr.mp3  

    Steven Donziger (right) in Ecuador. This week on CounterSpin: When Steven Donziger and other attorneys sued Chevron for polluting the soil and water in Lago Agrio in Ecuador, Chevron moved to have the case held in Ecuador, where they don’t have jury trials. When that court ruled against them, they sued against the lawyers that won the verdict, and accused one, Steven Donziger, of corruption, including bribing the judge. When the judge later recanted his testimony, that was somehow not important, and Chevron moved the case back to the US, where they have not only managed to keep themselves from ever facing scrutiny for the original crime, which they don’t deny, but have ruined the personal and professional life of the lawyer who internal documents show they had an explicit plan to “demonize.” It sure sounds like a story reporters interested in David vs. Goliath or climate change or corporate power or the future of humanity would care about. But no, it looks more like a story of a case a major fossil fuel company wanted to see silenced that has in fact had that effect. We’ll talk about what media would really rather you not now about Steven Donziger and Chevron in Ecuador with Paul Paz y Miño, associate director of Amazon Watch. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211022PazyMino.mp3 Transcript: ‘Every Turn in This Case Has Been Another Brick Wall, and Behind It Is Chevron’

OAN logo This week on CounterSpin: “If you have 12 Americans being fed a diet of untruth, that’s 12 too many.” So says John Watson, an American University journalism professor specializing in ethics and media law. He’s talking about OAN, or One America News Network, and its audience, which has been told, among other things, that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election and that chemical cocktails are a better response to Covid-19 than government-authorized vaccines. We’ll talk about how we got here with Bobby Lewis, researcher and editorial writer from Media Matters. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211015Lewis.mp3 Transcript: ‘OAN Would Not and Could Not Exist Without AT&T’s Blessing’ (photo: Greenpeace USA) Also on the show: Thousands of people are out in the street this week, calling on lawmakers to not just acknowledge that climate change is happening, but to do something about it. Media have a role to play here. It has to go beyond noting that protesters spraypainted a statue of Andrew Jackson. What about the work of saving the planet, and facing up to the forces that call themselves harmed? We’ll talk about people vs. fossil fuels with Jean Su from the Center for Biological Diversity. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211015Su.mp3 Transcript: ‘People Right Now Are Absolutely Feeling the Climate Emergency’

    (image via BillMoyers.com) This week on CounterSpin: The thing about the US Postal Service: Low-income people get the same service as the rich; rural people get their prescriptions and paychecks and ballots in the same timeframe as those in big cities. The idea has always been that postal service is a public good, not to be mined for profit, and not tiered to give the wealthy yet another leg up. USPS is the second-largest employer in the country, traditionally offering opportunities for people of color—and unlike the number one employer, Walmart, it doesn’t subsidize itself by paying wages so low that employees have to also rely on public assistance. That’s why it’s so worrying that the current leaders of the Postal Service seem intent on driving it into the ground. We’ll talk about the fight for the post office with Lisa Graves, executive director and editor-in-chief at True North Research</a https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211008Graves.mp3 Transcript: ‘There’s a Lot the Postal Service Can Do to Be Present in the 21st Century’ (image: AAPF) Also on the show: Attorney General Merrick Garland has ordered the FBI to work with local leaders to help address the “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against educators and school board members over mask mandates, and also interpretations of critical race theory, which has been distorted by conservatives to mean any teaching about racism or systemic inequity in US society. If you didn’t know that K–12 teachers and college professors are under visceral attack simply for teaching the unvarnished truth of US history, it might be because somehow many free speech advocates, including in the press corps, haven’t taken on this disturbing encroachment on the rights of educators and students. Teachers, however, are fighting back, and a number of groups are planning a Day of Action on October 14 to shed light on that fight and what’s at stake. We’ll hear about that from Stevana Sims, public school counselor in Montclair, New Jersey, and a member of the steering committee of the group Black Lives Matter at School. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211008Sims.mp3 Transcript: ‘Threats Are Being Made Against Teachers Who Are Teaching the Truth’

    New York Times (9/22/21) This week on CounterSpin: “Crime wave” politics are a time-honored response to political movements that take on racist policing in this country, dating back at least to Barry Goldwater, as organizer Josmar Trujillo was reminding us back in 2015. But here we are again, as outlets like the New York Times announce a reported rise in the murder rate with coverage steeped in false presumptions about what that means and how to respond. Our guest says prepare to hear a lot about how cops need more resources because “crime is surging,” and offers antidote to that copaganda. We hear from Alec Karakatsanis, 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/CounterSpin211001Karakatsanis.mp3 Transcript: ‘Crime Is Defined and Constructed by Police and Other Elite Interests’   Larry Nassar Also on the show: While we’re to understand that police could prevent crime, if only they’re permitted, we’re also asked to accept that the most powerful law enforcement in the country just somehow couldn’t manage to prevent Olympic gymnast team doctor Larry Nassar from sexually assaulting dozens of young women, even after they’d been alerted. FBI actions around Nassar went well beyond mere negligence—falsifying testimony, pressuring witnesses—but to actually address that, we’ll need to acknowledge a systemic indifference to gender-based crime. Jane Manning, director of the Women’s Equal Justice Project, joins us to talk about that. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211001Manning.mp3 Transcript: ‘It’s the Demeaning Treatment, but Also the Failure to Take Action’

    Sludge (8/6/21) This week on CounterSpin: A recent New York Times story about Senate Energy Committee chair Joe Manchin’s conflicts of interest quoted a source saying, “It says something fascinating about our politics that we’re going to have a representative of fossil fuel interests crafting the policy that reduces our emissions from fossil fuels.” A lot of people would say that’s less fascinating than horrific, particularly in the context of a new global survey of people between 16 and 25 that found that more than half of them believe “humanity is doomed”—and that 58% of young people said their governments are betraying them. You can’t talk about why we can’t get to realistic climate policy without talking about that betrayal, and its roots. Which is why we talk about Joe Manchin with David Moore, co-founder of investigative news outlet Sludge. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210924Moore.mp3 Transcript: ‘Manchin Has Taken the Lead in Diluting Ethics Provisions’ Also on the show: We get an update on media coverage of Covid with FAIR’s editor, Jim Naureckas. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210924Naureckas.mp3 Transcript: ‘You Should Get the Vaccine Despite the Media Telling You You Should’   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Rahm Emanuel’s ambassadorial nomination. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210924Banter.mp3  

    (Kendall Hunt, 2021) This week on CounterSpin: The primary “sense” of Sub-Saharan Africa in corporate media is absence. When Africa is discussed, it’s often been, to put it simply, as a material resource and as a staging ground for Great Nation politics and proxy war. Not as far removed as it ought to be from the Berlin conference in the late 19th century, when the European powers sat down to decide who got which slice of what the genocidal King Leopold II of Belgium called “this magnificent African cake.” Challenging and changing the frame requires seeing through the racist fables, the omissions and hypocrisy that have plagued US media’s Africa reporting through history and up to today. A new book takes that on, and we hear this week from its author. Milton Allimadi teaches African history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and publishes the Black Star News, a weekly newspaper in New York City. He’s the author of the new book Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in Western Media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210917Allimadi.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Demonization Was Meant to Pacify Readers to Accept the Brutality’

  (cc photo: Beth Wilson) This week on CounterSpin: Many people will know that the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade in 1973, enshrining women’s right to access abortion—to choose when and whether to have a child. It seemed to signal recognition that abortion is healthcare, that most women who have abortions are mothers (in other words, they don’t need to have an ultrasound to recognize what’s happening), that medical reality and theology are not the same, and that outlawing abortion doesn’t stop it, but just pushes women to have unsafe abortions. Less often considered is how immediately after Roe, Congress passed the Hyde amendment, taking this fundamental human right out of the hands of women who rely on government assistance—so low-income, overwhelmingly women of color. Hyde acknowledged that they wanted to outlaw abortion for all women, but poor women were the only ones they had legal standing to control. That cynical approach proved effective, as Americans watched the ability to access abortion chipped away, with wait times, parental notification rules, hospital credential requirements, clinic closings, funding cutoffs for international groups—all the while comforted by the notion that the “right” to abortion was somehow still legally protected. That narrative is exploding right now in the wake of the Supreme Court’s refusal to address, which amounts to an endorsement, what is overwhelmingly understood as an unconstitutional Texas law offering a bounty on anyone who “aids and abets” a woman seeking an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. We’ll talk with Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild and author of, among other titles, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210910Cohn.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Radical Right-Wing Majority of the Supreme Court May Well Overturn Roe v. Wade’ And we’ll revisit a conversation from January of this year about what law can and can’t do, with Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the group URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210910InezMcGuire.mp3 Transcript: ‘Restrictions on Abortion Are Invisible Because They Appear Based on Who You Are’

  Purdue heir David Sackler and wife Joss depicted in Vanity Fair (6/19/19) This week on CounterSpin: The engineers of the crack epidemic were never offered a deal to get out of the biz with impunity as long as they gave some money towards helping the families, communities and healthcare systems broken in the wake of the addiction epidemic they unleashed. Nor were any other neighborhood drug dealers you can think of, caught making money off drugs that, hey, they’re also very sorry if anyone used irresponsibly? Somehow that’s not the most relevant  context for corporate media talking about the bankruptcy ruling shielding the Sackler family, profiteers via Purdue Pharma on the drug Oxycontin, responsible for, conservatively, half a million deaths by overdose. We’ll talk about that with Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210903Claypool.mp3 Transcript: ‘Where Are the Threads Dropped With the Criminal Investigation of the Sackler Family?’ CEPR (1/21/20) Also on the show: You’ve seen the graphic showing how the US minimum wage has become unhinged from other indicators it should connect to, like productivity—the value of the goods and services that, after all, workers produce.  But how did that disconnect happen, and how would a true understanding of that help us push through foggy reportage toward a better world? We’ll get a breakdown of ideas elite media generally talk over from economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210903Baker.mp3 Transcript: ‘We’ve Structured Our Economy to Redistribute a Massive Amount of Income Upward’