This week on CounterSpin: Reporters covering the pandemic can’t help but note the impact of the digital divide: How do you work from home, or do remote learning, or even register for a vaccine, without not just available, but affordable high-speed internet? Yet a major congressional effort to end that divide is, so far, generating little interest from big media. It’s almost as if the corporate press accepted the existence of information haves and have-nots, because that’s how goods get divided in this country—even if it doesn’t make technological, economic or humanitarian sense. We’ll hear about the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act (AAIA) from Ernesto Falcon, senior legislative counsel at Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Also on the show: As with the country’s communication networks, there’s an obvious social win, and cost efficiency, in adapting buildings to climate realities—making them not just energy efficient (right now, they generate about 40% of greenhouse gases), but “future-proofed” against predictable and predicted weather events. Many cities think so, and they were working on building codes to reflect that—until industry groups, including home builders and the American Gas Association, said not so fast. We’ll get this very important but still under the radar story from Alexander Kaufman, who’s been on it. He covers climate change, energy and environmental policy as a senior reporter at HuffPost.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the Atlanta hate-crime shootings.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.