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.”
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.
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 bookGuns 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.
CounterSpin220527Volsky.mp3
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.
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.
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.
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.
CounterSpin220513Zekeria.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of murdered Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.
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.
CounterSpin220506Lehmann.mp3
(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.
CounterSpin220506Rispoli.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look back at recent coverage of Roe v. Wade.
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.
CounterSpin220428Trujillo.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of inflation, immigration restriction and democracy.
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.
CounterSpin220422Brown.mp3
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.
CounterSpin220422Baker.mp3
Two revelatory conversations about tax policy, this week on CounterSpin.
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.
CounterSpin220415Jones.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of FCC nominee Gigi Sohn, war coverage and “grooming.”
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.
CounterSpin220408Cohn.mp3
(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.
CounterSpin220408Liszewski.mp3
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.
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.
CounterSpin220401LiptonLubet.mp3
(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.
This week on CounterSpin: We heard a cable TV commentator say recently that with the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is trying to “put an end to democracy as we know it.” We know we wasn’t the only ones wondering, among other things, what “we” is being invoked here? And what’s the definition of the “democracy” we’re meant to be endorsing? Does it account for, say, the people who broke into the US Capitol last January trying to violently overturn a presidential election, and their supporters, explicit and implicit?
Thing is: Corporate news media don’t define the “democracy” they invoke as shorthand justification for pretty much anything, including war. It’s a murky stand-in for “a good place, where people have a voice and…stuff.” Even when and where it demonstrably means anything but.
With the ongoing horrific attack on Ukraine by Russia, you get the sense that war is a clarifier—proof that “Russia” as a country deserves pariah status, with all that entails (and media have a big box of what that entails).
And as Americans, media suggest, we’re meant to see and celebrate and fight for our difference from an imperialist, racist nation.
So it is, respectfully, a good time to recall that we had a war within this country, in which many people declared that they cared less about this country than about white supremacy. And that sentiment did not disappear. And those conversations have not finished. And ignoring them doesn’t erase them.
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African-American studies at Emory University, and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy and, most recently, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America
We talked with her in November of last year about the historical and ongoing struggle between white supremacy and this country’s hopes for democracy. We revisit that conversation this week.
CounterSpin220325Anderson.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the “no-fly zone” proposal.
This week on CounterSpin: It’s worth our while to think about why everyone we know is talking about Ukraine and Russia’s unlawful incursion—and equally worthwhile to ask why the same principles of concern don’t seem to apply in other cases. Those feelings don’t have to fight. But to hear Yemen put forward as just an example of an underconsidered concern is galling from the same people who underprioritized it in the first place.
Yemen is not a rhetorical device. It’s a country of human beings in crisis. We talk about that with Yemeni activist and advocate Shireen Al-Adeimi, who is also assistant professor of education at Michigan State University.
CounterSpin220318Al-Adeimi.mp3
Sarah Bloom Raskin (cc photo: New America)
Also on the show: Sarah Bloom Raskin was up for a job at the Federal Reserve. Everyone was for her nomination, including the bankers she would oversee. So why did she withdraw her nomination, and what does it tell us about the possibility of making any advances at all in facing the reality of climate change? Helping us see why issues media divide are completely related is David Arkush, managing director of the climate program at Public Citizen.
This week on CounterSpin: Russia’s horrendous invasion of Ukraine is providing yet another reminder that when elephants fight, it’s the grass that’s trampled. We see that not just in the front-page casualties; teenage soldiers dying fighting; civilian men, women and children killed by dropping bombs—but also in the measures we are told are meant to avert those harms: economic sanctions. Khury Petersen-Smith is Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He joins us to talk about the problem with seeing sanctions as an alternative to war.
Also on the show: In March 2012, Amazon opened an office dedicated to ferreting out tax breaks and subsidies. In other words, the megacorporation making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit puts in time finding ways to avoid supporting the communities it operates in—and to push local governments to divest money from education, housing and healthcare—to give to a company that doesn’t need it. This March, the group Good Jobs First marked that anniversary with a call to #EndAmazonSubsidies. We talk with the group’s executive director, Greg LeRoy.
This week on CounterSpin: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently: “Whenever I go to community meetings, it always comes up. Young and middle-aged and even some elderly. It tortures them.” What was he talking about? Student loan debt. So is what we call “higher” education an individual investment or a public good? The way news media talk about it could be decisive. We’ll hear from Braxton Brewington, press secretary and organizer at the group Debt Collective.
CounterSpin220304Brewington.mp3
(cc photo: Ted Eytan)
Also on the show: When media say there’s a debate about transgender peoples’ “right to exist,” remind yourself that trans people are going to exist; what’s on the table is whether they get to live free from persecution, oppression, exclusion and erasure. Texas state leadership is staking a position on that, but humans everywhere are pushing back, and we talk about that with Andy Marra, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund.
This week on CounterSpin: Black History Month has always been something of a double-edged sword: It implies that Black history is somehow not “history,” that it has to be shoehorned in, “artificially,” to garner any value, with the corollary implication that if you choose to ignore it, you aren’t missing anything crucial.
The idea that Black Americans are somehow something other than (meaning “less than”) “real” Americans is stupid, toxic…and fully in play, as reflected in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s response to a reporter’s question about efforts to suppress Black people’s voting rights with the statement that “the concern is misplaced because, if you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” So: There’s a reason Black people feel a need to lift up our particular history–our efforts and accomplishments, in and despite the context of violent, systemic harm we live in–that distinguishes that from the bland and euphemistic vision that usually passes as “US history.”
What matters is how the history of Black people is approached, discussed and integrated into what’s happening today. Journalists, of course, have an opportunity to do that work every month, not just the shortest.
Last year, we saw some open media acknowledgement of an event previously shrouded in silence and ignorance: the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of 1921. The layers of that story, the roles played by various actors, make it especially relevant for news media, who, to fully tell it, need to reflect on their own role, then…and now.
We talked about the Tulsa massacre around its anniversary last June, with Joseph Torres, senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press, and co-author with Juan González of the crucial book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. He works, as does CounterSpin‘s Janine Jackson, with Media 2070, a consortium of media-makers and activists that are detailing the history of US media participation in anti-Black racism, as well as collectively dreaming reparative policies, interventions and futures.
We hear from Joseph Torres about Tulsa this week on the show.
CounterSpin220225Torres.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look at media coverage of Ukraine.
There is a dangerous anger on rapid boil at the protest in Wellington. It is a stew of dispossession and unrest alongside various delusional beliefs and violent threats.
Two weeks into the protest and the police have had to endure human waste and acid thrown at them; a car driven into them; threats of violence; chants of “shame on you”; accusations of police brutality; physical attacks and injuries.
Meanwhile, the illegal occupiers (who refused to move their cars to a free car park) claim peace and love as the Ministry of Health reported today a record 2846 new community cases of covid-19 with 143 people in hospital with the virus.
It was joined by “everyday people” annoyed with mandates they don’t want to live with.
Well, if these “everyday people” can lower their standards to stand shoulder to shoulder with violent extremists all I can say is, “shame on you”.
Deputy Leader of the House, Labour’s Michael Wood recently spoke of these threats at Parliament: “There is a river of violence and menace. There is a river of anti-Semitism. There is a river of Islamophobia. There is a river of threats to people who work in this place and our staff.”
Michael Wood: “There is a river of filth, there is a river of violence and menace, there is a river of antisemitism, there is a river of Islamophobia…there is a river of genuine fascism in parts of the event that we see out the front of this parliament today” pic.twitter.com/h5zJRXA5TL
Deputy Speaker Michael Wood speaking in Parliament on February 17. Video: NZ Parliament
These underlying threads of violence give the protest its bite, if not its bark. The protest in Wellington was inspired by the truckers’ convoy in Canada and the occupation of Ottawa.
Conspiracy far right media platform Counterspin in New Zealand was central in the formation and viral spread of the Aotearoa convoy,
It is also, astoundingly, a protest that is preaching aroha (love) and peace. This is at odds with the Trump-loving, QAnon inspired cesspit of violence. QAnon believes that the government is full of elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and media.
They believe that politicians and journalists will be executed in a day of reckoning.
That is why “hang ‘em high” was chalked on the steps to Parliament in the first days of the protest. Many people at this protest want to see politicians and media people executed.
This protest also has the support of white supremacists with swastikas chalked on a statue in the early days.
This disgusting far-right, anti-establishment hatred has no place in Aotearoa. Yet here it is at a protest supported by thousands on the Parliament lawn.
I have protested at many events over the years in Aotearoa in the name of animal rights. Never would I stand alongside people who preach violence. And in all cases police behaviour toward myself and my fellow protestors has been exemplary and respectful.
The protest was ill-thought out in direction, leaderless, and doomed to failure. Their demands cannot possibly be met in a time of global pandemic that has brought the world quite literally to its knees.
And yet as the days tick by, yoga classes spring up alongside gardens. Food stalls and dancing, a concert, love and freedom grow like fairy tales.
It’s all a fairy tale. Make no mistake. This protest may preach peace, but its bones are evil.
— Lynley Tulloch
It’s all a fairy tale. Make no mistake. This protest may preach peace, but its bones are evil.
So where to go from here? There is no end in sight for this drama. The protesters are revelling.
The government can’t move them. Police can’t move them. The army can’t move them.
Ironically, as suggested by ex-Labour party president Mike Williams, it will be the covid virus itself that will bring them down. And that is one little virus that doesn’t care about threats of violence.
The only thing it will take notice of is a vaccine and a mask, and those are in short supply on Parliament grounds right now.
The virus doesn’t care if you are a child, or elderly, or immune-compromised or dangerously deluded. It doesn’t give a care in the world about your rights. It just goes and sticks its spikes right into you joyfully.
And so, Mike Williams is probably right. And therein lies the biggest irony of this whole protest.
Dr Lynley Tulloch is an educational academic and also writes on animal rights, veganism, early childhood, feminist issues, environmentalism, and sustainable development.
There was plenty of condemnation of New Zealand’s occupation of Parliament in the media at first — but this week some media painted a much more palatable picture of the protesters and their motivation.
However, those who track the far-right and the media channels they use warn that ignores and obscures the protest’s dark undercurrents.
When the convoy converged on Parliament last week, Newshub vox-popped Wellingtonians who called the protest “ridiculous and disruptive”.
When the convoy converged on Parliament last week, Newshub vox-popped Wellingtonians who called the protest “ridiculous and disruptive”.
Offshore, Al Jazeera’s headline quoted residents who called the protesters “‘stupid’ and ‘selfish’”.
Many in the media were at pains to point out the protesters were not just a minority, but a mere fraction of the anti-vax element.
There was also sympathy for the police being confronted by angry and aggressive crowds — and public anger about children being there, even through a record-breaking wet southerly blast and the Speaker’s sprinkler stunt last weekend.
Media highlighted unpleasant conditions
And as the occupation dragged on, media highlighted increasingly unpleasant conditions underfoot.
Newshub at 6 reporting on February 14 about health and safety worries at “Camp Freedom”. Image: Newshub at 6 screenshot/RNZ
“The [police] superintendent described the situation as squalor,” TVNZ’s 1News viewers were told last Monday.
“He said there’s faeces on the ground and children are playing in the mud.”
That amplified calls for the convoy crowd to stop blocking the streets — and the drains.
But Newstalk ZB’s political editor Barry Soper told listeners the poo problem was a fiction.
“There’s no faeces anywhere. They’ve got portaloos down there,” he said.
Soper went on to tell ZB’s Drive host Heather du Plessis-Allan the protesters were not as bad as they had been painted.
“They’re Kiwis. A lot of them have been mandated out of their jobs,” Soper said.
‘Do they have a point?’
“Do they have a point?” du Plessis-Allan asked rhetorically.
“Yes they have a point. They insist this is an anti-mandate protest and reporters on the ground say this appears to be the case. Now don’t confuse anti-mandate with anti-vax,” she warned listeners.
In fact, many reporters on the ground stressed that vaccine misinformation seemed near-universal among the occupiers — and amplification of irrational rhetoric, nooses, calls to “hang em high” and Nuremberg imagery were plain to see.
On the same ZB show soon after, NZME head of business Fran O’Sullivan said it was time to engage with them — even though there were no publicly-acknowledged leaders or mainstream political backers at that point.
“Not all people on that lawn are crazy. There’s a lot of people who are pretty ordinary folk who for one or another reason find themselves out of jobs,” she said.
Several commentators declared they were impressed by the pop-up infrustructure and support for what had earlier been described in the media as a leaderless and random occupation.
The front page of the Dominion Post on Friday – 11 days after the Convoy 2022 arrived in town. Image: RNZ Mediawatch
ZB’s Mike Hosking told listeners of his show the convoy deserved credit.
“I admire people who want to give up a lot of time and travel and hunker down and presumably get some sort of sense of personal accomplishment,” he said.
‘Too many nutters’
That’s quite a shift from the previous Friday, when Hosking dismissed the occupation as a waste of time with “too many nutters, and too many angry people”.
“Didn’t work. Protests make a point — but this one just pissed everyone off,” he said.
Back in 2019, he condemned those occupying Ihumātao as time-wasters too.
“Is it time in lieu you think they’re taking or annual leave they’re taking?” he said.
Politics lecturer and pundit Dr Bryce Edwards told ZB aggression at the protest had evaporated. He described protesters as merely “eccentric”.
The same day Edwards also told RNZ’s Morning Report the protesters had been unfairly smeared as “far right” — even though far right material and broadcasts were still clearly present at the protest.
“Bryce is quite wrong to gloss over the far right influence,” countered another commentator on Morning Report, academic Morgan Godfery.
Known far-right figures were among the first setting up and attending fresh occupation protests in Christchurch.
Watching their channels Byron C Clark, who researches New Zealand’s far-right and conspiracy theory scene, told Mediawatch that reporters and commentators declaring the protest peaceful and reasonable were ignoring some of its dark undercurrents.
“If you want a full picture, you need to be engaging with people on the ground but also be in the social media channels and watch their own media,” he said.
Extreme and sometimes violent messages are still being posted on apps like Telegram, and media channels like Counterspin, he said.
“They are talking to people who are saying different things to what they say to mainstream media journalists.”
TVNZ’s Cushla Norman also confronted Counterspin frontman Kelvyn Alp orchestrating the coverage outside Parliament last week. In a story that aired on 1News on Thursday TVNZ’s Kristin Hall found messages in stark conflict with the peaceful vibe many of the protesters were projecting publicly.
Protesters have been asking me all week for “evidence” of volatility towards the Wellington public so here it is. https://t.co/mhJNcXlMrF
“The Nuremburg 2.0 trials have started, why is no one reporting on that? You know, that’s the crimes against humanity and treason,” one protester told her.
Hall also pointed to Counterspin’s Kelvyn Alp telling ACT leader David Seymour he was “lucky they haven’t strung [him] up from the nearest bloody lamppost” after offering to mediate.
Common alt-right messages
Clark said those kinds of messages were common in parts of the movement.
“It’s not the case that everyone at the protest is a committed member of the alt-right movement, but it’s certainly the case that the alt-right has a presence in this movement and is trying to influence the direction it takes,” he said.
“On Telegram we’ve got people calling for trials and executions of politicians. On Counterspin Media, the hosts are telling people to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. To not report on that almost seems like part of that disinformation at this point in time.” Image: Telegram screenshot/RNZ Mediawatch
‘“On Telegram we’ve got people calling for trials and executions of politicians. On Counterspin Media, the hosts are telling people to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. To not report on that almost seems like part of that disinformation at this point in time.”
Many protesters identified as liberal or progressive, while being increasingly influenced by extreme content, Clark said.
“You might be skeptical of vaccines for left-wing reasons. You might be distrustful of the pharmaceutical industry. Then when you go into these anti-vax groups online, you’re going to be experiencing conversations about other conspiracy theories, and people will be saying, ‘yes, the media is lying to you, not just about this but also about these other things’.”
“You’re going to be influenced by a lot of these ideas and even if you continue to call yourself a liberal or left-wing, if you’re going to these protests that are shaped by the far-right, are you part of a far-right movement without realising it? I think that’s the case with a lot of the protesters,” he said.
‘Research these fringe elements’
Clark said the convoy was the culmination of years of activity on social media channels like Telegram, where thousands of people were still being radicalised.
He urged reporters to follow his lead and infiltrate those channels, so at the least they are not surprised when another movement emerges.
“I think some of our newsrooms should be putting more resources into researching these groups. Researching these fringe elements. Because we should know after Christchurch in 2019, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to burst out into the real world,” he said.
“These thousands of people have all been chatting to each other on Telegram for months if not years — so this wasn’t something that nobody saw coming. But it’s something the media is struggling to come to terms with,” Clark told Mediawatch.
This week on CounterSpin: You might think you’re not smart enough to talk about Ukraine. And, especially on US foreign policy, corporate media seem to suggest that any questions you have that fall outside their framework are not just dumb but traitorous, not earnest but dangerously naive. Peace? Diplomacy? The idea that US might have broken promises, might have material and not moral interests? Oh, so you love Putin then!
There is an interesting, relevant history to the state of tension between the US and Russia over Ukraine; but understanding it involves letting go of the storyline in which the US equals benevolent democracy and Russia equals craven imperialism.
We got some of that history from Bryce Greene, who wrote about Ukraine recently for FAIR.org. We’ll hear that conversation this week.
CounterSpin220218Greene.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Afghanistan.
This week on CounterSpin: You will have heard many things recently about the supply chain—as the reason you can’t find what you’re looking for on store shelves, or the reason it costs so much. But what’s behind it all? Why has the system broken down in this way? Here’s where thoughtful journalism could fill us in, could educate on a set of issues that affects us all, including discussing alternatives. But corporate news media aren’t good at covering economic issues from the ground up, or asking big questions about who is served by current structures. You could say media’s reluctance to critically break down systems is itself a system problem.
Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. She’ll join us to talk about the ideas in the article she recently co-authored for American Prospect, “How We Broke the Supply Chain.”
CounterSpin220211Mabud.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of polling and Israeli apartheid.
This week on CounterSpin: A New York Timesopinion piece by editorial board member Jesse Wegman says that debunking Republicans’ baseless, self-serving claims of voter fraud “was always a fool’s game,” because “the professional vote-fraud crusaders are not in the fact business.” The suggestion seems to be that even addressing such claims is “giving them oxygen.” But there’s a difference between airing such claims and training a scrutinizing, disinfectant light on them—and it’s really journalists’ choice which of those they do. The spate of new election-meddling laws proposed in Arizona suggests that looking away is not the answer. But Trumpers’ loss in Arizona could also map a way forward, if you’re interested. Our guest is interested. Steven Rosenfeld is editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Also on the show: If you think the “little guy” is left out of Wall Street deals, you’re not wrong. But is Bitcoin the answer? Is “cryptocurrency” a leveling force—or just a different flavor of grift that plays on that not-unfounded little guy frustration? Our guest gets at what’s new and what’s old in his description of cryptocurrency as “the people’s Ponzi.” Sohale Mortazavi is a writer based in Chicago; his recent piece on cryptocurrency appears in Jacobin.
This week on CounterSpin: Search corporate news media for recent stories on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan—in which some of the city’s overwhelmingly Black residents were paying upwards of $300 a month for water they couldn’t drink, based on an infrastructure decision on the water’s source that their elected officials had no say in—and you’ll find a few stories on how yes, lead-leaching pipes endangered people’s health…but there’s been a multi-million dollar settlement, and a presidential commitment to address lead in water, so maybe it’s all over but the shouting.
CNNhosted a Republican Michigan congressmember who explained that Flint was under an unelected austerity-minded emergency manager because their “city had essentially collapsed. They had no strong functioning government and the state had to step in and there was an error in shifting water sources.” That sounds lamentable, but not really blameworthy. So how do you square that “sorry but let’s move forward” line with the information that investigators looking into the crisis found that the cell phones of key health officials and other players, like then-Gov. Rick Snyder’s press secretary, had been wiped of messages for the key period?
While corporate media have largely let Flint go, the story isn’t over, nor has justice been served. We’ll hear from a reporter still on the case: Jordan Chariton, from independent news network Status Coup News.
CounterSpin220121Chariton.mp3
Patrice Lumumba
Also on the show: You don’t need to put your ear to the ground to hear US news media drumbeats for war of some sort with official enemies China and/or Russia. With China, part of what we’re being told to two-minute hate is their involvement on the African continent, where we’re to understand they are nefariously trapping countries in debt—unlike the US involvement in the region, which has been about bringing joy and love and hope.
Just because a playbook is old doesn’t mean it won’t be used again and again. The vision relies on amnesia and ignorance of what the US has done and is doing in Sub-Saharan Africa—a topic that, if news media wanted to explore it, they had a great chance this past week, with the 60th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Why was Lumumba killed? And what’s the living legacy of that undercovered murder? We’ll hear from Maurice Carney, co-founder and executive director of the group Friends of the Congo.
Prisoners of Guantánamo (photo: Shane T. McCoy/US Navy)
This week on CounterSpin: As we pass the grim milestone of 20 years of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, even Michael Lehnert, the Marine general who set the camp up, calls for it to close, says it shouldn’t have opened, that it’s an affront to US values. And yet here we are.
The number of Muslim men and boys in Guantánamo has shrunk from some 800 to 39—that’s meaningful. But when you read an offhand reference to those men as “awaiting justice,” one wonders: What do reporters imagine “justice” might mean to people charged with no crime, deprived of liberty unlawfully for decades, in a place designed to keep them from accessing justice, and to keep anyone else from hearing about them, much less questioning the processes that put them there?
We are a long way from understanding the full meaning of Guantánamo. But we can get the remaining detainees out. Our guest says that’s something that can happen and should happen, now. Pardiss Kebriaei is senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She’ll join us to talk abut how closing Guantánamo is not everything we can do, but it is something we can do, and should.
CounterSpin220114Kebriaei.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Lani Guinier, Desmond Tutu, and Covid and disability.
This week on CounterSpin: At FAIR, we say you can change the channel all you want, but you can’t turn on what isn’t there. The loss of an information source—a particular place for debate, for conversation, on issues relevant to you—is incalculable, but very real. We talked about the loss of local journalism, and why we can still be hopeful, with Craig Aaron of the group Free Press.
CounterSpin220107Aaron.mp3
Rana Plaza collapse
Also on the show: Fashion is always a huge media story, but what goes into it is not. The “fashion” industry is a prime driver of structured exploitation, whether we’re talking about blocked fire exits or a piece-rate system that steals workers’ wages systematically. The Garment Worker Protection Act, passed in California late last year, aims to address some of those harms. In light of that undercovered victory, we’re going to remind ourselves of one of the spurs for it. Barbara Briggs, then associate director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, spoke with CounterSpin in 2015 about the 2013 collapse at Rana Plaza, which brought murder charges against Bangladeshi factory owners and government officials—but, we can say now, somehow didn’t convince corporate media to keep a critical eye trained on the human costs of “fast fashion.”
This week on CounterSpin: the best of CounterSpin for 2021.
We call it the “the best of,” but this annual round-up is just a reflection of the kinds of conversations we hope have offered a voice or context or information that might help you interpret the news you read. We’re thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They help us see the world more clearly and see the role we can play in changing it.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
While it came in the midst of a calamitous time, the year’s beginning was still historically marked by an event we’re still accounting for. There are more than 700 arrests now, for crimes from misdemeanor trespassing to felony assault, connected to the January 6 Capitol insurrection, but that doesn’t mean we’ve reckoned with what went down. We talked with Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, activist, attorney and executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, on January 7.
Kimberly Inez McGuire
There is rightful concern about whether the Supreme Court will overturn 1973’s Roe v. Wade, affirming abortion rights. But reproductive justice has always been about much more than Roe or abortion; that’s a “floor, not a ceiling,” as Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the group URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, explained.
Igor Volsky
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, talked about how, when it comes to gun violence, the US has tried nothing, and is all out of ideas.
Dorothy A. Brown
Oftentimes people think corporate media are liberal, or even left, because they acknowledge discrimination. The thing is, that blanket acknowledgment is meaningless if you don’t break it down—explain how, for instance, racial bias plays out. That’s just what Dorothy A. Brown, professor at Emory University School of Law, and author of the new bookThe Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans—and How We Can Fix It, did for CounterSpin.
Bianca Nozaki-Nasser
The Covid pandemic highlighted many, many fault lines in US society, many aided and abetted by deficient media coverage. Anti-Asian reporting had predictable results, but as Bianca Nozaki Nassar, media-maker and educator with the group 18 Million Rising, told CounterSpin, the actions and the response fed into existing, noxious narratives.
Luke Harris
It might seem like 2021 was a head-spinner, but don’t get distracted. You don’t have to have heard of, for example, critical race theory to see that the panic around it is brought to you by the same folks who want to keep people from voting, or deciding whether to give birth, or loving who they love. We asked for some context from Luke Harris, deputy director at the African American Policy Forum.
David Cooper
“No one wants to work!” Are we over that yet? Things are shifting, but there’s still a media mountain to move about the very idea that workers choosing their conditions is something more than a “month” or a “moment”—and might just be a fundamental question of human rights. We spoke with David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, and deputy director of EARN, the Economic Analysis and Research Network.
Alec Karakatsanis
Fear-mongering crime coverage is a hardy perennial for for-profit media. But they don’t just scare you, they offer a response to that fear: police. The New York Times covered a murder spike with reporting from Jeff Asher, without tipping readers to his work with the CIA and Palantir, and a consulting business with the New Orleans police department. If only that were the only problem, as Alec Karakatsanis is founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System explained.
Paul Paz y Mino
Climate change was clearly a top story for 2021. But we’re past the point where reporters should be detailing what’s going wrong. We need to know who is standing in the way of response. And that’s where the “corporate” in corporate media kicks in. Look no further than coverage, or lack thereof, of Steven Donziger, the attorney who made the mistake of trying to Chevron responsible for its anti-human, anti-climate crimes. Paul Paz y Miño, associate director at Amazon Watch, discussed.
Michael K. Dorsey:
Yes, but isn’t the US a world leader on climate? No. Michael K. Dorsey works on issues of global energy, environment, finance and sustainability. While calling for continued people power, which he named as the thing that’s going to carry the day, he suggested much, much, much more needs to be demanded of political leadership.
This week on CounterSpin: When Xiomara Castro won a historic victory in Honduras last month—the country’s first woman president, winning with the most votes in history, in a decisive rebuke to the many-years dominant National Party—Associated Presssuggested that while that might “present opportunities” for the US, “there will be some painful history to overcome, primarily the US government’s initial sluggishness in calling the ouster of Castro’s husband Manuel Zelaya in 2009 what it was”—a coup.
Well, huh. In September 2009, APtold its readers that Honduras’
legislature ousted Zelaya after he formed an alliance with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and tried to alter the nation’s constitution. Zelaya was arrested on orders of the Supreme Court on charges of treason for ignoring court orders against holding a referendum to extend his term. The Honduran constitution forbids a president from trying to obtain another term in office.
Beyond the implication that “forming an alliance” with a leftist leader is somehow illegal, a later AP report underscored that “Zelaya was put on a plane by the military”—so OK, not the “legislature” anymore—”in June for trying to force a referendum to change the constitution’s limit of one term for presidents.” What’s not funny ha ha but funny peculiar is that before the coup, AP had told readers, accurately, that the referendum in question “has no legal effect: It merely asks people if they want to have a later vote on whether to convoke an assembly to rewrite the constitution.”
A dry-eyed observer would see AP‘s “editorial” position shifting along with, not facts on the ground, but US state rhetoric. Which brings us back to the present, and the idea that the US government, and their media megaphones, earnestly welcome a new leftist government in Honduras, and share their interest in lifting up the country’s people. Let’s just say: We’ll see.
Suyapa Portillo Villeda is an advocate, organizer and associate professor of Chicana/o–Latina/o transnational studies at Pitzer College, and author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras. She joins us this week to talk about the election, and signs of hard-won hope in Honduras.
CounterSpin211224Portillo.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of famine in Afghanistan.
This week on CounterSpin: Even if we don’t see a written-out master plan, the banning of books, the attacks on teaching real US history, the efforts to push out professors with views that transgress official US policy…. In their myriad forms. these tell us that it’s important to powerful people to restrict what ideas people can access. It’s the land of the free and home of the brave, except if you want to know what’s happened and happens here, or to tell people about it. It all shows us the power of ideas. As infuriating and sad and enervating as it all is, it also reminds us that knowledge is power.
So if you are someone who wants to know about the world—and if you aren’t in a position to buy books online to read—you might, as many of us did and do, go to the library. That’s the place where you don’t have to pay to sit down, you don’t have to buy a book or a coffee in order to read…. Libraries aren’t just a meaningful reality, but a meaningful symbol of the fact that there is a thing called the public interest, and it is a thing that the state, the thing we all are part of, that we support with taxes (yes, even those of us who aren’t documented citizens, but human beings who work and contribute to others and pay taxes) have a say in. So it matters a lot that this critical, loved public institution is under threat of usurpation by the same folks who think that there should be nothing, nothing, that private-sector, profit-oriented rich people don’t own and control. Do you care about libraries, that let anyone in and support anyone’s interest in learning? Well, then get ready to fight, because that space, that idea, is on the ropes.
Caleb Nichols is a librarian, writer, poet and musician, currently course reserves coordinator at Cal Poly/San Luis Obispo. His article, “Public/Private Partnerships Are Quietly Hollowing Out Our Public Libraries,” was published recently on Truthout.org.
This week on CounterSpin: Research from Harvard’s Institute of Politics finds young people worried about the state of US democracy and even the possibility of civil war. Yet US corporate journalists seem to feel nothing truly new is needed beyond the same old counsel: The “system” basically works, the US leads the world in rights and liberties, and “centrism” between the two dominant political parties is the wisest course, regardless of the content of their policies.
The Harvard project leader says young people still “seem as determined as ever to fight for the change they seek.” And in that, they have examples of folks who didn’t necessarily have odds in their favor, but who showed that even a small group of people, willing to confront entrenched ideas and power, really can make change in the public interest. One example is today’s guest: Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, author and radio host. We catch up with him this week on CounterSpin.
CounterSpin211210Nader.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of Kyrsten Sinema and pharmacies’ opioid guilt.
This week on CounterSpin, two archival interviews: As the year nears its end, it’s hard not to think back to how it started—with the violent assault on the Capitol by a crowd intent on preventing the declaration of Joe Biden as president. We spoke with organizer and strategist Dorothee Benz the next day about the import of the events of January 6.
Also on the show: While response to the insurrection came slowly, states have been cracking down on peaceful protests. We talked about that worrying trend with the ACLU’s Vera Eidelman around the Fourth of July.
This week on CounterSpin: What do we want? Multiracial democracy. When do we want it? Now. What stands in the way? White supremacy that has disregarded, derailed and violently defied that democracy at multiple turns.
Those anguished over the Rittenhouse acquittal, depressed by racist police brutality, unnerved by the failure to take seriously the January 6 insurrection, and worried about systemic predations on voting rights are sometimes led to say: “This isn’t America!” If you attend to actual US history (importantly different from what you might’ve read in your history textbook, or what you might someday be allowed to read in your history textbook), you will understand that this is America. But that still doesn’t mean it has to be. This can be a turning point, if more of us understand that history isn’t something that happens to us, but something we DO.
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African-American studies at Emory University, and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy. We talk with her about her recent Guardiancolumn on the historical and ongoing struggle between white supremacy and this country’s hopes for democracy.
CounterSpin211126Anderson.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of protest in India.
The Wall Street Journal (2/3/21) explains inflation.
This week on CounterSpin: If you read a paper, you know that inflation is a dire, important thing right now, a problem for the Biden administration, for economic policymakers, and for…regular folks who want to buy milk? You don’t need to understand it, elite media seem to say, but you do need to be mad about it, and direct blame for it toward…yourself? Jon Schwarz writes about elite media’s confusing and conflicting instructions around inflation, among other things, at the Intercept; we’ll talk with him about the current economic reality—and storyline.
CounterSpin211119Schwarz.mp3
Alex Jones
Also on the show: Ethically deficient radio host Alex Jones‘ defamation case is a political story about the impact of energetic, intentional disinformation. It’s a media story about how the profitability of hateful BS seems to change the terms around whether things that call themselves news outlets should be held accountable for demonstrably harmful lies. And it’s a speech rights story about whether you can yell fire in a crowded theater and then say, Ha! any dummy would know I was just kidding (but I’m not kidding about these vitamin supplements, please buy them). We’ll ask, “How does the legal system solve a problem like Alex Jones?” with Enrique Armijo, professor of law at Elon University.
This week on CounterSpin: We’ve talked on this show about how drugs and medicines are researched and developed by the government (on the public dime, if you will), and then pharmaceutical companies get patents on them and sell them back to the public at literally life-altering, or life-ending, prices. If you think, “But surely everything is different in a pandemic that’s killed 800,000 people in this country, one of every 400 people, and more than 5 million worldwide”—sadly, that means you don’t understand the nature of the game. Willie Sutton reportedly robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” Moderna is seeking a sole patent for the Covid-19 vaccine they created in partnership with the National Institutes of Health because, as a source told the New York Times, “that could help the company justify its prices and rebuff pressure to make its vaccine available to poorer countries.” We’ll hear about that, and better ways forward, from Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program.
CounterSpin211112Maybarduk.mp3
Aaron Swartz (cc photo: Nick Gray)
Also on the show: Aaron Swartz helped create the RSS protocol when he was 14; he was a founding figure behind SecureDrop, the Creative Commons licensing system, Open Library, Reddit and the civil liberties group Demand Progress, and he helped lead the fight against the censorious Stop Online Piracy Act. In the wake of his death in 2013, many groups vowed to push forward on his vision of citizens, regular people, unleashing data—with entailed access and communicability—in service of the public interest and the right to know.
Tracy Rosenberg uses data to build bridges between those affected by policy and those that make it, particularly on questions of privacy, surveillance and private or state encroachment on civil liberties—in other words, things you might not even know you need to know about. She’s executive director at Media Alliance and co-coordinator at Oakland Privacy. We’ll catch up with her today on CounterSpin.
CounterSpin211112Rosenberg.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the latest elections.
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.
This week on CounterSpin: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer 
