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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the latest elections.
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.
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.
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Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of the new climate denialism.
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.
Also on the show: A New York Timescolumn (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.
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.
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.
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(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.
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
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.
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 Timesannounce 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.
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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.
This week on CounterSpin: A recent New York Timesstory 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.
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Also on the show: We get an update on media coverage of Covid with FAIR’s editor, Jim Naureckas.
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Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Rahm Emanuel’s ambassadorial nomination.
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.
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.
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.
Purdue heir David Sackler and wife Joss depicted in Vanity Fair (8/19)
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.
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.
This week on CounterSpin: US news media are full of armchair generals who talk about weapons of war like they’re Hot Wheels, and have lots of thoughts about how “we coulda got ’em” here and “we shoulda got ’em” there. The price of admission to elite media debate is acceptance that the US, alone among nations, has the right to force change in other countries’ governments; and when this results, as it always does, in death and destruction, elite media’s job entails telling the public that that’s not just necessary but somehow good. Not to put too fine a point on it.
All of this and more is on display in coverage of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan—along with, as usual, some exceptional countervailing reporting. Ending the US occupation could mean a new day for the Afghan people, but with the anniversary of September 11 coming up, it looks like US media consumers may need not a broom but a shovel to deal with the self-aggrandizing, history-erasing misinformation headed our way. We’ll prepare ourselves with insights on Afghanistan from Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and from Matthew Hoh, senior fellow with the Center for International Policy.
Jeff Cohen co-founded FAIR in 1986 and is the author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.
This week on CounterSpin: Listeners to this show may take it as a given that, if you care about social, racial, economic justice, you have to also care about media—because corporate news media promote narratives that shape public opinion, public policy and all of our lives. Now we understand that tales that mainstream news media tell every day—”Healthcare for everyone is too expensive,” “rich people contribute to the economy, while workers just take from it,” “the rest of the world sees the US as the exemplar of democracy”—are not demonstrable truths, but reflect the interests and priorities of media owners and sponsors.
But it wasn’t always this way; there was a time—not long ago—when folks would tell you if it’s in the paper it must be true, and media’s idea of the limits of political debate and political possibility ought to be your limits too, if you’re sensible. Undoing that myth—with criticism and activism and promoting alternative sources of information—has been the project of FAIR, the worker collective media watch group that produces this show, for 35 years now.
We’re celebrating that anniversary by working more, basically, but this week we take a look back at FAIR’s beginnings with founder Jeff Cohen. After starting FAIR with Martin Lee and Pia Gallegos in 1986, Jeff went on to be founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, and now co-founder and policy adviser at the online initiative RootsAction. In between, he was a pundit on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, and wrote the book Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.
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Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look at media coverage of the Olympics.
Pro-government rally, Cuba (photo: AP/Eliana Aponte)
This week on CounterSpin: Imagine if China used its power to cut off international trade to the US, including for things like medical equipment, because they didn’t like Joe Biden, and hoped that if enough Americans were made miserable, they would rise up against him, and install a leader China thought would better serve their interests. How would you think about Chinese media that said, “Well, we heard a lot of Americans say they were unhappy; they even marched in the street! Obviously, that was a call for foreign intervention from a country that understands democracy better than they do.”
And then what if some Chinese people said, “Wait, you can’t immiserate ordinary Americans to push them to overthrow their government; that’s illegal and immoral,” and other Chinese people explained, “You don’t get it; US politics are very complicated”?
We talk about the admitted complexities of the hardships facing Cubans—and the relatively uncomplicated actions the US could take to stop contributing to those hardships—with James Early, board member at the Institute for Policy Studies, and former assistant secretary for education and public service at the Smithsonian Institution.
Also on the show: David Cooper, senior research analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, joins us to parse the “we all quit” phenomenon currently coursing through the US wage labor workforce, and through US economic news media. Does media’s narrative really match what’s going on?
