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New York Times (7/22/25)

This week on CounterSpin: The mainstream US media debate on the starvation and violence and war crimes in Gaza still, in July 2025, makes room for Bret Stephens, who explains in the country’s paper of record that Israel can’t be committing genocide as rights groups claim, because if they were, they’d be much better at it. Says Stephens:

It may seem harsh to say, but there is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal—if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans—why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?

“It may seem harsh to say” is a time-honored line from those who want to note but justify human suffering, or excuse the crimes of the powerful. It looks bad to you, is the message, because you’re stupid. If you were smart, like me, you’d understand that your empathy is misplaced; these people suffering need to suffer in order to…. Well, they don’t seem to feel a need to fully explain that part. Something about democracy and freeing the world from, like, suffering.

It’s true that corporate media are now gesturing toward engaging questions of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. But what does that amount to at this late date? We’ll talk about corporate media’s Gaza coverage with independent reporter and frequent FAIR.org contributor Ari Paul.

Disability Scoop (8/1/25)

Also on the show: The Americans with Disabilities Act is generally acknowledged in July, with a lot of anodyne “come a long way, still a long way to go” type of reporting. There’s an opening for a different sort of coverage this month, as the Trump administration is actively taking apart laws that protect disabled people in the workplace, and cutting off healthcare benefits, and disabled kids’ educational rights, and rescinding an order that would have moved disabled workers to at least the federal minimum wage; and, with a recent executive order, calling on localities to forcibly institutionalize any unhoused people someone decides is mentally ill or drug-addicted or just living on the street.

Does that serve the hedge funds pricing homes out of reach of even full-time workers? Yes. Does it undercut years of evidence-based work about moving people into homes and services? Absolutely. Does it aim to rocket us back to a dark era of criminalizing illness and disability and poverty? Of course. But Trump calls it “ending crime and disorder,” so you can bet elite media will honor that viewpoint in their reporting. We’ll get a different view from Scout Katovich, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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PBS NewsHour (7/18/25)

This week on CounterSpin: The Trump administration is funding a genocide in Gaza—never mind headlines like July 24’s Washington Post: “Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza as Deaths From Hunger Rise.” (No, it’s actual human beings stalking Gaza, who could right now choose to act differently.)

The White House is deploying masked men to disappear people out of job sites and courtrooms, and offering them salaries orders of magnitude more than those paid teachers or nurses. They’re daylight-robbing hard-earned benefits from everyone, with the most vulnerable first; operating wild grifts for Trump himself; and shutting down any openings for dissent.

None of this, while we acknowledge individual regretters, has radically shaken the MAGA base. But now that group, we’re told, may be fracturing, around the Epstein files.

To tell this as a tale about two uniquely bad men, one of whom mysteriously died in prison while the other mysteriously became president, is a terrible disservice to a story of thinly veiled institutional, professional machinery employed in the systemic criminal victimization of women. But how can we expect elite news media to tell that story when they’re busy wasting ink on Trump denials as though they were something other than nonsense?

There’s a lot going on here; we’ll talk about just some of it with Thom Hartmann, radio host and author of, most recently, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink.

Ken Saro-Wiwa

Also on the show: Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has just announced a posthumous pardon for Nigerian writer, teacher and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged in November 1995, along with eight of his comrades in the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Their crime was nonviolent protest against the exploitation of their land and their people by oil industry giant Royal Dutch Shell. CounterSpin covered it at the time—and then in 2009, we caught up on still-ongoing efforts to bring some measure of accountability for those killings, and Shell’s unceasing human rights and environmental violations, with Han Shan, working with what was then called the ShellGuilty campaign, a coalitional effort from Oil Change International, Friends of the Earth and Platform/Remember Saro-Wiwa.

In light of this pardon, which is being acknowledged as necessary but insufficient, we’re going to hear that conversation with Han Shan again this week.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Truthout (6/11/25)

This week on CounterSpin: The US official stance about the UN is, basically, they’re not the boss of us. But: If it looks like they can make hay with it, then sure. That’s why Secretary of State Marco Rubio is declaring “sanctions” against Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, following an unsuccessful pressure campaign to force the UN to remove her from her post. Albanese has long been clear in calling on the international community to halt Israel’s genocide of Palestinians—but the thing that broke US warmongers was her naming in a recent report of corporations that are profiting from that genocide. We’ll talk about why talking about profiteering is so key with Iman Abid, director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

New York Times (7/2/25)

Also on the show, and to the point: Victor Pickard will join us to talk about corporate actions that make sense as business deals—but, because this country has chosen to run the democratic lifeblood of journalism as just another business, affect everyone relying on news media to tell us about the world. Victor Pickard is professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he codirects the Media, Inequality & Change Center. He’s the author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism? from Oxford University press.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Intercept (7/8/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Along with many other hate-driven harms, the budget bill puts Stephen Miller’s cruel and bizarre mass deportation plan on steroids. $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers; that’s a 62% larger budget than the entire federal prison system.

The goons hiding their faces and IDs while they snatch people off the street? ICE’s “enforcement and deportation operations” get $30 billion. $46 billion for a “border wall,” because that’s evidently not a cartoon. And in a lesser-noticed piece: While courts are backlogged with immigrants complying with legal processes to access citizenship, the bill caps the number of immigration judges to 800, ensuring more people will be kept in vulnerable legal status.

The Economic Policy Institute tells us that increases in immigration enforcement will cause widespread job losses for both immigrant and US-born workers, particularly in construction and childcare: “While Trump and other conservatives claim that increased deportations will somehow magically create jobs for US-born workers, the existing evidence shows that the opposite is true: They will cause immense harm to workers and families, shrink the economy, and weaken the labor market for everyone.”

That’s without mentioning how ICE is telling people they’re being moved from Texas to Louisiana and then dumping them in South Sudan, as the Intercept’s Nick Turse reports. Or the puerile delight Republicans find in holding people in an alligator swamp, and forbidding journalists and public officials from seeing what goes on there.

It’s important to see that Donald Trump, while especially craven, is using tools he was given, in terms of the apparatus for mass deportations, including in the acceptance of prisons as economic boons for struggling localities. So the fight can’t be just anti-Trump, but must be rooted in policy and practice and law—and most of all, in community and shared humanity.

We’ll talk about standing up for human beings because they’re human beings with Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the Texas floods.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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(photo: Jim Naureckas)

This week on CounterSpin: White supremacy, Islamophobia and antisemitism are irreducible dangers in themselves. They are also tools that powerful, wealthy people take up to protect their power and wealth, and to deflect everyone’s attention from who is, actually, day to day, threatening all of our well-being. That brazenness (everything is in peril!)—and that skullduggery (you know who’s the problem? your different-looking neighbor!)—are both in evidence in corporate media’s hellbent, throw-it-all-at-the-wall campaign against democratic socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

We’ll talk about how elite news media are Trojan-horsing their hatred for any ideas that threaten their ill-gotten gains, via very deep, very serious “concerns” about Mamdani as a person, with Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, longtime political activists, writers and co-founders of the emphatically nonpartisan group RootsAction.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Gaza massacres.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Column (6/22/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Prosecutors at the 1946 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared:

War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

After the Trump administration dropped bombs on Iran last weekend, without congressional approval, the media debate wasn’t about legality, much less humanity. The Wall Street Journal offered a video series on The Massive Ordnance Penetrator, “The 30,000-Pound US Bomb That Could Destroy Iran’s Nuclear Bunkers.” But it’s not just boys excited by toys; the very important Wall Street Journal is “examining military innovation and tactics emerging around the world, breaking down the tech behind the weaponry and its potential impact.”

Most big media are consumed right now with whether those bunker busters did their bunker busting or maybe the US needs to buy bigger, better bombs to…do what, exactly? Well, now you’re asking too many questions.

Things you should not question? Statements like that of Sen. John Fetterman that Iran is the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror.

US corporate media in war mode are a force to reckon with. We do some reckoning with media analyst Adam Johnson, co-host of the podcast Citations Needed, Substack author at the Column, and co-author, with In These Times contributing editor Sarah Lazare, of some relevant pieces at InTheseTimes.com.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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CEPR (3/3/25)

This week on CounterSpin: We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities—brown immigrant communities—around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also. But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question—“Why is anyone trying to come to the US anyway?”—by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from. We’ll talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Inequality.org (5/29/25)

Also on the show: Anyone who pays attention and cares can see that the Trump budget bill is a brazen transfer of resources from those that are trying to meet basic needs to those that can’t remember how many houses they own. But corporate reporting rarely breaks out economic policy in terms of how it affects different people—especially how it affects communities for whom they show no consistent concern. Economic policy is itself racialized, gendered, regionalized, targeted. Humanistic journalism would help us see that.

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.”

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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(Creative Commons photo: Diane Krauthamer)

This week on CounterSpin: Media are focused on public protests in LA, but seem less interested in what’s making people angry. That’s in part about the federal government’s stated bid to capture and eject anyone they determine “opposes US foreign policy.” Protesters and witnesses and journalists in LA aren’t being shot at and thrown around and sent to the hospital because they disagree with US policy, we’re told, but because they’re interfering with the federal agents carrying out that policy. See how that works? If you don’t, and it worries you, you’re far from alone.

We hear from Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent, about the critical case of Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil, held without warrant in a detention facility in Louisiana since March, for voicing support for Palestinian lives. There’s an important legal development, but how meaningfully Khalil’s case ultimately translates—just like with ICE sweeps around the country—will have to do with us.

Other Words (6/4/25)

Also on the show: If the problem were to “get rid of” unhoused people, the answer would be to house them. It’s cheaper than jailing people for being homeless, so if it’s those “taxpayer dollars” you care about, this would be plan A. Why isn’t it? We hear from Farrah Hassen, policy analyst, writer and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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White House photo (5/30/25) of Elon Musk’s farewell press conference with President Donald Trump.

This week on CounterSpin: An email we got this week tells us: “The radical left is up in arms about DOGE. Just think about it—DOGE has exposed BILLIONS in wasteful spending, and is rooting out fraud and corruption at every turn. They’re making the government work for the people of this great nation once again, as the founders intended, and that is why the left simply can’t stand DOGE.” The ask is that we fill out a survey that represents “our once-in-a-lifetime chance to slash the bloated, woke and wasteful policies in the federal government. Thank you, and God Bless, Speaker Mike Johnson. (Paid for by the NRCC and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.)”

Reports are that Elon Musk is leaving government, going back to make Tesla great again or something. But if that’s true, why did we get this weird, sad email? We’ll talk about how to miss Musk when he won’t go away with Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project.

Lever (5/17/24)

Also on the show: The New York Times has its stories on the Boeing “non-prosecution agreement” in the “Business” section, suggesting that whether planes drop out of the sky is mostly a concern for investors. A huge corporation paying money to dodge criminal charges is evidently not a general interest story. And the families and friends of the hundreds of people dead because of Boeing’s admittedly knowing malfeasance? They’re just another county heard from. If you want reporting that calls crimes “crimes,” even if they’re committed by corporations, you need to look outside of corporate media. We’ll hear about Boeing from independent journalist Katya Schwenk.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of trans youth in sports and gender-affirming care.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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Tom Morello at Occupy Wall Street (CC photo: David Shankbone)

This week on CounterSpin: Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé and…Oprah? They’re among the entertainers in Trump’s ALLCAPS sights for, it would seem, endorsing Kamala Harris in the election? And/or maybe saying something unflattering about him or his  actions—which, in his brain, and that of the minions who’ve chosen to share that brain, constitutes an illegal political contribution to his opponents, wherever they may lurk.

At a moment when politicians who swore actual oaths are throwing over even the pretense of democracy, or public service—or basic human decency—many of us are looking to artists to be truth-tellers and spirit lifters; to convey, maybe, not so much information as energy: the fearless, collective, forward-looking joy that can sustain a beleaguered people in a threatening time.

There’s a deep history of protest music and music as protest, and our guest is very intentionally a part of it. Tom Morello is a guitarist; part of Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave, Prophets of Rage and The Nightwatchman, among many other projects. His music has always been intertwined with his activism and advocacy for social, racial, economic justice; so we talk about the work of artists in Trumpian times with Tom Morello, this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the embassy shootings, a lawmaker’s arrest and commencement protests.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Tom Morello at Occupy Wall Street (CC photo: David Shankbone)

This week on CounterSpin: Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé and…Oprah? They’re among the entertainers in Trump’s ALLCAPS sights for, it would seem, endorsing Kamala Harris in the election? And/or maybe saying something unflattering about him or his  actions—which, in his brain, and that of the minions who’ve chosen to share that brain, constitutes an illegal political contribution to his opponents, wherever they may lurk.

At a moment when politicians who swore actual oaths are throwing over even the pretense of democracy, or public service—or basic human decency—many of us are looking to artists to be truth-tellers and spirit lifters; to convey, maybe, not so much information as energy: the fearless, collective, forward-looking joy that can sustain a beleaguered people in a threatening time.

There’s a deep history of protest music and music as protest, and our guest is very intentionally a part of it. Tom Morello is a guitarist; part of Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave, Prophets of Rage and The Nightwatchman, among many other projects. His music has always been intertwined with his activism and advocacy for social, racial, economic justice; so we talk about the work of artists in Trumpian times with Tom Morello, this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the embassy shootings, a lawmaker’s arrest and commencement protests.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Common Dreams (5/14/25)

This week on CounterSpin: On a Sunday night, not when officials do things they’re most proud of, House Republicans passed a plan to give more money to rich people by taking it from the non-rich. Call it what you will, that’s what’s ultimately happening with the plan to cut more than $700 billion from Medicaid in order to “offset,” as elite media have it, the expense of relieving millionaires from contributing to public coffers. Even the feint they’re using—we’re not cutting aid, just forcing recipients to work, like they should—is obvious, age-old and long-disproven, if evidence is what you care about. Thing is, of the millions of people at the sharp end of the plan, most are children, who have no voice corporate media feel obliged to listen to. We’ll nevertheless talk about them with independent journalist Bryce Covert.

Washington Post (5/11/25)

Also on the show: You may have seen an editorial in the Washington Post indicating that, despite what you have heard for years, from trans people and from doctors and medical associations that work with trans people, maybe it’s OK for you to still entertain the notion that, weirdly, on this occasion, it’s not science but talkshow hosts who have it right, and trans kids are just actually mentally ill. We’ll talk about that with journalist and trans rights activist Erin Reed, of Erin in the Morning.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Reuters (5/2/25)

This week on CounterSpin: As part of its deadly denial of food, water and medicine to Palestinian people, Israel attacked a civilian aid ship endeavoring to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, setting it on fire, injuring crewmembers, cutting off communications. The ship was called the Conscience. Millions around the world ask every day what it will take to awaken the conscience of leaders to stop the genocide of Palestinians, instead of trying to silence the outcry.

Corporate media are complicit, with please-don’t-think-about-it headlines like NBC News‘ “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.”

We talk about attacks on aid delivery and media’s role with Mara Kronenfeld, executive director at UNRWA USA (UNRWA being the UN Relief & Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA USA being the partner group amplifying and grounding that work).

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Gaza’s starvation and the MOVE bombing.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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$Trump marketing website.

This week on CounterSpin: They say ignorance is bliss, but I know that, for myself and others, our lack of knowledge of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency will only hurt us in our response to the effects that the dealings around that stuff are having on our lives. Bartlett Naylor breaks it down for us; he works at Public Citizen, as a financial policy advocate at their project Congress Watch.

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (photo: Judith Slein)

Also on the show: Billionaires don’t need tax cuts; they already have a system designed to appease them. But it’s not enough! Part of the budget bill to give more to those who have everything is an effort to sell off public land for exploitation for fossil fuel companies, who are determined to die taking the last penny from our fingers. Pulling up the covers and waiting for better times isn’t the way; if we stay focused, we can save critical elements of, in this case, unspoiled wild places in this country. Ashley Nunes is public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. We hear from her this week about that.

Plus Janine Jackson looks back on an interview with the late Robert McChesney.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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$Trump marketing website.

This week on CounterSpin: They say ignorance is bliss, but I know that, for myself and others, our lack of knowledge of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency will only hurt us in our response to the effects that the dealings around that stuff are having on our lives. Bartlett Naylor breaks it down for us; he works at Public Citizen, as a financial policy advocate at their project Congress Watch.

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (photo: Judith Slein)

Also on the show: Billionaires don’t need tax cuts; they already have a system designed to appease them. But it’s not enough! Part of the budget bill to give more to those who have everything is an effort to sell off public land for exploitation for fossil fuel companies, who are determined to die taking the last penny from our fingers. Pulling up the covers and waiting for better times isn’t the way; if we stay focused, we can save critical elements of, in this case, unspoiled wild places in this country. Ashley Nunes is public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. We hear from her this week about that.

Plus Janine Jackson looks back on an interview with the late Robert McChesney.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Ruby Bridges challenged US segregation in 1960.

This week on CounterSpin: You can say someone ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to vote, or to have our experience and history recognized—as though that were a passive descriptor; she ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to be seen and heard. The website of the Kairos Democracy Project has a quote from John Lewis, reminding us: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.”

Tanya Clay House is board chair at Kairos and a longtime advocate for the multiracial democracy that the Trump White House seeks to denounce and derail—in part by erasing the history of Black people in this country. As part of that, she’s part of an ongoing project called Freedom to Learn and its present campaign, called #HandsOffOurHistory. We hear from Tanya Clay House about that work this week.

Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin

Also on the show:  Corporate news media evince lofty principles about the First Amendment, but when people actually use it, the response is more telling. When USA Today covered activism in Seattle around the WTO, it reported: “Little noticed by the public, the upcoming World Trade Organization summit has energized protesters around the world.” You see how that works: If you’re the little-noticing “public,” you’re cool; but if you band together with other people and speak out, well, now you’re a “protester,” and that’s different—and marginal. Whatever they say in their Martin Luther King Day editorials, elite media’s day-to-day message is: ‘Normal people don’t protest.’ In 2025, there’s an ominous addendum: ‘Or else.’

Danaka Katovich is co-director of the feminist grassroots anti-war organization CODEPINK, currently but not for the first time at the sharp end of state efforts to silence activists and activism. We hear from her this week.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Revolving Door Project

This week on CounterSpin: Elon Musk reportedly told Tesla investors that he’ll be amping down his role with the Department of Government Efficiency to, one guesses, bring his big brain back into their service. Like the “War on Terror,” “DOGE” is a thing that was in part spoken into normalcy by the corporate press. Media seem ready to, if not embrace, to make respectful space for whatever hot nonsense is proffered—if it fits within their political template. In this case, it’s a thing—not officially a new Cabinet-level department, but acting like one—wildly powerful, yet utterly opaque and run by an unelected billionaire. DOGE sparked lawsuits about its legality from day one, but today’s news is about, legal or not, what it’s doing and how we can respond. The Revolving Door Project is tracking all of that; we hear from executive director Jeff Hauser.

Pregnancy Justice

Also on the show: There’s no reason you need to know that Selena Chandler-Scott is a 24-year-old woman from Georgia who had a miscarriage last month; pregnant people lose those pregnancies routinely. You should know that Chandler-Scott was sent to jail for her miscarriage, and though later released, she won’t be the last. “Fetal personhood” may sound abstract or legalistic; but this case brings home vividly how granting legal rights to embryos and fetuses doesn’t “potentially” “open the door to,” but concretely, today, means undermining the rights of people who carry pregnancies, leaving them open to surveillance, suspicion and prosecution.

US media seem uninterested in Chandler-Scott’s story and its implications, but we hear from Karen Thompson, legal director at Pregnancy Justice.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Pope Francis.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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The Nation (3/27/25)

This week on CounterSpin: CBS News on April 14 said:

We’re following new violence in the Middle East. Israeli strikes hit a major hospital in northern Gaza. At least 21 people were reportedly killed. The emergency room is badly damaged. Israel accused Hamas of using the hospital to hide its fighters.

Meanwhile, Houthi militants in Yemen said they fired two ballistic missiles at Israel. The Israeli military initially said two missiles were launched and one was intercepted, but later said only one missile had been fired.

There’s information in there, if you can parse it; but the takeaway for most will be that framing: “violence in the Middle East,” which suggests that whatever happened today is just the latest round in a perennial battle between warring parties, where you and I have no role except that of sad bystander.

When it comes to Yemen, elite media’s repeated reference to “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” not only obscures the current fighting’s political origins and recent timeline, it erases the Yemeni people, who are paying the price both for the fighting and for the distortions around it, from political elites and their media amplifiers.

We get some grounding from Khury Petersen-Smith; he’s the Michael Ratner Middle East fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a look back at some recent press coverage of fossil fuel companies and climate change.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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Intercept (4/8/25)

This week on CounterSpin: We’re learning from Jonah Valdez at the Intercept that the Trump administration is now revoking visas and immigration statuses of hundreds of international students under the Student Exchange and Visitor Program—not just those active in pro-Palestinian advocacy, or those with criminal records of any sort. It is, says one immigration attorney, “a concerted effort to go after people who are from countries and religions that the Trump administration wants to get out of the country.”

It is disheartening to see a report like one in Newsweek, about how Trump “loves the idea” of sending US citizens to prisons outside of US jurisdiction, that feels it has to start by explaining “Why It Matters.” But things as they are, we have to be grateful for what straight reporting we get—at a time when some outlets are signing on to shut up if it buys them a moment of peace, which it won’t—and a moment in which staying informed, paying attention, learning what’s happening and how we can stop it, is what we have to work with.

Dara Lind is senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. She joins us this week on the show.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of the Hands Off! protests.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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New York Times (11/14/24)

This week on CounterSpin: If “some people believe it” were the criterion, our daily news would be full of respectful consideration of the Earth’s flatness, the relationship of intelligence to the bumps on your head, and how stepping on a crack might break your mother’s back. News media don’t, in fact, use “some people think it’s true” as the threshold for whether a notion gets talked about seriously, gets “balanced” alongside what “data suggest.” It’s about power.

Look no further than Robert Kennedy Jr. When he was just a famously named man about town, we heard about how he dumped a bear carcass in Central Park for fun, believes that children’s gender is shaped by chemicals in the water, and asserts that Covid-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” while leaving “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” immune.

But once you become RFK Jr., secretary of health and human services in a White House whose anger must not be drawn, those previously unacceptable ideas become, as a recent New York Times piece has it, “unorthodox.”

Kennedy’s unorthodox ideas may get us all killed while media whistle. We hear from Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about that.

Free Press (3/18/25)

Also on the show: For many years, social justice advocates rather discounted the Federal Communications Commission. Unlike the Federal Trade Commission or the Food and Drug Administration, whose actions had visible impacts on your life, the FCC didn’t seem like a player.

That changed over recent years, as we’ve seen the role the federal government plays in regulating the power of media corporations to control the flow of information. As the late, great media scholar Bob McChesney explained, “When the government grants free monopoly rights to TV spectrum…it is not setting the terms of competition; it is picking the winner.”

We’ll talk about the FCC under Trump with Jessica González, co-CEO of the group McChesney co-founded, Free Press.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Mondoweiss (3/18/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Israel has abandoned the ceasefire agreement and restarted its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, a war that has destroyed the region and killed tens of thousands of human beings. The ceasefire, as Gaza-based writer Hassan Abo Qamar among others reminds, still allowed Israel to deprive Palestinians in Gaza of “food, water, medical care, education and freedom of movement.” But it wasn’t enough and, as Belén Fernández writes for FAIR.org, Israel’s US-endorsed resumption of all-out genocide killed at least 404 Palestinians right off the bat, but was reported in, for instance, the New York Times as “Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages.”

We know that elite media will tell us someday that the whole world was horrified by the genocide of Palestinians, and that journalists decried it. But someday is not today. We need reporters who aren’t not afraid they will be targeted, but who may be afraid and are nevertheless bearing witness. Reporters like Hossam Shabat, 23-year-old Palestinian correspondent for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, targeted and killed March 24, and not even the first Israeli journalist assassination for the day: Hours earlier, Palestine Today reporter Mohammad Mansour was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza.

The genocide of Palestinians is a human rights emergency, and also a journalism emergency. US reporters who don’t treat it as such are showing their allegiance to something other than journalism. A key part of their disservice is their ignoring, obscuring, marginalizing, demeaning and endangering the many people who are standing up and speaking out. Pretending protest isn’t happening is aiding and abetting the work of the silencers; it’s telling lies about who we are and what we can do. We build action by telling the stories powerful media don’t want told.

We’ll talk about that with reporter Michael Arria, US correspondent for Mondoweiss and the force behind their new feature called “Power & Pushback.”

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of transphobia, and remembers FAIR board member Robert McChesney.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Public Information (3/17/25)

This week on CounterSpin: News site Popular Information alerted us to new Social Security Administration policy effectively requiring tens of thousands of recipients, by the agency’s own estimation, to travel to a field office to verify their ID. An internal memo predicts the shift will create “service disruption,” “operational strain” and “budget shortfalls” – unsurprising, given concurrent staffing cuts and field office closures. The inevitable harms will no doubt be declared part of a necessary attempt to purge “fraud” from the system that has disbursed earned benefits to elderly and disabled people for generations.

Journalists have choices. They can, as did the Record-Journal of Meriden, Connecticut, report that the cuts derive from repeated claims of fraud from Elon Musk that are “without evidence,” that Trump echoes Musk’s “unfounded statements,” quote a retiree advocate noting that accusations of loads of dead folks collecting benefits are “baseless, ” and put the words “fact sheet” in appropriate irony quotes when describing a missive from the White House.

Or you can go the route of the Arizona Republic, and lead with the notion that the interference in Social Security is most importantly part of Musk’s “implementing…measures to trim costs throughout the government.” Mention that the actions have “stirred a range of emotions, from cautious hope that the federal government might finally bring its deficit spending under control, to frantic fears that benefit cuts could undermine the financial or health security of millions of Americans,” go on to ask earnestly, “Where does Trump stand on Social Security and other benefits?” and begin with a White House statement “reiterating that the president supports these programs.” In paragraph 19, you might throw in that public polling shows that “most Americans would favor revenue increases rather than benefit cuts to Social Security,” which would include “requiring high-income individuals to pay taxes on more of their earnings.”

In short, easily verified facts, along with “most Americans,” can be centered  or tangential in your reporting on the drastic, opaque changes aimed at the program that keeps the wolf from the door for millions of people, but for Musk/Trump represents yet another pile of money they feel belongs to them and theirs. All that’s in the balance are human lives and health, and the ability of working people to plan for our futures.

We’ll talk about the new, yet also old, attacks on Social Security with Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Mahmoud Khalil, deportations and the FTC.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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This week on CounterSpin: In early February, when Rep. Maxwell Frost tweeted that he and Rep. Maxine Waters were denied access to the Department of Education, Elon Musk responded on the platform he owns: “What is this ‘Department of Education’ you keep talking about? I just checked and it doesn’t exist.” That, we understand, was the shadow president skating where the puck’s gonna be, as they say—because a month later, we learned that indeed newly appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon is tasked not with running but with erasing the department.

Elite media have talked about the political machinations, how this was expected, how it fits with Trump/Musk’s grand schemes. When it comes to what will happen to the under-resourced schools, and the students with disabilities for whom the DoE supported access and recourse for discrimination? Media seem happy with McMahon’s handwaving about how that stuff might be better off in a different agency.

The impacts of policy on people with disabilities are overwhelmingly an afterthought for corporate media, even though it’s a large community, and one anyone can join at any moment. We talked, on March 5, with journalist and historian David Perry about the threats McMahon and MAGA pose to people—including students—with disabilities.

Also on the show: You wouldn’t know it from what comes out of the mouths of today’s “leaders,” but there has long been a widely shared view in this country that people with disabilities deserve full human rights, but don’t have them. July 2023 marked the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And, as happens every year, a dismaying amount of the anniversary coverage was about buildings or spaces coming into compliance with the ADA—as though complying with a decades-old law was a feel-good story, and despite the relative absence of feel-bad stories about decades of noncompliance.

CounterSpin spoke at the time with Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder of New Disabled South, about what’s lost when the public conversation around disability justice revolves around abiding by a baseline law, rather than a bigger vision of a world we can all live in. We revisit that conversation this week on CounterSpin.

Featured Image: A protester at a disability rights protest in May 2022 in new York City. Credit: FollowingNYC from Pexels

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Reuters (3/6/25)

This week on CounterSpin: A NASA official warned workers to maybe think about not wearing their badges in public, to protect themselves from harassment against people identifiable as federal workers by MAGA randos who feel deputized by Trump and Musk to do…well, whatever it is Trump and Musk suggest.

It’s early days of the Trump/Musk federal smash and grab, and the harms are already piling up. But so too is the resistance. And federal workers, presumed to be easy targets—based in part on years of corporate media coverage telling us government is fat and lazy and the private sector does everything better—are also on the front lines of the fightback.

We talk about the power of workers—with or without a union—with labor activist and organizer Eric Blanc. He’s assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, and author of the new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trump’s congressional speech, “DOGE” and town hall repression.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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EarthRights (2/20/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Just because we might witness the daylight robbery of the social benefits we’ve been paying for and counting on for the entirety of our working lives, and just because Black people are no longer officially allowed to even mentor Black people coming in to fields they’ve been historically excluded from, and just because any program receiving public funding will now have to pretend there are “two genders”—doesn’t mean the environment isn’t still in immediate peril. It is.

But the lawsuits of deep-pocketed fossil fuel corporations against any and everyone who dares challenge their profiteering destruction are really also about our ability as non-billionaires to use our voice to speak out about anything. Not speaking out is increasingly a non-option. So where are we? We’ll learn about a case that is “weaponizing the legal system” against anyone who wants a livable future from Kirk Herbertson, US director for advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the FCC, the Washington Post and Medicaid.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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CNN (2/21/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump has declared that the US is going to “take over” the Gaza Strip, that the Palestinians who live there will be “permanently” exiled. Asked whether Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza under his scheme, Trump said “no.” But even those corporate media who aren’t actually endorsing this illegal, inhumane plan still can’t seem to find it in themselves to call it what it is: ethnic cleansing.

Media critic, activist and teacher Gregory Shupak has been looking into big media’s systematic refusal to use appropriate language about the human rights crimes unfolding before our eyes in Palestine. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and he’s author of the book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books.

Color of Change/Better IRS (3/24)

Also on the show: There is a deep, if muddled, sense that the US tax system is unfair. The little guy pays too much and rich folks and corporations find loopholes and offshore accounts. And then, on a different page, there’s a story about how “we” as a country just don’t have “enough resources” to allow school kids to eat lunch, because that would mean the dreaded higher taxes! But we will shell out another billion for a fighter plane, and shut up about that.

Media outlets that fail to make meaningful connections—between those clever offshore accounts and the supposed inability to fund school lunch; between cutting funding for the IRS and doubling down on people who use the Earned Income Tax Credit—are certainly not the ones to look to for an understanding of the racial impacts of supposedly neutral tax policy and practices, however demonstrable those impacts may be.  We’ll talk about that with Portia Allen-Kyle, interim executive director at Color of Change and author of the report Preying Preparers.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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New York Times (1/29/25)

This week on CounterSpin: A number of federal agencies rushed to make clear they would be scrubbing activities and events that “celebrate cultural awareness” in an effort to stay on the good side of the weird new White House. Trump and his abettors’ anti-anti-discrimination agenda is as subtle as a sledgehammer. “DEI hire,” for instance, is super-complicated code for the idea that if a person who isn’t white, cis and male got a job, that can only mean a better qualified white cis man was unfairly denied it. That’s just, Trump says, “common sense.”

The irony is not lost that history itself is seen as being manipulated for political purpose when it comes to Black History Month—because we know that history is constantly invoked, if implicitly, as a way of justifying present-day unfairness. White supremacy can be presented as natural if  white people invented everything, discovered everything, created all the wealth, and defined civilization. That lies back of many public and media conversations…so just saying Charles Drew invented blood banks is disruptive! What if Black people aren’t subhuman?

What people try to silence tells us what they fear. So what is so scary about everyone, not just Black people, acknowledging the particular circumstances and responses to those circumstances of Black people in these United States—our experience, challenges, accomplishments? Is it that history—real history, and not comforting tall tales—connects the past with the present in ways that are powerful, grounding and inspiring?

In March 2021, a hitherto no-name right-wing activist openly declared an intention to mislead around racism and to vilify any questioning of enduring racial inequities: “The goal,” wrote Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo,  “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” He bragged that he had “successfully frozen” the “brand” of critical race theory, and was “steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”

A self-respecting press corps would have taken that as a shot across the bow. The corporate news media we have dutifully signed on to present a campaign openly defined as uninterested in truth or humanity and concerned only with rolling back the clock on racial equity as a totally valid, “grassroots” perspective, deserving respectful inclusion in national conversation.

That was a jumping-off point for our conversation with law professor Luke Charles Harris, co-founder with Kimberle Crenshaw of the African American Policy Forum. We’ll hear that important conversation again this week.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Venezuela, Elon Musk and ICE.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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(CC photo: Ted Eytan)

This week on CounterSpin: We know that once corporate news label something “controversial,” we’re in for reporting with a static “some say/others differ” frame—even if one “side” of the “controversy” is a relatively small group of people who don’t believe in science or human rights or democracy. So as the Trump White House comes out fast and furious against transgender people, their weird hatefulness lands in a public arena that generally rejects discrimination, but also in an elite media climate in which the very lives of transgender people have long been deemed “subject to debate.” We’ll hear about the current state of things from civil rights attorney Ezra Young.

New York Times (5/8/24)

Also on the show: When the New York Times reported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s revelation that parasites have eaten part of his brain, Kennedy, running for president at the time, offered to “eat five more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.” We’re reminded of such “jokes” now, as Kennedy looks likely to be head of Health and Human Services, along with his claims that vaccines cause autism and chicken soup cures measles. But to resist Kennedy, we need to understand what fuels those who, even if they don’t like him, believe he might be a force for good in their lives. Anne Sosin is a public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College, who encourages looking around RFK Jr. to the communities that imagine he’s speaking for them.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Tech billionaires at Trump’s second inauguration: Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and X‘s Elon Musk (image: C-SPAN)

This week on CounterSpin: You may remember the testimony: former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz pouting to a Senate hearing on the company’s union-busting in which he was referred to as a billionaire that using that “moniker constantly is unfair”: “Yes, I have billions of dollars—I earned it. No one gave it to me. And I’ve shared it constantly with the people of Starbucks.”

The delusion that a billionaire “earned” every penny of it, or that it is shared equitably with workers, may be special to billionaires, but the broader notion—that “the government only helps some people; other people do it on their own” is conveyed throughout corporate media’s narrative, even as it’s corrosive to an understanding of democracy, much less the fight for it. The increasing influence of not merely the rich, but the super rich, on the politics and policy we all have to live with is an urgent story, if not a new one. Yet somehow, elite media seem less and less interested in it.

We’ll talk with David Kass, executive director of the Americans for Tax Fairness campaign, about that on this week’s show.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Trump’s illegal funding freeze, immigration raids and the Gaza death toll.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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Detention Watch Network

This week on CounterSpin: Those with a beating heart can see the horror of Trump’s plans to deputize wannabe vigilantes to denounce community members they suspect “don’t belong here,” to send ICE into schools and churches to round folks up—police records or no—and ship them to detention centers, to ride roughshod over time-honored concepts of sanctuary. But on immigration, as on other things, corporate news media have shaped their narrative around right-wing frames, such that immigration itself is now not a human rights story, or even an economic one, but yet another story about “their” crimes and “our” safety. Sure, it serves racist xenophobes and will harm all of us, but: horrible crimes attachable to brown and Black people? You don’t have to ask the press corps twice! It was bad enough when the narrative was about distinguishing “good” immigrants from “bad” immigrants; we’ve now gone beyond that to “all immigrants” vs. “everyone else”—and if MAGA is now driving that train, elite media have been fueling it up for years.

We’ll talk about the attack on immigrants—and about the resistance to it—with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of oligarchs and the Washington Post‘s new mission statement.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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New York Times (1/9/25)

This week on CounterSpin: While the New York Times rolls out claptrap about how both “the left and the right” have ideas about causes behind the devastating Los Angeles wildfires—the right blame DEI hires, while the left blame climate change—many people have moved beyond that sort of stultifying nonsense to work that directly confronts the fossil fuel companies, and their political enablers, for the obvious role that fossil fuels play in climate disruption, and that climate disruption plays in extreme weather events. Many are also now calling out insurance companies that take folks’ money, but then hinder their ability to come out from under when these predictable and predicted crises occur.

Would you be surprised to hear that these powerful industries—fossil fuels and insurers—are intertwined? We talked about it last year with writer and historian Derek Seidman. We’ll hear that conversation on this week’s show.

19th (12/6/23)

Also on the show: Did you see the coverage of how people with disabilities are dealing with the California fires’ impact? Probably not, given that the place of people with disabilities in elite media coverage ranges roughly from afterthought to absent. We talked about that last year with disability rights advocate and policy analyst Ariel Adelman, in the wake of a Supreme Court case that considered dismantling civil rights protections for people with disabilities, by criminalizing the ways that we learn about whether those protections are actually real. We’ll hear that too.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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New York Times (12/17/24)

This week on CounterSpin: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s December 17 piece, headlined “How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve US-China Relations,” contained some choice Friedmanisms, like:  “More Americans might get a better feel for what is going on there if they simply went and ordered room service at their hotel.” (Later followed quaintly by: “A lot of Chinese have grown out of touch with how China is perceived in the world.”)

But the big idea is that China has taken a “great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing” because of Donald Trump, who a source says “woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort.” And if the US doesn’t respond to China’s “Sputnik” moment the way we did to the Soviet Union, “we will be toast.”

The response has to do with using tariffs on China to “buy time to lift up more Elon Musks” (described as a “homegrown” manufacturer), and for China to “let in more Taylor Swifts”—i.e., chances for its youth to spend money on entertainment made abroad. Secretary of State Tony Blinken evidently “show[ed] China the way forward” last April, when he bought a Swift record on his way to the airport.

OK, it’s Thomas Friedman, but how different is it from US media coverage of China and trade policy generally? We’ll talk about China trade policy with Dean Baker, co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of Luigi Mangione.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson: Welcome to The Best of CounterSpin 2024. I’m Janine Jackson.

This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us, in part, by showing how elite news media are clouding them. It’s not to say big media always get the facts wrong, but that what facts they point us toward day after day, whose interpretation of those facts they suggest we credit, what responses we’re told are worth pursuing—all of that serves media’s corporate owners and sponsors, at the expense of the rest of our lives and our futures.

An important part of the work we do as producers and as listeners is to help create and support different ways to inform ourselves and to stay in conversation. As always, we are deeply thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. You’re listening to CounterSpin, brought to you each week by the mediawatch group FAIR.

***

2024 included many reasons for public protest, which our guest reminded is both a fundamental right and a core tool for achieving other rights. Journalist and activist Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent.

Chip Gibbons: “There’s always been what’s called a Palestine exception to free speech.”

Chip Gibbons: And I think it’s hard to talk about the future of dissent in this country this year without talking about what’s happening in Gaza, because that looms over everything. And we’re seeing a real outburst of protest around the ceasefire, around the occupation, around apartheid. And we’re also seeing a real heavy-handed attempt to demonize and repress these movements.

There’s always been what’s called a Palestine exception to free speech. Palestine supporters have been censored, jailed, spied on for decades. So this isn’t entirely new, but the level of public vitriol, where you have Congress passing resolutions condemning student groups, Congress passing resolutions that condemn university presidents, Congress calling on the FBI (this isn’t a resolution, these are just letters from individual members of the Congress) to investigate media outlets for these conspiracy theories that they had freelancers who—and mainstream ones, like New York Times; they’re not talking about small left-wing publications—were somehow involved in October 7.

It’s a really dark time, and I know a lot of people I talk to feel very strongly that the repression will backfire, because the movement is so strong, and people are so disgusted by what our government is complicit in. And I think that’s potentially true.

But I do have to caution: Before World War I, the left was very powerful in this country. The Socialist Party had members of Congress, they had mayors. And the repression of that war completely decimated them.

In the run-up to the Cold War, the FBI had all these internal files about how powerful they think the Communist Party is, that people are taking them seriously, that liberals work with them, that the 1930s were a pink decade or a red decade, and the FBI security apparatus is going to be like penicillin to the spread of the pink decade.

So a lot of the periods of repression have followed the left when it was at its strongest, not when it was at its weakest. And I’m not saying we’re going to be decimated, like we were during World War I or during McCarthyism, but I do think we should be cautious, that repression does have an impact, and it does follow popular movement successes.

And I do think part of the reason why we see this unhinged level of repression around the Gaza War—if you want to call it war; it’s more of a genocide—is because the atrocities that are being committed are so horrifying that, even if you’re someone who doesn’t think Israel’s an apartheid state, even if you’re a centrist, it’s hard to watch and hear about hospitals being targeted, to hear about refugee camps being blown up, and not be morally repulsed by what you’re seeing.

And I do think that people know that, and that’s why they’re escalating the ratcheting up of oppression around the ceasefire protest. Because there’s no defense of bombing a refugee camp. There’s no defense of having snipers outside a Catholic church and shooting church women who are going to use the restroom. There’s not really a strong defense of this. You can either deny it, or try to shut everyone up.

***

JJ: Svante Myrick is president of People for the American Way, and former mayor of Ithaca, New York. We spoke with him about voting rights and roadblocks.

Svante Myrick: “They’re not trying to take away everyone’s right to vote. They’re trying to take away certain people’s right to vote.”

Svante Myrick: Especially after the 2020 election, led by Donald Trump, state legislators—people who are not household names, folks that you won’t often see on CNN or MSNBC—state legislators are taking their cues from Donald Trump and passing dozens and dozens…. I just came from Utah, where yet another law was passed that makes it harder to vote.

Utah used to have very good voting laws. Everybody got a ballot in the mail. You could just fill it out, send it back in. You had weeks and weeks to do it. They just repealed that. Why? Is it because Donald Trump lost Utah? No, it’s because the state legislators are trying to curry favor with a president that just, frankly, does not want everyone’s vote to count.

And if it’s OK, if I just say what probably is obvious to many of your listeners, but I think it deserves to be said: They’re not trying to take away everyone’s right to vote. They’re trying to take away certain people’s right to vote. I’m a Black American, and I just know for a fact that this Trump-led faction of the Republican Party would love for Black Americans’ votes not to be counted. And I know that because they are moving with almost surgical precision to disenfranchise people like me and my family.

JJ: I am surprised when people are surprised that people don’t vote. While I lament it, I see the fact that some people just don’t see a connection between this lever they pull, and the policies and laws governing their lives. I see that as an indictment of the system, and not of the people.

And so I wanted to ask you to talk about what we’ve seen labeled “low-propensity voters,” and different responses, like what People For is talking about, responses that are better than saying, “These people are so dumb, they don’t even know how to vote their own interests.”

SM: And that’s so well said. Certainly our system has failed in many ways. But extreme right-wingers have also been waging an 80-year war, maybe longer, to convince Americans that government does nothing for them, that their representatives don’t improve their lives. And so when they do things like starve schools and school budgets, starve road budgets so that there are potholes in the street, and try to shrink government down to a size where you can drown it in a bathtub, they make sure it is dysfunctional, from Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump, they break the system, and then say, “Hey, see, government, it can’t work at all. Why bother? Why bother to vote at all?”

***

JJ: Though it’s dropped from many outlets’ radar, police violence continued in 2024, but so did efforts to reimagine public safety without cops at the center. Monifa Bandele is an activist with Movement for Black Lives, as well as senior vice president and chief strategy officer at MomsRising. She talked about a new report mapping police violence.

Monifa Bandele: “We actually know what keeps us safe. We know that people need care and not punishment.”

Monifa Bandele: Black people are just like any other people, right, all over the world. And so, for a long time, people had no idea what options there could be, what alternatives there could be, for community safety other than policing.

It’s not just presented in our policies and what we see on the streets, we’re fed a daily dose of it in our larger popular culture. The police shows, the true crime series. All of your favorite actors at some point have been on the policing shows, or even if it’s shows about “gangsters” or “criminals,” it really has what we call this copaganda—which is police propaganda—storyline, which ultimately says, you need police, you need vigilantes, you need this tough-on-crime entity in order to have some semblance of safety in your community.

So I’m actually really proud and impressed in the Black community, because what our report shows is that, even though we are really bombarded, millions and millions of dollars are spent to convince people that this is the only way that you can get safety, and people have lived their entire lives only experiencing this one model, that large portions of our community are really questioning that, and are really listening to folks who are saying: “Hey, we actually know what keeps us safe. We know that people need care and not punishment.”

And this is something that, while we do it sometimes in our buildings and in our tenant associations or in our families, this could be scaled up community-wide. This could be scaled up citywide, statewide, nationally, where we actually figure out and get to the root of violence. You prevent most of it from happening, because you have the right mechanisms in place. And then when people are in crisis, and may cause harm to themselves or others, we combat that by giving them what they need to not be in crisis in that moment.

***

JJ: Immigration stayed critical in 2024, but we didn’t hear much from folks particularly on the US southern border who don’t support aggressive unto lethal state responses. Aron Thorn joined us from the Rio Grande Valley. He’s senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Aron Thorn: “The very vast majority of folks who are showing up to the US/Mexico border are folks who are in need of protection.”

Aron Thorn: I think one angle of this story that we don’t always see, it’s been heartbreaking to see, for example, the state’s rhetoric of “come and cut it,” be very aggressive, “we have a right to defend ourselves,” etc., etc. The, in my opinion, overblown claims about just how many cartel members are among people, just how many drugs they’re finding on people, for example.

The very vast majority of folks who are showing up to the US/Mexico border are folks who are in need of protection, they’re in need of safety, they’re in need of stability. That is the very vast majority of people.

And so something that does not often show up in these stories, that is particularly pertinent right now, is, let’s be clear, Texas is fighting for its right to lay concertina wire so that people can get caught in it for hours, and get injured and languish there as punishment for trying to seek safety.

And what they want to do is push people back into Mexico where they are kidnapped, assaulted, raped, worse, as punishment for wanting to seek safety. That is what Texas is asserting its right to do. That’s what the Trump administration’s primary goal was on the US/Mexico border. That’s what Greg Abbott’s primary goal is at the US/Mexico border. And we don’t talk about that, as a country, of what that actually looks like every day, what that looks like on the ground.

What we talk about are US communities, we talk about people “taking our jobs,” we talk about the fentanyl that’s coming in—all real issues that are not touched, not controlled, by people who are desperate and are trying to seek safety. So to me, that is one of the biggest holes that I always see in these stories, that we don’t really take: our right to defend our border, but from what?

As a Texan, I don’t think what Texas is doing on the border day-to-day will actually improve the lives of Texans. We are spending billions of dollars of our own tax money for this political ploy that we are improving the lives of Texans, while we are stripping Texans off of Medicaid faster than any other state in the country. Texans are very strapped in an economy where inflation is still an issue, and nothing that we’re doing at our border is going to affect that.

***

JJ: Media Matters took a look at coverage of climate disruption, finding that, where there were some improvements, they just didn’t match the severity of the crisis. Evlondo Cooper is a senior writer with the Climate and Energy Program at Media Matters.

Evlondo Cooper: “Even the best coverage we see…there is no accountability for the fossil fuel industry and other industries that are driving the crisis.”

Evlondo Cooper: We look at coverage of, broadly, climate justice. I think a lot of people believe it’s representation for representation’s sake, but I think when people most impacted by climate change—and we’re talking about communities of color, we’re talking about low-income communities, we’re talking about low-wealth rural communities—when these folks are left out of the conversation, you’re missing important context about how climate change is impacting them, in many cases, first and worse. And you’re missing important context about the solutions that these communities are trying to employ to deal with it. And I think you’re missing an opportunity to humanize and broaden support for climate solutions at the public policy level.

So these aren’t communities where these random acts of God are occurring; these are policy decisions, or indecisions, that have created an environment where these communities are being most harmed, but least talked about, and they’re receiving the least redress to their challenges. And so those voices are necessary to tell those stories to a broad audience on the corporate broadcast networks.

JJ: Yes, absolutely.

Another finding that I thought was very interesting was that extreme weather seemed to be the biggest driver of climate coverage, and that, to me, suggests that the way corporate broadcast media are coming at climate disruption is reactive: “Look at what happened.”

EC: Totally.

JJ:  And even when they say, “Look at what’s happening,” and you know what, folks pretty much agree that this is due to climate disruption, these houses sliding into the river, it’s still not saying, “While you look at this disaster, know that this is preventable, and here is who is keeping us from acting on it and why.”

EC: Yeah, that is so insightful, because that’s a core critique of even the best coverage we see, that there is no accountability for the fossil fuel industry and other industries that are driving the crisis. And then there’s no real—solutions are mentioned in about 20% of climate segments this year. But the solutions are siloed, like there are solution “segments.”

But to your point, when we’re talking about extreme weather, when you have the most eyeballs hearing about climate change, to me, it would be very impactful to connect what’s happening in that moment—these wildfires, these droughts, these heat waves, these hurricanes and storms and flooding—to connect that to a key driver, fossil fuel industry, and talk about some potential solutions to mitigate these impacts while people are actually paying the most attention.

***

JJ: The oft-heard phrase “crisis of journalism” means different things to different people. This year, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science ran an article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm.” It was co-authored by our guests, Collette Watson, co-founder of the group Black River Life, and Joe Torres, senior advisor at the group Free Press. The two are co-founders of the Media 2070 project.

Colette Watson: “What’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm.”

Collette Watson: What’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm. And when we talk about that—Joe and I are both co-creators of the Media 2070 project—when Media 2070 talks about this, we often say that, similar to our education system and our legal system, which so many people understand as oppressive, our media system is rooted in anti-Blackness, and in racism and racial hierarchy, since the very beginning.

When you look at the earliest colonial newspapers, which stayed afloat on the revenues that they were gaining from serving as brokers in the trafficking of enslaved African people, by not only posting ads, paid ads, for people who had emancipated themselves and run away, but also in the sales of enslaved folks and serving as a broker for those transactions.

We know that from that earliest root, right on through till now, our system of news, information, journalism—even entertainment media, book publishing—all of those are interconnected, and have been rooted in upholding a myth of Black inferiority, and have actually perpetuated white supremacy and even white nationalism. So you have to have that in mind, whenever you are thinking about journalism and the role it has played in society, and the role that we want it to play in the safe, just, multiracial democracy we want in the future. We can’t achieve that without acknowledging the history of harm.

Joseph Torres: “We’re asking the question: When hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy?”

Joseph Torres: There is this big debate happening right now about the future of journalism, and how it goes, is mostly a white-led space. And the way the discussion has taken place is, the democracy is in crisis and so is journalism, and we need to save local journalism to save democracy. But as Collette is describing, what that does not acknowledge is the role of local news organizations and in local journalism in undermining democracy for Black people and people of color.

At the Media 2070 project, we’re asking the question: When hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy? And these media institutions have played a direct role in undermining democracy.

And in recent years, we have the Los Angeles Times apologizing for it being the paper of white supremacy for at least its first 80-plus years. We have the Oregonian saying that it was a paper, when it began, to try to ensure that Oregon remained a white state. The Baltimore Sun apologizing for its role in upholding the housing segregation in its editorials in the newspaper in support of it in Baltimore; and the Kansas City Star did much the same. The Philadelphia Inquirer apologized.

These are all just within recent years, and within the future of journalism debate, there isn’t even acknowledgement that this actually happened, that these papers have actually apologized. What are we creating that’s different?

***

JJ: Throughout the year, more and more entities declared Israel’s violent assaults on Palestinians a genocide. But how did elite US media talk about it? Greg Shupak of the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and author of The Wrong Story: Palestine Israel and the Media, talked with CounterSpin.

Gregory Shupak: “Genocide can and should never be just a normal story, but that is very much what it’s being treated like.”

Gregory Shupak: First of all, genocide can and should never be just a normal story, but that is very much what it’s being treated like. And second of all, it’s also: Yes, brutal, violent oppression of Palestinians has been the case since Israel came into existence in 1948, and, in fact, in the years leading up to it, there were certainly steps taken to create the conditions for Israel. So it is a decades-old story. But there is a kind of hand-waving that creeps into public discourse, and I think does underlie some of this lack of attention to what continues to happen in Gaza and the West Bank.

In reality, this is a very modern conflict, right? It’s a US-brokered, settler-colonial insurgency/counterinsurgency. It’s got very little to do with religion and everything to do with geopolitics and capitalism and colonialism. But it’s easier to just treat it as, “Oh, well, these backwards, savage barbarian and their ancient, inscrutable blood feuds are just doing what they have always done and always will. So that’s not worthy of our attention.” But that, aside from being wildly inaccurate, just enables the slaughter and dispossession, as well as resistance to it, to continue.

***

JJ: As we all reeled from the presidential election results, I talked with FAIR’s own editor, Jim Naureckas, and senior analyst Julie Hollar, for some thoughts about how we got here.

Jim Naureckas: “Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of.”

Jim Naureckas: I think that there’s an interesting parallel between the Trump campaign strategy and the business strategy of corporate media; there was kind of a synergy there. I don’t think that MAGA Republicans and corporate media have the same goals, necessarily, but I think they share a strategy, which is “fear sells.”

And that is also the strategy that Donald Trump has hit on. His campaign ads were all about fear, all about the danger of Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration. And he played on a lot of issues that corporate media have used to sell their papers, to sell their TV programs.

Immigration is one of the most obvious ones: Corporate media have treated immigration as, “Here’s something that you should be afraid about. There’s this flood of immigrants coming over the border. It’s a border crisis.” Particularly since the beginning of the Biden administration, this has been a drumbeat.

And there’s been a lot of distortions of numbers, of presenting this as some kind of unprecedented wave of migrants, that is not true. But by presenting it as this brand new threat, they’re able to sell more papers than they would otherwise have done—or sell clicks, I guess is what they’re in the business of now.

And so Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of. And he was the person who was promising to do something about them.

Julie Hollar: “Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward.”

Julie Hollar: I was thinking about how the corporate media, to me, bear such responsibility on both the issues of immigration and trans rights, because those two issues are miscovered by the corporate media in a very similar way. They’re both this beleaguered, very small minority—although the right wing, of course, is trying to make everyone believe that they are not a small minority, either of them—but both are very small minorities who are the target of these really punitive campaigns, whose bottom-line goal really is eliminating them from our society, which is classic fascism.

So you would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups. For the past many years, they should have been reporting these issues from the perspective of immigrants, from the perspective of trans people, humanizing them, providing us with this understanding of who’s really being harmed here, which is the opposite story of what the right wing is trying to tell.

And by not doing that at all—and I should also interrupt to say that not every corporate media outlet has been doing that on trans issues; the New York Times does really stand out, in terms of being bad about this. On immigration, it’s pretty much across the board bad in corporate media.

But instead of doing the kind of democratic journalism that you need in a moment like this, you have them really just feeding into the same narrative that the right-wing movement is putting out there. So when they then turn around—well, I’m getting ahead of myself—and then blame the left for these losses, it’s very angering.

Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward. And I think we can’t just ignore the big corporate outlets and let them off the hook and say, “Well, write them off because they’re never going to get better.” I mean, there are structural issues that are going to always limit them, and we have to keep demanding better, always.

And at the same time, I think it’s really important that everybody dig deep and support tough, strong, independent journalism that exists all over this country. Local outlets, wherever you are, that are doing really important work in your city or in your neighborhood, all of the independent media that are working nationwide as well, all the media critics; everyone is going to need so much support for the coming years to help defend this democracy, and we all really need to step up and support them.

***

JJ: That was FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas. Before them, you heard Greg Shupak, Collette Watson and Joe Torres, Evlondo Cooper, Aron Thorn, Monifa Bandele, Svante Myrick and Chip Gibbons, just some of the voices it’s been our pleasure to bring you this past year.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders on Laura Flanders and Friends (10/20/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Among many other things,  2024 was a series of reminders that corporate news media, tasked primarily with enriching the rich and shoring up entrenched institutions, will not, today or ever, do the liberatory, illuminating work of independent journalism—that boldly speaks truth to power, that stands up for the societally voiceless, that provides space for the debates and discussions we need to move society forward—for those of us who believe that US society needs to change.

New calendar years are symbolic, sure, but they can also offer a fresh start. Why not see 2025 as a much needed opportunity to acknowledge, support, create and grow independent journalism?

We talk about that this week with two people who are and have been doing not just critical, dissident, uplifting journalism, but the thinking and advocating around why we need it: Sonali Kolhatkar, from Rising Up! With Sonali, and Laura Flanders from Laura Flanders and Friends.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights’ Iman Abid about Israeli genocide for the December 13, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CBS News (12/5/24)

Janine Jackson: “Amnesty International’s report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.” So says Agnès Callamard, secretary general of that human rights group. She says research shows that “Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting.”

Amnesty’s statement invokes an “international community” that will hopefully be roused to action. But there are questions about what levers of power that community has access to, and what it means that many or most of that community receive our understanding from elite news media—not just about what’s happening, but about possible responses, and about what the law even means in this context.

Iman Abid is the director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Iman Abid.

Iman Abid: Thank you so much.

JJ: Genocide isn’t a slur, or an accusation that you just throw at people that you don’t like. There are definitions, and what Amnesty is saying is that those criteria are being met. So can you talk us through how this report—and it’s not the first report—but how and why does it arrive at the conclusion of genocide?

International Federation for Human Rights (12/12/23)

IA: Yeah, I want to acknowledge the fact that we are 14 months into this genocide, and have heard the word genocide being used to describe the situation in Gaza, not just by human rights organizations but the people themselves in Palestine, and many elected officials and different international institutions, such as the International Criminal Court, that have been using the word genocide to help describe the situation. So the fact that we are at this position now, where this internationally renowned human rights organization like Amnesty International is also now joining the ranks, and claiming this as genocide, is hugely profound and necessary.

I think one of the things that they do a profound job at in this report, particularly is highlighting the fact that this thing that’s going on right now is something that meets the entire set of criteria to describe genocide within the Genocide Convention, whether it be genocidal intent, whether it be the deliberate killing of a certain ethnic and cultural population, whether it be the prevention of placement of children. Whatever it is that’s going on, is happening here in Gaza. And the report does a profound job in helping construct just why they are making this claim, and that this is [not] a one-time sort of thing, but rather this has been continuing. This has continued for 14 months, and will continue if no one chooses to stop it.

Throughout the entire report, they do a beautiful job to help folks understand just why this is happening, what specific intent is behind the Israeli government and this military plan that they have on Gaza, as well as the personal harm that has been committed against thousands and thousands of Palestinians over the course of these last 14 months.

Reuters (10/21/24)

And it goes so detailed into describing the personal and bodily harm to people, the amount of deaths that have been committed, the destruction of the infrastructure that people use to stay alive, the prevention of aid, and specifically lifesaving aid to keep people alive. Israel is doing everything in its ability to prevent people from actually living in Gaza.

And Amnesty is trying to build a case that because of those things, and because of the criteria it meets within the Genocide Convention, this is in fact genocide, and it is not disputable, but rather it is time to acknowledge what is going on, look at the facts and the findings of what we’ve seen—and in many cases, actually, Israel has almost presented to the public itself—and to look at everything that’s been livestreamed over the course of these last 14 months, and do everything in our power to try to stop it.

So I think, again, 200 pages of findings and documentation that I think many folks can actually look back on and say, “My God, I actually saw this on social media at one point or another,” or, “I heard this specifically come from the Israeli government’s testaments and testimonials,” and recognize that this is, in fact, something that we have been undergoing now for the last 14 months.

JJ: And the ongoing commission of the crime is part of what’s being talked about. Often when we think of crime, and the way that crime is covered in the media, it’s a one-time act, and so you can think, “Well, the perpetrator, what was in their mind when this one-time act occurred?”

This is not that. This is a different kind of conversation, and I think that’s an important distinction for folks who are just reading about it in the paper as, like, a bad thing that’s happening.

IA: Exactly. I think that’s something that Amnesty has been trying to do, and I want to acknowledge as well, many other human rights experts have been trying to do in this moment. It’s to show that this isn’t something that just happened after October 7, but this has deliberately been extended to happen, and continue to happen, until all Palestinians are annihilated across Gaza.

JJ: And the report, it answers a lot of questions that you might just have in a conversation, you know, with your uncle or with a stranger: Is this just callous disregard? Israel has a goal, they want to destroy Hamas, and they’re not paying enough attention to civilians that are harmed in their carrying out of that process. And this engages that and says, no, this is genocidal intent. It’s not just recklessness.

Iman Abid: They’re trying to do everything in their ability to try to legitimize these killings, and dehumanize Palestinians, as though they are military targets, not actually dignified as everyday people.
(photo: Thomas Morrisey, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle)

IA: Exactly. I think that’s the thing, is that what we’ve seen happen is that Israel is trying to prove to the rest of the world that this is, in fact, not genocide, that this is out of self-defense. But the reality is that so many of the comments have been outlined here in the report and, again, have been available to us just on an everyday basis, the reality is that Israel itself has actually built the case for us in arguing that this is, in fact, genocide. They have used statements to try to dehumanize Palestinians—and all Palestinians, not just those that have been involved in anything—but the fact that all Palestinians, in some way or another, just due to who they are, should be dehumanized. And I think that that is an argument that they’ve been trying to make to help legitimize the mass killings of Palestinians.

There are statements that have been made to completely disregard all human life in Palestine, all across Gaza and even the West Bank, to be able to, again, legitimize this forcible displacement, to legitimize the prevention of lifesaving aid, to legitimize the bombings of residential buildings, to legitimize why they’re bombing hospitals, and claiming that Hamas, for instance, has tunneled underneath hospital grounds.

They’re trying to do everything in their ability to try to legitimize these killings, and dehumanize Palestinians, as though they are military targets, not actually dignified as everyday people, just so that the rest of the world is convinced of why Israel has the right to do this.

And, again, going back to the Amnesty report, it highlights just how this is beyond a military operation, it’s been intentionalized to try to use this moment, and leverage this moment, as a way to continue killing as many Palestinians as possible.

JJ: Well, and I wish it didn’t need saying, but I’ll say it. This report, as with other reports, acknowledges crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023. To say that those crimes are being ignored or being devalued is simply false. It’s just about the conversation of whether they justify what came after, and whether they should be seen in a context of what came before.

When media talk about the US and Israel and their “mutually beneficial relationship,” I always think, well, which US citizens, which even Israeli people are you telling me are individually benefiting?

Media treat nations like kaiju, like Godzilla, like there are monsters that represent countries and fight one another. And to me, that’s a big failing, in terms of representing what the US people believe and want and are capable of, and also what Israeli people want and are capable of. And that’s before we talk about ignoring the voice of Palestinians. There’s just a crudeness of the media coverage that is harmful, I think.

Intercept (2/7/24)

IA: Absolutely. Again, the fact is that for the last 14 months, we as Palestinians, even as a Palestinian-led organization here at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, have been trying to do our best to ensure that people do hold to account the Palestinian narrative, and the framing around what is happening.

Israel’s propaganda system is enormous, and it’s very effective. And I think we’ve seen just how media outlets go around saying the same exact thing that has now been used to legitimize this genocide. Rather than arguing the fact that it is genocide, we’re now trying to defend ourselves against the thought that this isn’t genocide, defend ourselves against the people who are saying this isn’t genocide.

And I think that it’s because of the fact that media has done such an incredible job at passing along statements that this is warranted, because of the October 7 attacks, that it’s as if the Palestinian people deserve this because of the October 7 attacks. But in reality, it’s long before October 7, and continues to happen after October 7, that this level of detriment to Palestinian civil society has existed, and Israel has done everything in its power to make these things happen.

I acknowledge the fact that in this moment, we, I think, are seeing a shift in the way that people are actually talking about this. I think that Western news outlets have been forced now to at least acknowledge that there is this mass atrocity happening. Whether or not they choose to use the word “genocide” is still a question, to some degree. But I think that when reports like this get publicized, going back to the Amnesty International report, the hope is here, we can then acknowledge the fact that this report has used, that has even the word “genocide” in its title, to the point that it has to be referenced, it has to be acknowledged.

Now, we know that there are people who go so far as still choosing to refute the 200 pages of evidence and documentation, but we know that that can only go so far.

Al Jazeera (8/20/24)

So I think that 14 months in, we’re starting to see a small shift, but I think the reality is there’s lots more work to do around it. And my hope is that reports like this can be used as a way to justify why we’re calling it as it is, and choosing not to actually try to continue using statements or saying statements that can continue legitimizing just what’s happening. Because the rhetoric we use, and especially that journalists use here in the West, is extremely harmful.

And it’s not just dehumanizing to the people in Gaza; it’s actually dehumanizing the Palestinians here in the West as well, so much so that a lot of what’s been heard on media has been used as a way to warrant hate crimes against Palestinians here in the US. And I think we saw that happen over the course of the last year. A young 6-year-old boy killed in the Chicago area, a young girl was slashed in the throat. That language is extremely violent, and can be used to justify this level of hate against a certain group of people. Again, not just in Palestine, but here across the West, for Palestinians as well.

JJ: Israel’s official response, as I see it so far in US media, is really not to address the substance, but to say Amnesty International is “deplorable and fanatical.” So then the way that we know that media choose to use a binary framing—us versus them, he said, she said—so it’s not even, “Let’s look at the substance here.” It’s just, “Oh, consider the source. Some people think Amnesty is a fanatical organization.” But I hear you saying that there are hopeful spaces in terms of media coverage, and in terms of this report pushing through in the narrative.

IA: Absolutely. I mean, even trying to debate whether or not Amnesty is legitimate or not still forces the conversation on genocide to happen. What Israel is doing right now is forcing this conversation, and even using the word “genocide,” and creating this battle out of it, that starts to make more people start to question, “Well, just why is it that this international human rights organization has put out such a report right at this moment?”

And it’s been used as a vehicle to try to prevent these things from continuing to Gaza, right? Amnesty is trying to do, in their best ability, to try to actually put something out there that can be used as a way to help us stop sending weapons to Israel, to stop sending military funding to Israel, to stop us from being complicit in this genocide here in the US, and to encourage even more elected officials to take that stance, as well as to use this as a vehicle to help explain to the American public audience, for those that are still on the fence around what is happening, that there is clear documentation, evidence, proof, whatever you want to call it, to help describe the situation, that they can then use to convince more people.

CNN (2/2/22)

I think the American public has actually been shifted dramatically over the course of this last year. We saw 70% of American voters are in agreement with the fact that this genocide does need to end, and the fact is that we know that that number continues to grow, as people have seen things escalate. And I think we want to continue seeing that happen. We want to continue educating people, and doing all of that.

This is not the first time Israel has tried to delegitimize a human rights organization. Let’s not forget the fact that there are a number of other organizations. Amnesty has already been counteracted by the Israeli government in the past. And I think that the reality is, every time Israel sees this level of documentation and evidence being put out there, they’re going to refute it.

And so, for me, it’s like if Israel has to go out of its way, especially if the Israeli government has to go out of its way, to try to delegitimize a report like this—recognize the legitimacy of the actual reporting at this point, and use that as a way to encourage yourself to learn more about the situation, and see just why these organizations are really putting this information out there.

US Campaign for Palestinian Rights

JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally, we know that the political system in this country, the corporate media, atomize us and tell us that, really, there isn’t anything that we can do. We can just watch the horror on TV.

You have a Stop Gaza Genocide toolkit. You have information on your site to help folks actually go beyond being horrified and depressed, and get engaged. And I just wonder what—you’ve started to say it—but what would you say to folks who want to take a next step?

Al Jazeera (12/11/24)

IA: Yeah, and thank you for these types of questions. I want to first acknowledge the fact that, even as we were speaking today, only a couple of hours ago, a residential building in Beit Lahiya was struck, and over 30 people were killed, right? And this is right next to a hospital that has already been deprived of receiving lifesaving aid to keep people alive. It doesn’t have enough units in the hospital to keep newborn babies alive.

The reality is that this report and everything we’ve just spoken of on the segment today isn’t a part of the past. It’s a part of what is continuing. It’s also a reminder to us that this matter is urgent, and needs to be addressed immediately. And I think that folks, as we’re entering the holidays, as we’re entering the end of the year, people just want to turn a blind eye and forget the fact that this is continuing. But it is continuing, and it will intensify the more we look away.

And so for anyone, recognize the fact that even your US tax dollars are being paid to invest in this genocide. So what are you going to do about it? We have toolkits and resources to help make people more aware as to how that money is being invested in this genocide. And there are opportunities and avenues to actually divest from this money, from continuing to fund this genocide. There are avenues out there, and I really hope folks can check out our website to figure out ways in which you can get involved in that divestment piece.

If you are someone who cares enough about changing the stance the US Congress has on this, as we know that they have continued to send military aid, even as President Biden closes his legacy out, he is choosing to still send weapons and funding to Israel, to continue committing the genocide. What are you going to do about it?

Middle East Eye (9/9/24)

So we ask both people that are part of the civil society here in the US to ask their elected officials to stop sending weapons, and to be public around choosing not to continue sending weapons. Even into the Trump administration, we ask folks to continue doing that.

There are so many avenues in which we can actually play a role as to stopping this from happening, whether it’s even putting this report out in front of your families across the holidays. We really encourage folks to use this as an opportunity to convince even more people in their surroundings to acknowledge just what’s going on, and to remind ourselves that Gaza in particular, right now in this moment, really does need the help to stop this from continuing to happen. And we in the US play a huge role in making sure that we’re not complicit in the genocide.

So people have a positionality that they can take, and there’s a moral choice here still. And we really hope that folks can continue doing everything that they can to get this to stop, because there is an opportunity for us to really make this stop.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Iman Abid from the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. You can find their work and their resources online at USCPR.org.

Thank you so much, Iman Abid, for joining us this week on CounterSpin. Thank you so much.

IA:  Thank you.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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CounterSpin host Janine Jackson

CounterSpin is your weekly look behind the headlines of the mainstream news. This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations from the past year that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us—in part by showing how elite media are clouding them.

It’s not to say Big Media always get the facts wrong; but that what facts they point us toward, day after day, whose interpretation of those facts they suggest we credit, what responses we’re told are worth pursuing—all of that serves media’s corporate owners’ and sponsors’ bottom line, at the expense of all of our lives and our futures. An important part of the work we do—as producers and as listeners—is to help create and support different ways to inform ourselves and stay in conversation.

Guests featured on this year’s Best of CounterSpin include Chip Gibbons,  Svante Myrick, Monifa Bandele, Aron Thorn, Evlondo Cooper, Joe Torres, Colette Watson, Greg Shupak and FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas.

As always, we are deeply thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Free Press (12/6/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Writing for a DC court of appeals, Douglas Ginsburg said yes, banning the wildly popular platform TikTok does raise concerns about First Amendment freedoms; but it’s still good, because in pushing for the ban, the US government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.” If that’s clear as mud to you, join the club. We’ll get an update on the proposed ban on TikTok—in the service of free speech, doncha know—from Yanni Chen, policy counsel at the group Free Press.

Sentencing Project (12/11/24)

Also on the show: We’re all familiar with the “if it bleeds, it leads” credo of, especially but not only, local TV news. But just because we’re aware of it, doesn’t mean the phenomenon isn’t still impacting our lives in negative ways. Richard Mendel is senior research fellow for youth justice at the Sentencing Project. He joins us to talk about new research showing how news media coverage actively harms young people of color, yes, but also all of our understanding and policy-making around youth and crime.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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New York Times (12/5/24)

This week on CounterSpin: The New York Times says that Amnesty International recently became “the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza.” That makes sense if you ignore the other human rights groups and international bodies that have said Israel’s actions in the wake of Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, meet that definition.

The Times account notes that genocide is hard to prove because it involves showing the specific intent to destroy a group, “in whole or in part”—something that, they say, Israeli leaders have persistently denied is their intent in Gaza. Declarations like that by Israeli President Isaac Herzog that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” appear nowhere in the piece.

The Times tells readers that Amnesty’s “contention” and “similar allegations” have been “at the heart of difficult debates about the war around the world.” So far, 14 countries have joined or signaled they will join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the World Court.

Gallup polling from March found the majority of the US public—55%, up from 45% last November—saying they disapprove of Israel’s siege of Gaza. And that support for Israel is dropping among all political affiliations.

A May survey from a private Israeli think tank says nearly a third of Jewish people in the US agree with the charge of “genocide,” and 34% view college campus protests as anti-war and pro-peace, compared with 28% who see them as primarily “anti-Israel.” More recently, the Israel Democracy Institute reports its survey from late November, finding that the majority of Jews in Israel—52%—oppose settlement in Gaza, vs. 42% in support.

There is absolutely debate around the world about Israel’s actions; outlets like the Times make that debate more “difficult” by misrepresenting it.

While not the first to ask us to see the assault on Palestinians as genocide, Amnesty’s report offers an opening, for those journalists who are interested, to ask why some are so invested in saying it isn’t. Iman Abid is the director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). We’ll talk with her today.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the minimum wage.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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New York Times (12/5/24)

This week on CounterSpin: The New York Times says that Amnesty International recently became “the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza.” That makes sense if you ignore the other human rights groups and international bodies that have said Israel’s actions in the wake of Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, meet that definition.

The Times account notes that genocide is hard to prove because it involves showing the specific intent to destroy a group, “in whole or in part”—something that, they say, Israeli leaders have persistently denied is their intent in Gaza. Declarations like that by Israeli President Isaac Herzog that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” appear nowhere in the piece.

The Times tells readers that Amnesty’s “contention” and “similar allegations” have been “at the heart of difficult debates about the war around the world.” So far, 14 countries have joined or signaled they will join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the World Court.

Gallup polling from March found the majority of the US public—55%, up from 45% last November—saying they disapprove of Israel’s siege of Gaza. And that support for Israel is dropping among all political affiliations.

A May survey from a private Israeli think tank says nearly a third of Jewish people in the US agree with the charge of “genocide,” and 34% view college campus protests as anti-war and pro-peace, compared with 28% who see them as primarily “anti-Israel.” More recently, the Israel Democracy Institute reports its survey from late November, finding that the majority of Jews in Israel—52%—oppose settlement in Gaza, vs. 42% in support.

There is absolutely debate around the world about Israel’s actions; outlets like the Times make that debate more “difficult” by misrepresenting it.

While not the first to ask us to see the assault on Palestinians as genocide, Amnesty’s report offers an opening, for those journalists who are interested, to ask why some are so invested in saying it isn’t. Iman Abid is the director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). We’ll talk with her today.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the minimum wage.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Progressive International (11/25/22)

This week on CounterSpin:  Few corporations have changed the US business and consumer model more than Amazon. So when that corporate behemoth buys one of the country’s national newspapers—it’s a conflict writ large as can or should be. But things as they are, reporting on Amazon has in general looked more like representing that conflict than confronting it.

Good Jobs First monitors megacompanies like Amazon and their impact on our lives. Their database, Violation Tracker Global, notes more than $2.4 billion in misconduct penalties for Amazon since 2010. The most expensive of those fines have been connected to the company’s anti-competitive practices; the most frequent offenses are related to cheating workers out of wages and jeopardizing workers’ health and safety. Arlene Martinez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. We’ll talk to her about the effort to #MakeAmazonPay.

Amazon Seattle HQ (cc photo: kiewic)

Also: A few years back, Amazon, like it does, dangled the prospect of locating a headquarters in New York City. And the city, like it does, eagerly offered some $3 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to entice the wildly profitable company to bring its anti-union, environmentally exploitative self to town. The deal fell through for reasons, one of which was informed community pushback. We talked about it with journalist Neil deMause, co-author of the book Field of Schemes. We’ll hear just a little of that conversation today.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Intercept (11/12/24)

This week on CounterSpin: It wasn’t the horrific abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, but the pictures of it, that forced public and official acknowledgement. The Defense Department vehemently resisted the pictures’ release, with good reason. Yet when, after the initial round, Australian TV put out new images, Washington Post executive editor Len Downie said they were “so shocking and in such bad taste, especially the extensive nudity, that they are not publishable in our newspaper.” The notion that acts of torture by the US military and its privately contracted cat’s paws are, above all, distasteful may help explain corporate media’s inattentiveness to the efforts of victims of Abu Ghraib to find some measure of justice.

But a federal jury has just found defense contractor CACI responsible for its part in that abuse, in a ruling being called “exceptional in every sense of the term.” The Center for Constitutional Rights has been behind the case, Al Shimari v. CACI, through its long rollercoaster ride through the courts—which isn’t over yet. We hear about it from CCR senior staff attorney Katherine Gallagher.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the ICC’s Israel warrants.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Lever (10/24/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Passed by a whisker in Missouri on November 5, legal sports gambling is the apple of the eye of many corporate and private state actors—but how does it affect states, communities, people? Our guest wrote in-depth on the question ahead of the election. Journalist Amos Barshad is senior enterprise reporter for the Lever, and author of the book No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World, from Abrams Press. We hear from him on this week’s show.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trump’s nominees and a Nazi march.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

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Fascists march in Charlottesville, 2017 (cc photo: Tony Crider)

This week on CounterSpin: We revisit the conversation we had in August 2017 in the wake of the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Writer and podcaster Adam Johnson had thoughts about the way so-called “mainstream” news media responded to a straight-up celebration of white supremacy.

(cc photo: Sasha Patkin)

Also on the show: If we’re to believe the chest-thumping, high on Trump’s agenda will be the enforced criminalization of immigration. We talked about that in July 2018 with Jacinta Gonzalez, senior campaign organizer at Mijente.

The past is never dead, it’s not even past: This week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press about Chris Matthews’ “morning after,” the New York Times‘ promoting white resentment, and Israel’s assassination of journalists.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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This week on CounterSpin: We talk about what just happened, and corporate media’s role in it, with Julie Hollar, senior analyst at the media watch group FAIR, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas.

Washington Post (7/25/21)

We also hear some of an important conversation we had with political scientist Dorothee Benz the day after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at non-presidential election results.

Featured image: Women’s March to the White House, November 2, 2024 (Creative Commons photo: Amaury Laporte)

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed ProPublica‘s Nicole Foy about immigration and labor for the November 1, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: One of the weirdest and most harmful things so-called mainstream news media do is to take concerns, social problems, experiences, hardships—and reduce them to “electoral issues,” meaningful solely to the extent that candidates talk about them, and defined in terms of what they say—rather than starting with people, and our lives, and judging candidates based on whether their proposed responses are grounded and humane.

Immigration would have to be near the top of the list of phenomena that exists, has existed, worldwide forever, but that corporate news media seem comfortable larding with whatever ignorant hearsay and disinformation politicians of the moment care to spout. Anyone interested in just, human-centered immigration policy has to keep their eyes on the prize through the fog of horserace coverage.

Journalist Nicole Foy reports on immigration and labor at ProPublica, where she’s Ancil Payne Fellow. She joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Nicole Foy.

Nicole Foy: Thank you so much for having me.

ProPublica (10/22/24)

JJ: I want to talk about your recent piece that gets at a lot of things, but it really is a story of a person. And so, before anything else, please just tell us, if you would, about Elmer De León Pérez, and what happened in January of this year.

NF: Yeah, so Elmer was a young, only 20 years old, Guatemalan immigrant who was living in Houma, Louisiana, which is a little bit southwest of New Orleans, one of the areas that’s quite frequently threatened by hurricanes. He was working at a shipyard in the Houma area. He was a welder, pretty skilled welder. He made a decent amount of money, and was called upon to do some pretty difficult tasks, including helping build a ship for NOAA, which people may know for weather forecasting and hurricane forecasting. This shipyard that he was working at had a number of government contracts for ships.

He was building this ship for NOAA on that morning in January, when, essentially, his coworkers realized that he didn’t show up for lunch that day. And by the time he was found in the tank of the ship where he was welding, he was already unconscious, unresponsive, and, later, first responders did not continue trying to resuscitate him because he was already showing signs of rigor mortis, meaning that he had likely died some time ago.

And in the aftermath of all of that, his family, which, even though he was only 20, he had a young son with another immigrant who also lives in Houma, and he has an extended family, from Louisiana to all the way back in Guatemala, who cared quite a bit about him. They not only struggled to get answers about what happened to him for a long time, but they’ve yet to receive any sort of compensation, or even really acknowledgement, from the company he was working for, and even though he died on the job.

JJ: So this is a person who dies on the job, working for a government contract. So what is it that made you want to report this out? It can’t be because you thought this is an anomalous case.

NF: Yeah. The way this story started is kind of interesting, actually, because my editor and I were initially very interested in finding a story that explained what happens when immigrant workers die on the job. I had been telling him how often you see families raising money, whether through GoFundMe, or asking for help on Facebook, often because they’re trying to get their loved ones’ bodies home to their home country, whether they’ve been here for years and years, and they really would prefer to be buried in their hometown, or because they had only been here for a couple of years, and they’re just trying to get their bodies home.

We were really interested in that concept, because it struck us as something really, I think, indicative of, I don’t know—I think it spoke to a number of things about how immigrant workers exist in the United States. We rely on them so heavily now, and have always, and yet their families are often left in really difficult financial straits just to do what they would consider, I am assuming, is the bare minimum, which is get them home, get them buried in the land that they may have wanted to return to, or that they came from. And we were really struck by that.

So I was looking into a number of different cases. I was poring through GoFundMe and Facebook and through OSHA fatality-on-the-job records and pulling different cases, and there’s so many. You spend a lot of time doing this, and you see just how many immigrants are dying on the job, everywhere from California to Louisiana to Texas. And reading the GoFundMe pleas or the Facebook pleas of their family asking for help, to try to have a funeral, send the body home.

Elmer De León Pérez (right) with his father, Erick De Pérez (family photo)

And we were really interested in his case, because as we were doing reporting, not only was I able to find all of the different, just really moving videos that his family had posted on Facebook, of trying to raise money, and then eventually they filmed his body arriving back home to his hometown in Guatemala. And the way the community really came together in a common way was really moving. And also then we, as I looked into his employer and where he died, realized that this was a company that has a number of government contracts, to build and repair ships for the Navy, for the Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers—you name it, there’s a government agency that needs a ship.

And so that’s kind of how we got started there, is we were interested in what happens to immigrant workers, to their families, when they die on the job, what kind of care is taken for them. And then we discovered this really truly heartbreaking case of someone who was building a ship for our country, and still his family couldn’t get the help that they say they need.

JJ: This is where journalism connects the human story with a data story, with a broader story, a policy story. The story about immigrant workers and the workforce, it’s like the worst kept secret in the country, the idea that farmworkers, and shipbuilders as you’re talking about, that these industries rely on, they couldn’t operate without, immigrant labor. And yet we’re still supposed to accept this weird capitalist story about only Americans can work here, and immigrants are actually stealing jobs. And it’s such a weird disconnect between what a lot of folks know is actually happening, and the storyline that people are being told.

And I think that’s what’s so important about this story: Organizations, companies, rely on immigrant labor, but they rely on them in a particular way. And that has to do with the contratista, the idea of the legal designation that is given to these workers. And that, of course, is important in Pérez’s story.

Nicole Foy:

NF: Yeah, I think, too, what I found really telling, reporting this story, is that it really is such a common story for immigrants who don’t currently have the legal authority to work in the US, the ways that they still have to pursue in order to support their families. And it was really interesting to see that playing out in an industry that you don’t really see as part of the immigration debate, shipbuilding, and particularly shipbuilding for government ships.

This particular shipyard, they don’t have contracts to build nuclear submarines or even battleships or anything, but they’re building support vessels or research ships for NOAA, for so many different branches of the military and for the government, that are pretty essential to our country’s defenses, and also just to keep our country running properly. And that’s not really something that you see in the immigration debate, is that we also need workers desperately for those types of jobs.

I think people still think of welding in a shipyard as a job that should pay so well, and does pay so well, that everybody is competing with each other for them. But the economic facts of our country right now are very different. We don’t have as many blue collar workers as we used to, and we have quite a lot of work that needs to be done. So that’s why you see immigrants in these jobs that, again, I think there’s often this narrative of “they’re taking these jobs from workers,” but the shipbuilding industry in particular is suffering greatly from a really dramatic lack of workers to do the jobs that they need, whether it’s welding or another job in a shipyard.

I just thought that was another good example of his life and the work that he was doing. It’s another good example of how, if you’re commonly thinking of immigrant workers, you may be thinking of agriculture, you may be thinking of maybe restaurants or construction. And certainly there are many, many immigrant workers sustaining those industries.

Brookings (10/17/22)

But they’ve become very essential to the fabric of our entire economy. It’s not very easy to disentangle them from the work that we need to do as a country. And that’s something that I don’t think a lot of our current rhetoric accounts for, is how many different jobs and how many different types of jobs around the country that these workers are fulfilling, that we’d miss them quite a lot if they weren’t there.

JJ: Let me just ask you, you tried to get responses from employers and from folks to say, “What’s going on here? What happened here? Why are you not accountable for this?” What happened with that exercise in trying to say: A person died, a person died, his family deserves compensation. What happened there?

NF: I did my absolute best. ProPublica takes it very seriously that we want everyone to have a chance to tell their side of the story. And so I did everything possible. It wasn’t just phone calls and emails. I came by the shipyard several times. I hand-delivered, actually, a letter with a list of questions to one of the shipyard executives several weeks before the story published, just in an attempt to try to get some answers.

I also spoke very briefly with the contractor that actually employed Elmer. I talked to him briefly, but he declined a comment on the advice of his lawyers.

I don’t know why Thoma-Sea, the shipyard where he was working, didn’t want to comment, because they told me very little. I did my best to reach out to them.

But I think it was really important to try to get their side of the story, especially since we also looked into the campaign finance records, and saw that, even though there are so many immigrants like Elmer, he was not the only one working at the shipyard, the company’s main managing director, top executive, has donated fairly heavily to many Louisiana politicians who have been vocal about their desire to either close the border, restrict immigration, and, honestly, what they think about immigrants in their own state.

JJ: I was struck, as I’ve said, throughout the piece, by how many powerful people and company representatives said they just had no comment. And it reminds me, it takes me back to independent reporting. It’s the families of the immigrant workers who are killed and then ignored and not given compensation; they look to the press, they need to speak, they want to get their voice out. And the powerful people, what’s in it for them? They don’t need to speak or justify or explain themselves. And it makes me mad, because I think Journalism 101 would send you back to those powerful people and demand some sort of answer from them.

The other thing is that you show up at this person’s home, and they’re like, “Oh, it’s really disrespectful to show up at the home of a company CEO where a worker has died on the job. It’s really disrespectful of journalists to bother us at home.” And I just think, there are people who need a press, an independent press, and there are people who don’t need it. It drives me angry. So I just want to say, the difference between getting access to people who are harmed and people who are harming, as a reporter, that’s a very different thing.

NF: Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I just wanted to make sure that everyone gets to tell their side of the story. As a reporter, I try not to approach something speaking as if I know everything, but want folks to share their side.

And genuinely, too, I think a lot of people, including Elmer’s family, are still seeking answers. I was trying my best to get answers as well.

JJ: There are very particular legal regulations that folks hide behind, in a way, in terms of delivering protections. You’re not an employee, you’re a contracted worker, or you’re a subcontracted worker, and that allows them some degree of cover.

NF: And also, too, at the same time that it allows them some degree of cover when it comes to liability in an accident, it’s also what makes it possible for many of these companies to hire immigrant workers who do not have authorization to work. So it’s one of those things where it’s sometimes the only way that an immigrant worker can get a job, as they’re trying to maybe support their family, support themselves.

But it can leave them very vulnerable, because these layers of contractors can make it much harder for them, or their families if they pass away, to claim any type of support or resources. They still can, but the workers’ compensation system is pretty difficult to navigate without a lawyer in a straightforward case. And when you add on different barriers that contractors may face, and then certainly folks who don’t speak English as their first language, and then also you have legal status mixed in there, and folks being really worried that coming forward could endanger them.

All of that does tend to make it easier for the company to have these systems in place, and certainly disincentivizes many folks who need these resources, need benefits, need some type of financial compensation. It disincentivizes them from stepping forward, or just fighting through what can be a pretty difficult process.

JJ: And, not for nothing, incentivizes the companies themselves to set up this system in which their workers don’t have access to this kind of compensation.

NF: Yeah, I would imagine that—I can’t speak for anybody’s motives, but I do think they’re going to get the workers that they need, one way or the other, and some ways leave their workers with much more limited protections.

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, if you have thoughts about the way that immigration and immigrants are covered, what would you have to say in terms of…. I had kind of a rant at the beginning about how I really am unhappy when immigrants are reduced to an electoral issue, when they’re human people and they have a story. And I feel like that’s what reporters should be doing.

But do you have thoughts in terms of the way that big media cover immigration, or just thoughts about something you’d like to see more or less of in terms of, big picture, the way the story is covered?

AP via PBS (10/12/24)

NF: Yeah, I think there are a lot of really wonderful immigration reporters out there who are doing their best to bring facts to a pretty charged conversation, honestly, a recurring conversation. I mean, I have not been in the industry for decades and decades and decades, but this is definitely the third election cycle that I’ve covered where immigration has been a pretty significant issue, whether because candidates have made it so, or people are concerned about folks arriving at the border. And I can say, as a journalist who is trying to present facts, it can sometimes be distressing to see the same misrepresentation of the facts repeated, sometimes without pushback or factchecking.

But the truth is, and I think the Elmer story shows this, is that candidates can say as much as they want that immigrants are stealing jobs, and the actual reality on the ground just does not really reflect that. And, at the same time, there’s a pretty significant narrative about, maybe, people who believe that immigrant workers get more than they do. I think you can see, in this case, that not only are many not getting more than a citizen worker, their families are often left abandoned and without any resources when something tragic happens.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with reporter Nicole Foy. Her article, “An Immigrant Died Building a Ship for the US Government. His Family Got Nothing,” can be found at ProPublica.org. Thank you so much, Nicole Foy, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

NF: Thank you for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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ProPublica (10/22/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Reading the news today, you might not believe it, but there was a time, not long ago, in which it was acceptable to say out loud that immigration is a boon to this country, and immigrants should be welcomed and supported. Now, news media start with the premise of immigration itself as a “crisis,” with the only debate around how to “stem” or “control” it. That the conversation is premised on disinformation about crime and wages and the reasons US workers are struggling is lost in a fog of political posturing. But immigration isn’t going away, no matter who gains the White House. And children torn from parents, families sent back to dangerous places, workers’ rights denied based on status, won’t be any prettier a legacy, no matter who it’s attached to.

Journalist Nicole Foy reports on immigration and labor at ProPublica. She wrote recently about the life and death of one man, Elmer De Leon Perez, as a sort of emblem of this country’s fraught, dishonest and obscured treatment of people who come here to work and make a life.

We hear that story this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a look back at recent press coverage of NPR‘s overseers and the Washington Post‘s non-endorsement.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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Intercept (10/17/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Dropped by her law firm—or, excuse me, resigning from her law firm—after being exposed as an advisor on the post–2020 election call where Donald Trump told Georgia officials to “find” him some votes, Cleta Mitchell has leaned in on the brand of “election integrity.” Platformed on right-wing talk radio, she’s now saying that Democrats are “literally getting people to lie” to exploit laws that allow overseas citizens to vote, so she’s bringing lawsuits. Does she have evidence? No. Is evidence the point? Also no. We speak this week with media law attorney and reporter Shawn Musgrave, who serves as counsel to the Intercept, about how Trump’s “Big Lie” attorneys are not so much returning to the field, but actually never left.

CounterSpin (3/16/18)

Also on the show: In 2018, elite media had apparently moved beyond the kneejerk reportorial pairing of documentation of voter suppression with hypothetical claims of voter fraud. But they were still doing faux-naive reporting of those fraud claims as something other than themselves a deliberate suppression campaign. Then, the shiny object was Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach trying to change registration laws in the state. We talked then with Orion Danjuma, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights & Dissent’s Chip Gibbons about the Gaza First Amendment Alert  for the October 18, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: There is other news, of course, but we cannot avert our eyes from the genocide of the Palestinian people, and the spreading effects of that murderous effort—including the silencing of criticism or concerns from US citizens on US soil about actions being carried out in our name.

Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a journalist, researcher and a longtime activist. He’ll join us to talk about the things we’re not supposed to say and the lives we’re told not to care about—and why we must never stop saying and caring.

***

Democracy Now! (10/16/24)

The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases.

In Palestine, the death toll is exacerbated by displacement; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency, one of very few humanitarian organizations working still in the region. A real accounting would also include, not just those that we don’t yet know are dead, but the maimed, the orphaned, the starved, the homeless.

Democracy Now! recently spoke with a doctor from Gaza who said that he wishes that

Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head. When a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.

The New York Times has deemed such images too graphic to print—too horrific, in other words, to run alongside reporting that suggests, implies or outright states that those deaths are justified, they make sense or, minimally, they’re not worth stopping eating your buttered toast about.

As media critics, we look to Palestinians to represent Palestinian views, but it’s crucial that we not see the present moment as something happening to other people somewhere else. The repression of simple anti-genocide calls, the censorship, the firings, the disinformation, the malforming of concepts like antisemitism—these are problems for all of us, about all of us, that will influence all of us forever.

Gaza First Amendment Alert (10/16/24)

Defending Rights & Dissent, online at RightsAndDissent.org, have started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday. Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. He’s a journalist, researcher and a longtime activist. He joins us now by phone.

Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.

Chip Gibbons: Thank you for having me back. I always say CounterSpin is one of my favorite shows to do, and it is so vital, with the sorry state of corporate media in this country, that we have outlets like yours, because we would never get our message out. Occasionally, occasionally, we break through, and BBC or the Guardian or whoever will call us up, but it’s pretty bleak out there.

Like everyone else, every day I see the horrible images and news coming out of Gaza, now Lebanon and, who knows, maybe Iran next. Pictures of people being burned alive while they’re hooked to an IV. Stories about people being forced to flee or be bombed, then bombed while they flee, then corralled into a refugee center, and then bombed some more. It’s really, really horrific.

And in the midst of this horror show, this genocide that is quickly spiraling into a regional war, with obviously Israel as the aggressor and our government as the financier of it, we’re witnessing this global tidal wave of repression against people who are saying, “Hey, wait a moment. Let’s not drop bombs on children.” Journalists who show us what it looks like to drop a bomb on children are being assassinated.

Defending Rights & Dissent (8/10/23)

The young people on college campuses who want to simply peacefully raise their voice are hit with police batons, or have false charges against them. Journalists who report on the ground are killed by snipers and drones in their house. They get text messages telling them that their families will be killed.

And every day, our Congress votes to spend more money to fuel this, and sends these ridiculous letters to the IRS or the DoJ or the FBI, whomever else, telling them to crack down.

And I do want to note that this is a global problem. On October 17, 2024, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Irene Khan, presented to the UN General Assembly her new report on the impact of the conflict in Gaza on freedom of expression globally. And Defending Rights & Dissent submitted testimony, and is cited in it. So this is a global problem, and you wouldn’t really know it from much of the corporate media.

Chip Gibbons: “”We cannot say we are for press freedom when we are giving Israel the guns it assassinates Palestinian journalists with.”

We started the Gaza First Amendment Alert as a project to compile together in one place—I won’t say all of the political repression in the US, because there’s so much it’s impossible to include it all, but the vast majority of it. So attacks on press freedoms, attacks on protest rights, attacks on civil society and attacks on transparency, we are documenting in one place in a biweekly newsletter.

Every congressional office on the Hill received an invitation to subscribe to this letter. I think the only thing more dismal in this country than our corporate media is our Congress offices. I’m sorry, I’m laughing out of despair. And we sent it out to journalists to receive. But there’s also been a really strong outpouring of support from people who work on these issues, from activists who have signed up to receive this newsletter, and have talked about how valuable it is.

And, for the most part, it is focused on the repression in the US. The one exception is we are—because Israel uses US weapons to do so—continuing to monitor Israel’s killing, detention, maiming of Palestinian journalists and international journalists.

The Nation (8/16/24)

And as you know, Janine, because FAIR endorsed this project this summer, Defending Rights & Dissent led a call of over 100 journalists, including four Pulitzer Prize winners, to call on [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken to impose an arms embargo on Israel, because we cannot say we are for press freedom when we are giving Israel the guns it assassinates Palestinian journalists with.

So the bulk of this newsletter focuses on domestic oppression in the US, but we will, every biweekly period, for as long as that happens, monitor the killing of journalists. I would love to have an issue that doesn’t have that in there because no journalists were killed. But in working on the first issue, I had to keep going back and updating the section on the killing of journalists, again and again, because Israel just keeps doing it.

We have seen college students engaging in protests. One of the big things we intended to cover on the inaugural issue was what took place on the anniversary of the war. On October 7, many college students and others who wanted to show their sympathy for the Palestinian victims, their opposition to the war, wanted to hold a protest or vigils. And there was a coordinated effort, that we show in the newsletter, to suppress this.

Campus Crisis Alert (10/23/24)

I get the Anti-Defamation League Campus Crisis Alert newsletter, which is a great resource on political repression in the US. They don’t intend it as such, but I use it as such. And police departments get that. I know, thanks to a FOIA request filed by Iain Carlos at Noir News, that the Chicago Police Department gets this newsletter.

And like every day for a month, they encourage you to call colleges and send them letters and tell them, “We know colleges love free expression”—I’m not sure we know that anymore—but “even protected expression can create a hostile environment. Even permitted protests can create a hostile environment.”

And they are abusing civil rights law, which is very important. Abusing antisemitism to claim they have to clamp down on political speech, and then telling them you need to put in place a policy for October 7 on how or if—”if” was a big one—you permit protest. And then, of course, encouraging them to cooperate with law enforcement when campus policies are broken about expression.

And many of these campuses have put in very draconian anti-speech policies, policies that would be unconstitutional in any other context, and, if they are public schools, are unconstitutional.

Guardian (9/18/24)

And I think one of the big victories the ADL got was they got the University of Maryland to try to prohibit an interfaith vigil of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, an interfaith vigil mourning the Palestinian victims of this genocide. And the school initially approved it, there was mass public pressure against it, and then the school put together a policy that stated that you could only have “expressive events”—this is a new phrase that we hear a lot: “Expressive events.” “Expression policy…”

JJ: Right—what?

CG: Yes, events where people are expressing themselves. And some people have noted, some of these policies, when you start talking about expression, could be really rather broad.

But you couldn’t have any “expressive events” that were not initiated by the school. And, of course, that is unconstitutional. And Palestine Legal and CAIR took them to court, and the court allowed the vigil to take place. I saw pictures of it. I read news reports that there were a hundred or so students having an interfaith vigil, recognizing people who were slaughtered in a genocide.

An the interesting thing to me was that same day, there was a pro-Israel vigil as well, to mark the Israeli victims and civilians killed on October 7. And there was a member of Congress speaking at it, Steny Hoyer. And we hear again and again about outside agitators on the college campuses, Hillary Clinton, and I think Mike Johnson, basically in agreement that these kids wouldn’t be upset about people being burnt to death in tents with US weapons if it wasn’t for outside agitators, or nefarious Iranian influence. Or one place I saw was Cuban influence. You really are bringing out all of the bad guys.

Wall Street Journal (5/12/24)

JJ: Castro from the grave.

CG: Castro’s ghost, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Putin, China. Really, all of the evil-doers, maybe, are behind it, apparently.

And yet, when I looked at the vigil, it looked like—I didn’t do an investigation of everyone’s identity, but it looked like University of Maryland students. Whereas the counter vigil seemed to have a lot of pro-Israel advocates and a member of Congress at it.

So I don’t like the idea of outside agitators. You are allowed to invite prominent figures to your school to speak in solidarity with you. But if there’s outside agitators on the campus, who are they, right? Is it the college kids, or is it the members of Congress coming to call for their repression and champion a genocide? I think I know the answer to that.

And so, again, we’ve seen schools like Cornell suspend international students, and put them at risk of being deported. Right before we were about to go to print—not print, it’s an email newsletter; I’m using print in the figurative sense—that decision was reversed, and the student had a victory. But another student at the University of South Florida had to return to Colombia, because they were suspended for political speech.

So that’s where we’re at as a country. And, unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to have any shortage of news two weeks from now. In fact, we already have multiple stories that we are considering for the next issue, including the fact that—you’ll love this—the Heritage Foundation yesterday announced Project Esther, named after Queen Esther from the Bible, to allegedly combat antisemitism. But when you read the opening section of it, they’re talking about a network of “anti-Zionist,” “anti-American” Hamas supporters. So they really mean, as you know—I think most listeners know—they mean pro-Palestinian speech.

Intercept (2/21/24)

And we have members of Congress calling for—I mean, every week in Congress they send a new letter to a new agency, proposing some new bonkers act that they should take against Students for Justice in Palestine. This week, they want them to register under FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which is, I mean, FARA is a very broad law. It’s a law I’ve thought a lot about, but it makes zero sense in this context. SJP are not agents of a foreign power. And if you’re claiming that they’re agents of Hamas, which is what this letter claims, from Chuck Grassley and Ted Cruz, they’ve got a lot bigger problems than the FARA statute.

So if someone were an unregistered agent of Hamas, which no one we’re talking about is, they would not even be indicted under FARA, or asked to register to FARA. They would be charged under the Material Support statute, under the Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction.

Earlier this week, we saw a Palestinian prisoner-support NGO sanctioned under OFAC, which has for decades been used to punish people for giving humanitarian aid in the Occupied Territory, to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism; has not been used in many cases against actual terrorism, but against people who have views the government doesn’t like, cases like Holy Land Foundation, Sami Al-Arian; Muhammad Salah, the grocer from Illinois who was tortured by the Israelis when he was giving aid, and then became the first person ever sanctioned by the US as a terrorist within the US, a US citizen, he had all his assets frozen.

You’ll like this, Janine. Judith Miller participated in his interrogation, and talked about it in one of her books, because the Clinton administration denied the Israeli government’s claims that Hamas was essentially based in Chicago, and she believed Israel. So in order to help them out, she went and met with this American citizen they were torturing, and she gave the interrogator questions. And then the interrogator asked them And then she later testified at his trial that he wasn’t tortured by the Israelis, because she was there, and Judith Miller would have noticed the torture.

JJ: She understood.

Well, listen, as I get older, I recognize that there is a value in simply collecting the harms. You think that everybody knows and everyone will remember, and it’s just not true. There is a value in collecting the harms that are being done, and in showing their coherence and their purposiveness. It’s not random, it’s targeted and it’s principled, in a way that we understand that term.

And there is also tremendous value in lifting up the dissent, the resistance, so that we can never think, later or right now, that everyone is complicit, that no one is speaking out, even if not everyone feels really comfortably placed to do so. Propaganda is weakened when we have other avenues of information and communication. And that seems to be what your work, and particularly this new project, is about.

CounterSpin (2/26/16)

CG: And the flip side of the “everyone is complicit” argument is, people use it later to evade accountability. I mean, how many times can people say, “Oh, that or this politician or journalists supported the Iraq War, but there was no one against the Iraq War.”

I went to my first protest against the Iraq War in September 2005. I was a sophomore in high school. There were hundreds of thousands of people there. And we were all more right than the New York Times and MSNBC and Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney. Well, I think Dick Cheney knew what he was doing, but you know what I mean?

JJ: Yes. I was there too. Yeah…

CG: I know you were, I know you were. That’s, as I mentioned before, I first started reading FAIR back during the Bush years. Which we’re back in.

JJ: But the point is that some folks might say, “Oh, you’re doing a newsletter and you’re collecting instances of censorship and firing and repression, and that’s useful,” but it’s not just a collection, it’s also a tool. It’s also a way of speaking, yeah?

CG: Yes. And we’re definitely trying to get this newsletter to be a tool for journalists, to be a tool for congressional staff, to be a tool for other advocates. I mean, anyone can subscribe to it, and I think everyone can benefit from it. But we are doing extremely hard work behind the scenes to try to put it in front of people in the press, to try to put it in front of congressional offices, so they can’t say, “We didn’t know.”

Or they can use it as a resource. Because I know they’re getting the ADL stuff. I know they’re getting the Heritage Foundation stuff. We know police departments get that sort of stuff.

Al Jazeera (1/19/14)

And the other side is extremely well organized. I’ll never forget when I was in college, after the 2009 massacre/bombing/war in Gaza. I mean, I went and met with my congressman’s office, with just a staffer, with some other pro-Palestine activists. And the very first thing he says is, “We hear from AIPAC all the time. We never hear from you guys.”

JJ: Wow. That’s incredible. And that speaks to the need for organization and activism in this case.

And at the same time, we know that when we get organized, when we speak out, elite media will not necessarily hear that voice, or platform that voice.

And I’ll just ask you a specific question: FAIR and CounterSpin, we’ve noted a lot that corporate media cover election issues as though elections were something that happened to politicians, and not something that happens to all of the people that were affected. And with Gaza, with Palestine, with the genocide, the stakes can’t be higher. But how are you seeing Palestine covered as a campaign issue, and what would you do different there? What would you see differently there?

CG: I had to tune out most of the corporate media about a year ago, when I was watching CNN, and they ran this ad about Jake Tapper speaking truth to power. He says, “I have the greatest job in the world. I have powerful people on and ask them questions.” And then he came back from commercial break, he had a member of Congress on, and he goes, I don’t remember what member of Congress. He goes, “Oh, congressman so-and-so, students at Harvard just posted this on Instagram. Do you condemn it?” And I was like, “oh…”

JJ: And that’s news. Yeah.

CG: Speaking truth to power: When you have a member of Congress on, “will you condemn college students at Harvard?”

So it is interesting, because the way the media covers elections in its own right is its own problem. It’s just constantly pushing the candidates to be more warmongering. Maybe you saw that debate where the first question was, “Will you support a preemptive strike on Iran?”—a war crime. Will you support a war of aggression? Not a candidate answered it, I don’t believe. I believe they both gave nonsensical answers, because they had prepared opening remarks and they gave them.

Washington Post (10/22/24)

But again, there’s a real chance, and I say this because I’ve worked for a nonpartisan organization, but with that caveat, there’s real questions about how Biden’s blanket support for Israel will impact Harris’s electability. At the end of the day, the murder of Palestinian children is not merely an electoral calculation for the Democratic Party.

And I’ve seen some people in liberal and left circles sort of talk about this, it’s like, “Oh no, Biden’s making a bad electoral calculation,” and had zero humanity towards the Palestinian people, when the murder of the children should be stopped because we shouldn’t be murdering children. It’s not this sort of horse race. The horse race approach to genocide is just something I can’t stomach.

JJ: When I talk to people, they almost offer a Hail Mary, like: The students, the children will save us all; but who’s looking out for the students? Who’s looking out for the kids that somehow are going to save us from this war nightmare that we’re in? There are laws, there are policies, there are things that we can do besides saying, “Well, gee, I hope those kids aren’t too scared of going to jail. I wish ’em well.” Thoughts on that?

CG: Yeah, it is troubling. And if the students are all suspended and arrested and beaten up, they won’t be there to save us. So the student protestors need our solidarity, even if we don’t always agree with the choice of words, or always the choice of tactics. I mean, I was a college student once. I didn’t always make the best decisions.

But they’re out there trying to stop a genocide, in a society where 9/10ths of our Congress, 9/10ths of our local politicians and like 9.9/10ths of our media are all on board and fueling the flames. And they are getting beaten with batons. They’re getting arrested, they’re getting suspended, they’re getting deported. They don’t need our armchair expert analysis, they need our solidarity and our support, and they need us to get out on the streets too.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons. He’s policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org, and that’s the place where you can get their Gaza First Amendment Alert. Chip Gibbons, thank you so much for joining us once again on CounterSpin.

CG: Thank you for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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Gaza First Amendment Alert (10/16/24)

The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases. In Palestine, the death toll is exacerbated by displacement; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRWA), one of very few humanitarian organizations working in the region.

A real accounting will also include not just those we don’t yet know are dead, but the maimed, the orphaned, the starved, the homeless.  Democracy Now! recently spoke with a doctor from Gaza who said that he wishes that “Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.”

The New York Times has deemed such images too graphic to print. Too horrific, in other words, to run alongside reporting that suggests, implies or outright states that those deaths are justified, make sense or, minimally, are not worth stopping eating your buttered toast about.

As media critics, we look to Palestinians to represent Palestinian views, but it’s crucial that we not see the present moment as something happening to Other People, Somewhere Else. The repression of simple anti-genocide calls, the censorship, the firings, the disinformation, the malforming of concepts like “antisemitism”—these are problems for all of us, about all of us, that will influence all of us forever.

Defending Rights & Dissent has started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday. Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a journalist, a researcher and a longtime activist.  He led a successful campaign to defeat a proposed unconstitutional anti-boycott bill in Maryland.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson: Unfortunately, we can assume listeners know the popular right-wing lines: Immigrants—that’s shorthand for Black and brown immigrants—are criminals, violent drug criminals especially, but also they’re stealing jobs, draining social services and, in election season, we hear they’re voting illegally in large numbers, because they are, in some way, props for the Democratic Party.

Anyone who wants to dispute those noxious tropes can do so with a search engine. Harder to combat is the overarching and bipartisan framing of immigration and immigrants as a “problem.” How do we replace batting away the latest slur with the reality-based humane conversation we need to move us to the 21st century immigration and asylum policies we could have?

Insha Rahman is vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice and the director of Vera Action. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Insha Rahman.

Insha Rahman: Thanks for having me, Janine.

Guardian (9/15/24)

JJ: Rather than ask you to engage intentionally misleading anti-immigrant talking points, I wonder if you would talk a little about the impacts. What is the fallout of myths and misinformation that might sound laughable or dismissable to many of us—what’s the fallout in the lives of the communities that you work with?

IR: First of all, the Willie Horton playbook of exploiting voters’ fears about crime, and frankly the dog whistles about race and criminality, it’s nothing new. When I say Willie Horton, everybody knows the 1988 ad that was run and allegedly sunk Michael Dukakis’ Democratic bid for president, and it’s a playbook that is old, well worn. We’ve seen it every election cycle.

And so this year, in 2024, if you feel like you’re hearing about immigration and migrants and cats and dogs nonstop, it isn’t anything new. It is really just another page of the Willie Horton playbook.

And it’s not really about immigration or immigration policies. Every poll that we have done, that we have seen, has found that Americans, by and large, understand that immigration is a fundamental part of our society, of our economy, of our communities. We are a country of immigrants. But, when it is wrapped up in a fear of crime, and playing upon racist tropes about crime and criminality, that’s where it has political impact.

And the fallout, we can see: One of the most depressing and staggering polls that I’ve seen recently is that overall support for immigration, which used to be a majority of Americans, including independents and moderate voters, supported immigration to this country. They fundamentally believed immigration is a good thing for our communities, our families, our economy. Now that support has dipped, for the first time, to below 50%. And so there’s a real fallout in terms of support for policy that’s actually smart and sensible.

Christian Science Monitor (9/19/24)

And then we see it in very real ways in places like Springfield, Ohio, where there has been a lot of legal—I should say, legal—immigration of Haitian migrants to this country, who are fleeing really devastating circumstances in Haiti. We’re watching bomb threats in local schools, immigrant residents of Springfield feeling afraid. In fact, all residents of Springfield feeling afraid, because suddenly the city, that nobody had heard of until September 10 and the presidential debate, is literally in the Klieg lights, and everyday Americans and a lot of politicians are talking about Springfield. So much so that even the Republican governor of Ohio said, “Stop the fearmongering, stop the misinformation. We are just fine. What Springfield needs is our support and help, and not fearmongering and rhetoric about us.”

JJ: I think that media give inadequate attention to the carryover or bleed-through effects. It’s not to say that people who fall for anti-immigrant misinformation, they’re not asking folks before they harass them, “To be clear, you’re Haitian, right? You’re not Dominican. I don’t want to get my hatred wrong.” It’s treated as though these are targeted attacks, and as though they end when one particular incident is resolved, or when the cameras go away. But, of course, the impact on communities goes on and on.

IR: Yeah.

JJ: Changing facts on the ground with law, with policy, with institutional culture can save and can change lives. It does also work to shift the dialogue about what’s possible, about what life looks like after you change that law, for example. What are some of the legal or policy changes that you think could be important right now, that could shift the ground on immigration and asylum?

Washington Monthly (5/21/24)

IR: One of the things that we have seen there’s widespread support for, and that can be done, is just: when there are new immigrants to our cities, to our communities, we make sure that they have the ability to work. Work, employment, is life-changing for everybody, including US citizens and other members of the community, who benefit from more labor. Right now, in many parts of this country, we have more jobs than we have people to fill them, and immigration is a necessary thing; it’s why economists across the country, across the political spectrum, say we actually need immigration. We can’t build a wall and mass-deport people and shut down the borders, because we literally will have an economic crisis in this country. So employment is a really basic thing we can do.

Another thing is, sometimes people hear, folks who are coming to our cities, especially people who are bused up from Texas and other border states, Florida—people resent housing and services and making sure basic needs are met. Well, in fact, that is cheaper than the alternative. And it is good for all of us.

And it’s not for forever: If you help somebody get on their feet with some temporary housing for three to six months, they have a work permit in hand, they have a job, they will not need to be dependent on government services and resources. It is actually better for us to set people up for a small period of time for future success.

And we’ve watched some cities do that really well. For example, Boston did not engage in the kind of fear-mongering about “all these newly arrived migrants, it’s going to be the end of the city, it’s going to destroy us,” which is what we heard from a certain elected mayor in New York City. That wasn’t the approach that Boston took. And, in fact, they’ve had a lot of newly arrived migrants as well, and they’ve managed it. And you’ll see they have really good outcomes, and there’s generally a sense of positivity towards new arrivals there in a way that there simply isn’t in New York City.

Insha Rahman: “There’s some really clear policy things we can do for folks who have just come here, like work permits, like making sure there is transitional housing and support and services.”

And so, again, there’s some really clear policy things we can do for folks who have just come here, like work permits, like making sure there is transitional housing and support and services. All of that is a better investment in our communities and our economy than the alternative.

And then we see there’s always been and always will be widespread support for a path to citizenship and legalization for folks who have been here, who are part of the fabric of our communities. And so those are some of the things we could do literally immediately, but at the local level, in terms of cities and states.

And then what we need to see Congress do—and 10 years ago there was, in fact, bipartisan support for more paths to citizenship. And we need to bring the Overton window and shift it back to there, because that’s actually good for all of us.

And one other thing I’ll just mention as a policy point is, even under the law as it is—and I would say we need to update the immigration laws so that there’s more legal paths to citizenship for folks. But even with the laws that we have, making sure people have lawyers, they have some basic due process before they’re facing deportation, means many more people access the asylum laws, other forms of relief under current immigration law, which means it keeps people and families together, it keeps people in jobs.

My organization, the Vera Institute of Justice, we run a national program where we’re helping folks who are facing deportation have access to counsel, and literally people are 10 times more likely to win their case and be able to stay in the country, stay with their families, be in their jobs and in their communities, than if they have to go through deportation proceedings without a lawyer. And there’s no right to a lawyer in those proceedings. And that’s a really big problem for keeping families and communities together.

JJ: Just finally, what would you be looking for in a healthy public conversation about the changes we need to get from where we’re at to where we could be, and maybe who would be in that conversation that isn’t being heard from so much now?

IR: Too often, the conversation about immigration is dominated by politicians who are looking to score cheap political points. And if you listen to their rhetoric, they don’t have a single solution. Mass deportation is not a solution. Building a wall is not a solution.

New York Times (9/30/24)

And you know who actually has, and maybe they’re unlikely players in this, but folks who actually have very clear solutions for how we have a real and thoughtful conversation about immigration, that’s business owners and chambers of commerce. And, again, I made the point earlier that economists are like, “If we just shut down immigration, if we deport everybody, our economy will collapse.” Nobody understands that better than businesses and business owners, and they’re actually a really important voice in this conversation that often gets overlooked.

Just to go back to Springfield, Ohio, that we talked about, you actually saw the local chamber of commerce, and a number of different business owners, go out and speak publicly on the record, on the nighttime news and the newspaper and city council hearings, to say, “We need our immigrant workers and family members and community members, because they’re a vital part of our economy.”

So I actually think that’s a missing voice in this conversation that could help to bring the poles together, because the right likes business. I think the left can live with business, if business is coming at the issues in the right way. And I think there’s an opportunity to really actually bring people together, and have a more reasoned, thoughtful conversation about what the path forward is.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, and the director of Vera Action. Find their work online at Vera.org. Thank you so much, Insha Rahman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

IR: Thanks for having me, Janine.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

 

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UC Press (2024)

This week on CounterSpin: For many people and for media, the idea of “racial discrimination in housing” invokes an image of individual landlords refusing to rent or sell homes to Black and brown people. But that understanding is so incomplete as to be harmful. A new book doesn’t just illuminate the thicket of effects of systemic racism as it affects where people live; it reframes the understanding of the role of housing—connecting housing injustice with health inequities and wealth disparities, as well as lifting up work that connects those “mutually constitutive” elements of what the author calls an “unjust, destructive and even deadly racial order.”

George Lipsitz is research professor emeritus of Black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He’s author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and How Racism Takes Place, among other titles. He joins us to talk about his new book: The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the port strike.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Newsweek (9/27/24)

This week on CounterSpin: “How Hurricane Helene Could Impact Florida’s Home Insurance Crisis” was a recent Newsweek headline, on a story with a source saying smaller insurers were “especially in danger.” A layperson might wonder why events we pay insurance for should present a crisis for the industry we pay it to. The unceasing effects of climate disruption will only throw that question into more relief.

Writer and historian Derek Seidman joins us to help understand what’s happening and how folks are resisting.

Vera Institute (3/21/24)

Also on the show: If it comes to issues that many unaffected people are told to care strongly about, immigration from the southern border is high on the list. But how seriously should we attend to a public conversation where believing that your Haitian neighbors want to eat your pets is not a bar to entry? We’ll talk about building a humane dialog on immigration and asylum policy with Insha Rahman,  vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice and the director of Vera Action.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at media coverage of the TikTok ban.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Al Jazeera (9/20/24)

This week on CounterSpin: On September 17, thousands of handheld pagers exploded simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria. The next day, it was hundreds of walkie-talkies—part of an Israeli attack, intended for Hezbollah, that Israel’s defense minister called “the start of a new phase in the war.” Media dutifully reported the emerging toll of dead and wounded, including many civilians, including children. Harder to capture is the life-altering impact of such a terror attack on those it doesn’t kill.

As every day brings news of new carnage, US citizens have a duty not to look away, given our government’s critical role in arming Israel and ignoring its crimes, and in misleading us about what they know and intend. Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and journalism professor at New York University, and former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday. He joins us to talk about the latest events and media response.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Rashida Tlaib, banned books and deportation.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

The Brainwashing of My Dad (2016)

This week on CounterSpin: Springfield, Ohio, schools are facing bomb threats because some people believe that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating dogs and cats. According to candidates for the country’s highest offices, and the KKK flyers showing up around town, this means that these legal immigrants should be pushed out of the country—or, no doubt, in the minds of inspired vigilantes, much worse.

We spoke with filmmaker, activist and author Jen Senko in April 2023. The Brainwashing of My Dad—Jen Senko’s film and the book based on it—are an effort to engage the effects of that yelling, punching down, reactionary media. We’ll hear our conversation with her this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of Donald Trump’s threat to democracy.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

New York Times (9/10/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate US news media continue to report things like Israel’s recent strike on the Gaza Strip that killed at least 19 people in an area designated a “refuge” for Palestinians, and to include warnings of a possible wider war in the region—but there’s little sense of urgency, of something horrible happening that US citizens could have a role in preventing. We’ll talk about that with media critic, activist and teacher Gregory Shupak.

Fox 5 Atlanta (9/12/24)

Also on the show: US corporate media have a similar “another day, another tragedy” outlook on gun violence. It happens, we’re told, but all reporters need to do is quote people saying it’s bad yet oddly unavoidable, and they’re done. We’ll hear from Robert Spitzer, a historian of gun regulation and gun rights, about some spurious reasons behind the impasse on gun violence.

That studied lack of urgent concern about human life—is that journalism? Why do the press corps need a constitutional amendment to protect their ability to speak if all they’re going to say is, “oh well”?

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

CEPR (8/26/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate economic news can be so abstract that it’s disinforming even when it’s true. The big idea is that there’s something called “the US economy” that can be doing well or poorly, which obscures the reality that we are differently situated, and good news for the stock market, say, may mean nothing, or worse, for me. A people-centered press corps would spell out the meaning of economic “indicators,” not just in terms of their impact on different communities, but in relation to where we want to go as a society that has yet to address deep historical and structural harms.

A new report on the current state of the Black economy takes up these questions. We’ll hear from its co-authors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies; and Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed Inside Climate News‘ Victoria St. Martin about suing Big Oil for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: A lot of us have started seeing local weather forecasts with numbers unfamiliar to us for this time of year. As reporters, you could treat that as, “Oh, isn’t that curious? How are folks on the street dealing with this? Are sales of sunscreen going up?” Or, as a reporter, you can seriously engage the predicted, disastrous effects of fossil fuel production as predicted and disastrous—not, though, in terms of what, in other contexts, we would call criminal.

So what does it look like when business as usual is called out as an actual crime? Our next guest is reporting on an important case in a county in Oregon.

Veteran journalist and educator Victoria St. Martin covers health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Victoria St. Martin.

Victoria St. Martin: Thank you so much. I’m so honored to be here.

Inside Climate News (7/8/24)

JJ: So what happened in summer 2021 in northwest Oregon, such that it became the subject of scientific study? What happened there? What were the harms?

VSM: The county called this a “heat dome disaster,” but basically there was a heat dome over three days in June of ’21 that recorded highs of 108°, 112°, 116°  Fahrenheit. During that time, 69 people died from heat stroke, and most of them were in their homes.

Typically, in this part of Oregon, they have very gentle summers. The highs top out at about 81°. But this was unprecedented.

And one of the attorneys that is working with the county says this was not an act of God. This was not caused by God, but caused by climate change.

JJ: And that’s exactly the point. Oftentimes, folks might be surprised to hear, but environmental impacts were legitimately, legally written off, if you will, as acts of God. This is just nature, this is just what’s happening. So this is actually something new.

VSM: Yes. The attorney that I was speaking about, his name’s Jeffrey B. Simon; he is a lawyer for the county. He talks about this idea of how, no, this is not an act of God. This catastrophe was caused by “several of the world’s largest energy companies playing God with the lives of innocent and vulnerable people, by selling as much oil and gas as they could.”

JJ: What is a heat dome, just for folks who might not know?

VSM: Let’s see, how would I describe it? I would call it the atmosphere creating an intense umbrella of heat, and especially in areas where they don’t typically see this type of heat, like northwest Oregon. We’ve had heat domes this summer already, all across the nation, in places that typically don’t have this type of high heat.

JJ: So it’s a thing we all need to get familiar with. If you don’t know what it means today, you need to figure it out for tomorrow.

VSM: Yeah, some scientists, they say it’s like the atmosphere traps hot air, and, yeah, I said an umbrella, but like a lid or a cap being put on a bottle, and trapping that hot air for days like it did in northwest Oregon.

JJ: We’ve had issues with news media who want to separate the stories. It’s not that they don’t cover things, it’s that they don’t connect dots. They separate a story from: Here was a heat emergency, in this particular case, and it was horrible, and people suffered from it. And then on another page, or on another day, they’ll have a story about fossil fuel companies lobbyists influencing laws. But part of the problem with news media is they don’t connect these things.

And so I wonder, as a person who, besides being a journalist, a person who thinks about journalism, where are the gaps or the omissions or the missing dots that you think that media could be doing on this could-not-be-more-important story of climate disruption?

Victoria St. Martin: “To connect the dots of the health harms and the climate disasters that are happening, we need to do more.”

VSM: Yes. One of my editors says that covering climate, it’s one of the greatest stories of the century, right, the greatest story of our lifetime, that we are covering. And I think one thing that we did well, journalism-wise, in the past 10 or so years, is we’ve pushed this idea that journalists have to be multidimensional, that they have to know how to edit photo and video and create a graphic and write a story.

But what I think was lost in that, and what is important here and what is missing in these heat dome stories, these stories that are very, very plainly, as you can see, climate change stories, but what is missing here is journalists aren’t necessarily trained to be multidimensional in subject matter.

And while there are environmental desks growing in newsrooms throughout the nation, newsrooms aren’t allowing the journalists interdisciplinary roles, to be able to cover a weather event and talk about climate. And we need to do more of that.  I think in order to connect those dots, to connect the dots of the health harms and the climate disasters that are happening, we need to do more of that.

I love how last summer, I think I really saw it come to a head, because the Canadian wildfires came to the East Coast and turned the skies orange in New York. And it was this story you could not ignore anymore. And it forced newsrooms to really start talking about wildfires, and is it safe to breathe the air? And what is the air pollution from a wildfire, and what causes wildfires? I think we need to do more of that.

While I don’t want climate disasters like wildfires to continue to happen, I do want journalists to think on their toes, think on their feet, think multidimensional, and be able to tell stories in a full and nuanced way, because we are not servicing our readers, our viewers, our listeners, if we aren’t. Our viewers, our listeners and our readers are here to get the full story, and we need to give them the full story and the full picture.

JJ: And just finally, in terms of journalistic framework, what I think is so interesting with the Multnomah County story is we’re moving the actions of fossil fuel companies into the category of crime. You knew this was going to cause harm, and you still did it, and it caused harm, and that’s a crime. And I feel like that’s, for journalism, for media, that’s a framework shift. Lobbying is a story, and legislative influence is a story. And then crime is a whole different story, and a whole other page. But if we’re talking about actions that cause people to die, that cause people to be harmed, well, then, a lot of things that fossil fuels companies are doing are crimes, and that’s what’s paradigm-breaking with this Multnomah County story.

VSM: I think also what’s different here is the attorneys reaching out once the county filed suit, once the attorneys filed suit, letting us know what’s happening, making sure that the story is amplified and gets out there. I think I appreciate it always, as a journalist, when there’s an open dialogue, and that I’m able to share the story with readers, viewers and listeners, because I had access to information, I had access to the lawsuit.

I think, what is that saying? When a tree falls in the forest….  I’m so thankful that somebody called me up and said, “Hey, this is what’s happening.” So I think everybody does their part, and I think in this case, it was a moment of allowing journalists to be a part of that process, and to be able to see behind the curtain and see what’s actually happening. Sometimes law can be…

JJ: Opaque.

VSM: …slow and boring and monotonous, and I think, just like anything, like science…. But I think when you allow journalists to have a front-row seat, it helps to tell the story.

JJ: Absolutely.

Well, any final thoughts in terms of what you would like folks to take away from this piece that you wrote about the effort to call fossil fuel companies out for the harms that they’re causing? Any tips for other journalists who might be looking at the same story?

VSM: I think one thing I constantly thought about when I was reporting this story, and something I did not see, is there’s a great database looking at lawsuits that have been filed by states and counties and cities that are seeking damages from oil and gas companies for the harms caused by climate change.

Again, there are about three dozen lawsuits out there right now, but this is one of the only lawsuits that is focused on a heat dome. And so this is what makes that case unique. This is what sets this case apart from the rest. And, for me, that was important to report.

So I’m thankful that you got to read it, and that others have gotten to read it, and I hope more people read about it. I think that was key here, and that was something I did not see before.  There are other lawsuits, but this one, a lot of law experts think, could really change the game here, because it’s focusing on a specific disaster, and how this county is going to pay for the costs that they’ve incurred from the effects of the heat dome.

I think for journalists, when we’re reporting on these things, think of ways to get ahead of the pack, think of what makes the story unique, what sets the story apart from other weather event stories, or other climate change stories, and how to really help paint a picture about how important this story is.

Sixty-nine people died over the course of three days. That is huge, and it is something that, for me, needed to be at the top of the story. The fact that this was one of the only cases that looked at heat dome disasters, that was something that needed to be at the top of the story for me. And I hope to keep reporting on this, so I can’t wait to see what happens next.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with journalist Victoria St. Martin. You can find her work on this and other stories at InsideClimateNews.org. Victoria St. Martin, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

VSM: Thank you so much.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

This week on CounterSpin: One of many things wrong with corporate news media is the way they hammer home the idea that the current system is the only system. If you don’t see yourself and your interests reflected in either of the two dominant parties, the problem is you. Part of the value of independent media is that the people they listen to give us new questions to ask. For example: How do we acknowledge the fact that many people’s opinions are shaped by messages that are created and paid for by folks who work hard to hide their identity and their interests? If we’re in an open debate about what’s best for all of us, why can’t we see who pays you? We’ll talk about “dark money” with Steve Macek. He’s professor and chair of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois. His recent piece, “Dark Money Uncovered,” appeared on TheProgressive.org.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Phil Donahue.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed ExxonKnews‘ Emily Sanders about criminalizing pipeline protests for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

FAIR.org (11/22/16)

Janine Jackson: We have not forgotten the years of protest by the people of Standing Rock in resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. The cause could not have been more fundamental. The news and images were dramatic, and the support was global and cross-community.

Fossil fuel makers, who would like to keep making money from the destruction of the planet’s capacity for life, along with their ally enablers in law and law enforcement, want nothing like that to ever happen again, and certainly not for you to see it and take inspiration.

Pursuant to that are new efforts reported by our guest.

Emily Sanders is senior reporter for ExxonKnews, a project of the Center for Climate Integrity. This story was co-published with the Lever. She joins us now by phone from Queens. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Emily Sanders.

Emily Sanders: Hi. Thanks so much for having me again.

JJ We’re talking, to start, about congressional actions. What is the context behind this new rulemaking authorization process that you’re writing about, and how did laws around pipeline protest get into this conversation?

HuffPost (8/26/21)

ES: Congress is currently working to reauthorize the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, which would set the agency’s funding and mandates for safety rulemaking on pipelines over the next few years. And that’s at the same time as the agency sets out to make new rules for carbon dioxide pipelines.

And both these processes are especially crucial right now, as the oil and gas industry plans to build out tens of thousands of additional miles of pipeline for carbon capture projects. And CO2 is an asphyxiant. It can travel long distances, it can shut down vehicles, and sicken, suffocate or even kill people and wildlife.

So these pipelines can be incredibly dangerous if and when they leak, as was the case in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020, when a Denbury pipeline, now owned by ExxonMobil, ruptured and stalled emergency vehicles, sent nearly 50 people to the hospital with reportedly zombie-like symptoms.

So, after that, and now in the wake of yet another leak in Sulphur, Louisiana, earlier this year, advocates and community members have really been pushing the agency to take a hard look at these pipelines, and provide more transparent information to communities and first responders, who are often just underfunded, or volunteer fire departments tasked with dealing with these leaks at the last minute. And they’re asking the agency to implement real rules and oversight for the companies that, in these cases of leaks, were not appropriately monitoring their sites.

So back in April, I reported on how the oil industry was lobbying to limit the scope of those rules, and dictate its own safety standards, so that it can build out CO2 pipeline infrastructure as quickly as possible, since it stands to benefit from huge tax incentives for CCS passed under the Biden administration.

Emily Sanders: “This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.”

And what I found, as I dug further into those lobbying records, is that oil companies and their trade groups are now trying to pressure lawmakers to use this PHMSA reauthorization process to push through measures that could further criminalize pipeline protests at the federal level.

The federal penalty for damaging or destroying pipelines is already a felony charge of up to 20 years in prison. But in hearing testimony that I found, and policy briefs posted online, oil industry trade group executives were basically pushing lawmakers to expand the definition of so-called “attacks” on pipelines that can be punished under felony charges to include vague language like “disruptions of service” or “attacks on construction sites.”

And that could implicate a much broader set of activities that are used to protest fossil fuel infrastructure. So something like “disruption of service,” or interfering at a construction site, that could implicate anything from planting corn in the path of a pipeline construction, to a march, or a sit-in at a site. And it’s really hard to say what that actually means, which is why it’s so concerning.

And we’re now already seeing this language show up in committee bills. So the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s draft reauthorization bill, which was one of two committee bills being negotiated before the legislation goes to the Senate, would add impairing the operation of pipelines, damaging or destroying such a facility under construction, and even attempting or conspiring to do so as felony activities punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

So this is something industry lobby groups have tried before, back in 2019, to use this reauthorization process towards this purpose. They say it’s about preventing damage or destruction of pipelines that could create a harmful situation for communities on the ground. But, again, that’s already a felony under federal law. This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.

JJ: Well, you’ve hit all the points, but let me just draw some out, because the perversity here—it’s not irony—this is coming at the center of legislative work about rules for industry due to devastating harms, like breaches in a carbon dioxide pipeline, things that have actively harmed the community.

So in the process of legislating rules around that, fossil fuel makers have said, “Oh, well, while we’re talking about safety of pipelines, let’s also wiggle in this idea that protesters might be endangering pipelines.”

And then here’s where it gets to peak irony, the idea that protesters might cause harm to human beings by protesting pipelines, when the context is we’re talking about the harm that these pipelines themselves have caused. I mean, it’s kind of off the chart.

ES: Exactly. And this is as these same companies are continuing to invest in more and more fossil fuel infrastructure, while every scientific body is telling us that we have to do the opposite to avoid cataclysmic climate impacts. So they’re really using this growing pushback against their own operations to take this opportunity to silence that opposition.

JJ: And then, of course, the vagueness of the language, which you point to in the piece, that is part of it, that you’re not supposed to quite understand, well, what counts as “protest,” what counts as “impairing the operation” of the pipeline. It’s very much suppressive of free speech and action.

Extra! (4/13)

ES: Exactly. There’s precedent for this, as you alluded to in your opening; this is part of a larger push to pass laws criminalizing protest of fossil fuel infrastructure since the protest against Keystone XL and Dakota Access, which brought together enormous coalitions of people that cross cultural and political boundaries to oppose those pipelines.

And much of the legislation we’ve seen since then, which has been lobbied for by companies like Exxon and Marathon, Koch and Enbridge—much of that legislation was primarily based on a model bill crafted by the oil- and gas-funded American Legislative and Exchange Council, or ALEC, which made it a felony to trespass on the industry’s so-called critical infrastructure.

And those critical infrastructure bills use a lot of the same, very vague types of language to describe trespass, which can make it incredibly dangerous, not just for protesters, many of whom are Indigenous people and farmers and other landowners just trying to protect their land and water rights, but also journalists and the press, who go to report on these protests on the ground. And, again, it’s just especially concerning when the cost to the planet and people’s safety are so high.

JJ: I just want to ask, finally, it’s kind of open-ended, but I mean, it’s just not plausible to think that people are going to stop resisting or stop protesting or stop speaking out against the harms climate disruption is inflicting, that are evident much more every single day. And I just wonder—obviously, these fossil fuel companies are hoping that news media will use their age-old frames about criminality and law-breaking to push people back into the idea of, “Oh, it’s OK to want what you want”—like, not to see the capacity for human life on the planet destroyed—”it’s OK for you to want that, but just do it through proper channels. Don’t do it by protesting, because now that’s illegal in a new way.” And I just wonder, media have to do something different, big media have to do something different to actually rise to this occasion.

ExxonKnews (6/17/24)

ES: I think it’s all about talking to the actual people on the ground who are doing the protesting. Like you said, it’s so easy to paint people as criminals, when the definition of a criminal is defined or written by the same industry trying to protect the product that those people are protesting. So I think it’s just so important to get their perspective, find out why they’re there. A lot of the time these are regular people, not just activists who are there because of the climate, but also just people who are there trying to protect their water, protect their land and their homes and livelihoods, or journalists who are trying to report on what’s going on. And I just think getting their voice heard from a source is the most important thing.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Emily Sanders, senior reporter for ExxonKnews. You can find the piece, “Big Oil Wants to Increase Federal Criminal Penalties for Pipeline Protests,” online at ExxonKnews.org, as well as LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Emily Sanders, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ES: Thanks again for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

ExxonKnews (6/17/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption is outpacing many scientists’ understanding of it, and it’s undeniably driving many harms we are facing: extreme heat, extreme cold, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes. News media are giving up pretending that these extreme weather events are just weird, and not provably driven by the continued use of fossil fuels. But fossil fuel companies are among the most powerful players in terms of telling lawmakers how to make the laws they want to see, public interest be damned. So the crickets you’re hearing about efforts to eviscerate the right to protest the impacts of climate disruption? That’s all intentional.  We’ll hear about what you are very definitely not supposed to hear from reporter Emily Sanders from ExxonKnews.

Inside Climate News (7/8/24)

Also and related: Not everyone is lying down and accepting that, OK, we’re going to die from a climate crisis that is avoidable, but since companies don’t want to talk about it, let’s not. A county in Oregon is saying, deaths from high heat are in fact directly connected to conscious corporate decision-making, and we’ll address it that way. We’ll hear about that potentially emblematic story from Victoria St. Martin, longtime journalist and journalism educator, now reporting on health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News.

Employing the law to silence dissent on life or death concerns, or using the law to engage those concerns head on—that’s this week on CounterSpin!

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Shayana Kadidal about the Guantánamo plea deal for the August 9, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

AP (via PBS, 8/2/24)

Janine Jackson: Years of negotiations led to the recently announced pretrial agreements for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants accused of directing the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that would’ve meant their pleading guilty to charges, including murder and conspiracy, and receiving lifelong prison sentences.

As AP put it:

The torture that the defendants underwent while in CIA custody has slowed the cases and left the prospect of full trials and verdicts still uncertain, in part because of the inadmissibility of evidence linked to the torture.

But at the 11th hour, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stepped in to override the agreements, claiming to do so in the name of victim’s families, the US military and the American public, who, he says, “deserve the opportunity” to see a military commission trial play out.

Here to help us understand what happened and what happens now is Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Welcome to CounterSpin, Shayana Kadidal.

Shayana Kadidal: Thanks for having me.

JJ: Media attention to Guantánamo Bay, and what happens to those held there, has been spotty and, in recent years, largely absent. So listeners may have forgotten that men were held there for years without charge, much less conviction. Some have been approved for transfer, meaning they’ve been determined not to be a threat, yet have remained there. And, of course, it’s undisputed that many have been tortured and abused at this extralegal military prison.

So these plea agreements came with all of that context, all of that history, and they weren’t seen as a victory for anyone; those aren’t the terms to think in. But they were seen as a meaningful and overdue step, yes?

Shayana Kadidal: “They’ve taken the most significant criminal trial of the century, the 9/11 case, and put it into a system where everything is being invented from scratch.” (image: TRT World, 3/3/17)

SK: Yeah, I think any plea bargain is a compromise, right? I’ve seen these described as kind of the least-worst solution, given the history of these cases. And, basically, they’ve been presented as trading off the death penalty in exchange for a guilty plea.

But I think the thing listeners need to really know is that prosecutors, the military prosecutors, really badly wanted this deal done, because they think, like everyone else who is observing these cases, they recognize that the death penalty was never, as a practical matter, going to happen in these cases, for a bunch of different reasons, right?

First of all, the military commission system is incredibly slow. They’ve taken the most significant criminal trial of the century, the 9/11 case, and put it into a system where everything is being invented from scratch. So things that have been well-established for two centuries in the federal criminal system have to be reasoned out from the beginning in the military commissions.

And then, on top of that, there are these issues around the use of torture evidence that have really slowed things down. That’s not to say that torture evidence is the main problem standing in the way of a conviction. There is plenty of evidence against these particular defendants that isn’t contaminated by torture, including interviews they did with media before they were ever captured.

But the bottom line is that this process is going along really slowly. The defendants are in their mid-50s, the two older ones, already.

And then there are a bunch of other questions. Even if they got a guilty verdict, then there would be a sentencing phase, where a military jury gets to decide between death and probably life imprisonment. And we know that the CIA is very reluctant to produce its own officials as witnesses in that kind of phase or proceedings. They basically refused to do it in another case that we had involving a plea bargain. So that may end up being something that stands in the way of a death penalty verdict.

Then, on top of that, there’s a way that military juries will do what some civilian juries have done, and react to the torture at Guantánamo with clemency, that they’ll want to punish the government by issuing a life sentence instead of death.

So, bottom line, the prosecutors really wanted this deal badly.

JJ: That might surprise some folks, I think, on the face of it. And then, on the other hand, some people might imagine that any kind of plea deal would be opposed by the families and friends of those killed, the nearly 3,000 people killed on September 11, but that wasn’t really the case, was it?

Fox News (8/2/24)

SK: Yeah, it’s a very mixed bag, I must say. The family members—there are a small group of family members who are very heavily engaged in the details of these cases, including the politics of it, and they fall all over the spectrum, just like regular Americans. We’ve got 9/11 families who have been out there saying that they were strongly in favor of this deal, because it offered some semblance of finality, and because part of the deal, apparently, was the ability to pose questions, I believe, in writing to the defendants, and have them answered within 45 days. And those questions would go to, not just things like their motivations for carrying out the attacks, but also some detailed things that we don’t have a lot of information about, even from their interrogation, things like the financing of the attacks, right? So the families wanted answers to these questions, and this is really the only way they were going to be able to get it.

On the other side, you’ve got folks who have been on Fox News a lot, talking about how the commissions are much tougher than the civilian criminal system—which, really, I think at this point in history, we can say is definitively not true—but have been very actively organized in favor of keeping these cases in the military system, right?

I suppose it’s probably worth noting that if these cases had been brought to the civilian system, they probably would’ve been over a long, long time ago. Eric Holder had made the decision in 2009 to bring these cases to New York and try them in front of a civilian jury. If that had been the case, as he said last week, these guys would’ve been a memory. The cases would’ve gone to trial in a year or two, the appeals would’ve been over in a year or two, and they probably would’ve received pretty severe sentences, maybe even death, and the cases would have been over. As Holder said, it was “political hacks” who stopped the cases from being brought to New York, where they would’ve been disposed of much more quickly than in the commissions.

PBS (11/10/15)

But, again, that’s political water under the bridge. Congress has banned bringing men to the United States for trial from Guantánamo. So, again, this is kind of the least-worst solution, plea bargain in the military trial system.

JJ: When people hear that Defense Secretary Austin revoked the pretrial agreements because there ought to be trials, I think a lot of people might be misled about what is meant by a “trial” in this situation, a military commission trial. What should we know about that?

SK: The first thing is that it’s going to take years to get there. These charges originally were brought in February 2008, and so it’s been, what is that, 15, 16 years of pretrial motions, and they’re nowhere close to being done with that. Then once you get to a trial, there are going to be all sorts of issues about, again, the CIA producing witnesses, to what they did to these men, not just in the merit phase, but also in the sentencing phase.

And then, also, where it took place. We have a lot of sensitive diplomatic concerns around where the secret prisons the CIA held these men in were located, right? So that may stand in the way of actually conducting a trial.

And after that, we’ve got appeals, into a military appeal system, and then from there into the appellate courts and the federal system, and then to the Supreme Court.

So, again, the oldest of these defendants is 56 years old. They are de facto already serving life sentences, if you think that these cases are never going to come to a resolution after a trial and appeals. And so, again, it made perfect sense for the prosecutors to pursue this.

New York Times (8/4/24)

The real question is, what was Lloyd Austin thinking? He had to have been aware that these negotiations were underway and were pretty close to being resolved. The New York Times even reported over the weekend that DoD officials knew about the progress of the negotiations. So why the reversal? I think there’s no explanation other than politics and the election.

JJ: That’s what I was going to ask, because Austin says he’s long believed that military trials were the only way forward. So that rings a little weird, given the timing.

SK: When you see people like Tom Cotton coming out and saying that this is Biden being soft on the terrorists with the plea bargain deal, you can understand why it might’ve been everybody’s preferred timing on the political end for this to happen after November.

But what comes next looks like it’s going to be legal challenges. There are very narrow circumstances where an assigned pretrial agreement like this, a plea bargain agreement, can be withdrawn. So I think the defendants are first probably going to challenge whether or not what Austin tried to do in voiding the agreements was even effective, whether he has power to void them.

And on top of that, military prosecutors are supposed to be relatively independent of the people above them in the chain of command. In the federal civilian criminal system, everybody knows that President Trump can relieve the attorney general if he doesn’t like some prosecution that he’s undertaking. But there are some norms about how the AG is supposed to be relatively independent in making judgment calls, right?

Well, on the military system, those aren’t norms; they’re actually written into the two major statutes, the Military Commissions Act and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So when you have civilian officials like Lloyd Austin, political appointee, trying to pull the strings on a prosecutor’s judgment, it’s a serious problem, and dismissal of the case is the usual remedy for that. So, again, something that could add years and years more delay to a system that wasn’t exactly moving along quickly.

JJ: All right, then; we’ll end on that note.

We’ve been speaking with Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. You can track their work on Guantánamo cases and others at CCRJustice.org. Shayana Kadidal, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SK: Thanks for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Janine Jackson interviewed the American Economic Liberties Project’s Lee Hepner about the Google monopoly for the August 9, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Slate (8/6/24)

Janine Jackson: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” So ruled district court Judge Amit Mehta in United States v. Google, being called a “landmark” antitrust case that will affect not just Google, but potentially all tech giants in the current landscape. The point was, Google pays billions every year to companies like Apple and Samsung that distribute search engines, to ensure that it’s the only search engine anyone would see, by making sure it’s the preset default on devices.

If your supermarket only had one brand of milk on the shelf, even if it had some others in the back, you would recognize that as unfair. But for many of us, the internet is still a mystery miracle, and we’re not used to bringing the same sorts of questions to bear. If it did nothing else, this ruling changes that.

So what happened? Lee Hepner is an antitrust lawyer and senior legal counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project. He joins us now by phone; welcome to CounterSpin, Lee Hepner.

Lee Hepner: Thanks so much for having me.

JJ: The Sherman Antitrust Act sounds like a history lesson. It’s from 1890, but it’s living, meaningful law. How or why exactly did the judge determine that Google was in violation of it?

LH: You said it right there. This law that dates back to the 19th century, that used to be used against railroad barons, has now been applied to this new tech industry. It’s really proof of the durability of one of the foundational laws for ensuring fair markets and competition across our economy.

And Google is ripe for being addressed by this law. The judge found that Google was essentially without competition in the market for search engines, and truth be told, I mean, 80% of overall searches are conducted via Google; on mobile devices, that’s 95%. And Google is able to profit extraordinarily off of not having competition, and by blocking out rivals who threatened to create new and innovative products that actually benefit consumers and move this technology forward. So that was really at the crux of the judge’s decision in this case.

National Post (8/9/24)

JJ: So it isn’t just that Google is the default search engine; it’s that they are doing things, including paying money, to maintain that, and to prevent other companies from being that.

LH: That’s exactly right, and the judge really eloquently, in his opinion, describes how Google maintains its power through that circular system. It pays for exclusive agreements across Apple, Samsung, Mozilla, other device manufacturers, and by virtue of those exclusive agreements, it achieves scale that it then sells to advertisers for extraordinary revenue, and then it reinvests that revenue back at the beginning, in securing those exclusive agreements. So you really see how this is a self-reinforcing monopoly that Google has been able to maintain through anti-competitive conduct.

JJ: And we know it’s not by accident, if anyone were to believe that. There are internal messages, I just read in a piece by Matt Stoller, where Google is saying, “Inertia is the path of least resistance.” They know what they’re doing.

LH: Oh, absolutely. It’s a clear monopoly strategy. And, just to be clear, those are the communications that we were able to see. Google was also criticized by this judge for deleting untold number of records that were relevant to the litigation. And that was a big part of this case, too: what Google didn’t say, because they were training employees to move communications to secret servers and auto-deleted chats. So even in the absence of a smoking gun, there was a very clear sense that Google was intentionally perpetuating an illegal scheme to maintain its market power.

JJ: It’s worth noting that this isn’t just a meta-issue, or inconsequential. There is an impact of the quality of searches. Not everyone’s just looking for “Thai restaurant near me.” It matters if searches are not the best that they could be, yeah?

Lee Hepner: “Google has maintained its monopoly position, not necessarily by having a superior product, but by blocking out rivals.”

LH: Yeah. We’ve all heard stories about Google search becoming worse over time. It’s harder to find that thing that you were looking for, because they’re not necessarily investing in the rank of search results, or they’re prioritizing paid ads that look like organic search results. So Google has maintained its monopoly position, not necessarily by having a superior product, but by blocking out rivals. And that’s just the core characteristic of monopolies that is as old as time, and we see across a lot of industries.

JJ: Yeah, I was just going to say, Google is not being punished for building a better mousetrap. And news media, I think, play a role here for the anthropomorphizing of, especially, tech companies as scrappy, as game changers: They’re not AT&T.  We’ve been trained to think, these guys–and they are guys–break the rules, but on behalf of all of us. And that’s not what’s happening here.

LH: Sure, and it’s just a radically different industry than it was, say, in the early 2000s, after we broke up the last big monopoly, Microsoft. That was a quarter century ago since the last decision on a case brought by the government against a big monopoly.

And then we were seeing that kind of scrappy innovation. Google was a startup at that point, and I think that right there really lends to the potential of this case, and of this decision, to unlock a new era of innovation, where small tech innovators are able to have a chance at entering the market, and creating something new and cool that maybe we can’t imagine today, but wouldn’t be possible without breaking up Google‘s hold on this industry.

JJ: I was going to ask you, what do you think happens now? We can’t necessarily predict it, but in terms of the case, what do you think will happen as we look to the remedy stage of things?

LH: Just to be clear, this is a case that was bifurcated. We just concluded the liability phase, and now the judge has to decide what to do about it. And what’s good about this stage is that the court has broad latitude, and must be deferential to the government’s request for remedies after that really difficult finding of liability.

And there’s a lot of tools on the table. Certainly we can expect an end to some of the exclusive agreements that have tied up this market for Google. But we also might see structural remedies that deprive Google of some of its ill-gotten gains, and divest certain business lines, or allow other search engines to have access to properties like Google‘s web indexer, or even their large language model.

The future of search is really in artificial intelligence, and the ability of chatbots to really revolutionize how people get information off the internet. And so I think that we’re going to be really clued in to how this court crafts remedies that ensure that that next era of AI innovation is not being controlled by Google, or any other dominant player in this market.

The Nation (11/10/23)

JJ: And then, finally, do you see knock-on effects? It does seem like a paradigm shift in terms of antitrust and the way we think about big companies. Do you see knock-on effects on, not just tech companies, but other big businesses?

LH: I do. And I think that when you have a case of this magnitude, there is going to be a bit of a culture shift. So if I’m a big law firm advising my clients, I’m going to tell them, “Hey, if you are entering into these types of exclusive agreements that are intended to maintain your market power, maybe you shouldn’t do that anymore, because the court is looking at these agreements with fresh eyes, and they’re not passing muster.”

I also think this decision builds momentum behind some of the other cases that the government has brought. There are parallels to the case against Live Nation, which also uses Ticketmaster to enter into exclusive agreements with venues. There are other parallels to the case against Apple or Amazon, which also lock consumers into a single-product ecosystem. So there’s going to be knock-on effects outside of this case, outside of this industry, and also for other pending cases that we’re watching closely.

JJ: All right then; we’ll end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. They’re online at EconomicLiberties.us. Thank you so much, Lee Hepner, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LH: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

This week on CounterSpin: You don’t hear the phrase “free market capitalism” so much anymore, but the idea still tacitly undergirds much of what you do hear about why products and services are the way they are. We all know about corruption and cronyism, but we still accept that the company that “wins,” that “corners the market,” does so because people simply prefer what they sell. The anti-monopoly ruling against Google challenges that idea of how things work. We’ll hear about it from Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.

Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay

Also on the show: A recent news report offered the familiar construction that the attacks of September 11, 2001, “plunged the US” into decades of war. Of course that’s not right; choices were made, unpopular choices, about how to respond to the attacks. Choices were made to not bring assailants to trial for the crime, but instead to detain people without charge and hold them indefinitely in a prison designed to be outside US law. None of it was inevitable. Now the Defense secretary has stepped in to overturn plea agreements that, while they wouldn’t have closed Guantánamo, would’ve brought some measure of closure to the cases against the alleged directors of the September 11 attacks. We’ll get an update from Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a look at recent press coverage of Sinclair Broadcasting.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

This week on CounterSpin: Dog whistles are supposed to be silent except for those they’re intended to reach. But as listeners know, the right wing has gotten much more overt and loud and yes, weird, about their intention to defeat the prospect of multiracial democracy. We unpack the latest weaponized trope—the “DEI hire”—with anti-racism educator and author Tim Wise.

(photo: Elvert Barnes)

Also on the show: Trying to help unhoused people and trying to make them invisible are different things. Keith McHenry, cofounder of Food Not Bombs, joins us to talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling that gave state authorities more power to dismantle the encampments in which many people live, with no guarantee that they will land anywhere more safe.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2024)

This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump said, on Fox & Friends in 2020, that if voting access were expanded, meaning easing of barriers to voting for disabled people, poor people, rural people, working people…. If voting were made easier, Trump said, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Why wouldn’t news media label that stance anti-democratic, and shelve any so-called good-faith partisan debate? And call for the multiracial democracy we need? And illuminate the history that shows why we aren’t there yet?

Ari Berman has been tracking voter rights, and why “one person, one vote” is not the thing to memorize as a definition of US democracy, for many years now. He’s national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and his new book is called Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. We’ll talk about that with him today.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Electronic Intifada (7/15/24)

This week on CounterSpin: In March, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”

But as Greg Shupak writes, even as evidence accumulates, denial is becoming socially and journalistically acceptable. Soon after the UN special rapporteur on the right to food asserted that Israel’s forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza was genocidal, Jonah Goldberg took to the LA Times to assure readers that Israel’s actions do not “amount to genocide,” and such claims are based on “Soviet propaganda” and Holocaust denial.

Years from now, we’ll hear about how everyone saw the nightmare and everyone opposed it. But history is now, and the world is watching. We’ll talk about real-time efforts to address the Israeli war on Palestinians with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the shooting of Donald Trump.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

CNN (6/6/24)

This week on CounterSpin: At some point, we will get tired of hearing news reports on “record heat”—because the “records” will continue to be broken,  and “heat” will have stopped meaning what it once may have meant. Media play a role in moving us from questions about where to buy a good air conditioner to what stands in the way of addressing a public health catastrophe? One obstacle is utility companies. In February of last year, we spoke with Shelby Green at Energy and Policy Institute and Selah Goodson Bell at the Center for Biological Diversity, about their research on the topic.

In These Times (12/27/17)

Also on the show: Some listeners will know that veteran labor organizer and author Jane McAlevey died recently. The tributes are coming in, but I have little doubt in saying that McAlevey would care less for attention to her life in particular than to those of people she worked for, inside and outside of unions. CounterSpin spoke with her in 2018, when the #metoo campaign was coming to fore. We’ll hear some of that conversation this week on the show.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

University of California Press (2024)

This week on CounterSpin: The power of the algorithm is ever clearer in our lives, even if we don’t understand it. You might see it as deciding what you see on social media sites, where maybe they get it wrong: You don’t actually want to see a lot of horror movies, or buy an air fryer; you just clicked on that once.

But algorithms don’t only just guess at what you might like to buy; sometimes they’re determining whether you get a job, or keep it. Some 40 million people in the US use online platforms to find work, to find livelihood. The algorithms these platforms use create an environment where organizations enact rules for workers’ behavior, reward and sanction them based on that, but never allow workers to see these accountancies that make their lives unpredictable, much less work with them to develop measurements that would be meaningful.

Hatim Rahman has been working on this question; he’s assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. And he’s author of a new book about it: Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, forthcoming in August from University of California Press.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of climate disruption.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Common Dreams (6/10/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Headlined “The Cash Monster Was Insatiable,” a 2022 New York Times piece reported insurance companies gaming Medicare Advantage, presented as a “low-cost” alternative to traditional Medicare. One company pressed doctors to add additional illnesses to the records of patients they hadn’t seen for weeks: Dig up enough new diagnoses, and you could win a bottle of champagne. Some companies cherry-picked healthier seniors for enrollment with cynical tricks like locating their offices up flights of stairs.

Such maneuvers don’t lead to good health outcomes, but they serve the real goal: netting private insurers more money. There is now new research on the problem, and the response. We hear from David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and co-author of this new analysis of Medicare Advantage.

(CC photo: Jim Naureckas)

Also on the show: You may get the impression from media that marijuana is legal everywhere now, that it’s moved from blight to business, if you will. It’s not as simple as that, and many people harmed by decades of criminalization have yet to see any benefit from decriminalization. Tauhid Chappell has tracked the issue for years now; he teaches the country’s first graduate-level course on equity movements in the cannabis industry, at Thomas Jefferson University. We’ll get an update from him.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Julian Assange.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Chicago Sun-Times (4/8/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump told a Las Vegas crowd earlier this month that, if elected, the “first thing” he would do would be to end the IRS practice of taxing tips as part of workers’ regular income. “For those hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy,” he said.  Labor advocates were quick to call it out as unserious pandering, particularly in the light of hostility toward efforts to provide those workers a livable basic wage.

Unfortunately, Trump can count on a general haziness in the public mind on the impact of “tipped wages,” more helpfully labeled subminimum wages. And that’s partly due to a corporate press corps who, through the decades-long fight on the issue, always give pride of place to the industry narrative that, as a Chicago Sun-Times headline said, “Getting Rid of Tipped Wages in Illinois Would Be the Final Blow to Many Restaurants.” And often lead with customers, like one cited in a recent piece in Bon Appetit, who proudly states that he only tips 10%, half today’s norm, because it’s what he’s always done, and “if servers want more, then they should put the same effort in that I took to earn that money.”

As president of the group One Fair Wage, Saru Jayaraman is a leading mythbuster on the history, practice and impact of tipping. CounterSpin talked with her in November 2015. We’ll hear that conversation again today, when much of what she shares is still widely unexplored and misunderstood.

Transcript: ‘A Woman’s Ability to Pay Her Bills Should Not Be Dependent on the Whims of Customers’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of child labor.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Rolling Stone (6/10/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote dozens of pages justifying his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, stating the Constitution does not confer the right to determine whether or when to give birth. None of those pages mention his intention to make the United States “a place of godliness,” or his belief that there can be no compromise on such concerns, because “one side or the other is going to win.” Yet those are thoughts Alito freely expressed with a woman he thought was just a stranger at a public event. So: Will elite news media now suggest we just go back to considering the Supreme Court a neutral body, deserving of life terms because they’re above the fray of politics? How long until we see news media take on this pretend naivete, and how much it’s costing us? Jim Naureckas is editor of FAIR.org and the newsletter Extra!. We talk to him about that.

Institute for Local Self-Reliance (2/28/24)

Also on the show: The news that “the economy” is doing great on paper doesn’t square with the tone-deaf messaging from food companies about mysteriously stubborn high prices: Kellogg’s says, sure, cereal’s weirdly expensive, so why not eat it for dinner! Chipotle’s head honcho says you are not, in fact, getting a smaller portion for the same price—but, you know, if you are, just nod your head a certain way. None of this indicates a media universe that takes seriously the widespread struggle to meet basic needs. Which may explain the failure to find the story in the upsurge in dollar stores, supposedly filling a void for low-income people, but actually just another avenue for ripping them off. We talk about that with Kennedy Smith from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Yahoo (5/31/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Surprising no one, Donald Trump and his sycophants responded to his 34-count conviction on charges of lying in business records by claiming that the trial was “rigged,” the judge and jury corrupt, that it was somehow Joe Biden’s doing, and “you know who else was persecuted? Jesus Christ.” Trump publicly calling the judge a “devil,” and Bible-thumping House Speaker Mike Johnson and others showing up at the courthouse in Trump cosplay, were just some of the irregular, shall we say, elements of this trial. It is a moment to examine the right-wing media that have fomented this scary nonsense, but also to look to reporting from the so-called “mainstream” to go beyond the “some say, others differ” pablum we often see. We’ll talk with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, about press response to the trial and the verdict.

New York Times (11/21/16)

Also on the show: For some people the violent police crackdown on peaceful college students protesting their schools’ investments in Israel’s war on Palestinians has been eye-opening. For others, it’s one more example of the employment of law enforcement to brutally enforce corporate power. The fight led by Indigenous women against the Dakota Access pipeline is not long enough ago to have been forgotten. We’ll hear a bit from an August 2017 interview with North Dakota organizer Kandi Mossett.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

The Lever (5/23/24)

This week on CounterSpin: In 2023, the California legislature passed legislation that said that big corporations doing business in the state have to tell the public, investors, how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. It’s knowable information, and people have a right to know it, right? The same way restaurants here in New York City have to tell potential customers how they did on their last health inspection; you can eat there or not, but at least you’re making an informed decision.

But no! This past January, the US Chamber of Commerce and a bunch of other industry groups challenged those laws, because, they said, making companies disclose the impact of their actions—in this case, their emissions—would force them to publicly express a “speculative, noncommercial, controversial and politically charged message.” That, they said, makes the laws a “pressure campaign” aimed at shaping company behavior.

Unfortunately, some courts are indulging this bizarre notion that regulation should be illegal, essentially, because it forces companies to say stuff they’d rather not say. Fortunately, other courts are calling this self-serving nonsense self-serving nonsense. But it’s not just a legal matter; public information, our right to know, is also on the line here, so we should know what’s going on.

Katherine Li addresses this issue in a recent piece for the Lever, where she is an editorial fellow. We hear from her this week on CounterSpin.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Law enforcement at UCLA looks on as student peace protesters are attacked by a right-wing mob (CNN, 5/16/24).

This week on CounterSpin: As an historic catastrophe, the deep and myriad impacts of Israel’s assault on Palestinians will not be fully understood until years from now, if then. That only adds urgency to present-day resistance to the collateral assault—on the ability to witness, to record and to remember. And of course to protest. The violent, state-sponsored attacks on college students and faculty across the country, who are standing in solidarity with Palestinians and opposed to colleges’ investment in the war and occupation, are showcasing many things—among them the abandonment by many educational institutions of their responsibility to protect not only students, but the space in which they can speak and learn freely.

When we spoke with historian Ellen Schrecker in 2017, she noted that the power of the movement associated with Joseph McCarthy was not the man himself, but the “collaboration of the employers, of the mainstream media, of the legal system, you name it, to go along with this anti-Communist purge.” And while many people feel comforted that McCarthy the man was eventually censured by the Senate, the truth is “the American political spectrum narrowed [and] a whole bunch of ideas and causes kind of disappeared from American political discourse and American political life.”

We hear again today from historian and author Ellen Schrecker, co-editor of the new book The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, from Beacon Press.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Amazon.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

(image: Voting Booth)

This week on CounterSpin: You and I may know that the 2020 election was not stolen from Donald Trump through various mysterious sorts of skullduggery. That does not mean that we can whistle past the fact that many people who vote do believe that. Many of those people are activated in a way that goes beyond easily ignorable segments on OAN, and has meaning for November. Steven Rosenfeld reports on transparency, among other electoral issues, for Voting Booth.  We’ll hear from him about kinds of election interference we ignore at our peril.

(image: Brennan Center)

Also on the show: You and I may believe that democracy means, at its core, something like “one person, one vote.” That doesn’t mean we can whistle past the fact that many voting people do not believe that. Indeed, some elite media–designated smart people have determined: “Citizens United, what? It’s folks who give ten bucks to a candidate that are really messing up the system.” We’ll explore that notion with Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel for the Elections & Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

The post Steven Rosenfeld on Election Transparency, Ian Vandewalker on Small Donors appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

This week on CounterSpin: CNN’s Jake Tapper is mad about college students protesting their institutions’ and their government’s support for Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza—because they’re preventing him, by his account, from covering Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Tapper whined recently: “We’re covering these protests and covering free speech versus security on campus. This is taking room from my show that I would normally be spending covering what is going on in Gaza, or what is going on with the International Criminal Court.”

Tapper and CNN, we’re to understand, are powerless to decide what they cover, and incapable of understanding that the clear, core demand of students protesting is that government (and media) not just chat about, but act to change, US enabling of Israel’s genocidal assault.

(photo: Jim Naureckas)

“I don’t know that the protesters are, from a media perspective, accomplishing what they want to accomplish,” Tapper said. If you listen closely, you can hear him say, “We, as media, don’t want them to accomplish anything, except to be presented, as protestors have throughout US history, as a nuisance and an interference with grownup conversation. And we, as media, will use our actual power to sell that idea.”

People, in media and elsewhere, who are used to unequivocal US support for Israel’s actions, used to summarily reducing any criticism of Israel to antisemitism, even when it comes from Jewish people, are seeing the ground shift, and they’re shook. What happens now is critical—first for Palestinians and Israelis, of course, but also for the US press and their handlers, who are so used to driving the narrative they don’t know what to do except yell “shut up shut up shut up” and send in the cops. In the name of, you know, principled debate.

We talk about latest developments in Gaza with Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at protester/press relations, “outside agitators” and TikTok censorship.

The post Ahmad Abuznaid on Rafah Invasion appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Media 2070

We’re now seeing the impacts of the reality that corporate media, as well as corporate-funded universities, will always side with official power—as they present students sitting quietly in tents in protest of genocide as violent terrorists. But the fact is, we’ve been seeing it for decades, as corporate media spin narratives about people of color as both violent and lazy, and the socio-economic status quo as the best possible option, even as millions of people increasingly recognize that it means a terrible life for them.

Many people, at the same time, are deeply interested in how different media, telling different stories, can change our understanding of our past, our present and our future. Joseph Torres is currently senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press, and co-author with Juan Gonzalez of News for All the People. Writer, musician and communications strategist Collette Watson is with Black River Life. They both are part of the project Media 2070, which aims to highlight how media can serve as a lever for racial justice, and how that includes changing entrenched media narratives about Black people.

Their co-authored article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm,” appears in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (5/23).

The post Joseph Torres & Collette Watson on Media for Social Justice appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Columbia encampment (CC photo: Pamela Drew)

This week on CounterSpin: Lots of college students, it would appear, think that learning about the world means not just gaining knowledge, but acting on it. Yale students went on a hunger strike, students at Washington University in St. Louis disrupted admitted students day, students and faculty are expressing outrage at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (emphasis added) canceling their valedictorian’s commencement speech out of professed concerns for “safety.” A Vanderbilt student is on TikTok noting that their chancellor has run away from offers to engage them, despite his claim to the New York Times that it’s protestors who are “not interested in dialogue”—and Columbia University students have set up an encampment seen around the world, holding steady as we record April 25, despite the college siccing the NYPD on them.

Campuses across the country—Rutgers, MIT, Ohio State, Boston University, Emerson, Tufts, and on and on—are erupting in protest over their institutions’ material support for Israel’s war on Palestinians, and for the companies making the weapons. And the colleges’ official responses are gutting the notion that elite higher education entails respect for the free expression of ideas. Students for Justice in Palestine is working with many of these students. We’ll hear from Sam from National SJP about unfolding events.

(CC photo: Edenpictures)

Also on the show: App-based companies, including Uber and DoorDash, are adding new service fees, and telling customers they have to, because of new rules calling on them to improve wages and conditions for workers. The rather transparent hope is that, with a lift from lazy media, happy to typey-type about the worry of more expensive coffee, folks will get mad and blame those greedy…bicycle deliverers. We asked Sally Dworak-Fisher, senior staff attorney at National Employment Law Project, to break that story down.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the TikTok ban.

The post Sam on Students for Justice in Palestine, Sally Dworak-Fisher on Delivery Workers appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Time (4/14/24)

This week on CounterSpin: The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuse of Iraqi detainees during the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia, with Al-Shimari v. CACI. Since the case was first filed in 2008, military contractor CACI has pushed some 20 times to have it dismissed.

Time magazine unwittingly told the tale with the recent headline: “Abu Ghraib Military Contractor Trial Set to Start 20 Years after Shocking Images of Abuse.” That’s the thing, people had been reporting the horrific treatment of Iraqi detainees at the Baghdad-area prison and elsewhere, but it was only when those photos were released—photos the Defense Department tried hard to suppress—that it was so undeniable it had to be acknowledged.

But still: When Australian TV later broadcast new unseen images, the Washington Post officially sighed that they weren’t worth running because they did not depict “previously unknown” abuse. Post executive editor Len Downie had a different answer, saying in an online chat that the images were “so shocking and in such bad taste, especially the extensive nudity, that they are not publishable in our newspaper.” Because that what officially sanctioned torture is, above all, right? Distasteful.

We got a reading on the case last year from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Transcript: ‘CACI Aided and Abetted the Torture of Our Clients’

Prometheus Books (2024)

Also on the show: Historians tell us that the Cold War is over, but the framing persists in news media that love a simple good guy vs. bad guy story, even as who the good and the bad guys are shifts over time. Telling history through actual human beings makes it harder to come up with slam-dunk answers, but can raise questions that are ultimately more useful for those seeking a peaceful planet. A new book provides a sort of case study; it’s about Ted Hall, who, as a young man, shared nuclear secrets from Los Alamos with the then–Soviet Union. Veteran investigative journalist Dave Lindorff has reported for numerous outlets and is author of Marketplace Medicine and This Can’t Be Happening, among other titles. We talked with him about his latest, Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World, which is out now from Prometheus Books.

The post Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Lawsuit, Dave Lindorff on <i>Spy for No Country</i> appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Washington Post (3/25/24)

This week on CounterSpin: US corporate media’s story about Haiti is familiar. Haiti, according to various recent reports, has “whipped from one calamity to another.” The country is a “cataclysm of hunger and terror,” “teetering on the brink of collapse,” “spiraling deeper into chaos” or else “descending into gang-fueled anarchistic chaos.” It’s “become a dangerously rudderless country.” According to one Florida paper’s editorial: “Haiti’s unrest” is now “becoming our problem,” as Floridians and the US “struggle to help people in Haiti, although history suggests there are no answers.”

Or, well, there is one answer: The Washington Post made space for a former ambassador to explain that 20 years ago in Haiti, “the worst outcomes were avoided through decisive American intervention. Today’s crisis might require it as well.”

At this point, the Austin American-Statesman’s “Haiti Cannibalism Claims Unfounded” might pass for refreshing.

AP had a piece that actually talked to Haitians amid what is indeed a deep and deepening crisis. A grandmother told the wire service, “We’re living day-by-day and hoping that something will change.”

We talk about what has to change—including, importantly, Western media presentations that ignore or erase even recent history—with Chris Bernadel, from the Black Alliance for Peace‘s Haiti/Americas Team and Haitian grassroots group Moleghaf.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Elon Musk vs. Brazil.

The post Chris Bernadel on Haiti appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Popular Information (4/4/24)

This week on CounterSpin:  In the final quarter of 2023, after-tax corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion. As reported by Popular Information, corporate profit margins were at a level not seen since the 1950s, as increases in prices have outpaced increases in costs—which Capitalism 101 says shouldn’t happen, because competing companies are supposed to step in with lower prices and grab some market share, right? What’s different now? Well, abject greed, abetted by policy and whistled past by the press corps. As one economist put it, “If people are paying $3 for a dozen eggs last week, they’ll pay $3 this week. And firms take advantage of that.” One reason we have details on “greedflation” is the work of the Groundwork Collaborative. We spoke with their economist and managing director of policy and research, Rakeen Mabud, a few months back. We hear some of that conversation again this week.

Transcript: ‘It’s Important to Focus on Big Companies Using the Cover of Inflation to Jack Up Prices’

Photo: Elvert Barnes

Also on the show: While much else is happening, we can’t lose sight of the ongoing assault on reproductive freedom, in other words basic human rights, being given tailwind by the Supreme Court. Advocates warned that overturning Roe v. Wade would not be the end, and it wasn’t. The court is now entertaining challenge to the legality of the abortion medication mifepristone, used safely and effectively for decades, including invoking the 1873 Comstock Act, about sending “obscene materials” through the mail. The Washington Post has described it as a “confusing legal battle,” but CounterSpin got clarity from the Guttmacher Institute’s Rachel K. Jones last year. We hear that this week as well.

Transcript: ‘People Who Don’t Support Abortion Ignore the Science and the Safety’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at NBC’s unhiring of Ronna McDaniel.

The post Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation, Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s Phyllis Bennis about the Gaza ceasefire resolution for the March 29, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Reuters (3/22/24)

Janine Jackson: Reuters reported on March 22 that the United Nations Security Council had rejected a resolution, proposed by the US, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and a hostage deal between the Israeli government and Hamas. Russia and China vetoed the measure, readers were told, while Algeria also voted no and Guyana abstained on a measure that “called for an immediate and sustained ceasefire lasting roughly six weeks that would protect civilians and allow for the delivery of humanitarian assistance.”

US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, cited in AP, said that the US had been “working on a hostage deal for months” that would call for a “six-week period of calm,” from which, she said, “we could then take the time and the steps to build a more enduring peace.” Well, what does that wording mean, and what do UN resolutions generally mean, if politicians and news media interpret them variously?

So helping us to sift through these attempts to respond to the violence of Israel’s ongoing war on Palestinians in Gaza is Phyllis Bennis; she’s senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and international advisor to Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as author of, among other titles, Understanding the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict: A Primer.

She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.

Phyllis Bennis: Great to be with you, Janine.

JJ: So the US introduced a resolution at the UN, nominally calling for a ceasefire, but also vetoed another resolution calling for a ceasefire, because, Thomas-Greenfield said, it would interfere with negotiations around freeing Israeli hostages. And then there’s this effort to portray the current decision as non-binding. It’s very confusing, especially for laypeople. Does the US want a real ceasefire or not? What’s happening here?

Al Jazeera (5/19/21)

PB: You raise all the right questions, Janine. The real issue has to do with the US view of the United Nations, which is that it’s annoying at best and a threat to US domination at worst, from Washington’s vantage point. So that earlier veto by Russia and China and opposition by Algeria, the abstention by Guyana, of the US resolution came after a history, a long history that goes back years, in fact, of the US vetoing calls for a ceasefire in situations when Israel is attacking, mostly Gaza, on occasion Lebanon, and the Security Council calls for a ceasefire, and the US says, “No, we don’t need a ceasefire yet.” Always meaning, “We haven’t killed enough people yet.” So there’s a long history of that. We don’t really have time to go into that.

But the US did it twice in a row on the Gaza question, where there were proposals for a ceasefire that the US vetoed, which would’ve passed. The US refused. Then the US comes up with its own resolution, which was a very, very sneaky one, because that quote that you read about what it says, those words were indeed in the resolution, but it did not call for them. The resolution did not call for an immediate ceasefire. There was a recognition by the Security Council, according to this resolution, that a ceasefire would be a good idea, and then went on to say and  therefore the Security Council should go on cheerleading—they didn’t use that word—but saying should support the US-controlled negotiations that are already underway in Qatar.

So it was a fake resolution. That’s why others did not like it, and weren’t willing to accept it as if it were an actual call. In international law, which is very complicated in a lot of ways, but certain parts of it are pretty clear. One of the parts that’s pretty clear, Article 25 of the UN Charter, says that all decisions, all resolutions, passed by the Security Council are international law. They’re all binding. That’s what the real world of international law says.

So when a resolution is passed, it needs to say the Security Council demands a ceasefire, period, full stop. If it talks about how the Security Council recognizes that such and such would be a good idea, that’s nothing to be binding on, right? That’s just a statement of what we think is nice.

Common Dreams (3/25/24)

So that’s what was distinctive, the new resolution that was passed just a few days ago that the United States was willing to allow to be passed, 14-to-0, with one abstention—the US abstained rather than vetoing it; that was a great step forward. And that one, crucially, did call for an immediate ceasefire, and it also called for release of all the hostages and compliance with international law in the treatment of all those detained by all sides, which is a clear reference to the Palestinian prisoners that Israel is holding. And it also, crucially, demanded lifting all barriers to the massive amount of humanitarian assistance that’s desperately needed as famine is moving across Gaza. So that was a huge shift.

At the same time, the US had weakened it in many ways. It removed the word “permanent” from the description of the ceasefire it was demanding, and said, “We just want a ‘lasting’ ceasefire”; nobody knows what that means. And, crucially, the other weakness was that the ceasefire is only called for for two weeks. It said that the ceasefire should last for the month of Ramadan, but it was passed two weeks into Ramadan, so there’s only about two weeks left, so that’s way too short. And there’s other limitations as well. But it was a very significant shift in the US position, and it really speaks to how the Biden administration is hearing, if not yet fully responding to, but feeling like they have to answer, the demands of this rising movement that is so powerful across the United States and now globally, saying we need a ceasefire now, and we need access for massive amounts of humanitarian aid, without any of the barriers that Israel is putting up.

Those things are desperately needed, and what we’re looking at now is a question of how that movement is rising, what the impact could be on the elections, that’s one of the biggest pressure points for the Biden administration. If they want to win this election, they have to be seeing that the only way to do it is to change their policy on what has been, up until now, unconditional support for Israel.

With all the language about criticisms of Netanyahu, and the massive amount of press  about how there’s this big divide between Biden and Netanyahu, between the US and Israel, that’s true only on the level of talking. On the level of acting, the US hasn’t changed a thing. $4 billion a year as a starting point of military aid; all the additional weapons that Israel wants, Israel gets.

Al Jazeera (3/6/24)

There’s just been no shift in the reality that the US is arming and financing a genocide, and as long as that’s underway, there’s people across this country that are mobilizing this “uncommitted” campaign, in places like Michigan and Minnesota, where those votes really matter, and it’s spreading. It’s about to happen in Wisconsin.

And at the end of the day, this isn’t just about the election, this is about what has to happen to stop this genocide. And I think what has to happen is that there has to be a way of convincing Joe Biden personally, not just others in his administration.

And right now, the pressure is rising, and the issue is going to be, how much longer can he keep up the political credibility, when he has people in his own administration resigning in protest of his policies? He has the staff of his own Biden/Harris campaign committee coming out with a public letter saying, “Mr. President, we can’t do our job. We can’t get you reelected with this policy.”

You have the White House interns. This is my personal favorite of all these protests. These are the most ambitious kids in the country. They all want to be president, right? And yet they’re willing to come out and say, “Mr. President, we are not leaders today, but we aspire to lead in the future, and we can’t do it with this kind of a model, when there is a genocide underway.”

So the US can do all it wants to say that this is a non-binding resolution, but that’s just not true. They can go out of their way to say that the South African initiative at the International Court of Justice, that led to a finding that Israel is plausibly committing genocide right now, or is moving towards a genocide, that that extraordinary brief prepared by the South African legal team somehow is “meritless.” They can claim that, but the rest of the world isn’t buying it, and increasingly US voters aren’t buying it.

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, I do see also just a lot of regular folks reading things like US Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood calling for a “lengthy pause to this conflict” and saying, “Well, we’re not calling for a pause to the conflict. We’re calling for a resolution. We’re calling for a way forward.” And then you see with concerns about a wider war, we have folks like John Kirby, White House National Security Council, on the Today Show saying, “Well, we don’t want a wider war in the region, but we got to do what we have to do.”

This is terrifying, but I also feel like folks are seeing through it. And so maybe let’s end on that note, that folks are figuring out that this politics-speak, they’re seeing it for what it is—and, more importantly, for what it isn’t.

Phyllis Bennis: “What we need is a real ceasefire. That doesn’t mean two weeks to release all the hostages, and then we go back to war.”

PB: That’s exactly right, Janine, and I think the good news, if there is any in this extraordinarily devastating time of real genocide in real time in front of our eyes on an hourly basis, the good news is exactly as you say: More and more people in this country and globally are seeing through those false claims.

It’s a false claim that the UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire is not binding. It is binding. It’s a false claim that the South African charges at the International Court of Justice were meritless. They had all the merit in the world.

All of these claims are designed to distract us. It’s all a distraction. The change in language is a distraction.

What we need is a real ceasefire. That doesn’t mean two weeks to release all the hostages, and then we go back to war. That’s not the point here. The point is to stop the fighting, stop the slaughter, stop the denial of food and water and medicine, which is deliberately causing massive starvation on a level that all of the experts in international humanitarian crises admit is the worst they have ever seen—not in terms of ultimate numbers, because the population in Gaza is not very big, but in terms of the percentage of people. Never have we seen 100% of a population facing extreme hunger, with 55% facing immediate famine. This has never happened before, as long as the international humanitarian organizations have been tracking famines. It’s shocking.

And the fact that it is going on while we watch, with weapons we provide, that we pay for with our tax money, is finally reaching everybody in this country. More and more people are saying no, not in our name, not with our tax money, not anymore.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Phyllis Bennis. You can find her recent work on UN resolutions on Gaza on CommonDreams.org, as well as ips-dc.org.

Phyllis Bennis, we have to end it here for today, but of course we’ll stay in conversation. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PB: Thank you, Janine.

The post ‘This Is About What Has to Happen to Stop This Genocide’:  <br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Phyllis Bennis on Gaza ceasefire resolution appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

BBC (3/28/24)

This week on CounterSpin: A senior UN human rights official told the BBC that there is a “plausible” case that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, a war crime. Meanwhile, US citizens struggle to make sense of White House policy that seems to call for getting aid to Palestinians while pursuing a course of action that makes that aid necessary, if insufficient.

Phyllis Bennis is senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, an international advisor with Jewish Voice for Peace and a longtime UN-watcher. She joins us with thoughts on the evolving situation.

American Prospect (10/31/19)

Also on the show: As reporter Alex Sammon outlined five years ago in the American Prospect, the Boeing scandal is an exemplar of the corporate crisis of our age. Putting resources that should’ve been put into safety into shareholder dividends and stock buybacks, selling warning indicators that alert pilots to problems with flight-control software as optional extras, and outsourcing engineering to coders in India making $9 an hour—these weren’t accidents; they were choices, made consciously, over time. So why are media so excited about Boeing’s CEO stepping down, as though his “taking one for the team” means changing the playbook? We hear from Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.

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This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

KXAS (3/19/24)

This week on CounterSpin: 2023 was the warmest year on record. The World Meteorological Organization announced records once again broken, “in some cases smashed” (their words), for greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea-level rise, Antarctic sea ice and glacier retreat.

Climate disruption is the prime mover of a cascade of interrelated crises. At the same time, we’re told that basic journalism says that when it comes to problems that people need solved, yet somehow aren’t solved, rule No. 1 is “follow the money.” Yet even as elite media talk about the climate crisis they still…can’t… quite…connect images of floods or fires to the triumphant shareholder meetings of the fossil fuel companies.

Narrating the nightmare is not enough. We’ll talk about the latest research on climate coverage with Evlondo Cooper, senior writer at Media Matters.

Also on the show: Part of what FAIR’s been saying since our start in 1986—when it was a fringe idea, that meant you were either alarmist or benighted or both—is that there is an inescapable conflict between media as a business and journalism as a public service. For a while, it was mainly about “fear and favor”—the ways corporate owners and sponsors influence the content of coverage.  It’s more bare-knuckled now: Mass layoffs and takeovers force us to see how what you may think of as your local newspaper is really just an “asset” in a megacorporation’s portfolio, and will be treated that way—with zero evidence that a source of vital news and information is any different from a soap factory.

Rick Goldsmith’s new film is called Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. We’ll hear from him about the film and the change it hopes to part of.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent coverage of Israel’s flour massacre.

The post Evlondo Cooper on Climate Coverage, Rick Goldsmith on Stripped for Parts appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

(image: Repair.org)

This week on CounterSpin: About this time seven years ago, John Deere was arguing, with a straight face, that farmers shouldn’t really “own” their tractors, because if they had access to the software involved, they might pirate Taylor Swift music. Things have changed since then, though industry still gets up and goes to court to say that even though you bought a tractor or a washing machine or a cellphone, it’s not really “yours,” in the sense that you can’t fix it if it breaks. Even if you know how, even if you, frankly, can’t afford to buy a new one. More and more people, including lawmakers, are thinking that’s some anti-consumer, and anti-environment, nonsense. We get an update from Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association.

Juan Orlando Hernández
(photo: Alan SantosPR)

Also on the show: “Former President of Honduras Convicted in US of Aiding Drug Traffickers” is the current headline. You’d never guess from the reporting that Juan Orlando Hernández was a US ally, that the US supported the 2009 coup that went a long way toward creating Honduras’ current political landscape. Instead, you’ll read US Attorney Jacob Gutwillig telling the jury that a corrupt Hernández “paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States.” Because Americans, you see, don’t want to use cocaine; they’re forced to by the wiles and witchery of Honduran kingpins—and, thankfully, one of them has been brought to justice by the US’s moral, as reflected in its judicial, superiority. That’s the narrative you get from a press corps uninterested in anything other than a rose-colored depiction of the US role in geopolitical history. We hear more from Suyapa Portillo Villeda, advocate, organizer and associate professor of Chicana/o–Latina/o transnational studies at Pitzer College, as well as author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras.

The post Gay Gordon-Byrne on Right to Repair, Suyapa Portillo Villeda on Honduran Ex-President Conviction appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Vox (3/4/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Among the multitude of harms that could rain on this country should Donald Trump become president again, he could order the Department of Justice to drop any charges against him stemming from his fomenting of an insurrection aimed at overturning by violence the results of the 2020 election. Not to put too fine a point on it, Trump could declare himself above the law—and that’s just been enabled by the Supreme Court, which put off until April the legal case wherein Trump declares himself immune to criminal prosecution. The Court can move quickly; they hopped right to the decision that Trump can’t be removed from presidential ballots in the states. But this, we’re to understand, will take, huh, maybe until after the election, to mull. Vox Court-watcher Ian Millhiser says he tries to reserve his “this is an exceptionally alarming decision” voice, but this occasion calls for it. We hear from him this week.

Also on the show: Corporate news media have an anti-elder narrative that’s as stupid as it is cruel. “Keep up or you’re in the way,” the line goes, “if you aren’t working 40 to 60 hours a week, you’re a societal drain.” It’s a weird position, erasing and marginalizing elderly people, given that the elderly are a sizable portion of the population, and a community we all get to join if we’re lucky. Alfredo Lopez is a longtime organizer and activist, and a founder of the new group Radical Elders. We talk with him about the space the group seeks to fill.

The post Ian Millhiser on Supreme Court Trump Protection, Alfredo Lopez on Radical Elders appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

This week on CounterSpin: Years ago when media critics called attention to ways corporate media’s profit-driven nature negatively impacts the news, lots of people would say, “But what about the internet?” Nowadays, folks seem to see more clearly that constraints on a news outlet’s content have little to do with whether it’s on paper or online, but on who owns it, who resources it, to whom is it accountable. You’ll see the phrase “crisis of journalism” newly circulating these days, but one thing hasn’t changed: If we don’t ask different questions about what we need from journalism, we will arrive at the same old unsatisfactory responses.

Victor Pickard is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, and author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society, from Oxford University Press. We talk to him about the crisis of journalism and its future.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of criminalizing journalism, gag rules and diversity data.

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This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Reuters (2/20/24)

This week on CounterSpin: International human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber told Electronic Intifada recently that the International Court of Justice hearings on the legality of Israel’s 56-year occupation of Palestinian land are

the largest case in history—more than 50 countries are taking part in this, and the US is virtually alone…in defending the legality of Israel’s occupation. Most states are affirming its illegality and cataloging Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other gross violations of international law.

Every day the US falls more out of step with the world in its support for Israel’s violent assault on Gaza. As Mokhiber said, US vetoes of ceasefires in the UN Security Council, after which thousands more were killed, mean the US is directly responsible for those deaths: “Complicity is a crime.” Many in the US press seem divorced from the idea of US responsibility, and somehow we’re seeing more of the opinions of random TV actors than of groups on the ground in Palestine, and international human rights and legal bodies.

We get some update on this unfolding nightmare from author and activist Gregory Shupak, from the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and from Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

The post Gregory Shupak and Trita Parsi on Gaza Assault appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

CEPR (1/31/24)

This week on CounterSpin: There’s an announcement on the New York City subway where a voice chirps: “Attention, everyone! There are 150 accessible subway stations!” One can imagine an alternate world where we’d hear, “Only 150 of New York City’s 472 subway stations are accessible, and that’s a problem!”

But people with disabilities are meant to be grateful, excited even, for whatever access or accommodation is made available for them to participate in daily life. There’s often an implied corollary suggestion that any violation of the rights of disabled people is an individual matter, to be fought over in the courts, rather than something to be acknowledged and addressed societally.

The overarching law we have, the Americans with Disabilities Act, is meant to be proactive; it is, the government website tells us, a law, “not a benefits program.” In reality, though, the ADA still meets resistance, confusion and various combinations thereof, 33 years after its passage. And news media, as a rule, don’t help.

The Supreme Court recently dismissed, but did not do away with, a case that gets at the heart of enforcement of civil rights laws for people with disabilities—though not them alone. Acheson v. Laufer is an under-the-radar case that, our guest says, is “part of a pattern of far-right reactionaries weaponizing the courts to dismantle labor protections, housing rights and health guidelines.”

Ariel Adelman is a disability rights advocate and policy analyst. Her piece, with Hayley Brown, appeared recently on CEPR.net, the website of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. She’ll tell us what’s going on and what’s at stake.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of the racist Charles Stuart murder hoax.

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This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed Groundwork Collaborative’s Rakeen Mabud about greedflation for the February 9, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: If you buy groceries, you know that prices are high. And if you read the paper, you’ve probably heard that prices are high because of, well, “inflation,” and “shocks to the supply chain,” and other language you understand, but don’t quite understand.

One article told me that

economists see pandemic-related spending meant to stabilize the economy as a factor, along with war-impacted supply chains and steps taken by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates

—all of which may be true, but still doesn’t really help me see why four sticks of butter now cost $8.

Not to mention that the same piece talks matter of factly about “upward pressure on wages,” which sounds like people who need to buy butter are getting paid more, but I’m pretty sure the language is telling me I’m supposed to be against it.

How do we interpret corporate news media’s coverage of prices? What aren’t they talking about?

Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Rakeen Mabud.

Rakeen Mabud: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be back.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1/19/24)

JJ: I want to say, the piece that I’m citing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette isn’t a bad piece. It’s just what passes for media explanation of what is a truly meaningful reality. People are really having trouble buying diapers, and buying food. And so to have journalists saying, “Well, it’s because of the blahdy blahdy blahdy blah that you couldn’t possibly understand”—the unclarity of it is galling to me, and it’s politically stultifying. I’m supposed to get mad at inflation, per se?

That’s the kind of informational void that Groundwork Collaborative’s work is intervening in. So let me just ask you to talk about what you find when you look into, for example, high grocery store prices right now.

RM: Yeah, this is a great question, and I love the fact that you’re focusing on the experiences of people, because that’s how we all experience the economy and, frankly, that’s how the economy is made, right, through our actions, through our demand, through our spending. And so it is really important to hone in on what’s going on to people on the ground, as we’re thinking about these big, amorphous concepts like inflation.

And the reality is, as you point out, prices are sky high for people around the country, and folks are really struggling. Grocery prices, obviously, are particularly worth digging into, because there’s a real salience of food prices in everybody’s lives. We all go to the grocery store on a weekly or maybe biweekly basis, and buy groceries to feed ourselves, and feed our families.

And my colleagues at the Groundwork Collaborative, Liz Pancotti, Bharat Ramamurti and Clara Wilson, recently authored a report that really digs into what’s going on with grocery prices. And what they find is that grocery price increases have outpaced overall inflation, and families are now paying 25% more for groceries than they were prior to this pandemic, compared to 19% of overall inflation. So there’s this gap between what folks are paying at the till, and what inflation would suggest.

And this is particularly hitting folks who are on the lower income end of the income distribution harder. In 2022, people in the bottom quintile of the income spectrum spent 25% of their income on groceries, while those in the highest quintile spent just under 3.5%.

And this is a trend that we see across the board with essentials. Because if something is essential, you have to buy it. If you earn less money, a bigger proportion of your income is going to go towards those essentials. And so that means that when you see inflation and, frankly, corporate profiteering, which I’ll get into in a second, showing up in spaces for essential goods, it’s always the people who are most vulnerable who are hit the hardest.

It’s wonderful that you’re really focusing in on groceries. And I think one thing to note, just to zoom out a little bit from grocery prices in particular, is that an underexplored topic still, I think, in the discussions around inflation is the role of corporate profit margins. Because the fact remains that corporate profit margins have remained high and even grown, even as labor costs have stabilized, input costs—the costs of things that are used to produce goods—have come down, and supply chain snarls have started to ease.

And in a different paper by two other of my colleagues, Lindsay Owens and Liz Pancotti, they find that from April to September of 2023, so that’s very recently, corporate profits drove 53% of inflation. When you compare that to the 40 years prior to the pandemic, profits drove just 11% of price growth.

There are a lot of explanations out there of what’s causing inflation, but it’s very important to focus on the role of big companies using the cover of inflation to jack up prices. And they continue to do that, even as their own costs are coming down.

JJ: And I want to say, you can illustrate that point with just data, as these works from Groundwork Collaborative do, but at the same time, you also have, as the kids say, receipts—in other words, earnings calls where CEOs are saying it out loud: Their situation in terms of supply chain, in terms of Covid and whatever, they’re using that as an opportunity to keep prices high.

Other Words (1/31/24)

RM: Yes, absolutely. So let’s talk about another essential good, which is diapers. And I think diapers are really a good example, because it illustrates what’s going on right now, and ties together the idea of corporate profiteering, but also this idea that, as scholars Isabella Weber and Evan Wasner put out there, about tacit collusion and implicit collusion. So let’s unpack that. What does that all mean?

So what they write about is that inflationary environments, when prices are rising across the board, it means that companies, especially those that are in a really concentrated market, can raise their prices, precisely because they know that their competitor is going to do the exact same thing. So if you are one of three big companies, and you know that your competitors are also going to raise prices, there’s no reason for you not to raise prices.

And that logic also applies in the reverse. So when costs are coming down, if you know that your competitors are going to keep their prices high, you’re also going to keep your prices high, which is I think why we’re seeing, even as input costs come down, prices are staying high, and people are still paying more than they should be, given the cost of input.

So diapers, right? Diapers, I think, is the perfect example for this. It’s a super, super concentrated market. Proctor & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark control about 70% of the domestic market, and diaper prices have increased by more than 30% since 2019, from about $16–$17 to nearly $22.

The main thing that goes into producing diapers is wood pulp. It’s also the main input into toilet paper, paper towels, basically paper products that we use around the house. The wholesale wood pulp prices really skyrocketed, by 87% between January 2021 and January 2023.

But in 2023, between January and December of 2023, [wood pulp] prices declined by 25%, but diaper prices have remained high. So what’s going on here?

And to your point, the executives at Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble are not hiding the ball. P&G CFO said on their October 2023 earnings call that high prices were a big driver of the reason that they could expand their profit margins, and that 33% of their profits in the previous quarter were driven by lower input costs. And during their July 2023 earnings call, the company predicted $800 million in windfall profits because of declining input costs.

Same thing on the other side, on Kimberly-Clark’s side; their CEO said in October that the company “finally saw inflection in the cost environment.” And he admitted that he believes the company has a lot of opportunity to “expand margins over time,” despite what they’re “doing on the revenue side and also on the cost side.” So despite large input cost decline, the CEO thinks that the company has priced appropriately, and didn’t anticipate a new price deflation.

So diapers, I think, is a really clear example of how these big corporations are exercising their corporate power in a moment where things are a little murky for consumers. We don’t know, necessarily; we don’t have all the data at our fingertips, or the time, frankly, to figure out: Is the box of diapers more expensive for sensible reasons or not? And these big companies are taking advantage of both the information asymmetry, and the particular inflationary environment we’re living in.

JJ: And you don’t have a choice. You’ve got to buy the diapers. You can try to puzzle out why it costs more than it cost a year ago, or six months ago, but you still have to buy them. And that’s the thing.

I want to draw you out on something, because I see articles—it’s not that media are not ever saying “greedflation,” or that they’re completely ignoring the idea that corporations might be keeping prices high to profit, although it’s still not shaping the dialogue in the way that you would hope. But I do see articles that put “corporate profiteering” in scare quotes, as if it’s not a real thing; it’s just an accusation. And I wonder, what do we call “profiteering,” and how does it differ from capitalism doing its capitalism thing?

Rakeen Mabud: “The truth of the matter is there are vested interests for folks to want to vilify workers, to want to vilify big public investments.”

RM: This is a question that I’ve gotten over the years, as we’ve done this work. It is not necessarily a bad thing for companies to be making a profit. That’s OK. Companies exist to make a profit. What we’re talking about here is really profits above and beyond what they should be making: excess profits, windfall profits, and companies making these profits on the backs of consumers.

The example that I always go back to is just the classic price-gouging example. If you are in the middle of a hurricane or a disaster relief situation, and you are a person who sells bottles of water, or gallon jugs of water—if you jack the prices up because you know that people are going to need that water, because there’s no safe tap water to drink, that’s price-gouging, and that is illegal.

And yet that happens across our economy all the time. And we’ve seen that in particular over the last couple of years, as we’ve experienced the pandemic and have gone through these series of crises. And yet we don’t point it out.

And I think part of the reason this idea is not taken seriously, again, there’s a couple of reasons. The first is that it doesn’t accord with the traditional story of where inflation comes from. The traditional story of where inflation comes from is, workers are super greedy, they’re asking for higher wages. And so we end up with higher wages, which push up prices, which force people to ask for higher wages. And you end up with what economists call a wage-price spiral.

The other factor in the traditional story about where inflation comes from is, too much public investment flooding the economy is just going to jack up prices.

And the reality of the situation is that wasn’t the case here. We have seen historic public investment, and inflation’s come down. We have seen a strong labor market. We haven’t had to put millions of people out of work in order to bring prices down.

And so the textbook story of how inflation works is not really holding water in the moment. It’s not according with literally the reality that we’re seeing in the data.

And the truth of the matter is there are vested interests for folks to want to vilify workers, to want to vilify big public investments, and to continue to perpetuate an environment where big corporations can hold power and hold money and earn windfall profits on the backs of consumers. So I think it’s really important to know that this is a narrative that’s new, and it’s a narrative that is challenging for the dominant stories about how inflation works.

Wall Street Journal (12/2/23)

But the reason it has made a toehold, and I think more than a toehold at this point—I mean, even the Wall Street Journal in December had a headline that said, “Outsize Profits Help Drive Inflation. Now Consumers Are Pushing Back.” The reason it’s gotten its feet on the ground is because of the experience of people across the economy, this is exactly how people are experiencing the economy, and it’s the truth of the matter.

And I think that is really what certainly my work is always trying to do, is let’s get to how people are experiencing the economy and speak to their concerns, because people know what’s up. You don’t need to tell them that big companies are exploiting them. They are very willing to believe it, because it’s how they’ve interacted with the economy for years.

JJ: I have to say, the idea that there’s an abstraction that I’m supposed to pay obeisance to, and it’s going to keep wages down and public investment down, but somehow I’m still supposed to be for it, is kind of strange to me, the idea that I’m supposed to be so opposed to inflation that I’m supposed to be against higher wages for workers, and I’m supposed to be against more public investment. It just shows how far we’ve gone in fealty to an abstraction, essentially, in terms of economic understanding. I find it very odd to have folks saying, “Oh, I don’t want upward pressure on wages, because somehow that’s going to be bad for me ultimately down the road.” It seems to me a kind of distortion of our understanding of the way an economy should work, and who it should serve.

RM: Right, I mean, we are the economy. That’s what we’re always saying at Groundwork, that we are the people, the regular people are the people who are the economy, and it’s our wellbeing that reflects whether the economy is doing well.

And I also think it’s important in conversations about inflation, I think; we pay attention to prices and cost of living and affordability in a moment of crisis. But the truth of the matter is that the high prices that people have been feeling in their household budget long predate this particular inflationary moment: the cost of childcare, the cost of healthcare, the cost of housing, the cost of education. All of these things go beyond what we’re experiencing in this particular moment. They have been burdens on people for decades.

And there are also structural factors that are perpetuating these burdens. So I think housing costs are a really good example. Housing costs are up about 21%, and we have this longstanding shortage of affordable and high-quality housing in this country. There have been instances, over the course of the last couple of years, where we’ve seen big home builders and landlords celebrating inflation as a way to restrict housing supply. Literally had a home builder say, “We could build a thousand more houses, but we’re not going to, because it’s going to help us restrict supply, and therefore jack up the prices of the homes we can build.” We’ve also seen landlords really celebrating inflation as a way to skim a little bit more off the top by raising rent a little bit higher.

So all of that is certainly happening, but we also need to pay attention to broader macroeconomic forces in perpetuating this housing crisis. So one of the best ways, kind of a no-brainer, of addressing a housing supply shortage is to build more houses. But the Federal Reserve, since we last spoke, has embarked on an interest rate–hiking rampage. What does that do? Sky-high interest rates crush new housing construction, because it stymies private investment, and it pushes potential buyers, because of high mortgage rates, back into the rental market, which pushes rents up.

So the Federal Reserve says, “We’re raising interest rates through this theory and this channel that we think works,” which, by the way doesn’t, because again, as I mentioned, we haven’t necessarily seen mass unemployment in order to bring down prices. But they’re saying, we’re trying to bring down prices, guys; we’re trying to bring down prices by raising interest rates. But really what they’re doing is making the problem worse, and they’re perpetuating this cost-of-living crisis that long predates the pandemic.

And so it’s really important, I think, to also call out big institutional actors, like Chair Powell, to lower rates immediately, given that it’s clear from the data that his rate hikes hadn’t had the intended effect, and are actually making the problem worse.

Groundwork Collaborative (2/24)

JJ: One of the latest reports from Groundwork is called “What’s Driving the Rise in Grocery Prices–and What the Government Can Do About It.” So let me ask you, finally, and it’s a lot, but what can government do about the problems that we’re talking about?

RM: I think, actually, we’re living in an exciting time when it comes to an expansiveness in the policy tools that folks are thinking about and using in order to bring down prices. We’re not in your 1970s inflationary world, where we’re just hoping that the Federal Reserve does its job and hoping for the best. They’ve sort of been discredited, and, again, time to bring down interest rates.

But we’ve seen President Biden and his administration really taking the issue of profiteering seriously. I mean, just last month, he said to any corporation that has not brought their prices back down, even as inflation has come down, even as supply chains have been rebuilt, it’s time to stop the price-gouging. To have that come from the president, to call out the big corporate actors who are taking advantage of people and lining their coffers, is remarkable.

And I think it’s not just words, right? The administration has taken some really early actions promoting competition in really concentrated markets—like meat packing, a sector that is really driving grocery-price inflation right now.

Agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are going hard after junk fees. Those are the sort of, when you check into a hotel, it says resort fee, this fee, that fee, and you never really know what you’re paying for. And the truth is, you’re just paying for these companies to get richer, right? So that in banking, overdraft fees, the CFPB has been going hard after junk fees.

The FTC and the DoJ are aggressively using their authority to crack down on the concentration that allows these companies to get away with jacking prices up on consumers.

And so I think what we need to see is a continuation of that. Look at anti-competitive mergers, especially throughout the food industry, but other industries where they’re producing essentials, to make sure that these environments that facilitate and breed both profiteering and tacit collusion are not allowed to be created.  Finalize regulations that improve fairness, competition and resiliency in supply chains.

And then the last policy idea here was—it feels a little bit unrelated, but it’s actually one and the same—we have a big opportunity to tackle the full problem of high prices coming up, because many of the provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the 2017 Trump tax cuts, are expiring at the end of 2025. And one of the best ways to tax excess profits is simply to raise the corporate tax rate. That’s it. It’s a pretty easy policy, and one that people understand and can get behind.

JJ: Thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Rakeen Mabud, chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative, online at GroundworkCollaborative.org. Thank you so much, Rakeen Mabud, for speaking with us this week on CounterSpin.

RM: Thank you so much for having me. It was such a pleasure.

The post ‘It’s Important to Focus on Big Companies Using the Cover of Inflation to Jack Up Prices’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Other Words (1/31/24)

This week on CounterSpin: CNN host Dana Bash asked a question in the Republican presidential debate (1/10/24) in Des Moines, Iowa:

The rate of inflation is down. Prices, though, are still high, and Americans are struggling to afford food, cars and housing. What is the single most important policy that you would implement as president to make the essentials in Americans’ lives more [affordable]?

Unfortunately, she asked the question of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who answered with word salad involving “wasteful spending on a Covid stimulus bill that expanded welfare, that’s now left us with 80 million Americans on Medicaid, 42 million Americans on food stamps.” Haley concluded with the admonition “quit borrowing. Cut up the credit cards.”

“Cut up the credit cards” is interesting advice for people who are having trouble affording diapers, but it’s the sort of advice politicians and pundits dole out, and that corporate news media present as a respectable worldview, worthy of our attention.

There is another view, that acknowledges that the same people who earn wages also buy groceries, and pretending that we’re pitted against one another is not just mis- but disinformation.

Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. They have new work on what’s driving grocery prices, that doesn’t involve getting mad at people using food stamps. We’ll hear from her today on the show.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at analogies that encourage genocide.

The post Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Texas Civil Rights Project’s Aron Thorn about the Texas border standoff for the February 2, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

New York Times (7/26/23)

Janine Jackson: Many see a looming constitutional crisis in Texas, where, as the New York Times put it, Gov. Greg Abbott has been “testing the legal limits of what a state can do to enforce immigration law,” with things like installing razor wire along the banks of the Rio Grande, and physically barring border patrol agents from responding to reports of migrants in distress—in one case, two weeks ago, of a woman and two children who subsequently drowned.

The tone of much corporate news reporting, outside of gleefully racist outlets like Fox, is critical of Texas’ defiance of federal law, but conveys an idea that, yes, there’s a crisis at the border, but this isn’t the way to handle it.

But what if their definition of crisis employs some of the same assumptions and frameworks that drive Abbott’s actions? Precisely how big a leap is it from Biden’s promise that, if he gets a deal for money to Ukraine, he would “shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” to razor wire in the Rio Grande?

Defining a crisis shapes the ideas of appropriate response. So, is there a crisis at the US Southern border, and for whom?

We’re joined now by Aron Thorn. He’s senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program of the Texas Civil Rights Project. He joins us now by phone from the Rio Grande Valley. Welcome to CounterSpin, Aron Thorn.

Aron Thorn: Thank you.

JJ: I want to ask about US immigration policy broadly, but all eyes are on Texas now for a reason. And from a distance, it just looks wild. As an attorney, as a Texan, what are the legal stakes that you see here? It feels a little bit like uncharted territory, even if it has historical echoes, but how alarmed should we be, legally, about what’s happening right now?

Texas Tribune (3/30/22)