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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 that the majority of the U.S. public — 55%, up from 45% last November — say 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 U.S. 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, while 42% express 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 U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). We talk with her today.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the minimum wage.
The post Iman Abid on Israeli Genocide appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
Few corporations have changed the U.S. 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.
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 several reasons, one of which was informed community pushback. We talk about it with journalist Neil deMause, co-author of the book Field of Schemes.
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This week on CounterSpin:
It wasn’t the horrific abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, but rather, the pictures of it that forced public and official acknowledgment. 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 U.S. 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 roller coaster 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.
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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? Journalist Amos Barshad wrote in-depth on the question ahead of the election. He 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.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trump’s nominees and a Nazi march.
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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.
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.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press about Chris Matthews’s “morning after,” the New York Times‘ promoting white resentment, and Israel’s assassination of journalists.
The post Adam Johnson on Charlottesville March (2017) / Jacinta Gonzalez on Criminalizing Immigration (2018) appeared first on KPFA. -
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.
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.
The post Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas on Placing Blame for Trump appeared first on KPFA. -
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 U.S. 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.
The post Nicole Foy on Immigration and Labor appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
Dropped by 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.
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 return to our talk with Orion Danjuma, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program.
The post Shawn Musgrave and Orion Danjuma: Vote Fraud Hoax as Voter Suppression appeared first on KPFA. -
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 he wishes “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.”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. The post Chip Gibbons on Gaza First Amendment Alert appeared first on KPFA.
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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.
The post George Lipsitz on the Impacts of Housing Discrimination appeared first on KPFA. -
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. Writer and historian Derek Seidman joins us to help understand what’s happening and how folks are resisting.
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.
The post Derek Seidman on Insurance and Climate / Insha Rahman on Immigration Conversation appeared first on KPFA. -
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, U.S. 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, a 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.
The post Mohamad Bazzi on Israeli Terror Attacks appeared first on KPFA. -
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, 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 hear that conversation with her this week.
The post Jen Senko on The Brainwashing of My Dad appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
Corporate U.S. news media continue to report things like Israel’s recent strike on the Gaza Strip, which 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 U.S. citizens could have a role in preventing. We’ll talk about that with media critic, activist, and teacher Gregory Shupak.
U.S. 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”?
The post Gregory Shupak on Palestinian Genocide / Robert Spitzer on Gun Rights and Rules appeared first on KPFA. -
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 U.S. 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 hear from its co-authors:
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
The post Dedrick Asante-Muhammad & Algernon Austin on the Black Economy appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
The country’s largest and second-largest grocery store chains want to merge and, surprising no one, they claim that giving them that tremendous market power will lead to lower prices, better quality food, and better conditions for workers. The FTC says, hold on a second, how does that square with on-the-record statements that Kroger is currently raising the prices of things like eggs and milk above inflation rates, simply because they can get away with it — a practice known as price-gouging? The response, dutifully reported in corporate news media is: We won’t do that anymore! And if you try to stop us, that’s illegal!
It could hardly be clearer that the public — consumers and workers — needs advocates willing to go behind talking points to enforceable law. Freddy Brewster is a writer and journalist; his report on the possible Kroger/Albertsons megamerger, its implications, and the behind the scenes shenanigans attendant to it, appears on LeverNews.com.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Golan Heights bombing.
The post Freddy Brewster on Kroger-Albertsons merger appeared first on KPFA. -
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. On the other hand, independent media gives 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.
The post Steve Macek on Dark Money appeared first on KPFA. -
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. We’ll hear about what you are very definitely not supposed to hear from reporter Emily Sanders from ExxonKnews.
Not everyone is lying down and accepting that 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. 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.
The post Emily Sanders on Criminalizing Pipeline Protest / Victoria St. Martin on Suing Fossil Fuel Companies appeared first on KPFA. -
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” — “cornering 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 hear about it from Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.
A recent news report offered the familiar construction that the attacks of September 11, 2001 “plunged the U.S.” 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 U.S. law. 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 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.
The post Lee Hepner on Google Monopoly / Shayana Kadidal on Guantanamo Plea Deal appeared first on KPFA. -
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 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.
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 they will land anywhere more safe.
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