Episódios
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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, U.S. 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.
The post Kirk Herbertson on Big Oil’s Lawsuit Against Environmentalism appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
Donald Trump has declared that the U.S. is going to “take over” the Gaza Strip, and 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 author of the book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books.
There is a deep, if muddled, sense that the U.S. 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!
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.
The post Gregory Shupak on Palestine Ethnic Cleansing / Portia Allen-Kyle on Tax Unfairness appeared first on KPFA. -
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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.
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 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.
The post Luke Charles Harris on Critical Race Theory (2021) appeared first on KPFA. -
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. 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.
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.
The post Ezra Young on Trans Rights Law / Anne Sosin on RFK Jr. and Rural Health appeared first on KPFA. -
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.
The post David Kass on Billionaire Election-Buying appeared first on KPFA. -
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. 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.
The post Silky Shah on the Attack on Immigrants appeared first on KPFA. -
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.
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.
The post Derek Seidman on Insurance and Climate (2024) / Ariel Adelman on Disability Civil Rights (2024) appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s December 17 piece, headlined “How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve U.S.-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.”
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.
The post Dean Baker on China Trade Policy appeared first on KPFA. -
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 U.S. society needs to change.
New calendar years are symbolic, 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.
The post Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders on Independent Media and the Year Ahead appeared first on KPFA. -
This is the time of year when we 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.
The post The Best of CounterSpin 2024 appeared first on KPFA. -
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 U.S. 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 — from Yanni Chen, policy counsel at the group Free Press.
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, as well as our understanding and policy-making around youth and crime.
The post Yanni Chen on TikTok Ban, Richard Mendel on Youth and Crime appeared first on KPFA. -
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.
The post Arlene Martinez on Amazon Misconduct / Neil deMause (2019) on Amazon HQ Fight appeared first on KPFA. -
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.
The post Katherine Gallagher on Abu Ghraib Verdict appeared first on KPFA. -
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.
The post Amos Barshad on Legalized Sports Betting appeared first on KPFA. -
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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