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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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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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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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$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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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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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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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.

Donald Trump is back in the White House, and faux opposition is once again the order of the day for the Western media and the Democratic Party. Whether it comes to criminalizing migrants (FAIR.org, 1/25/25), maintaining US “soft power” via USAID, downplaying anti-democratic power grabs (FAIR.org, 2/4/25) or whitewashing Nazi salutes (FAIR.org, 1/23/25), the centrist establishment seems quite content to normalize Trump or even outflank him from the right.

There is, of course, no area of greater consensus than US imperial grand strategy, from waging genocidal war in Palestine (FAIR.org, 1/30/25) to recolonizing Washington’s “backyard” south of the Rio Grande. Accumulation by laying waste to the societies of the global South via carpet bombing and/or economic siege warfare is, according to anti-imperialist political economist Ali Kadri, the name of the game.

Venezuela is no exception to this multi-pronged onslaught. And the US empire’s “paper of record,” the New York Times, proudly leads the charge, most recently advocating the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “through coercive diplomacy if possible or force if necessary.”

High on his own (imperial) supply

Bret Stephens (New York Times, 1/14/25): “Ending Maduro’s long reign of terror is a good way to start [the Trump] administration—and send a signal to tyrants elsewhere that American patience with disorder and danger eventually runs out.”

In a column belligerently titled “Depose Maduro,” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (1/14/25) made an overt case for US military intervention to topple Venezuela’s government. He hailed this textbook crime of aggression as “overdue, morally right and in our national security interest.”

For the Times’ self-described “warmongering neocon,” that last point is characteristically paramount. Specifically, he asserted that US “national security” requires “putting an end to a criminal regime that is a source of drugs, mass migration and Iranian influence in the Americas.”

The irony that during the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency actually facilitated the trafficking of cocaine to working-class Black communities in the context of the Iran/Contra scandal (FAIR.org, 12/29/24) was evidently lost on the Times columnist.

Then as today, the principal drug routes to the United States cut across the Pacific rather than the Gulf of Mexico (FAIR.org, 9/24/19). A 2017 DEA report found that less than 10% of US-bound cocaine flowed through Venezuela’s eastern Caribbean corridor, with WOLA reaching a similar conclusion in a 2020 study.

Not only does the bulk of drug trafficking flow through US-allied countries, but the US government itself is broadly complicit in the perpetuation of the multi-billion dollar contraband, as evidenced in its support for narco puppet regimes in Afghanistan (New York Times, 7/27/08) and Honduras (FAIR.org, 3/20/24; Covert Action, 3/14/24).

In marked contrast, the US has levied “narco-terrorism” charges against top Caracas officials, going as far as to place a bounty on Maduro’s head, without providing a shred of evidence, since Western outlets are happy to take US officials’ word, no questions asked (BBC, 1/10/25; New York Times, 1/10/25; Washington Post, 1/10/25; AP, 1/10/25).

Stephens lamented that Washington’s murderous economic sanctions “didn’t work” and that its bounty “also won’t work.” The columnist conveniently ignored that the unilateral coercive measures, described aptly by US officials as “maximum pressure,” were quite effective in deliberately gutting Venezuela’s economy, in the process killing at least tens of thousands, and spurring the migrant exodus he pointed to as justification for his proposed military adventure.

Such omission regarding US responsibility for Venezuelan migration is by now a staple of corporate media coverage (New York Times, 1/31/25; PBS, 1/31/25; CBS, 2/2/25). Indeed, support for Washington’s economic terrorism against Venezuela has been fairly uniform across the US political spectrum for years (FAIR.org, 6/4/20, 6/4/21, 5/2/22, 6/13/22).

Common tactics include describing sanctions as merely affecting Maduro and allies (New York Times, 1/6/25; NPR, 1/10/25; Al Jazeera, 1/6/25; Financial Times, 1/31/25) or portraying their consequences as merely the demonized leader’s opinion (New York Times, 1/31/25; BBC, 1/10/25; Reuters, 1/27/25).

The Iranian bogeyman

Stephens cites a story (Infobae, 1/10/25) about an Iranian “drone development base” in Venezuela that offers as its only source for the claim that “there is information” about such a base.

It is no surprise, either, that in Stephens’ casus belli, Iran appears alongside the familiar conservative tropes of Latin American migrant hordes and narcotics threatening the US (white settler) body politic.

Stephens’ Orientalist fixation with the Iranian bogeyman is notable, if hardly novel. Western media have in recent years circulated baseless rumors of Iran covertly shipping military equipment to Venezuela (FAIR.org, 6/10/20), and the Times in particular has promoted equally evidence-free claims of drug trafficking by Iranian ally Hezbollah (FAIR.org, 5/24/19, 2/4/21).

In the latest whopper, Stephens cited Iran having “reportedly established a ‘drone development base’” at a Venezuelan air base. However, this story comes from rabidly anti-Venezuelan government outlet Infobae (1/10/25), which did not even bother describing its anonymous source. The report only vaguely stated that “there is information” about this purported base.

Regardless of whether there is any truth to the alleged defense cooperation between the two sovereign nations, the perceived threat is, following the late Edward Said, symptomatic of Western imperialism’s enduring obsession with the “loss of Iran” in the wake of the 1979 overthrow of the Shah. Like the Chinese Revolution before it, Iran’s Islamic Revolution is still decades later portrayed as a global civilizational menace.

But the effort to update the “axis of evil” with a revised cast of rogue states from Venezuela to Iran also crucially serves to manufacture consent for military aggression against Tehran, which has long been the ultimate dream of significant segments of the US political class and intelligentsia, including Stephens (FAIR.org, 10/25/24).

On elections and ‘tropical despotisms’ 

In Stephens’ tropical gunboat diplomacy redux, there was something for everyone, even bleeding-heart “liberals” horrified that Venezuelan President Maduro supposedly “stole the election, terrorizes his opponents and brutalizes his people.”

As always, US imperialist intervention ideologically hinges on denying the Bolivarian government’s democratic credentials, most recently regarding the outcome of the July 28, 2024, presidential vote (Venezuelanalysis, 8/22/24, 7/29/24). However, Washington’s blockade ensured that the elections would never be free and fair. As the main factor driving economic hardship and migration, US sanctions meant Venezuelans headed to the polls with a gun to their heads, not unlike Nicaraguans in 1990.

It is the height of hypocrisy for US officials and their corporate media stenographers to claim the right to arbitrate other sovereign nations’ democratic legitimacy, even as they advance fascism at home and genocidal war across the globe. That sectors of the Western “compatible left” echo Stephens and his ilk, caricaturing the Maduro government as a “corrupt” and “repressive” regime, is unfortunate but not surprising (Ebb, 10/3/24).

The core racial assumption, going back to the 19th century, is that Global South states that refuse to bow to Western imperialist diktat constitute “tropical despotisms” to be toppled in a never-ending “civilizing mission,” with its anti-Communist, “war on terror” and neo-Orientalist mutations.

Demolishing the Death Star

Extra! (1–2/90): “In covering the invasion of Panama, many TV journalists abandoned even the pretense of operating in a neutral, independent mode.”

It is noteworthy that the script for Stephens’ Rambo sequel is over 35 years old: Stephens argued for “US military intervention of the sort that in 1990 swiftly ended the regime of the Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega.” Formerly US-backed narco dictator Noriega was, not incidentally, an ex-CIA agent involved in Iran/Contra (Extra!, 1–2/90; FAIR.org, 12/29/24).

The New York Times warmonger-in-chief’s rendering of the intervention is fantastically selective, forgetting that the Central American nation was already “pre-invaded” by US military bases, and that the savage bombing of the Afro-Panamanian neighborhood of El Chorrillo transformed it into “Little Hiroshima.”

But the sober reality is that Venezuela is not Panama. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Armed Forces, alongside other corps, like the Bolivarian Militia, have spent a quarter of a century preparing for a “prolonged people’s war of resistance” against the US empire at the level of doctrine, organization, equipment and training.

If the US and its Zionist colonial outpost failed to defeat the heroic Palestinian resistance in Gaza after nearly 500 days of genocidal war, an asymmetric conflict with a significantly larger and stronger force, across a territory more than 2,000 times as large, is not likely a serious proposition.

Nonetheless, it is the duty of all those residing in the imperialist core to grind Washington’s industrial-scale death machine to a definitive halt. This paramount strategic objective demands systematically deposing the New York Times’ Goebbelsian propaganda.

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

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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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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.

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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.

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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 Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

At midnight on October 1, over 45,000 port workers across the Eastern US began a strike that was to last for three days. This labor action was only the latest in a series of high-profile confrontations between workers and bosses in North America, but corporate media never seem to get better at reporting on such disputes.

In this particular case, the workers’ main demands were pay increases and assurances that automation will not replace them. But strikes in general have one straightforward aim: to demonstrate the power of workers, and thus the necessity of meeting their demands, by depriving the economy of their labor. The International Longshoremen’s Association gained an initial victory in securing a 62% wage increase over six years for its workers. Other issues, like automation, will continue to be negotiated, with a January 2025 deadline.

It seems, however, that the more a strike affects the economy, i.e., the more effective it is, the harder corporate media try to smear workers as selfish and destructive. To understand where media loyalties lie, one only needs to look at the experts they seek for quotes.

Big banking, big shipping, big banana

Washington Post (10/1/24): “The effects are expected to ripple through the country, costing at least hundreds of millions of dollars a day and getting worse each day the longshoremen remain off the job.”

When media report on high finance or business dealings, readers will rarely if ever find a quote from a union leader, much less a rank-and-file worker, in the news reports. However, when dockworkers initiate a labor action, it seems the first call a reporter makes is to a Manhattan office tower.

Stifel is an investment bank that manages $444 billion worth of assets. It’s perhaps best known for tricking five Wisconsin school districts into losing over $200 million in bum mortgage investments ahead of the 2008 financial crisis (Reuters, 12/8/16).

Lately, the phones at the bank’s offices have been overwhelmed with reporters seeking comment on the East Coast port strike. Analysts at Stifel have been quoted a total of four times in the Washington Post (10/1/24, 10/1/24) and New York Times (10/1/24, 10/1/24). The Post (9/28/24), presumably trying to prevent accusations of favoring finance over accounting, also sought comment from a chief economist at Ernst & Young.

If, when it comes to the economy, you prioritize banana availability above all other considerations, then corporate media has you covered. The Post (9/30/24) spoke to the Big-Ag lobbying and insurance group the American Farm Bureau Federation, who warned that 75% of the nation’s banana supply was at stake. Not to be outdone, the Times (10/1/24) tracked down their own source for the banana angle, Daniel Barabino, COO at the Bronx’s Top Banana, who warned a two-week strike would hit “all the banana importers.”

Later reporting by the Baltimore Banner (10/3/24) revealed that banana heavyweights Del Monte, Dole and Chiquita operate their own ships and are outside the trade group that represents management in bargaining, and thus their ships were still being unloaded. In other words, initial forecasts of banana scarcity were greatly overstated.

Naturally, logistics executives were well-represented in the news pages. The New York Times quoted the directors of two ports (9/24/24), as well as four members of management at different logistics firms (10/1/24, 10/1/24). The Washington Post quoted at least seven logistics executives in their coverage (9/18/24, 9/28/24, 9/30/24, 9/30/24), not to mention numerous importers and business owners.

Missing workers

The New York Times (10/1/24) ran an article on what the dockworkers strike might mean for wine importers—but no article on what the dockworkers strike might mean for dockworkers.

Union leaders were not totally silenced. Since September 24, four ILA leaders have been quoted by the New York Times (9/24/24, 9/26/24, 9/29/24, 10/1/24). For those keeping track, that is two fewer than the six wine importers the Times has quoted in coverage of the port strike (9/30/24, 10/1/24).

The number of rank-and-file dockworkers quoted by the Times is zero. To be fair, it seems that the union has instructed picketers to not talk to reporters, an understandable measure for message discipline.

However, in the lead-up to the strike, the Times found time to talk to Christmas tree, clothing and mango importers (9/24/24, 9/30/24). These people were understandably concerned for their livelihoods. However, by failing to interview even one dockworker or any of their families, the Times is showing their readers a picture where only the business owners are concerned for the economy, for their families, for the holiday season.

Will longshoremen have enough time to spend with their families or have enough money for gifts this Christmas? Readers of the Times have no idea.

Instead, Times coverage (10/3/24) has focused on Harold Daggett, the union’s president, and his “autocratic” style and “generous salary.” When the only union member profiled by the Times is depicted as rich, corrupt and incompetent, it encourages a dismissal of the union’s struggle as a whole.

Even once the strike ended, the Times (10/3/24) just couldn’t find a worker to quote. Instead, the piece extensively quoted the chief executive of the Anderson Economic Group, a corporate consulting firm, who was unhappy that the strike had been settled:

I cannot recall an episode that had so little effect on the economy, led to such a short strike and resulted in such a huge increase in earnings for workers who are already making over $100,000 a year…. We tend to shrug off the costs, but it does affect our ability to build things and export them.

During the UAW strike, Sarah Lazare noted that the Anderson Economic Group was used by media to decry labor’s threat to “the economy” without mentioning their auto-industry clients (American Prospect, 8/23/23). The firm was also cited on the danger posed by the UPS strike (FAIR.org, 9/26/23). It’s a group you would naturally turn to if your were looking for a quote decrying labor getting a larger slice of the economic pie.

Loud on wages, silent on profits

Corporate media coverage of longshoremen’s wages has emphasized that some union members make around $160,000 (Washington Post, 10/1/24). One story even reported that salaries for New York and New Jersey longshoremen range to “over $450,000” (Washington Post, 9/28/24).

Per the report that the Post seems to be referencing (they don’t bother to give a citation), the Port of New York and New Jersey elects to pay certain workers “special compensation packages,” which are not governed by the collective bargaining agreement. In other words, the Post is using some exceptional cases in the Port of New Jersey and New York, unconnected to the contract that’s up for negotiation, to suggest that some people are being paid nearly half a million dollars to load freight. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the 45,000 dockworkers whose salaries are governed by the collective bargaining agreement are maligned.

The starting wage rate for a dockworker is just $20 an hour. Given that the top wage (after six years of service) under the current contract is $39, a 40-hour-per-week salary would net a senior worker just over $80,000. To earn in the hundreds of thousands, overtime is clearly needed. However, the New York Times (10/1/24) reports merely that dockworkers “say they have to put in long workweeks to earn that much,” with no elaboration on whether or not that is true.

When nearly every story on the port strike mentions that dockworkers make up to $100,000 or $200,000, the object is clear: Media want readers to question if these “workers without a college degree” (New York Times, 10/1/24) really deserve a salary commensurate with the 10.5 million Americans in management occupations.

These ports are up and down the East Coast, including in high-cost-of-living metro areas like New York and Boston. Labor unions are one of the few paths to middle-class security available to most American workers. Yet it is standard practice for labor coverage in corporate media to suggest that workers fighting for their share is tantamount to greediness.

Soaring profits for shipping companies is an important business story (Economist, 6/27/24)—until it comes time for those companies to renegotiate labor contracts.

Shipping company profits, on the other hand, are rarely reported. When shippers’ high profits are mentioned, they’re often not presented as a fact, but as something that is “argued” by workers (e.g., Washington Post, 10/1/24).

However, outside of strike coverage, the shipping industry seems to be quite healthy. “Boom Times Are Back for Container Shipping,” according to a recent Economist headline (6/27/24). The windfall profits of the pandemic era, over $400 billion, are believed to be larger than the sum total of profits since containerization was implemented in 1957 (CNN, 9/26/24). Indeed, some of the pandemic-era inflation that has eroded dockworkers’ real wages may be due to the outsized pricing power of the oligopolistic shipping industry (Bloomberg, 1/18/22; The Hill, 2/2/22).

Why was there little mention of these profits in strike coverage? Readers are encouraged to view longshoremen as greedy and unreasonable, which is less sustainable when worker demands are juxtaposed with record profits. The easiest way to avoid that juxtaposition is to omit profits from the conversation. (In the same way, it’s easier to hate professional athletes for their multi-million dollar salaries when you ignore the billions they are making for the team owners.)

Frightening readers to management’s side

New York Times (10/1/24) warned of “cascading effects — such as layoffs — at American firms, including in the auto industry.”

The economic effects of the strike have been much-bandied. The cost to the US economy, depending on your source, could amount to $3.78 billion per week (Washington Post, 10/1/24), $4.5 billion to $7.5 billion per week (New York Times, 10/1/24) or a whopping $5 billion per day, according to the brain trust at J.P. Morgan (New York Times, 9/30/24).

While these numbers are supposed to frighten the reader into siding with management, what they are really doing is demonstrating the importance of labor being paid well and treated well. The fact that dockworkers’ labor is necessary to facilitate up to $5 billion in commerce every day is evidence that their labor is of the utmost importance, and an argument for their being compensated as such.

Besides serving up run-of-the-mill worker bashing, the Washington Post  (9/29/24, 10/1/24, 10/1/24) has taken the strike as an opportunity to raise the specter of pandemic-era inflation and price hikes. The Post (9/28/24) quoted Ernst & Young chief economist Greg Daco: “A work stoppage could slow progress on bringing inflation under control.” Never mind the fact that inflation has already been tamed (Politico, 9/11/24).

Other outlets have a more staid forecast, with the New York Times (10/1/24) noting that “a rapid acceleration in inflation” is unlikely.

Framing a strike as potentially strangling the economy (with little mention of the hardship striking workers would no doubt face) serves to help the reader, whose economic situation is almost certainly closer to the workers, identify instead with the multibillion-dollar logistics companies.

It’s not that workers are seeking to destroy the economy. However, it is up to the workers to look out for their own interests as labor share continues to decrease, especially in the face of automation (Marketplace, 4/12/24). Most Americans are sympathetic to unions and union members, but when it comes to labor actions, media try demonization above all else.

False choice

This Washington Post article (10/2/24) closes with a warning to President Joe Biden against “an approach to industry highly deferential to labor unions.”

Corporate media attempted to use the economic chaos apparently on the horizon to paint a less-than-rosy picture for the incumbent Democrats. With the presidential election a month away, the strike has been posed as a tough choice for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris between supporting unions and averting economic destruction. The Washington Post (10/2/24) reported that

Biden told reporters Tuesday that he would not use a federal labor law to force the longshoremen back to work…. But whether—or for how long—the president will stick to this posture has become a source of speculation in Washington, as Democrats try to project economic stability ahead of the November election.

Elsewhere, the Post (9/30/24) noted that some economic forecasters “assume that, with the election just weeks away, Biden will intervene in the labor dispute to head off more serious economic costs.” The New York Times (10/1/24) took a similar tone:

The prospect of significant economic damage from a strike puts President Biden in a quandary five weeks before national elections. Before the strike, he said he was not going to use a federal labor law, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, to force an end to a port shutdown…. But some labor experts said he might use that power if the strike started to weigh on the economy.

The Times failed to actually cite any of these labor experts who said President Biden might use the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, a controversial law that began the slow demise of organized labor since 1947. However, this framing supports the idea that a strike is effectively a hostage situation, with the workers putting a gun to the head of the economy, and the government must choose one of those two sides. Left out of the equation are the corporations, who have the power to end the strike immediately by sharing some of their inflated profits with their workers.

It should not be surprising that corporate media redirect readers’ anger towards workers. US news outlets have a habit of omitting wealth and income inequality from their coverage, and coverage of labor actions is no exception.

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

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.

Ken Klippenstein, an independent reporter operating on Substack and an investigative alum of the Intercept, announced (Substack, 9/26/24) that he had been kicked off Twitter (now rebranded as X). His crime, he explained, stemmed from posting the 271-page official dossier of Republican vice presidential candidate’s J.D. Vance’s campaign vulnerabilities; the US government alleges that the information was leaked through Iranian hacking. In other words, the dossier is a part of the “foreign meddling campaign” of “enemy states.”

Klippenstein is not the first reporter to gain access to these papers (Popular Information, 9/9/24), but most of the reporting about this dossier has been on the intrigue revolving around Iranian hacking rather than the content itself (Daily Beast, 8/10/24; Politico, 8/10/24; Forbes, 8/11/24). Klippenstein decided it was time for the whole enchilada to see the light of day:

As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I’ll let it speak for itself.

“The terror regime in Iran loves the weakness and stupidity of Kamala Harris, and is terrified of the strength and resolve of President Donald J. Trump,” Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, responded when I asked him about the hack.

If the document had been hacked by some “anonymous”-like hacker group, the news media would be all over it. I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combating foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know.

The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement that alleged Iranian hacking (9/18/24) was “malicious cyber activity” and “the latest example of Iran’s multi-pronged approach…to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our electoral process.”

Where’s the beef?

Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 9/26/24) argued that the Vance dossier ” is clearly newsworthy, providing Republican Party and conservative doctrine insight into what the Trump campaign perceives to be Vance’s liabilities and weaknesses.”

The Vance report isn’t as salacious as Vance’s false and bizarre comments about Haitians eating pets (NPR, 9/15/24), but it does show that he has taken positions that have fractured the right, such as aid for Ukraine; the report calls him one of the “chief obstructionists” to providing assistance to the country against Russia. It dedicates several pages to Vance’s history of criticizing Trump and the MAGA movement, suggesting that his place on the ticket could divide Trump’s voting base.

On the other hand, it outlines many of his extreme right-wing stances that could alienate him with putative moderates. It says Vance “appears to have once called for slashing Social Security and Medicare,” and “is opposed to providing childcare assistance to low-income Americans.” He “supports placing restrictions on abortion access,” and states that “he does not support abortion exceptions in the case of rape.”

And for any voter who values 7-day-a-week service, Vance “appears to support laws requiring businesses to close on Sundays.” It quotes him saying: “Close the Damn Businesses on Sunday. Commercial Freedom Will Suffer. Moral Behavior Will Not, and Our Society Will Be Much the Better for It.” That might not go over well with small business owners, and any worker who depends on their Sunday shifts.

‘Took a deep breath’

The Washington Post (8/13/24) suggested that Vance dossier was different from Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails in 2016 because of “foreign state actors increasingly getting involved” in US elections.

Are the findings in the Vance dossier the story of the century? Probably not, but it’s not nothing that the Trump campaign is aware its vice presidential candidate is loaded with liabilities. There are at least a few people who find that useful information.

And the Washington Post (9/27/24) happily reported on private messages Vance sent to an anonymous individual who shared them with the newspaper that explained Vance’s flip-flopping from a Trump critic to a Trump lover. Are the private messages really more newsworthy than the dossier—or is the issue that the messages aren’t tainted by allegedly foreign fingerprints? Had that intercept of material involved an Iranian, would it have seen the light of day?

In fact, the paper (8/13/24) explained that news organizations, including the Post, were reflecting on the foreign nature of the leak when deciding how deep they should report on the content they received:

“This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of the Post. Instead, “all of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.”

Double standards for leaks

Politico (10/7/16) quoted a Clinton spokesperson: “Striking how quickly concern about Russia’s masterminding of illegal hacks gave way to digging through fruits of hack.” This was immediately followed by: “Indeed, here are eight more e-mail exchanges that shed light on the methods and mindset of Clinton’s allies in Brooklyn and Washington.”

There seems to be a disconnect, however, between ill-gotten information that impacts a Republican ticket and information that tarnishes a Democrat.

Think back to 2016. When “WikiLeaks released a trove of emails apparently hacked from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman email account, unleashing thousands of messages,” as Politico (10/7/16) reported, the outlet didn’t just merely report on the hack, it reported on the embarrassing substance of the documents. In 2024, by contrast, when Politico was given the Vance dossier, it wrote nothing about its contents, declaring that “questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents” (CNN, 8/13/24).

The New York Times and Washington Post similarly found the Clinton leaks—which were believed at the time to have been given to WikiLeaks by Russia—far more newsworthy than the Vance dossier. The Times “published at least 199 articles about the stolen DNC and Clinton campaign emails between the first leak in June 2016 and Election Day,” Popular Information (9/9/24) noted.

FAIR editor Jim Naureckas (11/24/09) has written about double standards in media, noting that information that comes to light through unethical or illegal means is played up if that information helps powerful politicians and corporations. Meanwhile, if such information obtained questionably is damaging, the media focus tends to be less on the substance, and more on whether the public should be hearing about such matters.

For example, when a private citizen accidentally overheard a cell phone conversation between House Speaker John Boehner, former Speaker Newt Gingrich and other Republican congressmembers, and made a tape that showed Gingrich violating the terms of a ethics sanction against him, news coverage focused on the illegality of taping the conversation, not on the ethics violation the tape revealed (Washington Post, 1/14/97; New York Times, 1/15/97).

But when climate change deniers hacked climate scientists’ email, that produced a front-page story in the New York Times (11/20/09) scrutinizing the correspondence for any inconsistencies that could be used to bolster the deniers’ arguments.

When Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Michael Gallagher wrote a series of stories about the Chiquita fruit corporation, based in part on listening without authorization to company voicemails, the rest of the media were far more interested in Gallagher’s ethical and legal dilemmas (he was eventually sentenced to five years’ probation) rather than the bribery, fraud and worker abuse his reporting exposed.

Meet the new boss

Musk personally ordered the suspension of the account of antifascist activist Curt Loder, the Independent (1/29/23) revealed, noting that “numerous other accounts of left-leaning activists and commentators have been suspended without warning.”

There’s a certain degree of comedy in the hypocrisy of Klippenstein’s suspension. Since right-wing billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, he has claimed that his administration would end corporate censorship, but instead he’s implemented his own censorship agenda (Guardian, 1/15/24; Al Jazeera, 8/14/24).

The Independent (1/29/23) reported that Musk “oversaw a campaign of suppression that targeted his critics upon his assumption of power at Twitter.” He

personally directed the suspension of a left-leaning activist, Chad Loder, who became known across the platform for his work helping to identify participants in the January 6 attack.

Al Jazeera (2/28/23) noted that “digital rights groups say social media giants,” including X, “have restricted [and] suspended the accounts of Palestinian journalists and activists.” Musk has likewise fulfilled censorship requests by the governments of Turkey (Ars Technica, 5/15/23) and India (Intercept, 1/24/23, 3/28/23) officials, and is generally more open to official requests to suppress speech than Twitter‘s previous owners (El Pais, 5/24/23; Washington Post, 9/25/24).

Meanwhile, Musk’s critics contend, he’s allowed the social network to be a force multiplier for the right. “Elon Musk has increasingly used the social media platform as a megaphone to amplify his political views and, lately, those of right-wing figures he’s aligned with,” AP (8/13/24) reported. (Musk is vocal about his support for former President Donald Trump’s candidacy—New York Times, 7/18/24.)

“Twitter Antisemitism ‘Skyrocketed’ Since Elon Musk Takeover—Jewish Groups,” blasted a Newsweek headline (4/25/23). Earlier this year, Mother Jones (3/13/24) reported that Musk “has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents…spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers.”

‘Chilling effect on speech’

The message Ken Klippenstein got from X announcing he had been kicked off the platform.

Now Musk’s Twitter is keeping certain information out of the public view—information that just happens to damage the presidential ticket he supports. With Klippenstein having been silenced on the network, anyone claiming X is a bastion of free speech at this point is either mendacious or simply deluded.

Klippenstein (Substack, 9/26/24) explained that “X says that I’ve been suspended for ‘violating our rules against posting private information,’ citing a tweet linking to my story about the JD Vance dossier.” He added, though, that “I never published any private information on X.” Rather, “I linked to an article I wrote here, linking to a document of controversial provenance, one that I didn’t want to alter for that very reason.”

The journalist (Substack, 9/27/24) claims that his account suspension, which he reports to be permanent, is political because he did not violate the network’s code about disclosing personal information, and even if he did, he should have been given the opportunity to correct his post to become unsuspended. “So it’s not about a violation of X’s policies,” he said. “What else would you call this but politically motivated?”

Klippenstein is understandably concerned that he is now without a major social media promotional tool. “I no longer have access to the primary channel by which I disseminate primarily news (and shitposts of course) to the general public,” he said. “This chilling effect on speech is exactly why we published the Vance Dossier in its entirety.”

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.

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.

Lever (8/26/24)

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 also: 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. We hear about that this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Golan Heights bombing.

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

The New York Times (8/19/24) insinuated that Phil Donahue attributed to politics a cancellation that was really caused by low ratings.

If I were teaching a class called “How to Slime People in a Subtle, Scuzzy Way in the New York Times,” this paragraph from the Times‘ obituary (8/19/24) of Phil Donahue—written by Clyde Haberman, Maggie’s father—would be part of the curriculum:

In 2002, Mr. Donahue tried a comeback with a nightly talk show on MSNBC. Barely six months in, the program was canceled. He said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq. (In 2007, he co-produced and co-directed an antiwar documentary, Body of War.) It hardly helped that his ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.

Even now—more than 20 years after the New York Times was catastrophically wrong on the Iraq War—the paper cannot forgive anyone who was right.

1. Yes, Donahue “said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq.” Do you know who else said this? MSNBC‘s network executives, in a leaked memo. Get the fuck out of here with the “he said” bullshit.

MSNBC executives said, in a leaked memo, that Donahue was “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war… because of guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush.” This was reported by CNN (3/5/03), among other outlets, at the time. Unfortunately, these outlets are so obscure that the Times cannot access them.

2. Yes, Donahue’s “ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.” It was also the top-rated show on MSNBC. Sadly, the Times does not know this, because the only place it was reported at the time was in such little-known publications as the New York Times (2/26/03).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

The post Phyllis Bennis on Gaza Ceasefire Resolution, Robert Weissman on Boeing Scandal appeared first on FAIR.

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.

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.

The post Victor Pickard on the Crisis of Journalism appeared first on FAIR.

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

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.

The post Ariel Adelman on Disability Civil Rights appeared first on FAIR.

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

Chart: Washington Center for Equitable Growth (12/9/19)

One of the defining features of contemporary US capitalism is rampant inequality. Though there is some scholarly debate about its precise extent, even conservative estimates suggest a rise in income inequality of 16% since 1979 (as measured by the Gini coefficient). Moreover, of the 38 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of mainly high-income countries, the US currently ranks dismally as the sixth-most unequal.

In 2013, then–President Barack Obama described inequality, alongside a lack of upward mobility, as the “defining challenge of our time” (CBS, 12/4/13). This declaration spurred a brief moment of interest in inequality on cable news channels, which proved fleeting. During the two-month window of December 2013 through January 2014—Obama made his statement during a speech on December 4—the cable news channels Fox, CNN and MSNBC aired about a tenth of the total mentions of the term “inequality” that they would air from the start of 2010 through the beginning of 2024, a 14-year period.

Overshadowed by a hypothetical problem

The rapid rise in inequality over recent decades might have been expected to generate a deep sense of alarm in news media. But on cable news, there’s little sign of distress.

Compare cable coverage of inequality to coverage of other economic topics, such as inflation, recession and government debt. The following chart shows the number of mentions of various terms across Fox, CNN and MSNBC over the course of 2023:

Can you make out the bottom bar? That depicts combined coverage of four terms: “income inequality,” “wealth inequality,” “class inequality” and “economic inequality.” Those four together got less than 1% of the coverage of inflation during 2023.

The skew was evident but less extreme at text-based outlets. Searches of the New York Times archives for the year of 2023 deliver 1.5 times as many articles for “debt ceiling” as for “income inequality,” 2.5 times for “recession” and 7 times for “inflation.” Searches of the Washington Post archives for the same period return a more disproportionate 18 times for “debt ceiling,” 14 times for “recession” and 34 times for “inflation.”

Note that, although inflation and a debt ceiling battle were both issues in 2023, there was no recession. The reason there was so much coverage of the topic was that economists overwhelmingly forecast a recession—and utterly whiffed—and media signal-boosted their inaccurate predictions. Fears of recession, a fantasy problem, consequently overshadowed discussion of the very real problem of inequality.

Redirecting the conversation

Chart: Pew Research (1/9/20)

For media outlets owned by the wealthy, there’s obvious utility in directing the conversation away from inequality and toward other concerns. For instance, if the public’s attention can be directed toward a debt ceiling battle, corporate media outlets can hype fears about unsustainable deficits. In turn, the public can be primed to see government debt as a leading challenge, whether or not this actually makes much sense.

Public opinion data suggests that this has worked—53% of Americans see the federal budget deficit as a very big problem, whereas only 44% view economic inequality the same way.

Media hyper-fixation on inflation and a potential recession over the last couple years, meanwhile, has persistently distorted the economic evaluations of the general population, whose satisfaction with the economy remained at historically low levels last year amidst the strongest economic recovery in decades (FAIR.org, 1/5/24). In a recent poll, asked whether wage growth outpaced inflation over the past year, a full 90% of Americans said that it hadn’t, when in reality it had.

In each case, whether media are fearmongering about deficits, inflation or a potential recession, they have been able to steer the conversation away from progressive policies and toward a more centrist approach.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post, during last year’s debt ceiling battle, directed attention towards Social Security and Medicare, amplifying arguments for cutting these programs (FAIR.org, 5/17/23, 6/15/23). During the recent bout of inflation, both papers cheered on the Federal Reserve’s campaign to “cool” the labor market (read: reduce workers’ bargaining power) and potentially hike unemployment (FAIR.org, 1/25/23, 6/27/23).

Promotion of recession fears likewise functioned to sow doubts about the sweeping stimulus packages implemented in response to the pandemic, legislation that produced the most rapid recovery in decades and a substantial reduction in inequality. After all, if the inevitable result of an enhanced safety net is inflation and a downturn, why bother?

A focus on the fundamental issue of inequality, which has significantly exacerbated the effects of real but temporary issues like elevated inflation, would not serve these same ends. Rather, its likely effect would be to delegitimize centrist policies and point towards a more radical approach.

Consider these findings from a 2014 study: Asked what they view as an ideal pay ratio between CEOs and unskilled workers, Americans pointed to a ratio of 7-to-1. The real ratio at the time? 354-to-1. Meanwhile, Americans thought that the actual ratio was more like 30-to-1, about an order of magnitude off from reality.

There’s no way to get to Americans’ preferred level of equality without a massive redistribution of income. But is the public going to push for this sort of redistribution if media distract them from the topic, or if a lack of coverage results in them not even recognizing the extent of inequality in the first place?

Toward a less unequal media

CJR (4/18/22) noted that “only a handful of select schools feed the mastheads of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.”

At the heart of the issue is that news media don’t just structure conversations about inequality; inequality also structures the media. The dominant news outlets are major corporations owned by the wealthy. The flow of information is far from democratically controlled. Instead, a billionaire can pick winners among media outlets by, for instance, boosting the circulation of a staunchly centrist publication like the Washington Post.

Within prominent news outlets, journalists are drawn disproportionately from privileged backgrounds and top schools. They may come in with blinders about issues like inequality that are felt more viscerally by lower-income folks.

Even more worrisome is the personal advantage that on-screen personalities on top TV networks derive from ignoring inequality, which may explain why cable news is so much worse at covering inequality than a paper like the New York Times. Popular anchors at Fox, CNN and MSNBC make millions of dollars a year, putting them easily in the top 1% of earners nationwide. Is it at all surprising when they opt for an obsession with the deficit over an interest in inequality?

What can be done about this state of affairs? Calls for journalists to do better may get us somewhere, but more fundamental change is needed. As scholars Faik Kurtulmus and Jan Kandiyali have argued, getting media to pay more attention to issues affecting working-class and poor people requires a different funding model, one where the upper class doesn’t hold all the power.

One option would be a voucher system in which

everyone would be provided with a publicly funded voucher, which they would then get to spend at a news outlet of their choice, with the revenue going to that news outlet…. Coupled with a more representative and diverse pool of journalists, this could lead to a marked improvement in the media’s coverage of issues of poverty and inequality.

A complementary set of reforms are advocated by Thomas Piketty in his recent book A Brief History of Equality:

The best solution [to media concentration in the hands of the wealthy] would be to change the legal framework and adopt a law that truly democratizes the media, guaranteeing employees and journalists half the seats in the governing organs, whatever their legal form might be, opening the doors to representatives from the reading public, and drastically limiting stockholders’ power.

Ultimately, it’s going to take an attack on inequality within media to get media to take inequality seriously.

The post Media That Benefit From Inequality Prefer to Talk About Other Things appeared first on FAIR.

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

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.

Texas Tribune (1/22/24)

This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court ruled that federal agents can remove the razor wire that Texas state officials have set up along parts of the US/Mexico border. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Elite news media, for their part, suggest we seek a hallowed middle ground between those two worldviews.

Corporate media are filled with debate about the best way to handle the “border crisis.” But what if there isn’t a border crisis so much as an absence of historical understanding, of empathy, of community resourcing, and of critical challenge to media and political narratives—including that reflected in President Joe Biden’s call to allow access for “those who deserve to be here”?

We hear from Aron Thorn, senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent coverage of Gaza protest and the New Hampshire primary.

The post Aron Thorn on Texas Border Standoff appeared first on FAIR.

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

New York Times (10/14/23)

This week on CounterSpin: US corporate news media’s initial response to Israel’s terror campaign against Palestinians, unleashed in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas, was characterized, broadly speaking, by legitimization, a rhetorical blank check for whatever Israel might do. Israel, the New York Times editorial board said, “is determined to break the power of Hamas, and in that effort it deserves the support of the United States and the rest of the world.”

We’re more than three months into that “effort.” The death toll for Palestinians is, conservatively, as we record on January 18, over 24,000 people. The UN secretary general calls Gaza a “graveyard for children.” So how does the Times’ assertion that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law” stand up now?

We’re talking this week with media critic, activist and teacher Gregory Shupak. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and is author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at some recent press coverage of immigration.

The post Gregory Shupak on Gaza and Genocide appeared first on FAIR.

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

Yahoo (1/4/24)

This week on CounterSpin: The journalists at Yahoo Finance tell us that a Connecticut McDonald’s charging $18 for a combo meal has “sparked a nationwide debate” on escalating prices in the fast food industry. The outrage, readers are told, is “partly attributed” to a recent raise in the minimum wage—which has not yet gone into effect. Spoiler: We never hear about any other “parts” “attributed.”  Businesses like McDonald’s, the story goes, “have already raised their prices in anticipation of the wage hike.”

Were there any other responses available to them? Don’t ask! We’re moving on—to how it isn’t just that poor working Joes will have to pay more for a Big Mac, but also there will be layoffs…of fast-food employees. We meet Jose and Jim, who say they thought higher wages would be good, “considering the decline in tipping and increasing living costs.” Alas no, Yahoo explains: “The reality was harsher. The wage increase, while beneficial for some, has resulted in job losses for others, leading to a complex mix of gratitude and resentment among affected workers.” The takeaway: “The debate over the appropriate balance between fair wages and sustainable business practices remains unresolved.”

The piece does go on to lament the mental stress associated with economic uncertainty—not for owners, evidently—and the wise counsel that those troubled might consider “establishing a substantial savings account and making smart investments.”

Elite reporters seem so far removed from the daily reality of the bulk of the country that this doesn’t even ring weird to them. A raise in wages for fast food employees means fast food employees have to lose their jobs—that’s just, you know, “economics.” Union, what? Profiteering, who? The only operative question is, which low-wage workers need to suffer more?

We get a different view on raising the minimum wage from Sebastian Martinez Hickey, researcher for the EARN (Economic Analysis and Research Network) team at the Economic Policy Institute.

Tipped worker (cc photo: Daveblog)

Also on the show: A largely unspoken part of media’s wage conversation is the whole sector of workers whose pay rates are based in…enslavement. Yeah. In 2015, CounterSpin learned about tipped wages from Saru Jayaraman, co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. We hear part of that relevant conversation this week.

The post Sebastian Martinez Hickey on Minimum Wage, Saru Jayaraman on History of Tipping appeared first on FAIR.

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

(image: Jewish Voice for Peace)

This week on CounterSpin: It was a big deal when Jewish Americans who oppose US support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza filled New York’s Grand Central Terminal. But not big enough to make the front page of the local paper, the New York Times. US journalists invoke the First Amendment a lot, but not so much when it extends to regular folks using their individual voices, sometimes at significant personal risk, to say NO to something the US government is doing in their name.

Some listeners may remember marching with thousands of others in advance of the US war on Iraq, only to come home and find the paper or TV station ignored them utterly, or distorted their effort and their message—as when NBC’s Tom Brokaw reported a Washington, DC, anti-war march of at least 100,000 people, met with a couple hundred pro-war counter-protesters, as: “Opponents and supporters of the war marched in cities across the nation on Saturday.”

“Protest is the voice of the people,” our guest’s organization states. Defending Rights & Dissent aims to invigorate the Bill of Rights and, crucially, to protect our right to political expression. We talk with Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the media’s role in the recent Republican primary debates.

The post Chip Gibbons on the Right to Protest appeared first on FAIR.

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

Middle East Eye (12/14/23)

This week on CounterSpin: People in the US, the story goes, value few things more than individual freedom and money. So you’d think the way an individual uses their money would be sacrosanct. It’s a sign of where we’re at that there are currently congressional efforts to put people in prison, fine them millions of dollars, for choosing not to buy products from countries that are not declared “official enemies” by, well, presumably whoever’s in the White House at the moment. The anti-boycott measure the House Foreign Affairs Committee is pushing may never see daylight, of course, but it indicates a willingness by some in elected office to use state power to silence and sanction anyone using their voice in dissent of official actions—in this one case, lest it be confused, of people critical of Israel’s ongoing mass murder and displacement of Palestinians.

The work to shut down opposition to the siege of Gaza, and US facilitation of it, is reminding Americans of what it means when powerful institutions, including in the media, combine a decidedly selective understanding of free expression with a vehement desire to enforce it.

We talked about that with Wadie Said, professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, and author of the book Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions, from Oxford University Press.

The post Wadie Said on the New McCarthyism appeared first on FAIR.

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

Middle East Eye (12/14/23)

This week on CounterSpin: People in the US, the story goes, value few things more than individual freedom and money. So you’d think the way an individual uses their money would be sacrosanct. It’s a sign of where we’re at that there are currently congressional efforts to put people in prison, fine them millions of dollars, for choosing not to buy products from countries that are not declared “official enemies” by, well, presumably whoever’s in the White House at the moment. The anti-boycott measure the House Foreign Affairs Committee is pushing may never see daylight, of course, but it indicates a willingness by some in elected office to use state power to silence and sanction anyone using their voice in dissent of official actions—in this one case, lest it be confused, of people critical of Israel’s ongoing mass murder and displacement of Palestinians.

The work to shut down opposition to the siege of Gaza, and US facilitation of it, is reminding Americans of what it means when powerful institutions, including in the media, combine a decidedly selective understanding of free expression with a vehement desire to enforce it.

We talked about that with Wadie Said, professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, and author of the book Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions, from Oxford University Press.

The post Wadie Said on the New McCarthyism appeared first on FAIR.

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

New York Times (12/13/23)

This week on CounterSpin: UN Climate talks have ended with an agreement that, most importantly—New York Times headlines would suggest—”Strikes Deal to Transition Away From Fossil Fuels.” Headlines, all that many people read, are often misleading, and sometimes they aggressively deflect from the point of the story, which in this case is that everyone who wasn’t a polluting corporate entity came away from COP28 angry, worried and frustrated at the way that fossil fuel companies have been able to endanger everyone with their actions, but also hornswoggle their way into media debate such that we’re all supposed to consider how to balance the life of humanity on the planet with the profit margins of a handful of billionaires.

Corporate news media have a lot to answer for here, in terms of public understanding of climate disruption, what needs to happen, why isn’t it happening? Few things call more for an open public conversation about how to best protect all of us. Why can’t we have it? Well, mystery solved: The entities that are to blame for the problem have their hands in the means we would use to debate and conceivably address it.

Put simply: We cannot have a public conversation about how fossil fuels cause climate disruption within a corporate media moneyed by fossil fuel companies. We know that, and they know that, which is why one of the biggest outputs of polluting corporations is PR—is management of our understanding of what’s going on.

CounterSpin discussed fossil fuel corporations’ brazen lie factory almost precisely a year ago with Richard Wiles, director of the Center for Climate Integrity. We hear some of that conversation again this week.

Also: When you talk about climate, a lot of folks go in their head to a picture of clouds, butterflies and wolves. Climate policy is about money and profit and the meaninglessness of all those beautiful vistas you might imagine—at least, that’s how many politicians think of it. We addressed that with Matthew Cunningham-Cook from the Lever in August of this year. And we hear some of that this week as well.

Climate disruption reality as filtrated through corporate media, this week on CounterSpin.

Featured image:  Extinction Rebellion climate protest. Photo: VladimirMorozov/AKXmedia

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

AP (11/19/23)

This week on CounterSpin: “Abortion Politics Reveal Concerns” was the headline one paper gave a recent Associated Press story, language so bland it almost discourages reading the piece, which reports how right-wing politicians and anti-abortion activists are seeking to undermine or undo democratic processes when those processes accurately reflect the public desire to protect reproductive rights. Methods include “challenging election results, refusing to bring state laws into line with voter-backed changes, moving to strip state courts of their power to consider abortion-related laws, and challenging the citizen-led ballot initiative process itself.”

So there is a way to cover abortion access as a political issue without reducing it to one. But too many outlets seem to have trouble shaking the framing of abortion as a “controversy,” or as posing problems for this or that politician, rather than presenting it as a matter of basic human rights that majorities in this country have long supported, and centering in their coverage the people who are being affected by its creeping criminalization.

Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at the New Republic, and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work and of the forthcoming A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race and the Limits of Justice in America. She’s been reporting on abortion for years, and joins us this week to talk about it.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of marriage and ideology.

The post Melissa Gira Grant on Abortion Rights & Politics appeared first on FAIR.

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

Overflowing morgues. Packed hospitals. City blocks reduced to rubble.

In response to Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, Israel has unleashed mass destruction on Gaza. Into a region the size of Las Vegas, with a population of 2.1 million, nearly half children, Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of bombs, the equivalent of nearly two Hiroshimas. It has killed journalists and doctors, wiped out dozens of members of a single family, massacred fleeing Palestinians, and even bombed a densely populated northern refugee camp. Repeatedly.

As UNICEF spokesperson James Elder recently put it, “Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It’s a living hell for everyone else.”

In its initial attack on Israel, Hamas killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped about 240 more. By the end of October, less than four weeks later, the Palestinian death toll in Gaza had reached a wholly disproportionate 8,805 people. (Since then, the number has surpassed 11,000.)

This run-up in the death count was so rapid that prominent voices resorted to outright denialism. John Kirby, White House National Security Council spokesperson, labeled the Gaza Health Ministry, which is responsible for tallying the Palestinian dead, “a front for Hamas” (Fox, 10/27/23). (The ministry actually answers to the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority—Reuters, 11/6/23.)

And President Joe Biden, much to Fox’s delight (10/25/23), declared: “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed…. I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”

A Washington Post factcheck (11/1/23) diplomatically described this statement as an example of “excessive skepticism”:

The State Department has regularly cited ministry statistics without caveats in its annual human rights reports. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which tracks deaths in the conflict, has found the ministry’s numbers to be reliable after conducting its own investigation. “Past experience indicated that tolls were reported with high accuracy,” an OCHA official told the Fact Checker.

Some deaths count more

For cable news, however, determining the precise number of Palestinian dead may not be all that relevant. Because for them, an important principle comes first: Some numbers don’t count as much as others. Whereas around seven times as many Palestinians died as Israelis during October, Palestinian victims appear to have received significantly less coverage on cable TV.

A slew of searches on the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, which scours transcripts from MSNBC, CNN and Fox News to determine the frequency with which given words and phrases are mentioned on cable news, bears this out. Here’s the breakdown of the screen time awarded to various search terms related to Israeli and Palestinian deaths over the course of October 2023 (see note 1):

In each instance above, coverage of Israeli victims outpaced coverage of Palestinian victims, often to a significant degree.

Even if they had reached numeric parity, that would still have translated to about seven times the mentions of Israeli deaths per dead Israeli compared to Palestinian deaths per dead Palestinian.

In their seminal study on media bias Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky make a distinction between worthy and unworthy victims. As far as the US media is concerned, the worthy include citizens of the US and allied nations, as well as people killed by state enemies. The unworthy include those killed by the US government and its friends.

Herman and Chomsky argue that we can expect the worthy and unworthy to be treated far differently by US media. The former will be the recipients of sympathy and support. The latter will be further victimized by neglect and perhaps even disdain.

It’s not hard to see who the media considers worthy in Israel and Palestine.

Unnewsworthy war crimes

Victims aren’t the only ones who receive different treatment according to group status. So do victimizers. Consider, for example, how often war crimes are covered when they are committed by Hamas versus when they are committed by the Israeli military.

One war crime Hamas is often accused of is the use of civilians as “human shields.” As the Guardian (10/30/23) has reported:

Anecdotal and other evidence does suggest that Hamas and other factions have used civilian objects, including hospitals and schools. Guardian journalists in 2014 encountered armed men inside one hospital, and sightings of senior Hamas leaders inside the Shifa hospital have been documented.

However, the same article continues:

Making the issue more complicated…is the nature of Gaza and conflict there. As the territory consists mostly of an extremely dense urban environment, it is perhaps not surprising that Hamas operates in civilian areas.

International law also makes clear that even if an armed force is improperly using civilian objects to shield itself, its opponent is still required to protect civilians from disproportionate harm.

And it’s worth noting, as the Progressive (6/17/21) has, but the Guardian article unfortunately does not, that

detailed investigations following the 2008–2009 and 2014 conflicts [between Israel and Hamas] by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Council and others have failed to find a single documented case of any civilian deaths caused by Hamas using human shields.

For its part, Israel has been accused of the use of white phosphorus in Gaza, a violation of international law. And its “indiscriminate military attacks” on Gaza have been described by United Nations experts as “collective punishment,” amounting to “a war crime.”

Yet coverage of these Israeli war crimes doesn’t even come close to coverage of “human shields.”

While “human shield(s)” got an estimated 907 mentions throughout October, “collective punishment” got only 140, and “white phosphorus” a mere 30.

Distracting from context

The difference in media’s treatment of a friendly victimizer—one that may cause more death and destruction, but is a longstanding close ally of the United States—and of an official state enemy doesn’t stop there.

On top of downplaying the friendly victimizer’s current war crimes, the media are also happy to distract from a context in which the friendly victimizer has been oppressing a population for years. In this particular case, Israel has illegally occupied Palestinian land since 1967, and has enacted “ruthless policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement and dispossession, coupled with rampant discrimination.” It has subjected Gaza to an illegal air, land and sea blockade since 2007. And it has imposed a system of apartheid on the Palestinian population in the occupied territories, as documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem.

Cable coverage of this context can’t exactly be described as extensive. Shows in which “Hamas” was mentioned near “terrorism” or “terrorist(s),” in fact, outnumbered shows that mentioned “Israel” near “apartheid,” “occupation,” “blockade” or “settlement(s)” more than 3-to-1 during the month of October. (See note 2.)

Put simply, coverage of Israel’s long-standing oppression of the Palestinian people doesn’t appear to come anywhere close to coverage of Hamas’s terrorist acts. Context is swept under the rug. An enemy’s crimes are displayed indignantly on the mantel.

This sort of coverage does not contribute to creating a population capable of thinking critically about violent conflict. Instead, its main purpose seems to be to stir up hatred for a state enemy, and blind support for a state ally. All a viewer has to remember are two simple principles:

1. The suffering of our allies matters. The suffering of our enemies? Not so much.
2. The crimes of our enemies matter. The crimes of our allies? Not so much.

Methodology notes

1. The Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer provides estimates of screen time based on the number of mentions of search terms in the transcripts of cable shows. A time interval is assigned to each mention of a search term—by default and in the searches used for this article, this time interval is equal to one second. The time intervals for a given search term are then filtered for commercials, and for overlap with other time intervals for that same search term, to prevent overcounting. The number given for screen time is the sum of the time intervals after this processing. Since each mention of a search term is set to register as a one-second time interval, the figure for screen time in seconds is equivalent to number of mentions, which is the measure used in these graphs. These results are not without limitations, however, since the Analyzer does not filter for commercials with 100% precision, and CC captions can contain errors. For more details on the Analyzer, consult the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer website.
2.  The Analyzer tallies the number of full shows, the vast majority of which clock in at around one hour in length, during which search terms are mentioned. Due to methodological issues, it’s difficult to get a precise picture of coverage when more complicated searches are fed into the Analyzer. A count of shows in which the search terms are mentioned near each other is therefore a cleaner way of estimating the extent of coverage than a measure of “number of mentions” of search terms. The searches used earlier in this piece, by contrast, were simple enough to avoid the methodological issues associated with more complicated searches. Thus, a count of mentions could be used to provide a more fine-grained estimate of the extent of coverage in those cases.

The post For Cable News, a Palestinian Life Is Not the Same as an Israeli Life appeared first on FAIR.

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

“A free press for free people” boldly champions the censorship of dangerous foreign ideas (Free Press, 11/1/23).

Axios (10/31/23) reported that in a two-week period, TikTok saw “nearly four times the number of views to TikTok posts using the hashtag #StandwithPalestine globally compared to posts using the hashtag #StandwithIsrael.” As a result, the conservative outrage machine kicked into high gear.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wisc.), who serves on the House select committee investigating China’s Communist Party, took to the web publication Free Press (11/1/23) to sound the alarm: TikTok’s Chinese ownership meant that a dangerous foreign power was using social media to sway public opinion against Israel. His solution was clear: It’s “time for Congress to take action. Time to ban TikTok.”

This is interesting for a few reasons, but chief among them is that the Free Press was started by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, one of a handful of conservative journalists who banded together to assert the federal government exerted too much control on Twitter before it was acquired by Elon Musk (NPR, 12/14/22). The company’s liberal corporate governance, they asserted, had suppressed conservative ideas (Washington Post, 12/13/22).

Weiss even signed the Westminster Declaration, a vow to protect “free speech”: “Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices,” it said. These “large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Now the Free Press fears the internet is too free, and should be cleansed of ideas deemed hurtful to the Israeli government.

Censorship by the wrong people

Gallagher said that “TikTok is the top search engine for more than half of Gen Z, and about six in ten Americans are hooked on the app before their 17th birthday.” This is worrisome, he said, because TikTok “is controlled by America’s foremost adversary, one that does not share our interests or our values: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”

This brings Gallagher, and other GOP lawmakers, to the conclusion that the US must ban TikTok. “We are ceding the ability to censor Americans’ speech to a foreign adversary,” he said–suggesting that censorship isn’t altogether wrong, it’s just wrong when committed by an undesirable entity. He pointed out that “for a century, the Federal Communications Commission has blocked concentrated foreign ownership of radio and television assets on national security grounds.”

This indicates that Gallagher, in the name of anti-Communism, doesn’t think the market should decide which media consumers can access. Instead, this must be highly regulated by a powerful federal agency. So much for his commitment to “get big government out of the way.”

‘Massively manipulating’

Critics call for banning TikTok because users are getting the “wrong information,” thus “undercutting support for Israel among young Americans,” which is “contrary to US foreign policy interests” (NBC, 11/1/23).

He’s hardly alone. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.), who once blasted (10/20/20) what she saw as censorship against conservative voices at Facebook and Twitter, called for a ban (NBC, 11/1/23), saying “It would not be surprising that the Chinese-owned TikTok is pushing pro-Hamas content.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) concurred,  saying in a statement, “For quite some time, I have been warning that Communist China is capable of using TikTok’s algorithm to manipulate and influence Americans.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) wants a ban (UPI, 11/7/23), and the New York Post editorial board (11/6/23) approvingly cited Gallagher’s Free Press piece.

Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who has called for punitive action against Harvard University students who made pro-Palestine statements (Wall Street Journal, 10/11/23; Business Insider, 11/5/23), “said TikTok should ‘probably be banned’ for ‘massively manipulating public opinion’ in favor of Hamas and stoking anti-Israel animus,” the New York Post (11/1/23) reported.

CNN (11/5/23) also insinuated that TikTok is skewing public opinion and reported that the Biden administration is monitoring the situation, saying the president’s aides “are also warily monitoring developments like how the Chinese government-controlled TikTok algorithm just happens to be prioritizing anti-Israel content.”

If this freakout about TikTok seems selective, that’s because it is. Since Musk took over Twitter, hate speech and antisemitism have run amok on the platform (Washington Post, 3/20/23; LA Times, 4/27/23), but congressional Republicans and their journalistic allies on the social media beat aren’t clamoring for an intervention into the mogul’s extremist influence on US discourse.

Republicans have been looking to ban TikTok, howling about its Chinese ownership, since the Trump administration, but the call became all the more real when the state of Montana banned the app completely (FAIR.org, 5/25/23). TikTok is banned on US government devices (CBS, 3/1/23); in liberal New York City, the same is true for city government devices (NPR, 8/17/23). Given all that, the concept that the Republican-held House could push to ban TikTok completely, on the grounds that it allows too much criticism of Israel, is no laughing matter.

Media moral panics

Facebook‘s parent company paid a PR firm to promote the view that “TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is No. 1 in sharing data that young teens are using” (Washington Post, 3/30/22).

Some of this vitriol toward TikTok is purely cynical. The Washington Post (3/30/22) reported that “Facebook parent company Meta,” a major competitor to TikTok, worked with “one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.”

But the history of US politics has been defined by periodic moral panics about the subversion of American values through media. The Grant administration took tight control of the US Postal Service out of fear that sexual content circulated through the mail was degrading the nation’s moral core.

The advent of film spawned local and state censorship boards throughout the country, starting with Chicago in 1907. The Supreme Court held in 1915 that film was “a business pure and simple,” and thus not protected by the First Amendment—a decision not reversed until 1952. In the mid–20th century, anti-Communist zealots in the House of Representatives persecuted numerous Hollywood writers and actors, based on the suspicion that they were indoctrinating the American public with socialist ideas through the movies.

In the 1980s, Tipper Gore, wife of then-Sen. Al Gore (D–Tenn.), started a campaign that forced record labels to put warning stickers on albums with “explicit lyrics” (New York Times, 1/4/88).

They must be brainwashed

The Washington Post (11/13/23) noted that “young Americans have consistently shown support for Palestinians in Pew Research surveys, including a poll in 2014, four years before TikTok launched in the United States.”

The current rhetoric against TikTok is not only a hypocritical attack on free speech, it’s an insinuation that the only reason people could be critical of Israel is manipulation by a foreign government. There’s no way people from all walks of life could simply be horrified by what’s happening in Gaza; those devilish Chinese Communists must be warping their minds.

In fact, the Washington Post (11/13/23) found that TikTok was not even unique among social networks for the gap between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel support in public posts. It said:

But Facebook and Instagram, TikTok’s US-based rivals, show a remarkably similar gap, their data show. On Facebook, the #freepalestine hashtag is found on more than 11 million posts—39 times more than those with #standwithisrael. On Instagram, the pro-Palestinian hashtag is found on 6 million posts, 26 times more than the pro-Israel hashtag.

Any move by elected officials to ban TikTok should be taken seriously; it’s not just about the app’s videos about terrible first dates and secret menu items. Free speech is a principle. When so-called defenders of free speech advocate censorship because they find certain political ideas too dangerous, be very worried.

Featured image: Screenshots of Israel/Palestine content on TikTok.

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

New York Times (6/5/22)

This week on CounterSpin: Elite media are fond of saying that the US is resetting its Middle East policy. During the 2020 campaign, the New York Times explained, Joe Biden pledged, if elected, to stop coddling Saudi Arabia, after the brutal murder of prominent dissident and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. “We are not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them,” Biden said. “We’re going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.”

When officials said Biden would visit the kingdom in July of last year and meet with Mohammed bin Salman, understood as the architect of Khashoggi’s murder, a New York Times headline explained that Biden had “‘only bad options’ for bringing down oil prices.”

We talked at the time with Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at DAWN, Democracy for the Arab World Now, an organization founded by Khashoggi. We’ll hear that conversation again today.

Transcript: ‘In the Middle East, We Are Hearing a New Set of Excuses to Justify the Same Old Policy’

Aftermath of Tulsa Massacre (photo via bswise)

Also on the show:  “If you’re not careful,” Malcolm X famously warned, “the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” This is a problem of long standing, and in June 2021 we explored one case of it—the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma—with author and activist Joseph Torres. We hear that this week as well.

Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’

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

Paxlovid tablets

This week on CounterSpin: Advertising critics have long noted that a company’s PR tells you, inadvertently but reliably, exactly what their problems are. The ad features salmon splashing in crystalline waters? That company is for sure a massive polluter.

That’s the lump of salt with which to take the recent announcement from the US Department of Health and Human Services that their new deal with Pfizer “extends patient access” to Covid treatment drug Paxlovid and “maximizes taxpayer investment”—as the HHS works with the drug company to “transition” Paxlovid “to the commercial market.” The announcement doesn’t note that this “transition” entails hiking the cost of the treatment to more than $1,300 for a five-day course, or 100 times the cost of production.

We discuss this outrage, and what allows it, with Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines group at Public Citizen.

(image: Truthout)

Also on the show: CounterSpin listeners, more than many, recognize news media as a keystone issue—important not simply in their own right but to all of the other issues we care about. The media lens—the points of view that they show us day after day, those they obscure or ridicule—affects the way we understand the world, our neighbors and what’s politically possible. That’s why we see the fight for a thriving media ecosystem as bound up completely with the fights for social, racial, economic and environmental justice. We talked about that nexus with Maya Schenwar, author and editor at large of Truthout, and director of a new project, the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism.

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

BBC (10/11/23)

This week on CounterSpin:  In the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas and the ensuing bombing campaign from Israel on the Gaza Strip, many people were surprised that CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria aired an interview with a Palestinian activist who frankly described the daily human rights violations in Gaza, the right of Palestinians to resist occupation and apartheid, and how any tools of resistance they choose are deemed violent and punishable. Such statements aren’t controversial from an international law or human rights perspective, but they stand out a mile in elite US media suffused with assumptions listeners will know: Palestinians attack, Israel responds; periods of “calm” are when only Palestinians are dying; stone-throwing is terrorism, but cutting off water is not.

“War is not the time for context” still seems to be the mantra for many in the US press. But there is, around the edges, growing acknowledgement of the dead end this represents: showing hour after hour of shocking and heart-wrenching imagery, in a way that suggests violence is the only response to violence—when so many people are looking for another way forward.

We’ll talk with Phyllis Bennis from the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Saudi Arabia, Nicaragua, US political division and the Federal Reserve.

The post Phyllis Bennis on Gaza appeared first on FAIR.

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

This week on CounterSpin: The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik is one of vanishingly few national reporters to suggest that if media care about crime, if they care about people having things stolen from them—maybe they could care less about toasters and more about lives? As in, the billions of dollars that are snatched from working people’s pockets every payday by companies, in the form of wage theft—paying less than legal wages, not paying for overtime, stealing tips, denying breaks, demanding people work off the clock before and after shifts, and defining workers as “independent contractors” to deny them benefits. Home Depot just settled a class action lawsuit for $72.5 million, while their CEO went on Fox Business to talk about how shoplifting means we’re becoming a “lawless society.”

There is legislative pushback; New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has added wage theft to the legal definition of larceny, allowing for stronger prosecutions. But such efforts face headwind from corporate media telling us to be mad about the rando taking toilet paper from the Walgreens, but not the executive who’s skimming your paycheck every two weeks. Not to be too poetic, but corporate thieves don’t need masks as long as corporate media provide them.

We talk about wage theft with Rodrigo Camarena. He’s the director of the immigrant justice group Justicia Lab, and co-author, with Cristobal Gutierrez of Make the Road New York, of the article “How to End Wage Theft—and Advance Immigrant Justice” that appeared earlier this month on NonProfitQuarterly.org. He is co-creator of Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat wage theft.

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

The post Rodrigo Camarena on Wage Theft appeared first on FAIR.

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

Photo: UAW

This week on CounterSpin: An unprecedented labor action is underway as thousands of Midwest autoworkers working for the Big 3—Ford, GM and Stellantis (which used to be Chrysler)—went on strike at the same time. Some things workers are calling for may sound familiar: a pay raise for workers that bears relation to raises that owners have generously given themselves; reinstatement of cost-of-living increases. Others—a shorter work week; the elimination of “tiered” jobs, where some folks are just never on the track for benefits; and a seat at the table for workers in any conversations about climate-related economic transitions—sound downright visionary.

It would be a critical story at any time. But right now,  every day brings news—like Australian real estate developer Tim Gurner’s declaring, out loud, in public, “We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40–50%, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy”—that tells us that the situation isn’t about “the economy working,” but about for whom the economy is supposed to work.

Unionized autoworkers are saying that profits—like the $21 billion the Big 3 have declared in the first six months of 2023—have to mean better conditions for the people doing the work. “We can’t afford it” is a harder message for corporate media to support as unions grow in strength, and as people find other sources than major corporate outlets to look to for explanations about what’s happening.

Lisa Xu, organizer with Labor Notes, is in Detroit right now. We talk with her about this historic UAW strike.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of depleted uranium and RICO indictments.

The post Lisa Xu on Auto Workers Strike appeared first on FAIR.

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

(CC photo: Paul Hart)

This week on CounterSpin: It is back to school week in the US.  Schools—pre-K to college—have been on the front burner for at least a year now, but education has always been a contested field in this country: Who has access? What does it teach? What is its purpose? Do my kids have to go to school with those kids? So while what’s happening right now is new, it has roots. And it does no disservice to the battles of the current day to connect them to previous battles and conversations, and that’s what we’re going to do this week on the show.

We hear from three of the many education experts that have been our pleasure to speak with: Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro.

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

(image: New Disabled South)

This week on CounterSpin: “We’ve come a long way but there’s a long way to go” is a familiar, facile framing that robs urgency from fights for justice. It’s the frame that tends to dominate annual journalistic acknowledgement of the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed 33 years ago in late July.

Like Black history month, the ADA anniversary is a peg—an opportunity for journalists to offer information and insight on issues they might not have felt there was space for throughout the year. As depressing as that is, media coverage of the date often doesn’t even rise to the occasion. You wouldn’t guess from elite media’s afterthought approach that some 1 in 4 people in this country have some type of disability, or that it’s one group that any of us could join at any moment.

Likewise, you might not understand that the ADA didn’t call for curb cuts at every corner, but for an end to “persistent discrimination in such critical areas as: employment, housing, public accommodations, education, transportation, communication, recreation, institutionalization, health services, voting and access to public services.” Nothing less than the maximal integration of disabled people into community and political life—you know, like people.

And if that’s the story, it’s clear that it demands all kinds of attention, every day—not a once a year pat on the back about “how far we’ve come.”

We talk about some of all of that with Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder and chief operating officer of New Disabled South.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Maui fires and the climate crisis.

The post Kehsi Iman Wilson on Americans with Disability Act appeared first on FAIR.

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

Victim of US torture at Abu Ghraib, 2003

This week on CounterSpin: For corporate news media, every mention of the Iraq War is a chance to fuzz up or rewrite history a little more. This year, the New York Times honored the war’s anniversary with a friendly piece about how George W. Bush “doesn’t second guess himself on Iraq,” despite pesky people mentioning things like the torture of innocent prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema has just refused to dismiss a long standing case brought against Abu Ghraib torturers for hire, the company known as CACI.  Unlike elite media’s misty memories, the case is a real-world, stubborn indication that what happened happened and those responsible have yet to be called to account. We can call the case, abstractly, “anti-torture” or “anti-war machine,” as though it were a litmus test on those things; but we can’t forget that it’s pro–Suhail al-Shimari, pro–Salah al-Ejaili,   pro– all the other human beings horrifically abused in that prison in our name.  We get an update on the still-ongoing case—despite some 18 attempts to dismiss it—from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Gizmodo (8/9/23)

Also on the show: The internet? Am i right? Thomas Germain is senior reporter at Gizmodo; he fills us in on some new developments in the online world most of us, like it or not, live in and rely on. Developments to do with ads, ads and still more ads, and also with the disappearing and potential disappearing of decades of archived information and reporting.

The post Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Torture Lawsuit, Thomas Germain on Online History Destruction appeared first on FAIR.

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

New York Times (8/6/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Why was Detroit mother Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, arrested and held 11 hours by police accusing her of robbery and carjacking? Because Woodruff was identified as a suspect based on facial recognition technology. The Wayne County prosecutor still contends that Woodruff’s charges—dismissed a month later—were “appropriate based upon the facts.” Those “facts” increasingly involve the use of technology that has been proven wrong; the New York Times report on Woodruff helpfully links to articles like “Another Arrest and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match,” and “Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm.” And it’s especially wrong when it comes to—get ready to be surprised—Black people.

Facial recognition has been deemed harmful, in principle and in practice, for years now. We talked in February 2019 with Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU of Washington state.  We hear that conversation this week.

Transcript:  ‘Face Surveillance Is a Uniquely Dangerous Technology’

Newsweek (8/7/23)

Also on the show: Listeners may know a federal court has at least for now blocked Biden administration efforts to forgive the debt of student borrowers whose colleges lied to them or suddenly disappeared. The White House seems to be looking for ways to ease student loan debt more broadly, but not really presenting an unapologetic, coherent picture of why, and what the impacts would be. We talked about that with Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective in March 2022. We’ll revisit that conversation today as well.

Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’

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

The post Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition appeared first on FAIR.

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

New York Times (8/6/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Why was Detroit mother Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, arrested and held 11 hours by police accusing her of robbery and carjacking? Because Woodruff was identified as a suspect based on facial recognition technology. The Wayne County prosecutor still contends that Woodruff’s charges—dismissed a month later—were “appropriate based upon the facts.” Those “facts” increasingly involve the use of technology that has been proven wrong; the New York Times report on Woodruff helpfully links to articles like “Another Arrest and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match,” and “Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm.” And it’s especially wrong when it comes to—get ready to be surprised—Black people.

Facial recognition has been deemed harmful, in principle and in practice, for years now. We talked in February 2019 with Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU of Washington state.  We hear that conversation this week.

Transcript:  ‘Face Surveillance Is a Uniquely Dangerous Technology’

Newsweek (8/7/23)

Also on the show: Listeners may know a federal court has at least for now blocked Biden administration efforts to forgive the debt of student borrowers whose colleges lied to them or suddenly disappeared. The White House seems to be looking for ways to ease student loan debt more broadly, but not really presenting an unapologetic, coherent picture of why, and what the impacts would be. We talked about that with Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective in March 2022. We’ll revisit that conversation today as well.

Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’

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

The post Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition appeared first on FAIR.

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

Washington Post (7/25/23)

This week on CounterSpin: As contract negotiations went on between UPS and the Teamsters, against a backdrop of a country ever more reliant on package deliveries and the people who deliver them, the New York Times offered readers a lesson in almost-but-not-quite subtext, with a piece that included the priceless line: “By earning solid profits with a largely unionized workforce, UPS has proved that opposing unions isn’t the only path to financial success.” The tentative agreement that both the union and the company are calling a “win win win” presents a bit of a block for elite media, so deeply accustomed to calling any union action a harm, and any company acknowledgment of workers’ value a concession.

Teddy Ostrow will bring us up to speed on Teamsters and UPS. He reports on labor and economic issues, and is host and lead producer of the podcast the Upsurge.

Lever (7/25/23)

Also on the show: Despite how it may feel, there’s no need for competition: You can be terribly worried about the devastating, galloping effects of climate disruption, and also be terribly confused and disturbed by the stubborn unwillingness of elected officials to react appropriately in the face of it. What are the obstacles between the global public’s dire needs, articulated wants, desperate demands—and the actual actions of so-called leaders supposedly positioned to represent and enforce those needs, wants and demands? Wouldn’t a free press in a democratic society be the place where we would see that conflict explained?

Independent media have always tried to step into the space abandoned by corporate media; the job only gets more critical. Matthew Cunningham-Cook covers a range of issues for the Lever, which has the piece we’ll be talking about: “The GOP Is Quietly Adding Climate Denial to Government Spending Bills.”

The post Teddy Ostrow on UPS/Teamsters Agreement, Matthew Cunningham-Cook on GOP Climate Sabotage appeared first on FAIR.

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

Janine Jackson interviewed The Nation‘s Dave Zirin about the elimination of the New York Times‘ sports section for the July 28, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

New York Times (10/23/17)

Janine Jackson: Earlier this month, the New York Times made an announcement: The paper has a plan, they said, to “become a global leader in sports journalism.” Weirdly, the statement accompanied the news that the Times is shutting down its sports page. Times sports coverage is now in the hands of something called the Athletic, a sports website and app that the Times purchased a year and a half ago.

Athletic co-founder Alex Mather explained his outfit’s aspirations in a 2017 interview with, as it happens, the New York Times:

We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last one standing. We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.

An Athletic editor tweeted a week or so ago, “Don’t be fooled by the cranky ‘sports journalism is dying’ tweets. The future has never been brighter.” The future of what, exactly, you might ask.

Dave Zirin is sports editor at The Nation as well as host of the Edge of Sports podcast. He’s author of a number of books, most recently The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World, and he’s a writer/producer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL. He joins us now by phone from Takoma Park, Maryland. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dave Zirin.

Dave Zirin: Oh, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

The Nation (7/14/23)

JJ: Let me ask you, I guess, to start with what you see being lost. Not everything is worth preserving, of course, and not everything new is bad, but this decision represents more than, well, you might want to look somewhere else for box scores, yeah?

DZ: Yeah. I mean, we’ve been losing local coverage all over the country in the world of sports. Now, what does that mean? It doesn’t just mean that your local high school doesn’t get the attention it deserves, although, frankly, that is something.

It also means that all of the local scandals that invariably arrive through sports, whether it’s the public funding of stadiums and all the skullduggery that goes on with that, whether it’s the cozy relationships between political officials and team owners, whether it’s bad behavior by players in a public setting that in some way, shape or form endangers the public: All of these things are a product of local reporting, in terms of informing the public who these people are that we’re cheering for and what these teams represent that we’re cheering for.

The ascension of the Athletic is the negation of that kind of local sports coverage. It’s basically, even though it has a lot of talented reporters, many of whom are my colleagues and friends, a hedge fund posing as a sports operation that aims to hurt local sports pages all over the country.

And the issue here: It’s not just about the quality of the New York Times sports page historically, it’s not just about its Pulitzer Prizes and assorted awards or names that I grew up with, the Dave Andersons, the Harvey Aratons, the Red Smiths, for goodness’ sake, the Bob Lipsytes, these legendary names—Selena Roberts, Sonja Steptoe. It’s not just about that.

It’s the fact that it’s the industry leader, the New York Times, it really signals how dire the situation is nationally.

JJ: And it sounds like there’s things to know, you’ve started to tell us, that we need to know about the Athletic in particular, and the kind of rules by which they run their operation.

DZ: Yeah, it’s a union-busting operation, and it’s about presenting itself as a possibility for outsourcing for your local media baron that is having union troubles. We just saw this in the New York Times, where the New York Times workers, they stood together strong. The journalists stood together. I believe it was a one-day strike. Correct me if I’m wrong.

JJ: I believe so.

Dave Zirin: “When you get rid of local coverage, what you also get rid of is the watchdog that is so important…. It’s not all fun and games.”

DZ: And what it did was, it put the Sulzbergers and company back on their heels. What do they do in response to that? Oh gee, by sheer coincidence, hey, we’re shutting down a section of the newspaper, of course populated by Guild workers, union workers, and we’re replacing it with this non-union operation that, frankly, we’re already paying for. And we’re going to put it under the guise of, as Sulzberger said, this is going to make us the leader in sports.

So these people live in Bizarro World, the Superman world where everything is opposite. So they say, “Hey, we’re going to have the best sports coverage in the world.” After you fire or reassign all your sports reporters? That’s how you make the step to have the best sports coverage in the world?

But no, they’ll say, we have the Athletic, it’s a national operation. But as I said earlier, especially when you’re talking about the city of New York, when you get rid of local coverage, what you also get rid of is the watchdog that is so important, because of the corruption so endemic to the business of organized sports. It’s not all fun and games.

JJ: Some of the conversation makes it seem as though people really just were looking for scores from last night’s games. If that’s all you think sports coverage is, well then maybe nothing’s being lost. But that isn’t what it can be, and that isn’t what it is at its best.

And then another thing that was noted in this 2017 New York Times piece, and it’s been noted elsewhere—I like the way it was described, so I’ll use that quote: “They don’t hew to traditional, they would say antiquated, norms” about editorial independence. They have deals with teams, they have ties to gambling apps, and that’s out of the same mouth that they’re talking about quality journalism.

DZ: Amazing. And the infestation of the gambling apps, which I have described on other occasions, is really nothing more than a regressive tax on sports fans, and preying on addiction issues that exist in the general populace, for the broader purpose of further filling the coffers of organized sports. I mean, this has been an economic boom for organized sports.

And it’s the similar mentality of the hedge fund that is really running the Athletic, it’s the hedge fund mentality that says, where is profit to be found? It’s not to be found in creating, it’s not to be found in jobs. Profit is to be found by picking the meat off the bones of what’s left. It’s declinism writ large.

So to fund the gambling that’s done by fans, which further funds sports, which makes the players and particularly ownership that much richer—like I said, a regressive tax—but yet one that goes into the pockets of ownership, not like the lottery, where it goes to state funding for schools or whatever. I mean, it’s like a privately run lottery system, and I mean, frankly, betting is basically a lottery system, as some of us have found out the hard way.

But the second part of that, too, is the connection with the teams themselves, the foregoing of editorial independence, has created—I mean, this is a crisis in sports journalism.

Daily Northwestern (7/8/23)

And the quote you read by an editor at the Athletic named Stewart Mandel, about people like myself, “stop bellyaching and crying about the state of sports journalism”—he was using as an example the very inspiring story of the Northwestern sports journalists at Northwestern University.

They uncovered this terrible scandal involving hazing and brutality on the football team. It caused the head coach, who’d been there forever, to get fired. And so he’s saying, “look, sports journalism’s alive and well; look at the Northwestern paper.” But where are these people supposed to work? And how are they supposed to do similar journalism, even if they are lucky enough to get a job, if they work for somewhere like the Athletic that quashes their story?

And even if the Athletic wouldn’t spike a story like this, let’s be honest, anybody who’s worked in mainstream media will agree with what I’m about to say: There is something called the “invisible censor” in every mainstream newsroom, where sometimes you don’t need an editor to spike a story, but you just know, whoa, if I run afoul of the Northwestern football team, then that could somehow affect my prospects, because of the Athletic’s relationship with that powerful institution.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, of course, we at FAIR, and on this show, talk constantly about the conflicts between journalism as a public service and media as a business. This is an attenuation of that, hyped-up evidence of that.

But I always say, can we at least not fall for the same BS again and again? “If you let us merge, we’ll do double the good reporting. Bigness and market dominance is going to lead to quality.” You’ve said it really already, but this is codswallop, this argument.

DZ: It is codswallop. That’s a word I’m going to use in the near future. Thank you.

The part, though, that I want to accentuate before we finish up is something that you just said that I think is so important, which is this conflict between commerce and principled reporting exists in every newsroom, you have to say, under the umbrella of the mainstream media, of course.

And yet, at the very least, in the New York Times sports section case, it was a conflict. This feels so much more like a surrender.

JJ: All right, I’m going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation. You can find his piece, “The End of the New York Times Sports Page Is a Tragedy,” online at TheNation.com. Dave Zirin, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.

DZ: Thank you for having me. I really support and respect the work that you do.

The post ‘The Athletic Is the Negation of Local Sports Coverage’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

Houston Chronicle (7/11/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Listeners may have heard that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott installed barrels wrapped in razor wire in some parts of the Rio Grande to block migrants from crossing and harm those that try. As revealed by the Houston Chronicle, Texas troopers have been ordered to push people back into the river, and to deny them water. The cruelty is obvious; the Department of Justice is talking about suing.

But there are other ways for immigration policy to be inhumane. Advocates have long declared that Biden’s asylum restrictions (which look a lot like Trump’s asylum restrictions) are not just harmful but unlawful. And a federal judge has just agreed. We learn about that from a participant in the case, Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies.

New York Times (10/23/17)

Also on the show: In October 2017, the New York Times ran a story headlined “Why the Athletic Wants to Pillage Newspapers,” that began, “By the time you finish reading this article, the upstart sports news outlet called the Athletic probably will have hired another well-known sportswriter from your local newspaper.” In January 2022, the Times bought the Athletic for $550 million, saying that “as a stand-alone product…the Athletic is a great complement to the Times.”

It’s now July 2023, and the New York Times has announced it’s shutting down its sports desk, outsourcing that reporting to…the Athletic. Dave Zirin joins us to talk about that; he’s sports editor at The Nation, host of the Edge of Sports podcast, and author of many books, including A People’s History of Sports in the United States.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Europe’s economy.

The post Melissa Crow on Asylum Restrictions, Dave Zirin on NYT’s Vanishing Sports Section appeared first on FAIR.

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

Janine Jackson interviewed the African American Policy Forum’s Kevin Minofu about Say Her Name for the July 21, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Like most powerful exercises, it’s a simple one. Professor and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw asks audience members to stand as she lists names of Black people killed by law enforcement in this country, and to sit when they hear a name that they don’t recognize.

(Haymarket Books, 2023)

For Eric Garner, George Floyd, Michael Brown, most of the crowd—whatever crowd it is, students, academics, the general public—stay standing. But when it gets to Sandra Bland, Atatiana Jefferson, it thins and thins.  And by the time it gets to Rekia Boyd and Michelle Cusseaux, generally everyone is seated.

Is that because Black women’s deaths via the same state-sanctioned violence that kills Black boys and men are less compelling? Are the victims less worthy? Or do they somehow not matter?

It’s hard to tease out and to talk about what’s happening. But if we genuinely want to address racist police violence, and bring all of us into the imagined future, we have to have the conversation.

The Say Her Name project from the African American Policy Forum, on whose board I serve, has worked to lift up the names of women, trans women and girls killed by law enforcement on and off duty, and to talk about how their murders are the same as, and different from, police murders of Black men and boys.

That project is now reflected in a book, Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence, out this week from Haymarket Books.

Joining us now is Kevin Minofu, senior researcher and writing fellow at the African American Policy Forum. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Kevin Minofu.

Kevin Minofu: Hi, Janine. It’s a pleasure to be on. I’m very grateful for you making the time and, yeah, great to be on the show.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, as you and I both know, the Say Her Name project encompasses activism, art, research and writing, and support for families. But the heart of it, the radiating center, is still this really simple thing: “Say her name.” Why is that so meaningful?

KM: I think in describing that, it’s kind of useful to go back to the origins of the movement, because people are always interested in how it developed. People have probably heard about it, but oftentimes may be confused about its history.

Atlantic (12/4/14)

And so Say Her Name developed around December 2014, during the protests that were ignited in New York City after the acquittal of the police officer who had killed Eric Garner, at the march where thousands of protesters from across the country of all ages and all races joined together and were standing up against police violence against Black people, and mentioning the names of men who had been killed by police violence.

In the context of that protest, the African American Policy Forum were, at the protest, trying to uplift the names of women who had been killed by police violence. And so in the process of being part of that activity, we were saying the names of these women, saying their names out loud, and looking at the looks of lack of recognition, of confusion, from the other participants at this protest.

And I think that was emblematic of the erasure of these stories, and the ways in which by saying the names of these women, we were speaking them into existence in people’s minds, into people’s memories, and making them understand a problem that up until then they hadn’t been able to see.

JJ: There’s a thing that we talk about, the loss of the loss, which is, there’s a horror that happens, obviously, when somebody is killed by police, and where you understand that it’s emblematic of the worthlessness of Black lives, in terms of law enforcement in this country.

But when it’s a Black woman or a trans woman or a girl, and then it doesn’t get acknowledged, there’s a deeper level of loss there. And that’s kind of what this project is about.

Kevin Minofu: “Not a lot of people would understand that Black women are often killed by the police when they actually ask for help.”

KM: Exactly. As we’ve always described it, there’s the immense loss of what it means for a person to lose a daughter, a mother, a sister, a friend, in their families. These are women who all had incredibly full lives, lots of them had children, were all loved by family members and their communities. So there’s that loss that everyone who’s been through grief or has lost someone unexpectedly will suffer.

And I think that loss is exacerbated by the fact that these are women who are killed by the same institutions that are designed to protect them. So the police officers that we entrust with the safety of our communities and in our neighborhoods and in our cities are the people who are responsible for taking away these lives.

And then once we understand that loss, there’s the secondary loss that the family members are burdened with, which is the loss of their loss. Their loss is not legible to people. People don’t recognize that this is something which is a tragedy. People don’t recognize that that’s something which is a problem.

People don’t recognize the injustice of being killed if you are, in the case of one of the women, Miriam Carey, who was killed while driving with her 18-month-old child by the Secret Service in front of the White House. If you were killed like India Kager, who was also driving with her son in Virginia Beach, and killed in a hail of bullets. If you were killed in the context of your own home, over what was an outstanding traffic violation, like Korryn Gaines.

So an inability for the general public to see the horror of these deaths, and the loss that those deaths mean for the family members that survive, is what we like to term the loss of the loss, and why this book is such a big intervention to try and publicize and get that loss into the public’s attention.

JJ: And to inform the conversation about state-sanctioned police violence against Black people.

But I just want to say, let me just intercede early: I want us to dispense early with the idea that Say Her Name is somehow an invidious project. And I think some listeners might be surprised to hear, but we know that this project has been met with the idea that if you are uplifting the names of Black women and girls who have been killed by police, that somehow that means you don’t think it matters that Black men and boys have been killed by police.

LA Times (7/21/23)

But I will say, having done a lot of looking into media coverage of the issue, very early on, we absolutely saw the question of state-sanctioned police violence as a question about police killing Black men and boys.

And to the extent that women were in the conversation, they were mothers and wives and sisters of Black men who were the victims of state violence. And so let’s just address the fact that this is not about saying that Black men and boys are not also [affected].

KM: I think that’s a very vital thing to add. Thanks for making that, Janine, because the whole impetus of this campaign is stating that we need to expand the scope of our politics, not just replace the names that we include. So we’re not just replacing Black women and Black men in the conversation, but understanding that we need to have a gender-inclusive understanding of police violence.

So of course we know that, across racial groups, that men are killed more often, Black men are killed more than any other race and gender group. But we do know that Black women represent about 10% of the female population in the United States, yet account for one-fifth of all women killed by the police. And more so, research suggests that three out of five Black women who are killed by police are unarmed.

So there’s a particular vulnerability to being a Black woman that exacerbates the chance of being in a deadly and a lethal police encounter that other women don’t face, and even a lot of men don’t face as well.

So being able to speak about that is able to make us understand how we should be able to hold the death of George Floyd in conversation with the death of Breonna Taylor, which happened only a couple months before George Floyd was killed. So that is the point and impetus of our project.

JJ: And also, a problem that is not named is not studied, is not addressed, and then it’s easier for people to say it’s not really a problem, because we don’t have any data on it. So part of this is just to actually collect some numbers and to say this is happening.

AAPF (7/15)

KM: Absolutely. The kind of driving mantra of our work, and our broader work of the Policy Forum, is that we can’t fix the problem that we can’t see, that we can’t name.

And so maybe to give a bit of background, this book is building on work that we did in 2015, which was the inception of our Say Her Name report.

The Say Her Name report then looked at the ways in which Black women were killed. So, for example, driving while Black is something that we have a context for and understanding for, from looking at the history of how people commonly understand police violence.

But looking at, for example, how often Black women who are in a mental health crisis are killed, that expanded the scope of how we understood police violence, because not a lot of people would understand that Black women are often killed by the police when they actually ask for help.

So giving ourselves these frames for understanding the ways in which this problem occurs, both gave us a comparison to link it back to the ways in which we commonly understand it, and also expanded the scope for how we want to respond to the crisis.

JJ: Yeah, absolutely. There is a narrative, which maybe some listeners are not privy to or don’t understand, but there is a dominant narrative in which Black men who are killed by police are victims of state violence, but Black women who are killed, eh, what did they do to get themselves killed?

And so introducing both the mental health vector, but just, there’s meaning in saying that it’s both the same—racist police violence is similar—and then there are also distinctions. And if we don’t pay attention to them, then we can’t address them.

News 5 Cleveland (11/11/22)

KM: I think part of that work has been, there’s a policy intervention that is required, of course, there’s legislation both across the country and in certain states that needs to be effected to change this, but a big part of this is also just a narrative shift.

So it’s how the media report on the ways in which Black women are killed, or decline to report on them at all. And I think the Breonna Taylor example is indicative of that. The fact that Breonna Taylor was killed in March, and very little was made of the fact at the time, on a national scale, and then a few months later, that’s when her name joined that conversation.

The fact that Tanisha Anderson was killed only a few days before Tamir Rice was killed by the same police department.

The ways in which the media can, frankly, just do their job better, to make sure that we have a more capacious and broader frame of police violence, and are able to tell the stories of these women in a way that doesn’t show deference to the narratives that emanate from police sources, and shows the full beauty of their lives.

JJ: So important. To come back to the book, specifically, this book is not just a book. It’s meant to be a tool. It’s not meant to just sit on a shelf.

And Fran Garrett, who is the mother of Michelle Cusseaux, who was killed by law enforcement, she talks in the book about how things are actually different based on the work around Say Her Name, and how the mental health response in her community, which happens to be Phoenix, Arizona, but now mental health wellness orders are handled differently, and it’s not necessarily law enforcement that comes first to your door.

So the book is a way of also encouraging action. It’s not just documentation of sad things; it’s about how to make things different.

YouTube (9/24/21)

KM: Absolutely. At the heart of the book—and I would encourage all your listeners to go out and get it at a bookstore near you, and online—at the heart of the book is the Say Her Name Mothers Network. The Say Her Name Mothers Network was formed not long after the inception of the Say Her Name movement, and it represents mothers, daughters, sisters, family members who have lost women to police violence.

And that community has existed, and has existed as a source of advocacy, a source of community. It’s connected them to women across the country, from Virginia to California, from New York to Texas.

It shows that there is a community out there, and through this community, and then particularly through storytelling, artivism, using art to disrupt popular narratives, we released a song with Janelle Monáe, who also wrote the forward for the book, called “Say Her Name (Hell You Talmbout).”

And that’s designed to just—all of these narrative interventions are the seeds for what becomes policy and actually becomes change. It’s a historical project that Black people have been doing in this country since our arrival. And it’s the Black feminist legacy that brings this book into fruition.

JJ: And then, just on media, I think some listeners might think, well, media are covering police violence against Black women, and what they might be thinking about is these terrible, wrenching videos, or these just horrible images of Black women being abused by law enforcement.

And we want to be careful about this, because I think for a lot of people, that might look like witnessing, that might look like seeing what’s happening, but that can’t be the end of the story.

And certainly for journalists, the responsibility of reporters—but also for all of us—is to not just look at it, but to do something about it. And I wonder if you were talking to reporters or thinking about journalism generally, what would be your thoughts about what would be actually righteous response to what’s happening?

Salon (10/28/15)

KM: Yeah, absolutely. I think that, of course, we live in an age of spectacle, and there is still a great spectacle to Black suffering. And the visibility of that, that has increased with the internet and social media, has been important in being able to document abuses and violence across the country.

But the story can’t end there. It can’t end there, just that particular moment. If this was a camera shot, the camera needs to be expanded to look at the dynamics of the communities, the relationship between police forces and these communities, and the patriarchal relationship between the male police officers and women, the racialized relationship between a police force which has been designed to serve white interests and Black communities.

And so to do the vital work of understanding what led to that situation, what led to the Black girl being violently dragged out of a classroom, or beaten for swimming, or killed in a part of the misguided war on drugs. To understand that broader story is the vital work of journalism that we need at the moment, and the vital work that is actually going to save lives.

JJ: Do you have any final thoughts, Kevin Minofu, about this importance and the place of this intervention in the public media conversation about Say Her Name, and about police violence against Black women?

KM: The Say Her Name book, as I said, features different interviews with members of the Say Her Name Network. And so just hearing those stories and actually getting behind a news story and learning about the lives that should have been is really important for everyone to be able to contextualize and humanize the women that form part of the network and this broader movement.

And looking at the ways in which the knowledge that is being lifted up here is vital to us understanding racism, sexism, and at the same time, being cognizant of the fact that that is the precise knowledge which at the moment a backlash to what is termed wokeness across the country is attempting to erase.

I can imagine that the content of the Say Her Name book would inflame the sensitivities of various conservatives and right-wing people that are attempting to silence our ability to speak about our circumstances, because they don’t want us to change it.

So in this context of that environment, reading this book, sharing it with your communities, letting people know about the problem, letting people know that to truly respond to structural racism, to racial injustice, we have to have a gender-expansive, gender-inclusive understanding of it…. I think that’s the work, that’s the mission of Say Her Name.

And we’ve been very grateful to be supported by the public so far. We’ve seen the movement grow, but there’s still so much work to be done, and that’s the work that we’re excited to continue.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Kevin Minofu, senior research and writing fellow at the African American Policy Forum. You can learn more about this work on the website AAPF.org. Thank you so much, Kevin Minofu, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KM: Thanks, Janine.

The post ‘We Need a Gender-Inclusive Understanding of Police Violence’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

(Haymarket Books, 2023)

This week on CounterSpin: If corporate news media didn’t matter, we wouldn’t talk about them.  But elite, moneyed outlets do, of course, direct public attention to some issues and not to others, and suggest the possibility of some social responses, but not others.  It’s that context that the African American Policy Forum hopes folks will bring to their new book, based on years of research, called Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence. It’s not, of course, about excluding Black men and boys from public conversation about police violence, but about the value of adding Black women to our understanding of the phenomenon—as a way to help make our response more meaningful and impactful. If, along the way, we highlight that ignoring the specific, intersectional meaning that policies and practices have for women who are also Black—well, that would improve journalism too. We’ll talk about Say Her Name with one of the key workers on that ongoing project, Kevin Minofu, senior research and writing fellow at African American Policy Forum.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of campaign town halls.

The post Kevin Minofu on Say Her Name appeared first on FAIR.

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

After its embarrassing town hall with Donald Trump, which helped precipitate the downfall of chair and CEO Chris Licht (FAIR.org, 6/8/23), CNN has doubled down on the format—at least for Republican candidates. Since Trump’s May 10 appearance, the network has featured GOP candidates Nikki Haley (6/4/23), Mike Pence (6/7/23) and Chris Christie (6/12/23), with more promised. Curiously, however, no offers to Democratic or third party candidates have been announced, which prompts the question: What purpose do these town halls serve?

In the case of the Trump town hall, CNN‘s decision appeared to be entirely self-serving. Having worked to move the network rightward, Licht had led CNN to “its historic nadir,” as described in the Atlantic (6/2/23), in terms of both ratings and newsroom morale. The Trump town hall was meant to be the “big win” that would turn those things around.

Of course, the plan backfired. Trump had a field day, spewing lies and trampling over and insulting host Kaitlan Collins to the wild cheers of the crowd. The entire affair read as a giant campaign rally sponsored by CNN, aided by the floor manager’s instructions to the audience that while applause was permitted, booing was not. While immediate ratings spiked (Axios, 5/11/23) they then plunged even further (TV Insider, 5/16/23), as the network’s reputation immediately suffered and morale hit rock bottom. Licht was soon given the boot (FAIR.org, 6/8/23).

‘In the public’s interest’

CNN‘s Anderson Cooper (5/11/23) suggested that critics of the Trump town hall were upset because “maybe you haven’t been paying attention to him since he left office.”

But CNN anchor Anderson Cooper (5/11/23) would have you believe the network was actually putting democracy and the public interest first. He went on the air in a huff to accuse the network’s many critics of trying to stifle debate and refusing to face disagreeable realities. “Many of you felt CNN shouldn’t have given [Trump] any platform to speak,” he scolded. “Do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away?”

Fellow anchor Jake Tapper agreed. Speaking on a New York magazine podcast (On With Kara Swisher, 7/10/23), Tapper argued that the town hall format for Trump was “in the public’s interest.”

Some outside of CNN stepped in to defend the outlet’s decision as well. The New York Times‘ Maureen Dowd (5/13/23), for instance, wrote that “the task is to challenge Trump and expose him, not to put our fingers in our ears and sing ‘la, la, la.'” She approvingly quoted former Obama adviser David Axelrod:

It strikes me as fundamentally wrong to deny voters a chance to see candidates, and particularly front-running candidates, answering challenging questions from journalists and citizens in open forums…. You can’t save democracy from people who would shred its norms by shredding democratic norms yourselves.

But these specious arguments are easily dispensed with. What democratic norms require offering a serial liar a town hall stuffed full of supporters, in which the audience is instructed that applause is welcomed but booing is forbidden? In what way does that serve the public interest?

After four years of the Trump presidency and the democracy-shaking transition out of it, CNN would be hard-pressed to find a living soul who doesn’t know exactly who Trump and his supporters are and how they can be expected to behave. That the town hall was devoid of thoughtful policy discussions but replete with insults and falsehoods should have surprised no one. And despite her efforts, CNN‘s Collins had no chance of pinning down Trump in any useful way on any of his lies or contradictions in such a format.

Platform for falsehoods

CNN.com (6/4/23) assured readers that former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley “correctly cited a variety of facts and figures”—as though this were a noteworthy thing for a politician to do.

But the problem goes beyond Trump. Trump’s challengers have all broken with the former president to some degree, though few will risk alienating his followers by forcefully denouncing his lies. Still, they represent a slightly more reality-based GOP than Trump, such that their town hall appearances might be expected to meet the extremely low bar of not being as filled with disinformation as Trump’s.

Yet CNN‘s own factchecks of its subsequent GOP town halls showed Haley, Pence and Christie were permitted numerous falsehoods without real-time challenge by their journalist hosts.

Haley, for instance, claimed that crime is at “all-time highs” (judged by CNN factcheckers—6/4/23— to be “not even close to true”), that Roe v. Wade made “abortion anytime, anywhere for any reason” the law of the land (“not true”), and that the US “is very good when it comes to emissions,” while the Chinese and Indians “are the problem” (seriously misleading, as the US is second to China in total current emissions, with India well in third place; the US has much higher total historical emissions, and much higher per capita emissions, than China or India).

Tapper, the host, did not push back against any of these claims.

Or take Pence’s town hall, in which he announced that inflation is “at a 40-year high” (nope—”the inflation rate has fallen for 10 straight months,” noted the CNN fact check—6/7/23), that the Trump/Pence family separations began “under Obama” and Trump and Pence simply “continued” it (“not true at all”), and that their administration “reduced CO₂ emissions beyond what the previous administration had committed to just through American innovation, through expanding American energy and natural gas.” (That one CNN didn’t factcheck, but it’s terribly false.)

Host Dana Bash did not challenge any of these statements, either.

Town halls for GOP only

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was given a town hall of his own by CNN (6/12/23), despite having the support of approximately 1 in every 40 likely Republican primary voters.

In contrast to its apparent policy of handing out GOP town halls like candy, CNN has announced no plans to give any Democratic candidates town halls. While Biden has the power of incumbency that the GOP field lacks, he does have at least two announced challengers: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Marianne Williamson. Meanwhile, Cornel West has declared a presidential run with the Green Party.

Kennedy and Williamson, with recent polling averages of 14.6% and 5.6% respectively among Democratic primary voters, have been polling higher than either Haley (3.5%) or Christie (2.3%). (Pence’s latest average is 6.0%.)

But Kennedy, whose campaign seems to be driven largely by right-wing funders and media as a spoiler (see FAIR.org, 6/29/23), is an outspoken conspiracy theorist on issues ranging from vaccines to the climate crisis to 5g networks. Williamson, a self-help author with mostly progressive politics, long encouraged doubts on vaccines and anti-depressants (Vox, 7/31/19), though she has since at least partially rejected those positions.

CNN‘s Tapper, despite his full-throated support for the CNN Trump town hall, has declared that he would not host a town hall with Kennedy because of his conspiracy theories. (Upstart NewsNation—6/28/23—did give Kennedy such an opportunity, the only network so far to do so.)

One of the worst possible ways

Biden may not traffic in conspiracy theories or attempt the level of dishonesty Trump revels in, but his claims regularly require factchecking as well. Virtually all politicians’ claims do—and our corporate media have never been up to the task (FAIR.org, 8/24/20). But live, single-candidate town halls before a strictly friendly audience are indisputably one of the worst possible ways for news outlets to help the public make an informed choice at the ballot box.

Holding a politician accountable to the facts across the universe of possible topics is a herculean task for a journalist in the best of circumstances, and impossible in a town hall format that’s set up more like a campaign rally than a serious journalistic forum. In 2020, Donald Trump’s strategy of overwhelming interlocutors with lies rendered even the debate format essentially useless (FAIR.org, 10/2/20)—and that was with an opponent and a respectful audience.

The public needs to understand the candidates they’ll be choosing from next year, which means news outlets must offer them a platform. But the kind of platform offered is crucial. In the Trump era, town halls simply don’t offer the tools necessary to hold politicians accountable, whether that politician is Trump or Kennedy, DeSantis or Biden.

Good journalism demands one-on-one encounters with the candidates, with incisive questions that speak to people’s actual needs and concerns, and real-time factchecking (or a taped format with factchecking provided prior to airing). If candidates can’t agree to a platform that can hold them accountable, they don’t deserve to have a media platform at all.

ACTION ALERT: Messages to CNN can be sent here (or via Twitter @CNN). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

Featured image: Donald Trump and Kaitlin Collins at a CNN town hall (5/10/23).

Research assistance: Lara-Nour Walton

The post CNN Town Halls Do Democracy No Favors appeared first on FAIR.

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

“Recession” and “inflation” have dominated headlines (Reuters, 12/7/22); “recovery,” “jobs,” not so much.

By a wide range of metrics, the US is in the midst of a historic economic rebound. In January of this year, the unemployment rate hit a 53-year low of 3.4%. Two months later, prime-age (25–54) employment surpassed its pre-recession peak, putting to shame the sluggish job growth that followed the Great Recession of 2007–09, when it took a full 12 years for prime-age employment to return to its pre-recession level.

Low-wage workers, meanwhile, have seen major gains, far outpacing their real (inflation-adjusted) wage growth during previous business cycles.

The blight on this recovery has been a surge in inflation, though that hit its high point in the summer of 2022, and inflation has been falling ever since. As international data highlight, this problem has been globally shared, not US-specific.

And even here, the US has not fared too poorly. Despite having at first higher inflation than other rich countries, the US now has the lowest inflation of any G7 country. All the while, its recovery, as measured by real GDP, has been the strongest.

While the United States remains a deeply unequal country with relatively high levels of poverty, looking at key indicators valued by the media points to a remarkably strong recovery in the face of significant headwinds. As the progressive economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/10/23) recently put it:

Everyone knows damn well that if Donald Trump was in the White House and we had the same economic situation, he would be boasting about the greatest economy ever all the time. Every Republican politician in the country would be touting the greatest economy ever. And all the political reporters would be writing stories about how the strong economy will make it difficult for the Democrats to beat Trump in the next election.

What recovery?

“It’s a total mystery,” snarks Mark Copelovitch (Twitter, 6/7/03), on “why does everyone think the economy is so terrible.”

If you were a casual consumer of the news over the last couple years, you may not have heard much about these success stories. You may, in fact, think that everything has suddenly gone wrong all at once.

And it would be hard to blame you. In the wake of a historically progressive response to an economic downturn, corporate media have been intently focused on the negative.

News articles, for instance, have focused overwhelmingly on inflation. Mark Copelovitch, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been tracking this trend for the last couple years. His most recent update, which he posted in early June, shows that, since the start of 2022, the word “inflation” has appeared in the headline or subheading of more than 17 times as many articles as the words “unemployment” and “jobs” (both of which are metrics associated with the strong recovery) combined.

Also notable: Over the same time period, the word “recession” has shown up in the headline or subheading of ten times as many articles as has the word “recovery.” Strange, considering there was no recession in 2022, and there has been no recession this year so far. Instead, the recovery has chugged along nicely.

On television, the story has been much the same. According to data from the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, “inflation” (which has been unusually high during this period) has garnered more than six times as much attention as “unemployment” (which has been unusually low) across Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.

Over the same period, “recession” and “recovery” have been mentioned roughly the same amount on these channels, a more balanced outcome than in the case of news articles, but still promoting a misleadingly dreary picture of the economy. Strikingly, recession was discussed far more in 2022 than in 2020—almost three times as much. The difference? In 2020, there actually was a recession. In 2022, there was none.

If we look more broadly at the television coverage of positive aspects of the economy versus negative ones, we see that the negative has taken priority. Back in 2021, the liberal think tank Center for American Progress found that, over a one-month period,

the terms “inflation” and “prices” garnered 50% more screen time on CNN and MSNBC than mentions of these terms: “unemployment,” “employment,” “wages,” “jobs,” “jobless,” “consumer spending,” “GDP,” “income,” “stock market,” “wage growth,” “job growth” and “economic growth” combined.

Using this same framework, if we look at the Biden presidency so far, we see that “inflation” and “prices,” which point to troubles, have continued to draw more attention than the rest of the terms, which point to the strong recovery. Across Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, “inflation” and “prices” have gotten 32% more screen time than the other terms combined over this period.

Economic disinformation

Unsurprisingly, this negative coverage has been driven primarily by right-wing media. Of the three outlets considered, Fox had by far the most disproportionate focus on inflation. MSNBC was the only one with more coverage of the positive parts of the recovery than inflation. It’s worth noting, though, that CNN and MSNBC together still had more coverage of inflation than the recovery over the full period, so this negativity isn’t solely a right-wing phenomenon.

Nevertheless, if we hone in on specific terms, right-wing media continue to lead the pack in economy-bashing. For instance, on Fox, “inflation” has gotten nine times as many mentions as “unemployment” during Biden’s presidency. On CNN, the ratio is more like six-to-one. And on MSNBC, it’s four-to-one. During this period, Fox‘s inflation panic has reached the level of absurdity, with the outlet in one case emblazoning “Empty Shelves Joe” over an old photo taken in a Japanese supermarket after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Fox has been a leader in recession hype as well. Its coverage has included such headlines as:

• “Fox & Friends Hosts on Biden Admin Denying US Is in Recession” (7/29/22)
• “White House Denying Recession Is a ‘Reach’: Kudlow” (7/29/22)
• “Biden Adviser Deflects From Economic Recession” (7/28/22)
• “US Economy Reports Second Quarter of Negative GDP, Signals Official Recession” (7/28/22)

These headlines are economic disinformation. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which determines when recessions have officially occurred, defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months.” Notice that this is not the definition Fox offered: two quarters of negative GDP growth.

The NBER did not end up declaring a recession in 2022, despite real (inflation-adjusted) GDP shrinking at a 1.6% rate in the first quarter and 0.6% in the second, because other economic indicators at the same time were pointing to continued expansion: Consumer spending was strong and employment was booming. GDP growth for the entire year ended up being a 21st century–normal 2.1%. But, you know, Fox is never one to let the facts get in the way of their feelings.

Quacking like a recession

CNN (7/26/22) turned to Larry Summers for an economic prognosis—who earlier this year was saying it would take a year of 10% unemployment to quickly contain inflation.