CounterSpin

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.

Electronic Intifada (7/15/24)

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Common Dreams (6/10/24)

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

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

(CC photo: Jim Naureckas)

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

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

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.

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.

Transcript: ‘They Are Not Applying Universal Principles as Philosopher Kings’

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.

Transcript: ‘These Stores Are Unhealthy for Our Communities’

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.

Transcript: ‘The Press Has a Problem Being Forthright About Trump Where the Right Has Rallied Around Him’

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.

Transcript: ‘The Fight Doesn’t End Until We Stop It at the Source’

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.

Transcript: ‘Their Effort to Avoid Accountability Is Very Thinly Veiled’

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

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

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

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

Transcript: ‘We’re Seeing Universities Following a Corporate Agenda to Get Favor With Donors’

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