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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.
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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.
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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.
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UC Press (2024)
This week on CounterSpin: For many people and for media, the idea of “racial discrimination in housing” invokes an image of individual landlords refusing to rent or sell homes to Black and brown people. But that understanding is so incomplete as to be harmful. A new book doesn’t just illuminate the thicket of effects of systemic racism as it affects where people live; it reframes the understanding of the role of housing—connecting housing injustice with health inequities and wealth disparities, as well as lifting up work that connects those “mutually constitutive” elements of what the author calls an “unjust, destructive and even deadly racial order.”
George Lipsitz is research professor emeritus of Black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He’s author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and How Racism Takes Place, among other titles. He joins us to talk about his new book: The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the port strike.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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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.
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.
The Brainwashing of My Dad (2016)
This week on CounterSpin: Springfield, Ohio, schools are facing bomb threats because some people believe that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating dogs and cats. According to candidates for the country’s highest offices, and the KKK flyers showing up around town, this means that these legal immigrants should be pushed out of the country—or, no doubt, in the minds of inspired vigilantes, much worse.
We spoke with filmmaker, activist and author Jen Senko in April 2023. The Brainwashing of My Dad—Jen Senko’s film and the book based on it—are an effort to engage the effects of that yelling, punching down, reactionary media. We’ll hear our conversation with her this week on CounterSpin.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of Donald Trump’s threat to democracy.
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”?
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