CounterSpin

New York Times (9/22/21)

This week on CounterSpin: “Crime wave” politics are a time-honored response to political movements that take on racist policing in this country, dating back at least to Barry Goldwater, as organizer Josmar Trujillo was reminding us back in 2015. But here we are again, as outlets like the New York Times announce a reported rise in the murder rate with coverage steeped in false presumptions about what that means and how to respond. Our guest says prepare to hear a lot about how cops need more resources because “crime is surging,” and offers antidote to that copaganda. We hear from Alec Karakatsanis, executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System.

Transcript: ‘Crime Is Defined and Constructed by Police and Other Elite Interests’

Larry Nassar

Also on the show: While we’re to understand that police could prevent crime, if only they’re permitted, we’re also asked to accept that the most powerful law enforcement in the country just somehow couldn’t manage to prevent Olympic gymnast team doctor Larry Nassar from sexually assaulting dozens of young women, even after they’d been alerted. FBI actions around Nassar went well beyond mere negligence—falsifying testimony, pressuring witnesses—but to actually address that, we’ll need to acknowledge a systemic indifference to gender-based crime. Jane Manning, director of the Women’s Equal Justice Project, joins us to talk about that.

Transcript: ‘It’s the Demeaning Treatment, but Also the Failure to Take Action’

Sludge (8/6/21)

This week on CounterSpin: A recent New York Times story about Senate Energy Committee chair Joe Manchin’s conflicts of interest quoted a source saying, “It says something fascinating about our politics that we’re going to have a representative of fossil fuel interests crafting the policy that reduces our emissions from fossil fuels.” A lot of people would say that’s less fascinating than horrific, particularly in the context of a new global survey of people between 16 and 25 that found that more than half of them believe “humanity is doomed”—and that 58% of young people said their governments are betraying them. You can’t talk about why we can’t get to realistic climate policy without talking about that betrayal, and its roots. Which is why we talk about Joe Manchin with David Moore, co-founder of investigative news outlet Sludge.

Transcript: ‘Manchin Has Taken the Lead in Diluting Ethics Provisions’

Transcript: ‘You Should Get the Vaccine Despite the Media Telling You You Should’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Rahm Emanuel’s ambassadorial nomination.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s response to Jake Tapper that her proposals would save far more than they cost was ruled to be not an answer at all by Tapper’s colleague Chris Cillizza (CNN, 9/18/18).

Jake Tapper’s career is inextricably linked to America’s so-called longest-running war. His travels there, and book–turned–Hollywood film detailing his exploits, are how, more than any other beat, he polished his reputation as a Serious Journalist, and not just another pretty suit behind a desk. He’s reported dozens of stories on the conflict, done book events, tweeted nonstop for years about the war in Afghanistan, and done scores of segments on the conflict, including a two-hour primetime special earlier this month lamenting “what went wrong” in the war for the United States.

The second-most essential beat to cementing his gravitas has been his Very Serious concern about debts and deficits—i.e. grilling liberals, leftists and progressives for over 20 years about “how they will pay for” broad social welfare programs.

Suspiciously, these two primary Tapper beats have never crossed paths. Which is strange, because, as a new Brown University study shows, the post-9/11 wars have cost the Pentagon $14 trillion, one-third to one-half of which went to US military contractors. That’s between $4.6 trillion and $7 trillion, just on contractors for the post-9/11 wars. In one year alone—fiscal year 2020—the study finds that Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in contracts from the Pentagon.

The Afghanistan War was itself a huge expense. A separate study from Brown University finds, “Since invading Afghanistan in 2001, the United States has spent $2.3 trillion on the war, which includes operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

So what has Tapper highlighted to show the risks of runaway government spending? Let us examine items that have compelled Tapper to ask, “How will we pay for it?”

Here he is grilling New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over several of the items, all in one clip:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defends an estimated $40 trillion price tag for progressive policy programs, including Medicare for all https://t.co/ZqR6WWpmI2 pic.twitter.com/JoDDeIq712

— CNN (@CNN) September 16, 2018

Sarah Lazare (In These Times,  3/2/20) noted that debate moderators “are saying we can afford policies that spread militarism—but not those that protect human life.”

Tapper has used some of the biggest platforms possible to engage in this line of questioning. As Column contributor Sarah Lazare noted in March 2020, “Night one of the second democratic debate, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked four questions in close succession, grilling candidates on how Medicare for All would be paid for.” In just one example, he said to then-candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, “At the last debate, you said you’re, quote, ​‘with Bernie on Medicare for All’”:

​Now, Senator Sanders has said that people in the middle class will pay more in taxes to help pay for Medicare for all, though that will be offset by the elimination of insurance premiums and other costs. Are you also, quote, ​”with Bernie” on Medicare for All when it comes to raising taxes on middle-class Americans to pay for it?

As Lazare noted in the piece, there were zero questions asked to the centrist Democrats on stage about how they planned on “paying for” their support for large military budgets and wars.

Now, let us examine the items Tapper has never asked how they would pay for it (costs over 20 years):

An audit of transcripts, tweets and articles authored by Tapper reveals no questions over deficit concerns for these big ticket items.

The reason for this glaring inconsistency is that high-profile media brands like Tapper simply do not view the expense of empire maintenance to be debatable, contestable or subject to critical analysis. This expense just is—like gravity or the universal constant. These institutions exist, always have existed, and are beyond the realm of politics. Whereas programs that house the homeless, feed the poor, combat climate chaos, provide childcare, educate people, build roads and schools, and provide jobs for the working class are “expensive” “progressive” “wishlists” with “price tags” that need to be constantly justified item by item to the half cent.

Never mind that, year after year, the Pentagon can’t complete a basic audit and can’t account for $21 trillion in spending. The real drivers of our deficit are dreaded liberal programs. The banal and unremarkable war machine whose bloat and borderline criminal waste is rubber stamped every year by Congress and corporate media alike requires no such interrogation.

Along with schlocky, mugging Troop Defender, Concerned Deficit Scold is how Tapper rose to prominence at CNN. While at ABC News, Tapper would make presser spectacles out of his Deep Worry over the national debt, grilling Obama press secretary Jay Carney over the Obama Stimulus (a stimulus we now know was way too small), while engaging in facile—and incorrect—comparison to family budgets borrowed directly from Pete Peterson front groups:

.@jaketapper cut his centrist bona fides during the Tea Party years by–

1. earnestly acting like GOP cared about deficits

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) November 18, 2017

So where is the deep concern after this high-profile recent study found that we spent $14 trillion on wars since 2001? What about these costs which we will “pass down to our children”? Where is Tapper hauling in war hawks lobbying to stay in Afghanistan, like senators Lindsey Graham and Bob Menendez, demanding they explain “how they will pay for it”? No such spectacle will be forthcoming, because that which props up the unquestionable axioms of US militarism is simply taken for granted, while that which provides for the poor, unhoused and vulnerable is a “wishlist” in need of a rigorous 10-point program detailing a plan for complete fiscal solvency.

This post originally appeared on Column (9/14/21), a media criticism and political analysis Substack newsletter written by Adam Johnson with contributions from Sarah Lazare.

(Kendall Hunt, 2021)

This week on CounterSpin: The primary “sense” of Sub-Saharan Africa in corporate media is absence. When Africa is discussed, it’s often been, to put it simply, as a material resource and as a staging ground for Great Nation politics and proxy war. Not as far removed as it ought to be from the Berlin conference in the late 19th century, when the European powers sat down to decide who got which slice of what the genocidal King Leopold II of Belgium called “this magnificent African cake.” Challenging and changing the frame requires seeing through the racist fables, the omissions and hypocrisy that have plagued US media’s Africa reporting through history and up to today.

A new book takes that on, and we hear this week from its author. Milton Allimadi teaches African history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and publishes the Black Star News, a weekly newspaper in New York City. He’s the author of the new book Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in Western Media.

Transcript: ‘The Demonization Was Meant to Pacify Readers to Accept the Brutality’

by Jeff Cohen (Column, 9/14/01)

“Outrage is the natural and appropriate response to the mass murder of September 11. But media should not be glibly encouraging retaliatory violence without remembering that US retaliation has killed innocent civilians abroad, violated international law and done little to make us safer.”

(Action Alert, 9/27/01)

“The report—which ends by saying that ‘no one really knows how much authority the new security czar will really have’—suggests that to stay safe, Americans must surrender liberties without even pausing to ask which ones.”

by Norman Solomon (Extra! Update, 10/01)

“Restrictive government edicts, clamping down on access to information and on-the-scene reports, would be bad enough if mainstream news organizations were striving to function independently. American journalism is sometimes known as the Fourth Estate—but Dan Rather is far from the only high-profile journalist who now appears eager to turn his profession into a fourth branch of government.”

by Jim Naureckas (Extra! Update, 10/01)

“One non–Boy Scout the CIA worked with in the 1980s was none other than Osama bin Laden (MSNBC, 8/24/98; Atlantic, 7–8/91)—then considered a valuable asset in the fight against Communism, but now suspected of being the chief instigator of the September 11 attacks.”

by Jim Naureckas (Extra! Update, 10/01)

“Even before investigators identified Arab militants as the apparent hijackers, the media assumption was that the terrorists had ties to the Mideast. But rather than a serious examination of what political realities might contribute to an anti-American climate there, many media commentators offered little more than self-congratulatory rhetoric.”

Extra! (11-12/01)

by Seth Ackerman and Peter Hart  (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“War fever in the wake of the September 11 attacks has led to a wave of self-censorship as well as government pressure on the media. With American flags adorning networks’ on-screen logos, journalists are feeling rising pressure to exercise ‘patriotic’ news judgment, while even mild criticism of the military, George W. Bush and US foreign policy are coming to seem taboo.”

by Jim Naureckas (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“It’s still ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ in other words, and we are told to care very much when ‘we’ are in danger and are explicitly warned not to worry too much about ‘their’ lives. Saying that it ‘seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardships in Afghanistan’ (Washington Post, 10/31/01), CNN chief Walter Isaacson even announced that the network would air some kind of disclaimer whenever footage of dead or wounded Afghans is shown.”

by Rachel Coen (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“The legal definition of ‘terrorism’ is crucial because the USA PATRIOT act gives law enforcement broad new powers to be used against ‘terrorist’ individuals and groups. The American Civil Liberties Union (10/23/01) warns that this new definition will ‘sweep in people who engage in acts of political protest’ if those acts could be deemed dangerous to human life.”

by Peter Hart (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“FAIR activists sent hundreds of letters to O’Reilly after his September 17 program, urging him to consider the ramifications of his rhetoric—and the fact that bombing civilian targets and using starvation as a weapon are war crimes.”

by Jim Naureckas in Extra!, 11–12/01)

“But is it really inevitable that anchors will pass on uncorroborated stories to the public—and portray them as fact, not rumor? For days, New Yorkers expressed surprise that the George Washington Bridge story was not true—victims of a needless panic that Dan Rather had helped to spread.”

by Seth Ackerman (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“No experts on international law appeared, even though a lively debate among international jurists has been brewing since September 11 over how the United States could respond legally to the attacks. Very few university-based experts on the Middle East appeared. (The main exception was [Fouad] Ajami.) This absence contributed to the networks’ striking lack of explanation of what United States’ policies in the Middle East have been in recent years.”

by Steve Rendall (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“Whether the mainstream daily op-ed page was ever a true forum for debate or for ‘nontraditional voices’ is questionable. But during the weeks following September’s terrorist attacks, two leading dailies [New York Times and Washington Post] mostly used these pages as an echo chamber for the government’s official policy of military response, while mostly ignoring dissenters and policy critics.” 

by Tom Morello (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“When the horrible attacks of September 11 are used as a pretext for squashing the opinions of dissident artists, people who are not beating the blood-lust drum feel alone and isolated. It’s in times like these when we most need intelligent, thoughtful discussion and debates about the issues of the day.”

(Extra!, 11–12/01)

“Leave it to Ann Coulter—whose racism was too much even for the Arab-bashing National Review—to reduce the pro-profiling argument to its fallacious core: ‘Not all Muslims may be terrorists,’ she allowed, ‘but all terrorists are Muslims’ (Yahoo! News, 9/28/01).

“That’s just wrong, of course, as Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber and decades of clinic-bombing, doctor-shooting Christian extremists can attest. The fact is that ethnicity has never been a reliable indicator of who might be involved in terrorism, making racial profiling not only discriminatory but ultimately ineffective.”

by Janine Jackson (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“A number of pundits and politicians offered Americans a simple solution to the helplessness and anxiety they were feeling in the wake of the September 11 attacks: Go shopping!”

by Peter Hart (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“The distinction between ‘peace with terrorists’ and a peace movement rooted in justice and international law was blurred by the media in general, which rather than airing the views of anti-war leaders generally had pro-war pundits explain—and belittle—those views.”

by Jeff Cohen (Extra!, 12/01)

“A free press would be debating the issue of Washington’s relations with Islamist extremists in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and whether such movements are bred by US policy committed to suppressing secular reformers and leftists in Islamic countries. When the CIA funded the Afghan Mujaheddin in 1979 before the Soviet occupation, it hoped to destabilize a secular, Soviet-friendly government (initially led by Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin), which supported land reform and rights for women.”

Extra! (5-6/02)

by Mark Crispin Miller  (Extra!, 5–6/02)

“Countless leaders have been deified by national emergency, but few have been remade as quickly and completely as George W. Bush. In many cases, those who had misread him as a simple tool, braying automatically at his most trivial mistakes, now automatically revered him. Such converts suddenly agreed with those who had seen Bush’s flaws as signs of latent greatness—thitherto the notion only of a large plurality, but now the common wisdom.”

(Media Advisory, 8/26/02)

“Unfortunately, many media outlets seem ready to exploit America’s grief by replaying the trauma of the attacks, instead of honoring the date with a serious debate over where the country is headed”

by Seth Ackerman (Extra!, 1–2/04)

“Hardline officials have spent the last two years leaking stories, writing op-eds, holding private briefings and making public insinuations, all intended to convince the country that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda worked hand in hand.”

by Norman Solomon (Media Beat,  3/25/04)

“On September 12, Bush’s media stature and poll numbers were soaring. Suddenly, news outlets all over the country boosted the president as a great leader, sometimes likening him to FDR. For many months, the overall media coverage of President Bush was reverential.”

by Francis Cerra Whittelsey  (Extra!, 3–4/06)

“Not only was good reporting unusual and largely out of sight after September 11, it was also overwhelmed by the Bush administration’s public relations effort…. These journalists see themselves fighting an unrelenting public relations machine, whose effectiveness comes in large part from constant message repetition and automatic coverage of the president every day, even when he makes no news”

by Julie Hollar ( Extra!, 11–12/06)

“It’s not just the government that failed the workers and the public with misleading assurances; the New York Times itself must share that burden. Shortly after the attacks and into the ensuing years, the Times—as both a New York paper and a national paper—failed to mount a functional degree of skepticism toward city and federal government pronouncements about the safety of the air and dust around Ground Zero. They by and large dismissed fears of residents and workers about their safety—even as troubling studies and voices of dissent cropped up in the public and private sectors, and in other media outlets.”

Extra! (5-6/07)

by Steve Rendall (Extra!, 5–6/07)

“[Jonathan] Alter dubbed Giuliani ‘the new Mayor of America,’ which soon morphed to ‘America’s Mayor,’ a moniker used by journalists as if it were a matter of public acclamation rather than a symptom of press corps hero worship.”

by Steve Rendall  (Extra!, 3/10)

“That George W. Bush kept America safer from terrorism than Barack Obama is a conservative article of faith these days—and corporate media seem little inclined to challenge the blatant falsehoods used to advance this childish GOP talking point.”

by Steve Rendall (Extra!, 3/11)

“But the hallowed memory of September 11 is a conservative sham. While the attacks may be the gift that keeps on giving for GOP politics—when politically useful—the right frequently permits itself to diminish or deride the memory and symbols of the attacks for its own convenience.”

Extra! (7/11)

by Peter Hart (Extra!, 6/11)

“Despite Bill O’Reilly’s assertion that his show was a lonely pro-torture voice, there were many media voices suggesting a reevaluation of whether torture should be an accepted practice for the U.S. government. Bin Laden may be dead, but the corrosive effect on public discourse of the “war on terror” lives on.

by Jim Naureckas (Extra!, 7/11)

What was missing from these and most other corporate media discussions of bin Laden and Afghanistan was any recognition of the part that country played in the Al-Qaeda leader’s strategic vision. For bin Laden, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was not a threat to his plan for the triumph of his brand of right-wing Islam—it was the central element of that plan.

by Steve Rendall (FAIR.org, 7/15/11)

“Glenn Beck’s temporary replacement in the 5 p.m. slot on Fox News, Eric Bolling, has started out with a bang. On the July 13 edition of his new show the Five, the host declared: ‘America was certainly safe between 2000 and 2008. I don’t remember any attacks on American soil during that period of time.'”

Extra! (9/11)

by Peter Hart (Extra!, 9/11)

“The shift from the US’s time-limited military adventures since the Vietnam War—in conflicts like Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Kosovo—to today’s seemingly interminable and endlessly multiplying military commitments is one of the most notable, yet little noted, features of the post–September 11 landscape. And corporate journalists seem all too willing to encourage Washington’s new ‘permanent war’ footing.”

by Andy Worthington  (Extra!, 9/11)

“On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, media bear a large responsibility for having allowed cynical lawmakers to portray Guantánamo as a prison holding ‘the worst of the worst,’ despite so much evidence that Bush administration officials were lying when they first coined that phrase.”

by Janine Jackson (Extra!, 9/11)

“Media submerge the reality of the assault on civil rights every time they report the state’s overreaches as being about ‘terror-fighting tools,’ as the AP (5/26/11) described Patriot Act provisions. Under a system of civil liberties, people are regarded as criminals after being convicted of crimes—not deemed to be so beforehand to facilitate stripping them of rights.”

by Peter Hart (FAIR.org , 9/6/11)

“Someone who was really sorry for stoking war fever would be honest enough to point out that not everyone was on board. And of course Richard Cohen knows this—he was writing columns attacking those who weren’t ‘going along with it.’ As he wrote about Dennis Kucinich, ‘How did this fool get on Meet the Press?'”

by Jim Naureckas (FAIR.org, 4/16/13)

“The fact that journalists assigned to cover this story could fail to remember that political violence has been part of the United States landscape for the past decade and more is testament to a narrow definition that dismisses right-wing domestic violence as not really terrorism—and to a will to believe, for partisan or psychological reasons, that George W. Bush ‘kept us safe‘ after 9/11. The reality is not so comforting.”

by Norman Solomon (Extra!, 5/13)

“While the Obama administration considers how to reorganize its war efforts, we should ask why the US media establishment took more than a decade to begin asking basic questions about the Authorization for Use of Military Force—and why the underlying premises of perpetual war continue to elude concerted journalistic scrutiny.

“The consequences of such media evasions have persisted in tandem with Washington’s political machinations. Rather than handling 9/11 as a crime committed by criminals, the ‘war on terror’ under the AUMF umbrella propelled US military actions that have killed hundreds of thousands in at least six countries.”

by Jim Naureckas (Extra!, 5/14)

“After the September 11 attacks, which reignited a xenophobic backlash against immigration, the Department of Homeland Security began recruiting local law enforcement agencies as the next front in the detection and apprehension of undocumented immigrants. What followed was a massive wave of deportations that increased under the Obama administration to over 2 million (Politico, 3/4/14).

“Like immigration, the ‘War on Terror’ is now being shifted to local law enforcement agencies who, in exchange for federal dollars, are deploying powerful surveillance tools with little oversight and applying these tools to everyday policing, not just ‘counterterrorism.’”

by Jim Naureckas (FAIR.org, 3/18/15)

“There are indications (as noted by the blog Moon of Alabama—3/11/15) of a shift in the Western foreign policy establishment toward seeing groups like Al-Qaeda—that is, far-right terrorist groups who espouse a violent strain of Sunni Islam—not as the main targets of US military operations but as potential allies against the governments Washington has identified as more important enemies, namely Shi’ite-led Iran and Syria.”

(Extra!, 9/16)

“In his retrospective (7/19/16) on outgoing Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who lost his job amidst numerous charges of sexual harassment, New York Times media reporter Jim Rutenberg included this remarkable sentence:

It was Mr. Ailes who, after the September 11 attacks, directed his network to break with classic journalistic detachment to get fully behind the war efforts of the George W. Bush White House, which jarred the rest of his industry.

“Of course, Fox News was far from alone in abandoning ‘classic journalistic detachment’ (such as it is) in the lead-up to the Iraq War—the New York Times certainly not excepted. Times reporters like Michael Gordon and Judith Miller helped get the nation ‘fully behind the war’ with front-page stories touting ‘evidence’ of WMDs that did not exist, while others wrote ‘news analysis’ like ‘All Aboard: America’s War Train Is Leaving the Station’ (2/2/03) and ‘US Plan: Spare Iraq’s Civilians’ (2/23/03).”

by Adam Johnson (FAIR.org, 7/6/17)

“In its reporting on a dubious lawsuit alleging Iranian meta-involvement in 9/11, the New York Times badly misunderstood the case and maintained for more than three years, in the paper of record, that the government of Iran ‘sponsored’ the September 11, 2001, attacks. The belated correction, issued late Wednesday night on two widely spaced articles on the topic, unceremoniously noted that Iran did not, in fact, help commit the 9/11 attacks.”

by Josh Cho (FAIR.org, 9/11/19)

“The New York Times (8/2/19) gave a platform to retired generals Jack Keane and David Petraeus to lobby for keeping thousands of “Special Operations forces” in Afghanistan:

“US troops in Afghanistan have prevented another catastrophic attack on our homeland for 18 years,” General Keane said in an interview. “Expecting the Taliban to provide that guarantee in the future by withdrawing all US troops makes no sense.”

“The Times might have pointed out that the September 11 attacks were carried out by militants based in the United States and recruited in Germany.”

by Ari Paul (FAIR.org, 10/10/19)

“Giuliani was heralded as a hero when the United States was desperately looking for one after the WTC attacks—despite the fact that his actions on the day of the attacks contributed to the deaths of emergency responders, and his insistence that the air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe without filtration no doubt led to the deaths of many more (Extra!, 11–12/06, 5–6/07).”

(Extra!, 10/20)

“’Overall, Americans took 9/11 pretty calmly,’ New York Times columnist Paul Krugman tweeted on the 19th anniversary of September 11 attacks. ‘Notably, there wasn’t a mass outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence, which could all too easily have happened.’ Anti-Muslim hate crimes increased 17-fold after 9/11, the FBI reported (Human Rights Watch, 11/02)—but apparently that doesn’t qualify as ‘mass.’

“Krugman, after praising George W. Bush as someone who ‘tried to calm prejudice, not feed it,’ did acknowledge that he used 9/11 to ‘take us into an unrelated and disastrous war’—the almost 19-year-long occupation of Afghanistan, apparently, not qualifying as a disaster. Before alluding to Iraq, Krugman mentioned that in the wake of the attacks, “my wife and I took a lovely trip to the US Virgin Islands…because air fares and hotel rooms were so cheap.”

by Gregory Shupak (FAIR.org, 8/19/21)

“In addition to the Taliban signaling that it could be open to extraditing the Al Qaeda leader in October 2001, according to a former head of Saudi intelligence (LA Times, 11/4/01), the Taliban said in 1998 that it would hand over bin Laden to Saudi Arabia, the US’s close ally; the Saudi intelligence official says that the Taliban backed off after the US fired cruise missiles at an apparent bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, following attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania attributed to Al Qaeda. The outlets thus failed to inform their readers that, had the US pursued negotiations for bin Laden’s extradition, Afghans may have been spared 20 years of devastating war.”

Research assistance: Adam Weintraub, Jasmine Watson

(cc photo: Beth Wilson)

This week on CounterSpin: Many people will know that the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade in 1973, enshrining women’s right to access abortion—to choose when and whether to have a child. It seemed to signal recognition that abortion is healthcare, that most women who have abortions are mothers (in other words, they don’t need to have an ultrasound to recognize what’s happening), that medical reality and theology are not the same, and that outlawing abortion doesn’t stop it, but just pushes women to have unsafe abortions.

Less often considered is how immediately after Roe, Congress passed the Hyde amendment, taking this fundamental human right out of the hands of women who rely on government assistance—so low-income, overwhelmingly women of color. Hyde acknowledged that they wanted to outlaw abortion for all women, but poor women were the only ones they had legal standing to control. That cynical approach proved effective, as Americans watched the ability to access abortion chipped away, with wait times, parental notification rules, hospital credential requirements, clinic closings, funding cutoffs for international groups—all the while comforted by the notion that the “right” to abortion was somehow still legally protected.

That narrative is exploding right now in the wake of the Supreme Court’s refusal to address, which amounts to an endorsement, what is overwhelmingly understood as an unconstitutional Texas law offering a bounty on anyone who “aids and abets” a woman seeking an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

We’ll talk with Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild and author of, among other titles, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.

Transcript: ‘The Radical Right-Wing Majority of the Supreme Court May Well Overturn Roe v. Wade’

And we’ll revisit a conversation from January of this year about what law can and can’t do, with Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the group URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity.

Transcript: ‘Restrictions on Abortion Are Invisible Because They Appear Based on Who You Are’

Purdue heir David Sackler and wife Joss depicted in Vanity Fair (6/19/19)

This week on CounterSpin: The engineers of the crack epidemic were never offered a deal to get out of the biz with impunity as long as they gave some money towards helping the families, communities and healthcare systems broken in the wake of the addiction epidemic they unleashed. Nor were any other neighborhood drug dealers you can think of, caught making money off drugs that, hey, they’re also very sorry if anyone used irresponsibly? Somehow that’s not the most relevant  context for corporate media talking about the bankruptcy ruling shielding the Sackler family, profiteers via Purdue Pharma on the drug Oxycontin, responsible for, conservatively, half a million deaths by overdose. We’ll talk about that with Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool.

Transcript: ‘Where Are the Threads Dropped With the Criminal Investigation of the Sackler Family?’

CEPR (1/21/20)

Also on the show: You’ve seen the graphic showing how the US minimum wage has become unhinged from other indicators it should connect to, like productivity—the value of the goods and services that, after all, workers produce.  But how did that disconnect happen, and how would a true understanding of that help us push through foggy reportage toward a better world? We’ll get a breakdown of ideas elite media generally talk over from economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Transcript: ‘We’ve Structured Our Economy to Redistribute a Massive Amount of Income Upward’

Image: Charles C.J. Hoffbauer

Anyone born before last week can see US news media lying about history as it’s happening. But fast forward to 10, 20 years from now, and those media stories will have hardened into narrative, into the unspoken “given” presented as context for the latest thing.

That’s the power of history as told. A power well understood by James Loewen, the historian and author who died August 19 at the age of 79. Some US media are now lauding Jim Loewen, but without ceasing to generate the very sort of misty misinformation he fought against.

CounterSpin spoke with James Loewen in July 2015. We listen again to that conversation this week.

Transcript: ‘That’s the Biggest Lie, That We Started Out Great and We’ve Been Getting Better Ever Since’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of climate “terrorism” and “generous” unemployment benefits.

(LA Times, 8/16/21)

This week on CounterSpin: US news media are full of armchair generals who talk about weapons of war like they’re Hot Wheels, and have lots of thoughts about how “we coulda got ’em” here and “we shoulda got ’em” there. The price of admission to elite media debate is acceptance that the US, alone among nations, has the right to force change in other countries’ governments; and when this results, as it always does, in death and destruction, elite media’s job entails telling the public that that’s not just necessary but somehow good. Not to put too fine a point on it.

All of this and more is on display in coverage of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan—along with, as usual, some exceptional countervailing reporting. Ending the US occupation could mean a new day for the Afghan people, but with the anniversary of September 11 coming up, it looks like US media consumers may need not a broom but a shovel to deal with the self-aggrandizing, history-erasing misinformation headed our way. We’ll prepare ourselves with insights on Afghanistan from Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and from Matthew Hoh, senior fellow with the Center for International Policy.

Transcript: ‘Accountability to the People of Afghanistan Should Remain Our Focal Point’ and ‘So Much of This War Has Got Almost Nothing to Do With the Afghans Themselves’