CounterSpin

A new FAIR study finds that TV news coverage of the southern US border largely ignores the experiences and voices of those most impacted by the immigration system.

Despite the Biden administration’s promise of a more humane immigration approach, thousands of children continue to be detained at the border. The issue has gotten widespread media attention, but in a highly sensationalized manner that lacks critical analysis as well as historical context (FAIR.org, 3/25/21, 5/24/21).

FAIR studied the coverage of migration at the US southern border on five major evening TV news shows: CNN’s Situation Room, ABC World News Tonight, Fox News Special Report, MSNBC‘s The Beat and CBS Evening News, from March 14 to April 14.

Over this period, these five shows featured 194 sources over 60 segments on the border issue. (Several of these were repeat appearances by the same guests; we counted 113 unique sources total.)

Most sources—122, or 63%—were current or former US government officials. Of these government sources, 66% were Democrats, mostly from the Biden administration: The top three sources were Joe Biden, with 18 appearances, White House press secretary Jen Psaki with 14 and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas with 12.

While migrants and refugees were frequently shown on air, only 11 migrant/refugee sources were heard from—a total of 6% of all sources. Three of the migrant/refugee sources were unnamed. Notably, the migrant/refugee voices had hardly any dialogue. Most interactions were translations of short answers, such as “a lot of dangers here in Mexico” (Gustavo Mendez, CBS 3/22/21) or “a better life for your children” (unnamed Guatemalan woman, CBS, 3/23/21).

Migrant/refugee sources had on average one sentence apiece, or around 11 words, and a total of 126 words spoken between them. There were almost twice as many law enforcement sources (21), who spoke a total of 736 words.

Words Spoken by Sources in Border Stories: Migrants/Refugees vs. Law Enforcement

Of all sources for which immigration status and race/ethnicity could be identified, 74% were US-born, 72% were male and over half were non-Latinx whites. Only 22 sources were immigrant citizens/residents, and of these, 19 were high-ranking government officials, mostly repeat appearances by Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s chief of DHS, and Sen. Ted Cruz, both of whom are wealthy white Latino men whose immigration experiences are very different from those of the mostly poor and Indigenous people being detained at the border. As Roberto Lovato, Salvadoran-American journalist, wrote (CJR, 6/26/18): “What good is a Latino politician when the voices of people at the border, of experts, and of leaders from their large communities in the US are erased?”

The shows varied significantly in their coverage. At one end of the spectrum, 41% of the sources on CBS Evening News were from the US government, whereas fully 92% of CNN‘s sources were current or former officials. US government officials made up 72% of sources on Fox, 60% on ABC, and 57% on MSNBC.

Six of the sources on CBS were migrants/refugees; ABC aired five migrant/refugee sources. There were zero migrant/refugee sources on CNN, Fox or MSNBC.

CBS (4/6/21) and MSNBC (4/12/21) did offer exceptional investigative reports by going to Guatemala, where many US migrants/refugees originate, and speaking with locals and government officials about how recent hurricanes worsened people’s living conditions, and the effect of Biden’s immigration messaging on people there.

CBS also had the most immigrant and Latinx representation among its reporters: 41%  (7 reporters) were immigrants and 82% (14) were Latinx. In contrast, CNN and ABC had zero immigrant reporters, and Fox had one immigrant reporter from Australia. Although representation does not necessarily translate to better reporting, it is notable that CBS Evening News stands out among the shows in terms of featuring reporters that might better relate to the stories being told.

Notably marginalized were Central American scholars, immigrant activists or journalists who could have challenged the dominant government voices or provided greater historical context and analysis of the complex issues around immigration.

Only 7% of the sources were immigrant advocates, most of whom were from nonprofits that tended to support Biden’s “compassionate” rhetoric, but said little about his actual policies—such as Sister Norma Pimentel, who was asked, “What makes this time so much different than previous years?” on CBS News (3/17/21):

There’s several components that are definitely different. The fact that we have a president, an administration that is very open to respond in a very caring, compassionate, and a very respectful way to human life.

There was only one source, immigrant advocate Erika Andola  (MSNBC, 3/24/21), who spoke to the broader issue of the carceral immigration system as a whole:

We have chosen to send Rambo to the border, instead of sending Mother Teresa, right? We are sending more and more money for Border Patrol, for militarization to the border. And I can go on and on, instead of figuring out, how do we create our infrastructure that can welcome people, so we don’t have to open these kinds of reception centers or detention centers for children that pop up every now and then?

Both TV news and Democratic and Republican government sources, for different purposes, mentioned Biden’s attitude as the reason more migrant/refugees were coming to the border (CBS, 3/21/21; MSNBC, 3/23/21, 3/24/21, 3/25/21, 4/12/21; Fox, 3/30/21, 3/24/21, 3/25/21). Fox tended to feature reporters and sources who called Biden’s policy of allowing unaccompanied minors to stay too lenient, resulting in a humanitarian crisis at the border.

Centrist corporate media pushed a narrative that distinguished Biden from Trump as a humane president, and downplayed the conditions children were subjected to at the border or excused them as Trump’s fault.  MSNBC in particular featured pundits that boosted this line of a more “compassionate” (3/25/21) and “caring” (3/24/21) administration.

CBS reporter Christina Ruffini (3/21/21) introduced her segment on March 21: “His [Biden] administration’s compassionate approach to immigration policy has been confused for leniency, and a record 15,000 migrant children are now in U.S. custody.” CBS‘s own reporting contradicted this line; after speaking with migrants/refugees at the border about why they are coming, correspondent Manuel Bojorquez (3/23/21) reported that it is less about policy change and more about the conditions migrants/refugees are fleeing.

The news shows routinely referred to the border situation as a “crisis,” using the word at least once in 40 out of 60 segments to describe the border situation. Much of the conversation revolved around which administration—Trump’s or Biden’s—was to blame for it, as if the inhumane conditions and detention of migrant/refugee children at the border did not predate the last five years:

[Biden’s] cleaning up a mess that was left there by President Trump, and his systematic and inhumane attacks on the immigration system.

— Sen. Tammy Duckworth (CNN, 3/22/21)

It is an emergency. It is a crisis. It is one of their [Biden administration’s] own making.

— Sen. John Thune (CBS, 3/24/21)

None of the few migrant voices that made it on air supported this blame game, and instead spoke about the oppressive conditions they were fleeing, and those they continued to endure. An unnamed migrant woman interviewed in a shelter in Tucson, Arizona, who had been recently separated from her son, said on CBS (4/1/21) : “You got to this country, a country of freedoms, and now you’ve been separated.”

Because the media framed the situation at the border as a Biden vs. Trump or Democrats vs. Republicans issue, the only voices aired that were critical of the Biden administration were Republicans blaming Biden for a supposed “open border” policy.

The reality is that over 480,000 people have already been deported since Biden took office, largely using Title 42, a Trump-era policy that Biden has quietly continued. Families are still being separated, albeit not with the same type of force as under Trump (Politico, 3/20/21): Parents now have to make the devastating decision to separate themselves from their children in order for them to at least have a chance at asylum. Biden’s budget request for 2022 has an $18 million increase in funding for ICE, and his administration is still seizing people’s land near the border in order to continue construction of the wall he promised to not build “another foot of” (ABC, 4/20/21).

By giving over the conversation almost entirely to government sources—whose dominant policy positions range from cruel to crueler—TV news offered extremely limited room to highlight and challenge those realities.

We used the Nexis news media database to search transcripts of the shows studied from March 14-April 14. We defined a source as any person either asked a question by a journalist or making a statement to a public audience on camera, such as at a press conference. People whose casual comments were incidentally captured on tape were not counted as sources.

James Stewart filibustering in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

This week on CounterSpin: NBC News recently reported that “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said…he is ‘100%’ focused ‘on stopping’ President Joe Biden’s administration.”

The statement is remarkable for the painful mockery it makes of Democrats’ and corporate media’s stubborn insistence that the most important value is “bipartisanship,” Democrats and Republicans getting along—over and against majorities of the US public getting the laws and policies they want and need, and have elected officials to enact.

But then, wait a minute, the Senate minority leader is vowing to “stop” the dominant party’s legislative agenda? How’s that work? Listeners know the problem stems from a Senate where, to start with, Wyoming, with 578,000 people, has the same representation as California, population 39.5 million—and then there is the filibuster, the rule that allows Senate minorities to block legislation indefinitely unless the majority can get 60 votes. It’s the crucial backdrop to any conversation about the Biden agenda, though media don’t always bring that point home. We’ll talk about the filibuster with Andrew Perez, senior editor and reporter at the Daily Poster.

Transcript: ‘The Filibuster Functions as a General Block on All Legislation’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of racist facial recognition, Naomi Osaka and billionaire taxes.

ChiFresh Kitchen, a worker co-op

This week on CounterSpin: In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, employees of Whole Foods—owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos—were asked to give their own accrued paid sick days to co-workers who had either contracted the virus or been forced to take time out of work.  Bezos could have given every single worker unlimited paid sick leave without his bank account even noticing. But the move shows, for those who miss the message, that corporate capitalists really mean it: This is the system they support all the time, even when it means wealthy companies saying that life-saving equipment just isn’t sufficiently profitable for them to distribute, or that, yes, they’ll take “paycheck protection” money from the state and then fire workers anyway, or that actually protecting workers’ health in a pandemic just doesn’t serve their “bottom line,” so, no, they won’t do it.

Then if you’re confused or upset, here come corporate media saying, nope, that’s a completely valid point of view—and underscoring the idea that our “economy” means everyone is always on the edge of disaster, so you better show up for work, or else you’ll lose your healthcare, you won’t make your mortgage or your rent payments, you’ll be sick and on the street, and you know what? That’s just how it is.

Such a deep, encompassing, anti-human narrative calls for not just debunking points nibbling at the ankles, but a full-frontal assault on a story about how workers are powerless and deserve to be. An important part of a counter-narrative is provided by worker co-operatives: the way they treat workers, and productivity, and the balance of worker health and company success, in a pandemic and every day.  We’ll talk about the complications co-ops pose to corporate media’s economic storyline with Jaisal Noor, senior reporter at the Real News Network.

Transcript: ‘Having a Say Can Be Transformative’

Source: Clean Creatives

Also on the show: The Keystone XL pipeline has evidently just been killed; Enbridge’s Line 3 is, as we speak, the center of a huge gathering in Minnesota—the Treaty People Gathering—to call attention to the myriad harms it likewise poses to people and to the environment. Fossil fuel companies’ onward march is under threat—maybe not as much as many of us would like, but obviously much more than they would like. As companies get increasingly desperate—and let’s not fool ourselves; no one’s headed to the poorhouse; it’s an industry that wants to make every last penny before they close shop—we can only expect their greenwashing to get smarter and more subtle. They’ve been working on that greenwashing for a long time, with a lot of smart people.

Part of their work right now is convincing you and me that fossil fuel companies are working hard to get to the net zero emissions standard that the Paris Accord calls for and, more broadly, to give us to understand that if we’re looking for a solution to climate disruption, we ought to honor and even privilege the participation of fossil fuel companies in that conversation. We’ll start to unpack that message, and shine a light on the messengers, with Duncan Meisel, campaign director at the climate-focused, behind-the-scenes ad group Clean Creatives.

Transcript: ‘The Goal of These Ads Is to Distract From Their Actual Business Model’

June 1, 2021, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

This week on CounterSpin: The word is a number of proposed documentaries about the 1921 murderous assault on Tulsa, Oklahoma’s, prosperous Black community, and how the story was not just little-known but actively erased, were meeting general disinterest. Then the TV show Watchmen, adapted from Alan Moore’s graphic novel, proved that—not to put too fine a point on it—white people could handle hearing the history. A false accusation against a young Black man led to a lynch mob and the descent of hundreds of “deputized” white people on the part of town known as Black Wall Street. The assault left this area, which represented the success and the hopes of Tulsa’s Black community, a blasted ruin, with hundreds dead and hundreds more wounded and scattered.

It’s no criticism of the show, generally credited with handling the harrowing events respectfully, to acknowledge that “what white people are comfortable with” can’t be the criterion for what history is allowed to enter public discourse and to shape it. So while the present reflection on the Tulsa nightmare is welcome and overdue, we might still think about who decides what lessons we take away, given that journalism has been central to public reckoning with Tulsa ever since that late May night 100 years ago.

We’ll talk about journalism and the Tulsa massacre with Joseph Torres, co-author of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, and senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at Amazon‘s “native” advertising and the US’s non-support for public media.

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

New York Times (5/25/21)

This week on CounterSpin: A May 25 New York Times story reports that India’s leading Bharatiya Janata Party is pressuring Twitter to censor and sanction anyone posting critically about prime minister Narendra Modi. An after-dusk visit by “officers from India’s elite antiterrorism police unit” to Twitter‘s New Delhi offices wasn’t so much legally binding as symbolic, the Times explained, sending a “a clear message that India’s powerful ruling party is becoming increasingly upset with Twitter because of the perception that the company has sided with critics of the government.”

In that effort to cow those calling attention to its failings, the Times said, Modi’s government is “following the path of some other countries trying to control how and where messages can spread on social media.” For first example, “the Russian government said it would slow access to Twitter, one of the few places where Russians openly criticize the government.” Lest you miss it, the subtext of this kind of storytelling is that it is a mark of an undemocratic society that you can’t access all kinds of perspectives—not just on your own country, but on any country—and freely, make up your own mind.

It’s a misleading premise, and though India is just one example, it’s a powerful one: The country is the new epicenter of the Covid pandemic, a major vaccine exporter than can’t vaccinate its own people, a potential example of how and why austerity and disaster capitalist programs fail—yet US corporate media don’t seem to see a story worth telling, beyond how Modi might hold on to power despite some unfortunate “missteps.”

We’ll talk around corporate media about current events in India with historian, author and journalist Vijay Prashad, executive director at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and author of, among other titles, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Pride and police.

Transcript: ‘The Modis, the Trumps, the Bolsonaros Come Out of the Wreckage of Neoliberal Policy’

SiriusXM’s purchase of design podcast 99% Invisible means that the canary in the coalmine just died.

In the past couple of years, two high-profile acquisitions of podcast companies have produced a whirlwind of think pieces from the media press. Forbes (12/4/20) prophesied that Amazon’s 2020 purchase of podcast publisher Wondery put the industry “on a Path to a Crossroads.” And a Poynter headline (2/7/19) proclaimed Spotify’s 2019 purchase of celebrated commercial podcast network Gimlet Media “could change podcasting’s future.”

But that future has already arrived. In a largely ignored story last year, Liberty Media, a conglomerate that already owns SiriusXM radio and the audio streaming and podcast platform Pandora, secured the right to a 50% stake in radio and podcast producer iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel).

That left the podcast industry dominated by a handful of players—with Liberty, Spotify and public radio (via NPR and PRX) in the drivers seat, and Amazon, Apple and the New York Times not far behind. The new podcast oligopoly has arrived, and monopoly is on the horizon.

In April, the final “canary in the coalmine” of industry consolidation keeled over dead: SiriusXM  bought  99% Invisible, the vaunted architecture and design podcast often held as a standard bearer of the noncommercial podcasting space.

This is a far cry from podcasting’s past, which featured an ecosystem of independent companies that separately produced, hosted, distributed, platformed and monetized content. The medium’s advertising market is 20% the size of radio, but it’s projected to top $1 billion in ad revenue this year and continue to grow. Large media corporations realized if they consolidated these services and combined them with targeted advertising, podcasting could become a veritable “money spout” for whoever captured a large swath of listeners.

Spotify may be best positioned to open that money spout. It’s arguably the most popular podcasting platform in the US, and the press sometimes compares the company to Netflix because of its sizable investments in content. Over the past two years, Spotify has purchased high-profile producers (often styled “networks”), acquiring Gimlet,  The Ringer and Parcast, and signed exclusive licensing deals with Joe Rogan, DC Comics, Kim Kardashian West and Michelle Obama.

Spotify is arguably the most popular podcasting platform in the US.

Producers and platforms have often been the first to merge in the monopolistic “podcast wars,” and typically get media attention as the most visible pieces of the industry. But as a Verge headline (2/17/21) argues, “The Podcast Wars Will Come Down to Ad Tech, Not Exclusive Content,” and if that’s true, Spotify‘s  purchase of Anchor FM and Megaphone (formerly Slate’s Panopoly) are much more important.

Megaphone is a podcast monetization company that makes money for producers by inserting ads into their content. Anchor is a podcast hosting company that stores the audio, distributes it to the various platforms, and gathers analytics about numbers and demographics of listeners.

Anchor’s “one-stop shop” technology allows publishers to record, host, distribute and even monetize their content. The ease with which it allows amateurs to start a podcast quickly made the company one of the most popular hosts on the market. Spotify has used its purchase of Anchor to lower the barrier to entry even more, adding 1 million new shows on the platform in 2020 (Verge, 12/2/20). That brings in more listeners and potential subscription revenue, and means more ad inventory the company can sell.

Anchor’s ad tech has struggled to make money for amateur publishers, but with the help of advertising-focused Megaphone, Spotify launched its “final infinity stone” last month: a full-on automated advertising suite (Input, 2/22/21). Combining a platform (Spotify) with hosting (Anchor) and new dynamic ad-insertion technology (Megaphone) means advertisers can collect audience data and serve “different ads to different listeners” in real time, wrote Ken Doctor in Nieman Lab (1/13/16). This “could mean a 400% jump in ad capacity” by placing ads on old content as well as new.

This is the coup de grâce of the podcast monopoly wars. More audience analytics means more ad revenue for publishers, which brings more publishers to the platform, which means more listeners, which means more audience analytics, ad infinitum.

Podcast consolidation. (See larger view.)

“If Spotify can leverage cheap capital to lock a large audience into its ecosystem, podcasts would need to go there,” warned YouTube veteran Hank Green (Washington Post, 5/27/20).

If this model reminds you of another large company besides Netflix, you’re not off base. In the Washington Post (5/27/20), veteran YouTuber Hank Green wrote:

My guess—and I’m hardly alone—is that Spotify wants to become to podcasts what YouTube is for video: simply, the default platform for both listeners and creators. And that should worry people in both of those groups.

In the early- to mid-2000s, this monopolistic system allowed YouTube to foster a vibrant community of DIY creators through its “Partner Program,” which enabled many to make a living with dedicated audiences as small as 10,000 subscribers. But those creators soon faced the consequences of enmeshing their livelihoods with Google. which bought YouTube back in 2006.

YouTube‘s ever-changing algorithm has burned out creators and decimated their audiences. The company has threatened to demonetize content—taking away ad revenue—to force its partners to sign contracts beneficial to Google, and changed the terms of the program overnight. Today, the company has largely left its erstwhile indy stars in the lurch as it pursues safer, more sanitized content palatable to its advertisers.

Wrote Green:

In the ecosystem of YouTube, which Google owns, tens of thousands of small businesses depend on the whims of one of the largest companies in the world for both audience and revenue.

We’re seeing a glimpse of what that could look like for publishers on the new podcast uber-platforms. Publishers gain a lot from being owned by one of the new oligopolists, but it comes at a cost. PJ Vogt, a former host of the popular Gimlet podcast Reply All, pointed out on Twitter (11/4/20), “Since Spotify acquired Gimlet, we do not have any say in rejecting advertisers.”

Amazon Music attempted to require podcasts on its platform to “not include advertising or messages that disparage or are directed against Amazon,” before backing down in the face of backlash (Input, 8/12/20).

Ashley Carman in the Verge (11/11/20): “We all might end up having to use Spotify whether we like it or not.”

The biggest changes for listeners will come from targeted advertising. Its absence from podcasting reduced revenue for creators, but meant digital audio was one of the final provinces where people maintained some reasonable expectation of privacy. Megaphone, Anchor and their ilk spelled the end of that, and consolidation has taken it further by concentrating users’ personal information on fewer and fewer platforms. Wrote Ashley Carman for the Verge (11/11/20):

Spotify knows listeners’ names, billing information, where they live, their age, what music they like, the other shows they enjoy, who they’re friends with on Spotify, what devices they use and plenty of other data.

In 2020, Spotify filed a patent for technology that tracks its users’ personality traits, which it could employ to change the tone of voice of advertising on the platform (“upbeat” for extroverts and “soft-toned” for introverts, etc.). And this year, it filed a second patent to identify users’ “emotional state, gender, age or accent” by recording them. The inventors of the first patent wrote in a research paper that their future research “could begin to link streaming behavior with brain scanning, genetic and physiological data” (Music Business Worldwide, 10/7/20, 1/27/21).

Spotify started selling personalized playlists to brands in 2019 (Vox, 1/11/19), and we can expect something similar for podcasts coming down the pipeline. Pandora has also recently come out with a new analytics tool that “will tell podcast hosts where their listeners live and how long they listen,” according to the Verge (6/18/20).

Liberty Media and its podcasting holdings.

Spotify and Apple Podcasts compete for the most listeners on their platforms, but Liberty is the only true competitor with Spotify for an all-in-one platform, via its audio-streaming platform Pandora. In 2018, Liberty’s satellite radio company SiriusXM bought Pandora for an epic $3.5 billion. Later that year, Liberty bought podcast monetization company Adwizz, followed in 2020 by host Simplecast, and folded them into Pandora to create “a full-on podcast distribution and monetization system” (RAIN News, 6/17/20). Later in 2020, Sirius closed the loop by adding producing, and much, much more, when it bought the already-consolidated producer-platform-monetization company Stitcher from the E.W. Scripps media conglomerate.

Stitcher’s own earlier consolidations are a good case study on how the stage was set for the insta-monopolies formed in the late ’10s. In 2014, monetization company Mid Roll and podcast publisher Earwolf merged into Midroll Media. In 2015, Scripps bought Midroll, followed in 2016 by then-podcast platform Stitcher. In 2018, Scripps merged all these parts together into a single company under the Stitcher brand.

Perhaps wary of Spotify‘s success, and the machinations of Apple and Amazon to create their own podcast walled gardens, Liberty is hedging its bet that Pandora will come out on top. The conglomerate secured the go-ahead from regulators to buy a 50% stake in iHeartMedia last year, and has since increased its share to 40%. A legacy commercial radio broadcaster better known by its former name Clear Channel, iHeart has focused on distributing content to as many platforms as possible rather than pushing users to its own. But it has also held its own in the consolidation wars when it comes to combining all the spokes of the industry.

In 2018, iHeart bought publisher Stuff Media and targeted ad company Jelli. In 2020, it acquired another monetization company called Voxnest, which itself already owned hosting company Spreaker. In February 2021, it tied these together with the purchase of the respected monetization and analytics company Triton Digital from Scripps (that company’s last major digital audio holding).

Medium and small podcasting companies have continued to merge over the past few years. Old-time podcast host LibSyn just acquired monetization company Glow. Music streaming platform LiveXLive bought mid-sized podcast producer PodcastOne in 2020. And monetization-hosting company Acast bought hosting company Pippa in 2019, and the dual platform-advertising company RadioPublic this year, making it a scrappy competitor for the throne. These and other still independent companies, like host-monitizer Art19, could serve to boost one of the lesser oligopolists to prominence with a well-timed purchase.

Spotify and Pandora’s industry dominance began with platforms buying producers. Last year, the New York Times bought the much-vaunted producer Serial Productions from This American Life, home to the “podcasting’s first breakout hit,” in the words of David Carr (New York Times, 11/23/14). Last year Apple bought Scout FM, an application that creates podcast playlists, and just introduced paid subscriptions to its long-standing podcast app (triggering Spotify to do the same). We can be assured there is more to come.

Patreon was founded in 2013 with the goal of creating a donation-based subscription model that has proved popular among podcasters.

So what’s the alternative to commercial monopoly? Luminary is pursuing a pure subscription model, avoiding the problems targeted ads bring by eschewing them altogether. Acast has developed a hybrid approach to paywall content listeners can still access across multiple platforms. In 2013, Patreon launched with a vision for a donation-based subscription model that has become popular with podcasters.

Then, of course, there is public radio. From the outset, the three major public radio corporations in the US have been key players in podcast production, accounting for almost 30% of the total audience of the Podtracs top 20 publishers. Today National Public Radio (NPR) competes with iHeartMedia for the top spot, with the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) coming in fifth and American Public Media (APM) 19th.

While commercial podcasting is racing toward oligopoly, public media are holding the line on an alternative vision with a parallel universe of services that reflect the medium’s multi-platform roots. In some ways, this makes public radio odd bedfellows with iHeartMedia, which is pursuing a similar content-focused multi-platform ecosystem. It remains to be seen how Liberty’s purchase of the company may change that formulation.

PRX’s Radiotopia is a bold experiment in organizing and funding a podcast network that blends pieces from the commercial and public podcasting world. Each show in the “federation” shares advertising, distribution, cross-promotion, foundation support and donations, but remains editorially independent.

Radiotopia relies on PRX‘s in-house hosting, monetization and analytics platform Dovetail to dynamically place ads across all of its content. It’s a direct competitor to the likes of Megaphone, Anchor and Adwizz, and can boast of serving ads on Serial, the “fastest-growing podcast of all time” (Medium, 5/18/16).

In what the Verge (3/2/20) called public media’s “answer” to Spotify, NPR and some of its member stations acquired podcast platform PocketCasts in 2018, and the BBC joined the partnership this year. PRX and a number of commercial investors spun off their own platform in 2016, called RadioPublic, though they have since sold it to Acast.

This growing open ecosystem to produce, distribute and monetize podcasts could be dubbed the “PRX model,” a new twist on the oft-celebrated and oft-maligned motley model that has funded public radio in the US for decades through listener donations, foundation support and “underwriting” (i.e., advertising). The dynamism of US public audio funding models is admirable, but they are not without baggage.

Donation-funded media incentivizes content directed towards middle- and upper-class audiences who can afford to donate. The continued reliance on foundations plays into the interests of the nonprofit/industrial complex. And the shift away from regulated radio has loosened public media’s already weak resolve to maintain clear boundaries between their content and advertisements. (In 2016, the head of podcast ad sales for NPR, Bryan Moffett, euphemistically expressed this as taking “advantage of the uniqueness” of podcasting.) Not to mention public media have not been above their own consolidation: Public Radio International merged with PRX in 2018.

Where does this leave us? On the one hand, the new emerging walled garden models of Spotify, Pandora and Amazon can create space for DIY audio producers to thrive, but it puts them at the mercy of monopolist overlords. On the other hand, the open source podcasting world championed by US public media continue to produce some of the most important audio storytelling today, but act as de facto gatekeepers.

One simple answer to this conundrum is true public funding of podcasting and media at large, as with John Nichols and Robert McChesney’s proposal for a $200 tax credit Americans could use to donate to media of their choice. But absent a large-scale movement for media democratization, this is nothing to hold our breath for.

US public radio could band together and expand on their vision with PocketCasts to create a complete competitor to the likes of Pandora and Spotify. But that would represent a full-on pivot from their current strategy, and US public radio as it stands, with its heavy dependence on corporate and foundation money, is far from a perfect steward of a potential public podcast monopoly.

Time will tell how the landscape continues to harden. We will not be waiting for long.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the purchaser of 99% Invisible. The podcast was bought by SiriusXM, not by iHeartMedia.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Liberty Media held a 40% stake of iHeartMedia. Liberty offered to buy a 40% stake, but withdrew the offer in 2018. Liberty maintained a 5% stake in iHeart since 2017, which it fully sold off in 2021. 

(cc photo: Charles Edward Miller)

This week on CounterSpin: When Clyde Chambliss, Alabama senate sponsor of a 2019 law banning virtually all abortion—no exceptions for rape or incest—was asked whether the law would likewise criminalize in vitro fertilization clinics that discard embryos, his answer was: “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman.” Let that sit a minute.

The Guttmacher Institute’s Elizabeth Nash and Lauren Cross described right-wing ideologues who have pushed, since January, 536 abortion restrictions, including 146 abortion bans, introduced across 46 states, as “engaging in a shock and awe campaign against abortion rights as part of a large and deliberate attack on basic rights that also includes a wave of voter suppression laws and attacks on LGBTQ people.” Anti-reproductive rights folks have been shooting their shot for a while, and they now have a Supreme Court majority to help. So who’s speaking for the actual majority of US citizens who support a person’s right to determine whether and when to have a child? (You know most women who have abortions already have children, right?) Where are the news media that will not just acknowledge, but build reporting around the fact that abortion opponents are demonstrably unconcerned about actual women or their actual children? Who will connect the dots from anti-choice to anti-immigrant, anti–poor people, anti-healthcare, etc., lest “pro-life” be mistaken for pro-life?

We’ll talk about the Supreme Court’s potential overturning of Roe v. Wade with Preston Mitchum, director of policy at URGE: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, and adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center.

Transcript: ‘Roe Has Never Been Enough, and We Still Need It’

(photo: NBC News/Getty)

Also on the show: Arizona Republicans are insisting on an audit of one county’s votes in the 2020 election—just the presidential line on the ballot, not any others, but we’re not supposed to ask about that. Given that, if you’re playing along, the notion is that the recount is about transparency and accountability, it should be noteworthy that, as the Arizona Republic‘s Jen Fifield and Andrew Oxford reported, Arizona senate Republicans got the ballots, voting machines and voter information from the county through a court order, and then handed it all over to private contractors to do the audit, who have since studiously declined to name or specify the people who have access to that information, or who is paying for the work.

As much as one might want to dismiss it as sour grapes, observers are calling the Arizona maneuver “a new, more dangerous front” in the voting wars that merits our attention. We’ll talk about the Arizona audit with Steven Rosenfeld, editor at Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Transcript: ‘They’ve Been Looking to Bolster the Claim the Election Was Stolen’

(via Twitter)

This week on CounterSpin: A report showing that fewer jobs were added in April than expected has some business owners and media minions shaking heads and pointing fingers about how people “don’t want to work!”  Listeners will have heard the trope, providing a scarcely needed opening for shopworn right-wing assertions about how government assistance to keep folks’ head above water robs people (some people, mind you, it’s always only some people) of their work ethic.

At this point, the fact that data don’t support a connection between unemployment benefits and difficulty in hiring is beside the point. That work “ethic” equals the willingness to work in whatever conditions at whatever wage is an unchallenged, mostly unspoken pillar of corporate reporting. Trouble for them is, millions of people are hearkening to the idea—expressed in a popular meme—that if as an employer you “offer” wages less than unemployment, you are less a job creator than a poverty exploiter. And they’re less and less willing to accept the line that an insistence on a livable life will wreck what we’re told is “the” economy.

Do elite media have space for people who don’t want to risk their lives for less money than they need to live? It’s a big conversation, but we’ll start by talking about breaking through false but hardy narratives with Michael Hiltzik, business columnist and blogger for the Los Angeles Times and author of, most recently, Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads and the Making of Modern America.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Israel/Palestine, Venezuela and voter suppression.

Transcript: ‘We Need to Stop Taking Employers’ Viewpoint as Gospel’

Janine Jackson interviewed Knowledge Ecology International’s James Love about Bill Gates and vaccine politics  for the May 7, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

New York Times (5/3/21)

Janine Jackson: A recent New York Times story, “Pressure Mounts to Lift Patent Protections on Coronavirus Vaccines,” reported that President Biden and drug makers face demands from “liberal activists and global leaders” to suspend intellectual property rights on vaccines, as people continue to die and suffer myriad long-term harms from a virus for which vaccines exist.

It’s possible to overwork Plato’s metaphor of shadows on the cave wall, where you get caught up in the image of the image of the thing and lose track of the real. But when you read, “The debate on waiving an international intellectual property agreement that protects pharmaceutical trade secrets is both a political and a practical problem for President Biden, who has vowed to restore the US as a leader in global health,” you might wonder where the people are, the dead and the sick and the ones who don’t even know they’re sick, and their families and loved ones?

There is assuredly a human interest story to be found elsewhere, maybe with big, poignant photographs. But what’s lost by not bringing those voices into this straight news story, where an investment banker is cited on the “terrible, terrible precedent” opening access to vaccine production would set: “What it would say to the industry is: ‘Don’t work on anything that we really care about, because if you do, we’re just going to take it away from you.’”

And then, finally, what’s this all to do with Bill Gates? Joining us now to put it together is James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International. He joins us by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jamie Love.

James Love: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure.

JJ: We’re recording on May 6, and things are shifting as we speak. There has been, I understand, a waiver on those intellectual property rights. I’ll ask you, then, just to kind of drop us in where we’re at.

That same New York Times story, which I’m just using to stand in for a lot of coverage, talked about debate inside the White House, that some advisors to President Biden say there’s a moral imperative to act, to get more vaccines out to more people, but “others say spilling closely guarded but highly complex trade secrets into the open would do nothing to expand the global supply of vaccines.”

So that seems to be the gist of the argument. I wonder, before you even talk about Bill Gates, can you talk about this idea that, oh, everybody wants everyone to get vaccines, but somehow loosening patent protections or IP rights isn’t the way to get there?

JL: The Times story you talked about, there’s two different things that we’re talking about: One is the issue of the patents themselves, which are not secret. Patents are granted; they’re published and anyone can read them. That’s one of the important things about a patent. Trade secrets have to do with the know-how, how to manufacture a vaccine. And those things are often kept secret by a company.

So in the current environment, where you’re trying to increase the manufacturing and the supply of vaccines so you can vaccinate more people around the world and do it faster, both of these things are important.

The patent is an exclusive right; it allows somebody that has ownership of an invention to prevent anyone but themselves from practicing that invention, so that can make it illegal to manufacture a vaccine, for example.

If you acquire somehow, either by paying for the patent or having the government override the patent right through a compulsory license to that patent—where the government forces the owner of the patent to give a license to someone to manufacture—then you still are faced with this problem of, do you know how to manufacture it? Where’s the know-how? And that’ll often involve a lot of things that you could describe, in some cases, as “trade secrets.” So both of these things are important for scaling the vaccine response.

Medium (3/20/21)

JJ: So then what about the idea that allowing access to them actually wouldn’t change the global supply of vaccines, which is an argument that’s been put forward by, among other people, Bill Gates, who as you’ve written and talked about recently, is a real powerful force in this sphere?

JL: I think most people would agree that if you somehow got rid of the barriers that patents present, by forcing people that own the patented inventions to allow third-party generic manufacturers to use those inventions to make a generic vaccine, and also shared the know-how, that would, in fact, definitely expand the production and supply of vaccines.

I think that what Bill Gates’ opinion is that that’s a bad idea. He would argue that breaking down the strong protection of patent rights and know-how would be bad in some ways, because he thinks the private ownership of both the know-how and the inventions is a positive. He thinks they’re what makes the world go around. He’s a strong advocate of strong monopolies on both inventions and know-how. He thinks that’s necessary in order to get private investment.

But it’s a pretty weak argument in this particular case because every single vaccine that’s on the market today has had the backing of governments in the development. Even the Pfizer vaccine—which, the Pfizer CEO likes to claim, didn’t get any research contracts from the US—they started out with 400 million euros from Germany and another 100 million in support from European connections and a $1.95 billion advance purchase contract from the United States. And that’s not really completely a story of free enterprise; that’s a story of governments really putting money into developing a vaccine.

For Moderna’s vaccine, for the Novavax vaccine, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the  Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, all of those other vaccines had even more support from governments. And you can say the same thing about some of the vaccines in development or from other countries, like Russia or Cuba.

What you have right now is a lot of government money that’s gone into vaccine development being privatized by a handful of companies, and those companies saying, “You know, we’re going to decide who is allowed to manufacture and who’s not allowed to manufacture, and how fast things go and what prices we want to charge.” But there’s massive economic dislocation worldwide. You have kids out of school, you have people losing businesses, you have people getting evicted, defaulting on loans, mental health problems and everything else.

To the companies, it’s not like they’re not making any money. Pfizer this year says they’re going to make $26 billion in selling their vaccine, Moderna claims they’re going to make about $20 billion selling a vaccine that the US government paid for, and the CEO of Moderna is said now to be worth over $5 billion. So I don’t think we have to really worry too much about these companies not making money.

JJ: And not being inspired to do more or to innovate, or whatever, supposedly, the inhibition is going to be.

JL:  At the beginning of the pandemic, most of the companies, with the notable exception of Pfizer, but a number of companies claimed that they were going to operate on a nonprofit basis. As we go deeper and deeper into the pandemic, and now Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, even AstraZeneca, are all talking about raising prices. In some cases, they’re turning around numbers like tenfold increases in the price of their products. As you move down the road, Pfizer suggests you might need to be vaccinated every single year. When you’re talking about vaccinating the entire planet, that becomes pretty expensive.

JJ: There’s plenty to be said about how being wealthy, however you get there, evidently conveys expertise, at least according to US news media, and to many other actors in society. Part of the reason that people have a distorted or misleading understanding of the balance of arguments, in terms of vaccinating people, has to do with media coverage and the outsized voices of people like Bill Gates.

I wanted to ask you, just finally, about media coverage. If we’re talking about Gates—he’s an expert on malaria, he’s an expert on public education, now he’s an expert on vaccines. And if you just look at sources, I’m not sure the voices we’re hearing are the voices that we actually necessarily need to hear. What’s your thinking on that?

JL: Well, there’s the song, “If I Were a Rich Man,” which is the notion that people think just because you’re rich, you must know. And that’s one issue that you have, but it’s more than that. Gates personally—and his foundation, which has some of his money—spends a huge amount of money on public relations. They fund a lot of media organizations, they give money to BBC, they give money to lots of organizations that cover public health, and so they tend to give very favorable coverage to the projects that Gates is involved in. They offer money to all sorts of organizations, whether or not they take it or not, so it’s out there.

We once approached one publication, the Washington Monthly, about doing a story that involved Gates’ support of media organizations. And the reporter came back and he said he talked to his editors—and this is a really a small, niche publication in Washington, DC, one that we like, but it wasn’t really a major one—and the editor said, “That’s a great story. But we also have a grant application out to the Gates Foundation, so we’re just not going to write it.”

JJ: Wow.

JL: And there’s that kind of a problem. And then there’s the fact that not just Gates personally, his expertise, but his organization—they have consultants, they have organizations they fund that work on vaccines, he plays an important role in CEPI and in COVAX, too, the organizations who play a role in development and distribution of a vaccine for infectious diseases. He has consulting firms like McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group that work with them. And he knows the CEOs of companies, he has a lot of contacts and things like that.

So when the pandemic hit, very few people in government knew anything about vaccines or anything about infectious diseases, and so Gates was a famous guy; he has some expertise. So people would be like, “What does he have to say?” And because he was giving away a fair amount of money—or managing money; people like Warren Buffett were donating money—it seemed like he must be a pretty honest broker, because he’s pretty free of any kind of conflict, unlike a company.

But Gates himself has an ideological connection to strong intellectual property rights. Ever since he was in college, he’s always thought that strong intellectual property rights and strong privatization of government-funded research were good things, not bad things. He’s been focused on that his entire life, and I don’t think people realize how radical he is on those views. Even during the height of the AIDS pandemic, when there were very few people getting access to treatment, he was trying to block every effort to expand access to generic HIV drugs, despite the fact that there were probably 9,000 people a day dying from the disease at the time.

James Love: “People who have less power and less money around the world are the people last in line—and that line is going to be pretty long if you don’t speed up the production.”

So here we are, fast forward, it’s a pandemic, it’s Covid. And he’s telling people, “No, no, don’t worry about things. We’ve got the manufacturing all ready to go, we’re working with all the best people, all the best companies. We know more about this. The people that want more open sourcing of the vaccine are anti-capitalist, know-nothing activists. Listen to me, I’ll give you better advice.” So that was sort of the early role he was doing. And then he started to use his surrogates, like the Center for Global Development and other groups, to lobby against the TRIPS waiver. He personally started lobbying against it.

And when he was interviewed on Sky News about a different issue than the patent issue, he was asked about the know-how issue, he said he was opposed to sharing the recipe, or the know-how, how to make a vaccine, with developing countries and, more broadly, making it more public.

And I think that’s a ridiculously dangerous position to take, because the companies that are manufacturing vaccines right now are not remotely close to meeting demand, and if you go at the pace that they prefer, which is to keep the technology closer and control the pricing mechanisms, you’ll have a slower rollout that exposes us to risks of new variants, and it means people who have less power and less money around the world are the people last in line—and that line is going to be pretty long if you don’t speed up the production.

So it’s been difficult, because he has an outsized voice. And I think Gates is a smart guy; he’s not the only smart guy around or smart woman around. I think people need to listen to other views. And, actually, Gates has sort of a mental block about these issues, and so some of his arguments just don’t add up.

JJ: All right then. We’ll end there for now, with an eye towards tracking it as we go forward. We’ve been speaking with James Love. He’s director of Knowledge Ecology International. They’re online at KEIonline.org/. Thank you so much, Jamie Love, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JL: Thank you very much.

New York Times (4/27/21)

This week on CounterSpin: “Rights Group Hits Israel With Explosive Charge: Apartheid.” You don’t need to be a linguist to think there’s something leading about the New York Times choice of headline for a report from a human rights organization detailing how Israel’s daily, grinding suppression of Palestinian people’s rights actually constitutes a crime. But where elite media present a frozen he said/she said, never-the-twain-shall-meet debate, more and more people see a different way forward. We get an update from Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

Bill Gates (cc photo: ILRI)

Also on the show: Corporate media will have you believing there’s just no reasonable answer to your simple questions about how we can have a world where people are dying from a pandemic, at the same time as vaccines exist. How we navigate that has to do with media’s elevation of “experts” like Bill Gates, who—divorce distractions aside—raise serious questions about why we allow billionaires to set policy on something as important as public health. We talk about that with James Love, who thinks a lot about this as director of Knowledge Ecology International.

Transcript: ‘What We’ve Seen in Sheikh Jarrah Is a Microcosm of What We’ve Experienced for the Last 70+ Years’ and ‘Government Money That’s Gone Into Vaccine Development Is Being Privatized by a Handful of Companies’