CounterSpin

Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s  Lynn Parramore about hedge funds vs. the Green New Deal for the April 30, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Institute for New Economic Thinking (3/4/21)

Janine Jackson: A new Green New Deal was announced last week, though you might not have noticed based on media coverage. Corporate media coverage of climate change is disorienting, in that journalists acknowledge that it’s happening, it’s life-endingly important; but then when it comes to what to do about this not imminent but already-happening crisis, we go back inside the Beltway again. And Senator So-and-So says, “Any change to our energy systems will kill your job and force you to eat only lettuce.” And that opinion needs “respectful space.”

What if media turned the corner and acknowledged that anyone serious about averting the most devastating impacts accepts that major societal changes have to be made, now; that those who are harmed will need help, and those who continue to harm will need to be shown off the stage? Then we can have necessary conversations about our possible livable future, including naming the actors and the processes that stand between us and the changes we need to make.

One critical piece of that conversation would include realities recently explored by our next guest. Lynn Parramore is senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and author of the piece, and maybe I’m tipping her hand here, “Meet the ‘New Koch Brothers’–the Hedge Fund Activists Wrecking America’s Green New Deal.” She joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Lynn Parramore.

Lynn Parramore: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ:  When we think about converting the economy to reflect the realities of climate disruption, we think, “The government should,” and we think, “US companies could.”

LP: Yes.

JJ: So my question is: Who and what stands in the way of what government should, and companies could, do?

LP: Yes, well, there is a group of Wall Street financiers, they are typically called “activist shareholders,” which kind of sounds like maybe it’s a good thing–activism is good, right? But these guys are actually the descendants of the corporate raiders that we used to hear about in the 1980s, who would go in and buy a company, strip it down, fire all the workers and head out with a bunch of cash.

These hedge fund managers of today, and we’re talking about guys like Carl Icahn, they are billionaires many, many times over, very, very powerful men (and I say men, because they seem to be always men). They are able to buy shares of a company, like Apple, say, and then they can start telling the company what to do. They buy the shares, and then they line up proxy votes, and then they might start pressuring the CEO through letters, or maybe on social media, or in other public forums. And they’ll spend millions of dollars putting pressure on the CEOs and executives of a company to do what will enrich the shareholder in the short term.

So what that usually means is something called a “stock buyback.” Now, what is a stock buyback? That’s when a company buys outstanding shares of its own stock, thereby reducing the number of shares, which makes each share worth more money.

JJ: Right.

Lynn Parramore: “The money that the company spent on buying those outstanding shares in the stock buyback could have been used to develop new products, it could have been used for innovation, it could have been used to maintain and attract talent.”

LP: So the hedge fund managers like that. It gives them a quick return: They buy the shares, they force the CEO to do stock buybacks, or they pressure the CEO. And now their shares are worth more and they can dump them, head out of town with a quick bundle of cash, and leave the company to deal with the repercussions.

Now, what are the repercussions for the company? Well, the money that the company spent on buying those outstanding shares in the stock buyback could have been used to develop new products, it could have been used for innovation, it could have been used to maintain and attract talent. All the kinds of things that you want happening in the case of a company that might be able to work with the government on a Green New Deal.

You know, the government can’t just snap its fingers and make electric cars, or semiconductor chips, or all of those products and technologies that are needed to create a sustainable future. It needs big companies with the know-how, the capital investments, to get these things done.

Let me just give you one example: Intel is a company that makes semiconductor chips. You need these for all kinds of computer systems. You would need them to upgrade any electric grid. They’re found in almost everything: your phone, your car, whatever. Not many companies have the capital investment capability to make semiconductor chips. Intel is the one American company that does. The leaders in this industry, actually, are in China, mostly in Taiwan. But the US has Intel.

Any Green New Deal is going to involve semiconductor chips. But Intel, instead of investing in its manufacturing, it has been pressured by a hedge fund manager to use its resources to jack up the stock price, and, actually, it’s been pressured to get rid of its manufacturing arm, and just be a designer of chips, in which case the United States wouldn’t have any company that made semiconductor chips.

So you can see how these hedge fund managers, in the interest of making a quick short-term profit, really bleed companies of their capabilities and their resources, so that they can’t be leaders in technology.

And guess who doesn’t have this problem? China does not have this problem. Its companies don’t do stock buybacks. So Chinese companies are free to use their resources to invest in research and development, pay the talent, create manufacturing plants, do all the things that we wish our companies were doing if they weren’t caught up in these Wall Street games.

JJ: Let me just confirm: All of this is legal; none of this is breaking the law, but it’s still something that…. It’s still not transparent, exactly, you would say. There’s skullduggery, and yet it’s perfectly legal.

LP: Well, it used to be unlawful. Prior to 1982, stock buybacks were considered stock manipulation, and they were not legal.

JJ: OK.

JJ: But the Reagan administration came in, which was very friendly to Wall Street, and the law was changed.

Now, there are a lot of people—including economist William Lazonick, who has worked on this issue extensively—who think that stock buybacks should be made illegal once again. I happen to agree with that.

And there are more and more people in the political sphere who are beginning to understand this problem. Tammy Baldwin is a very good example. And Biden himself has a pretty good understanding of stock buybacks and the damage they cause. And he, for example, I think would be open to banning companies from doing this kind of Wall Street casino game playing, if they enjoy government contracts in any kind of big Green New Deal project or infrastructure project.

So that’s a start: banning companies from doing it as long as they are partnering with the government, and getting taxpayer money to partner with the government on these projects; that would be a very, very helpful thing.

And, eventually, it would be nice to just ban them altogether, because these stock buybacks really do nothing except pump up the price of stock shares temporarily. It’s really an illusion. A company’s stock price isn’t going up because suddenly it’s making better products or it has some wonderful vision for the future. It’s just a temporary boost that enriches wealthy executives and these hedge fund managers who, again, are already wealthy enough, and they really don’t need another superyacht.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Lynn Parramore, senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Thank you so much, Lynn Parramore, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LP: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Aggression, in international politics, is commonly defined as the use of armed force against another sovereign state, not justified by self-defense or international authority. Any state being described as aggressive in foreign or international reporting, therefore, is almost by definition in the wrong.

It’s a word that seems easy to apply to the United States, which launched 81 foreign interventions between 1946 and 2000 alone. In the 21st century, the United States has attacked, invaded or occupied the sovereign states of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Despite the US record, Western corporate media overwhelmingly reserve the word “aggression” for official enemy nations—whether or not it’s warranted. In contrast, US behavior is almost never categorized as aggressive, thereby giving readers a misleading picture of the world.

The Hill (10/3/19)

Perhaps the most notable internationally aggressive act in recent memory was the Trump administration’s assassination of Iranian general and political leader Qassem Soleimani last year. Yet in its long and detailed report on the event, the Washington Post (1/4/20) managed to present Iran as the aggressor. The US was merely “choos[ing] this moment to explore an operation against the leader of Iran’s Quds Force, after tolerating Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf for months,” in the Post’s words.

It also gave space to senior US officials to falsely claim Soleimani was aiming to carry out an “imminent” attack on hundreds of Americans. In fact, he was in Iraq for peace talks designed to bring an end to war between states in the region. The Iraqi prime minister revealed that he had invited Soleimani personally, and had asked for and received Washington’s blessing to host him. Trump instead used that information to kill him.

For months, media had been awash with stories, based on US officials’ proclamations, that Iranian aggression was just around the corner (e.g., Yahoo! News,  1/2/20; Reuters, 4/12/19; New York Times, 11/23/19; Washington Post, 6/22/19). The Hill (10/3/19) gave a retired general space to demand that we must “defend ourselves” by carrying out a “serious response” against Iran, who is “test[ing] our resolve with aggressive actions.”

New York Times (11/12/20)

Russia is another country constantly portrayed as aggressive. The New York Times (11/12/20) described a US fishing boat’s mix up with the Russian navy off the coast of Kamchatka as typical Russian aggression, complete with the headline, “Are We Getting Invaded?” The Military Times (6/26/20) worried that any reduction in US troops in Germany could “embolden Russian aggression.” And a headline from the Hill (11/14/19) claimed that “Putin’s Aggression Exposes Russia’s Decline.” In the same sentence that publicized a report advocating that NATO expand to take on China directly, the Wall Street Journal (12/1/20) warned of “Russian aggression.” Suffice to say, tooling up for an intercontinental war against another nuclear power was not framed as Western warmongering.

Other enemy states, such as China (New York Times, 10/6/20; CNBC, 8/3/20; Forbes, 3/26/21), North Korea (Atlantic, 11/23/10; CNN, 8/9/17; Associated Press, 3/8/21) and Venezuela (Wall Street Journal, 11/18/05; Fox News, 3/10/14; Daily Express, 9/30/19) are also routinely accused of or denounced for “aggression.”

Corporate media even present the Taliban’s actions in their own country against Western occupation troops as “aggression” (Guardian 7/26/06; CBS News, 11/27/13; Reuters, 3/26/21). The New York Times (11/24/20) recently worried about the Taliban’s “aggression on the battlefield,” while presenting the US—a country that invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and still has not left—as supposedly committed to the “peace process.”

Even as the US has been flying squadrons of nuclear bombers from North Dakota to Iran and back, each time in effect simulating dropping atomic bombs on the country, media have framed this as a “defensive move” (Politico, 12/30/20) meant to stop “Iranian aggression” (Defense One, 1/27/20) by “deter[ring] Iran from attacking American troops in the region” (New York Times, 12/30/20).

Forbes (3/26/21)

In February, President Joe Biden ordered an airstrike on a Syrian village against what the White House claimed were Iran-backed forces. The Department of Defense absurdly insisted that the attack was meant to “deescalate” the situation, a claim that was lamentably uncritically repeated in corporate media, with Politico (2/25/21) writing that “the strike was defensive in nature” and a response to previous attacks on US troops in Iraq. Needless to say, it did not question the legitimacy of American troops being stationed across the Middle East.

That the US, by definition, is always acting defensively and never aggressively is close to an iron law of journalism. The US attack on Southeast Asia is arguably the worst international crime since the end of World War II, causing some 3.8 million Vietnamese deaths alone. Yet in their seminal study of the media, Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (Extra!, 12/87) were unable to find a single mention of a US “attack” on Vietnam. Instead, the war was commonly framed as the “defense” of South Vietnam from the Communist North.

Even decades later, US actions in Vietnam are still often described as a “defense” (e.g., Wall Street Journal, 4/29/05; Christian Science Monitor, 1/22/07; Politico, 10/10/15; Foreign Policy, 9/27/17). In a 2018 autopsy of the conflict headlined “What Went Wrong in Vietnam,” New Yorker staff writer Louis Menand (2/26/18) wrote that “our policy was to enable South Vietnam to defend itself” as the US “tried to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist state.” “Millions died in that struggle,” he adds, as if the perpetrators of the violence were unknown.

It was a similar story with the US invasion of Grenada in 1983, which was presented as a defense against “Soviet and Cuban aggression in the Western hemisphere” (San Diego Union-Tribune, 10/26/83).

US News (4/26/21)

There have only been three uses of the phrases “American aggression” or “US aggression” in the New York Times over the past year. All came in the mouths of Chinese officials, and in stories focusing on supposedly aggressive Chinese actions. For example, at the end of a long article warning about how China is “pressing its territorial claims aggressively” from the Himalayas to the South China Sea, in paragraph 28 the Times (6/26/20) noted that Beijing’s priority is “confronting what it considers American aggression in China’s neighborhood.” Meanwhile, two articles (10/5/20, 10/23/20) mention that Chinese disinformation calls the Korean War the “war to resist American aggression and aid Korea”. But these were written off as “visceral” and “pugnacious” “propaganda” by the Times.

Likewise, when the phrase “American aggression” appears at all in other leading publications, it is largely only in scare quotes or in the mouths of groups long demonized in corporate media, such as the Houthi rebels in Yemen (Washington Post, 2/5/21), the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad (Associated Press, 2/26/21) or Saddam Hussein’s generals (CNN, 3/3/03).

The concept of US belligerence is simply not being discussed seriously in the corporate press, leading to the conclusion that the word “aggression” in newspeak means little more than “actions we don’t like carried out by enemy states.”

Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson

This week on CounterSpin: Fox News is a flagship of right-wing disinformation, racism and hatred, and Tucker Carlson is its figurehead. Carlson spews harmful nonsense like it’s his job, which it is, and he gets some $10 million a year from it—but did you know that, if you have cable, you’re paying into that income? We’ll talk about how that works with Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the group Free Press.

Transcript: ‘We Need to Mobilize People Who Don’t Want to Pay Tucker Carlson’s Salary’

(image: Institute for New Economic Thinking)

And speaking of pollution: Polluting companies tell us every day how they’re invested in the future; we’ve heard corporations en masse say, “Profits, what? We’re all about the people now!” There’s a certain amount of people-who-make-the-problem-pretending-they’re-the-solution that we can  see through, but there’s still plenty going on behind the scenes. We’ll talk with Lynn Parramore, senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, about how hedge funds get in the way of the big changes all kinds of companies need to make to fight climate disruption.

Transcript: ‘Hedge Fund Managers Bleed Companies of Their Capabilities’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

This week on CounterSpin: It’s not hard to see—indeed, it’s hard not to see—how the initial Minneapolis police department account of George Floyd’s death,  “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction,” would have been the last word were it not for intervening factors: One was the witnessing of teenager Darnella Frazier—whose historical act deserves a serious responsive effort to protect and respect citizen reporters, and to fight racist policing—more so than pats on the head like that from the Washington Post‘s Margaret Sullivan about her “pure…motivations” and “moral core.”

And another being the unprecedented multi-racial protests Floyd’s murder kicked off. If the verdict is testament to the power of protest, so too are the vigorous efforts to squelch that power. We’ll talk about that with Elly Page, legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law and founder of their US Protest Law Tracker.

Also on the show: After the Supreme Court ruled last summer that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protects workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation or transgender status, the Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin wrote, “While we might be slow in getting there and are diverted time and again, Americans can eventually be prevailed upon to come down on the side of fairness, equality, inclusion and simple human decency.” The notion that civil rights just expand naturally without struggle—and that justice delayed is, you know, fine—isn’t serving trans kids as right-wing legislators target them at the state level. We’ll hear from Christy Mallory, legal director at the Williams Institute, based at UCLA School of Law.

Transcript: ‘It’s Important Americans Don’t Take for Granted They Can Exercise Their First Amendment Rights’ and ‘Laws Targeted at Trans Youth Are Stigmatizing, Are Harmful’

(cc photo: John Morgan)

This week on CounterSpin: Taxes, the concept of taxation, does a lot of work in US public discourse, though the role is not consistent: When reporting on a wished-for social good, like universal healthcare or improved infrastructure, the “cost to taxpayers” is presented as central; “raising taxes” is a synonym for increasing hardship on working people, and unironically offered as the reason those same people can’t have nice things, like healthcare and infrastructure. At the same time, but on a different page, we read that corporations like Zoom, Amazon and Netflix are super-successful, exemplary—what magic do they have to earn themselves such fortune?—and, oh yeah, they pay zero or near zero federal tax on their profits, but that’s complicated, and sort of clever? And anyway legal, so whaddya gonna do? Except, remember that you can’t have nice things because: taxes.

We’ll talk today with two people who, while recognizing that it’s not the sole source of inequality, have thoughts about what we can do about blatant, enduring and powerful unfairness in US tax policy.

Dorothy A. Brown teaches tax policy as Asa Griggs Candler professor of law at Emory University School of Law. She’s author of the new book, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans—and How We Can Fix It.

Transcript: ‘The System for Building Wealth Is Designed for White Wealth’

Amy Hanauer is executive director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and Citizens for Tax Justice. They’ve been tracking corporate tax avoidance and its societal impact for decades.

Transcript: ‘Some of Our Most Profitable Companies Are Not Contributing to Our Basic Needs’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at rewriting the history of the January 6 coup attempt.

Daniel Hale

This week on CounterSpin: The idea that you don’t “shoot the messenger” dates back, evidently, to Sophocles. It echoes today as a man named Daniel Hale stands convicted nominally of breaking a law aimed at spies sneaking intel to foreign enemies, but actually with revealing things the US government didn’t want known about its drone warfare programs—the ones elite media have often presented as precise in separating “bad guys” from “innocents,” and so superior to other methods of (what we are to understand is) “counterterrorism.”

Big media have shown little interest in the case. We’ll get a backgrounder from researcher and journalist Chip Gibbons, policy director of the group Defending Rights & Dissent.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of Georgia’s voter suppression law.

Transcript: ‘Hale’s Crime Is Not Leaking Information, but Exposing Government Lies About the Drone Program’

Over the past few weeks, the subject of anti-Asian racism has received an unusual degree of Western media attention, ever since a video showing the January 28 killing of Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai immigrant in San Francisco, was widely shared on social media. Coverage intensified when gunman Robert Aaron Long targeted three Asian-owned spas on March 6, killing six Asian women among eight victims in Atlanta, Georgia. Local and national media centered the gunman’s professed motive of a “sex addiction” and police statements disputing whether the crime was racially motivated, even though gendered racism is still a factor when racist incidents don’t meet the narrow and arbitrary requirements of what constitutes a hate crime (FAIR.org, 3/26/21).

While this has given more exposure to the longstanding history of racism towards Asian people in the West, as well as the various ways Asians are often gaslit by having their racial oppression trivialized, Western news outlets have also deceptively omitted the centrality of media-promoted Sinophobia to this latest spike in hate crimes toward anyone perceived to be Chinese.

Western media reports throughout the pandemic have presented the most obvious explanations behind the spike in anti-Asian violence, settling on the Trump administration’s repeated use of the phrase “Chinese Virus” and “Kung Flu,” even after being informed that such rhetoric fuels the risk of hate crimes and discrimination against Asian people.

USA Today (2/11/21) acknowledges that Covid messaging can encourage hate crimes, but doesn’t examine corporate media’s participation in the new cold war against China.

Time (3/20/20) pointed out that Trump was “part of a long history of associating diseases with foreign countries.” USA Today (2/11/21) reported that “racist rhetoric about the coronavirus pandemic may be fueling a rise in hate incidents.” The Los Angeles Times (3/5/21), reporting on a study that found anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 major cities had risen 149% last year—while total hate crimes against all minority groups had dropped 7%—declared that “the rise is almost certainly related to the pandemic.”

But the Trump administration wasn’t the only actor associating Covid-19 with China. Asian writers (Salon, 2/7/20; CNN, 3/28/20) have pointed out the racist logic often employed by the scientific community and Western media in naming an epidemic: If a virus is believed to have originated from and is circulating in Western countries, either refer to it by a generic numerical designation (e.g. H1N1), or reference the animal believed to be responsible for the zoonotic spillover (e.g., Mad Cow Disease, Swine Flu). If the virus is first detected in a country that the West has stereotyped, then the epidemic will be named after the region it’s believed to have originated from (e.g., Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, West Nile Virus).

The World Health Organization (WHO), breaking with this tradition in 2015, officially named the novel coronavirus that started the pandemic “Covid-19” on February 11, 2020, to avoid stigmatizing Chinese people, even though the virus was informally referred to as the “Wuhan Coronavirus” in Western media reports both before (e.g., New York Times, 1/21/20; CNN, 2/4/20; US News & World Report, 1/24/20), and after the WHO’s official designation (e.g., Fox, 12/29/20; BBC, 8/18/20). Indeed, towards the beginning of the pandemic, US media outlets saw fit to publish loaded headlines in op-eds like “A Communist Coronavirus” (Wall Street Journal, 1/29/20), “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia” (Wall Street Journal, 2/3/20) and “Coronavirus Spreads, and the World Pays for China’s Dictatorship” (New York Times, 1/29/20).

Despite WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus’s calls to avoid politicizing the virus and “pointing fingers,” because it would hinder international cooperation crucial to combating the pandemic, Western media have also echoed the Republican Party’s strategy of blaming China to avoid accountability for the US’s disastrous handling of the pandemic.

“If China had a different government, the world could have been spared this terrible pandemic,” claims Paul D. Miller (Foreign Policy, 3/25/20). Like one of the Western governments that allowed a thousand times more Covid cases per capita than the Chinese government?

Foreign Policy ran an op-ed, “Yes, Blame China for the Virus” (3/25/20), dismissing calls to avoid politicizing the virus as “nonsense” because the Chinese government’s “missteps are directly responsible for its global transmission and uncontrolled spread.” The Atlantic ran another op-ed, “China Is Avoiding Blame by Trolling the World” (3/19/20), stating that the “evidence of China’s deliberate cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan is a matter of public record,” and that the Chinese “regime imperiled not only its own country and its own citizens but also the more than 100 nations now facing their own potentially devastating outbreaks.”

Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen wrote “The Election Is Over. Can We Finally Blame China for the Pandemic?” (12/8/20) arguing that those who tried to avoid blaming China were merely attempting to suppress an inconvenient truth for political gain:

If the regime had taken action as soon as human-to-human transmission was detected, it might have prevented a worldwide pandemic. Instead, Chinese officials deliberately covered up the outbreak, punished doctors who tried to warn the public, intentionally lied to the world about the danger the virus posed, and proactively impeded the US and international response. It is the Chinese regime’s lies and incompetence that are responsible for the most devastating and costly pandemic in American history.

Western media also ran op-eds demanding China pay “reparations” to other nations, asserting that China was not only to blame for the pandemic, but deserved to be punished: Newsweek (5/1/20) published an op-ed by far-right British politician Nigel Farage, which described the “liberal democracies of the West” as being “increasingly pitched against that clever, ruthless opponent called China,” and questioned whether “Western governments really have the collective nerve to ensure” China pays reparations to them. The Spectator (12/5/20) talked about “the need of the citizens of the world to be given reparations by China for what it did to us all this year.”

Marc Thiessen (Washington Post, 12/8/20) blames China for not doing enough in December 2019 to stop a pandemic that killed its first identified victim on January 9, 2021.

In “China Should Be Held Legally Liable for the Pandemic Damage It Has Done,” the Washington Post‘s Thiessen (4/9/20) declared, “Somebody has to pay for this unprecedented damage. That somebody should be the government of China.” He accused Beijing of “intentionally lying to the world about the danger of the virus, and proactively impeding a global response that might have prevented a worldwide contagion.”

The inevitable result of Western media actively assisting the Trump administration’s attempts to blame China for the world’s pandemic woes is to give rationalizations to those carrying out anti-Asian violence out of the racist belief that all Asians, wherever they are, are collectively guilty and worthy of punishment for perceived wrongdoings of the Chinese government. But pointing fingers at China doesn’t just inflame anti-Asian racism; it’s also factually inaccurate.

Western media narratives of a supposed Chinese “coverup” primarily hinge on the myth of the Chinese government punishing “whistleblower doctors” like Dr. Li Wenliang, and other falsehoods, such as the Chinese government denying that there was any human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 before January 20, 2020, or needlessly delaying the release of the SARS-CoV-2 genome (FAIR.org, 10/14/20, 1/20/21; CGTN, 4/23/20, 8/22/20).

What nearly all Western media reports criticizing China for not acting faster than it already did omit is that a joint mission report from WHO and China described the Chinese response as probably the most “ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.” They also omit that earlier action and information probably would have made little difference, since countries like the US didn’t act on the information it already had when the Chinese government initiated the unprecedented lockdown on Wuhan on January 23, 2020, which was widely dismissed and condemned by US media outlets at the time for being “authoritarian” (e.g., Washington Post, 1/27/20; Atlantic, 1/24/20; Slate 1/24/20).

In actuality, the Chinese government and people went to extraordinary efforts to contain Covid-19, buying the rest of the world time to prepare for the pandemic (which countries like the US squandered).

Foreigners and Chinese people living in China were motivated to produce the independent documentary Blaming Wuhan after seeing the blatant falsehoods and misrepresentations in Western media about what was happening on the ground in China, so that people could see and hear for themselves what Chinese life was really like. The documentary contains numerous testimonies showing that Chinese media’s unified science-based reporting to contain panic and prevent infection—along with the Chinese people’s expressed trust and respect for their government—led to widespread compliance with government directives, as opposed to complying out of fear. The documentary also attributes China’s success in containing the pandemic to greater cultural consideration for the collective good, as well as the government devoting significant resources to contain the virus.

Their testimonies are corroborated by visitors to China such as Dr. Bruce Aylward, an experienced Canadian medical expert who led a team visiting China for WHO (New York Times, 3/4/20):

Journalists also say, “Well, they’re only acting out of fear of the government,” as if it’s some evil fire-breathing regime that eats babies. I talked to lots of people outside the system—in hotels, on trains, in the streets at night.

They’re mobilized, like in a war, and it’s fear of the virus that was driving them. They really saw themselves as on the front lines of protecting the rest of China. And the world.

The New York Post (1/23/20) reported on a video showing a woman eating a bat “at an undisclosed restaurant in the Wuhan province”—which turned out actually to be in Palau, an island nation 2,700 miles from China.

Despite this, Western media have promoted centuries-old racist stereotypes of Chinese people as exceptionally uncivilized and filthy. Western media reports like the New York Post’s “Revolting Video Shows Woman Devouring Bat Amid Coronavirus Outbreak” (1/23/20) reported on a “gag-inducing clip” featuring an “unidentified woman at an undisclosed restaurant in the Wuhan province clutching what appears to be a fruit bat with chopsticks while nibbling its wing like chicken.” The Daily Mirror’s “Coronavirus: Woman Eats Whole Bat in Disturbing Footage After Outbreak Linked to Soup” (1/24/20) described the video as a Chinese woman “eating a bat in a plush restaurant, despite fears the new deadly coronavirus could have been spread by a soup made from the mammal,” with bat soup being “a delicacy in the country and a popular dish in Wuhan, where the virus originated.”

In fact, the widely circulated video was first shared by Chinese social media users condemning the act, and was later revealed to be the host of an online travel show eating in the Micronesian nation of Palau in 2016. But when Western media operate within an Orientalist framework that depicts all Asian people as a barbaric monolith, factchecking crucial details like time and location don’t matter when they can spread clickbait articles by playing into racist stereotypes instead.

Before the origin theory of Covid-19 emerging from Wuhan “wet markets” was abandoned, I also criticized (FAIR.org, 5/7/20) how early Western media coverage falsely conflated what were called “wet markets” with wildlife markets, even though the vast majority of wet markets don’t keep or sell wildlife.

An op-ed in USA Today (4/8/20) from a former Shanghai-based journalist described how the “strangest animals for human consumption” to his “Western eyes” were “turtles, snakes and frogs,” before condemning Chinese “cultural traditions of medicine, animal husbandry and culinary tastes” for being a “unique incubator of terrible diseases.” Georgetown professor Bradley Blakeman wrote a patronizing op-ed (The Hill, 4/1/20) arguing that “China’s domestic demand and customs for exotic and live food are a direct threat to the health, safety and welfare of the world.”

Business Insider’s “Both the New Coronavirus and SARS Outbreaks Likely Started in Chinese ‘Wet Markets.’ Historic Photos Show What the Markets Looked Like” (2/6/20) maximized shock value and outrage by using photos that are up to 16 years old across China, along with images from Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines, which undermined the epidemiological need to be specific about what animal species the Huanan Market in Wuhan actually contained, and in what frequency. There are significant regional variations in cuisine in a country populated by over 1.3 billion people, and a more contextual approach would have informed audiences that wildlife actually isn’t commonly eaten in China—the practice being largely restricted to the southeast region and some towns—with one poll finding nearly 97% of Chinese people disapproving of the practice.

One can also find sources critical of the unsanitary eating habits of Americans, as well as them eating exotic meat like turtles, snakes, frogs, squirrels and camels, yet it still wouldn’t be fair to criticize all Americans for the peculiar eating habits of a few.

Western media have also made Asian people the face of the coronavirus from the very beginning of the pandemic, giving excuses for people who already held latent racist and xenophobic attitudes towards Asians to act on them under superficially plausible pretexts. Several reports have criticized Western media practices of lazily and insensitively using stock photos of Chinatown and Asian people wearing masks, even when the people getting infected and dying from the coronavirus weren’t Asian, or in Asian countries. Western media have also used photos of Asians wearing masks, even when the racial background of people testing positive for coronavirus haven’t been released in those reports, reinforcing implicit biases against Asians.

Gothamist (1/31/20) illustrated an article about the absence of coronavirus in New York with a photo of Flushing, a largely Chinese-American neighborhood in Queens.

The most notable instance of this practice was when outlets like the New York Post and New York Times used images of East Asian people in Queens wearing masks on a story about New York City’s first confirmed Covid-19 case being in Manhattan, after contracting the virus in Iran. This particular story is especially ironic, because it was later revealed that New York City was the primary source of infection across the US, with most New York cases being traced back to Europe, not Asia.

The story of Covid-19 itself is especially ironic, as observers, including Indi Samarajiva in Sri Lanka, have pointed out that Western incompetence in containing the pandemic, and hoarding of vaccines, have been responsible for infecting and harming the rest of the world. Samarajiva (Medium, 5/4/20), along with FAIR (6/6/20), has criticized Western media coverage for praising and highlighting the Global North’s efforts in combating the pandemic, while downplaying the superior pandemic achievements of Asian nations in the Global South like China, Vietnam and the Indian state of Kerala.

Yet white people have not been blamed or associated with the coronavirus the way Asians have in racialized Western media coverage. This is despite some white people leading anti-lockdown, anti-mask and anti-vaccine protests, along with the European Union and the US having more than 58 million total confirmed cases as of April 7, 2021, with China barely surpassing 100,000 total confirmed cases—even though China has around double their combined population—according to Oxford University’s Our World in Data project.

Several Asian observers have already made the connection between US imperialism and expansionism in Asia, accompanied by bipartisan aggressive and fearmongering rhetoric about China, leading to racist stereotypes, anti-Asian violence and state persecution of Asian people (Nation, 3/19/21; Washington Post, 3/19/21). Dehumanizing portrayals of Asian people have been necessary to prepare Westerners to rationalize massacring millions of Asian people in the West’s historical legacy of invasion and colonization, as well as to justify paranoid and blanket state persecution of Asian people living in the West, often with many false accusations, and little evidence of alleged Chinese infiltration and espionage (e.g., USA Today, 8/23/20; Newsweek, 10/26/20; Foreign Policy, 9/28/20).

Looking at the alarmism in Western media coverage throughout the years, one can easily get the impression that China is a hostile and expansionist power seeking to dominate the world, as the US has done since World War II:

China has repeatedly declared its explicit desire for a “multipolar” world and “win/win cooperation,” with “no ambition to seek hegemony, much less to replace the United States,” which it contrasts with a US preference for “unilateralism” and “zero-sum games” (People’s Daily, 9/10/20). As with most nations, China’s past and current foreign policy has unscrupulous aspects, but Chinese state media have also criticized the non sequitur that aspiring to become a more powerful nation necessarily means desiring world domination, citing the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence codified in China’s constitution (People’s Daily, 5/21/15). While government declarations of principles shouldn’t always be taken at face value, these are recognizably different arguments from Chinese media than the ones commonly found in US media propagandizing the desirability and necessity of US supremacy (FAIR.org, 12/11/20).

And despite Western media’s dehumanizing and incoherent portrayals of Chinese people being a monolith of brainwashed robots supportive of their government, while simultaneously being cognizant people with agency being governed against their will, one can find a wide diversity of opinion on China and the US’s place in the world there:

The debate around whether Chinese officials can be trusted generally ignores the question of whether US officials can be trusted not to start a war, or fearmonger about an ascendant China to retain US hegemony. A Defense News analysis (2/17/21) argued that “lawmakers, Pentagon leaders and defense industry–funded think tanks have been ramping up ‘great power competition’ rhetoric for years as a ploy to justify greater military spending,” and that China’s military investments are clearly “meant to keep invaders at a safe distance rather than project its own military power forward,” with the Chinese military advantages evaporating “beyond its shores.”

In Defense News (2/17/21), Dan Grazier notes, “When spending levels threaten to dip, discussion of a new national security threat ramps up to coax defense spending safely upward.”

Even establishment commentator Fareed Zakaria (Washington Post, 3/18/21), generally noted for his celebration of US power, mocked the threat inflation surrounding China, citing the US having 20 times as many nuclear warheads as China, the US having over 800 military bases around the world (many surrounding China) compared to China having as many as three, and China spending roughly only one-third as much annually on its military as the US (FAIR.org, 10/1/19).

And while the Western-centric question of whether China is a threat to us is a convenient distraction from the more pertinent question of whether the US is a threat to China, the Union of Concerned Scientists (5/7/20), for example, has pointed out that China has had an unconditional no-first-use pledge ever since it first developed a nuclear deterrent in 1964, whereas the US maintains the right to target China with a nuclear first strike. China is not planning to build a hostile missile network, or deploy Chinese soldiers near Western borders, as the US is doing to China (Nikkei Asia, 3/5/21, 7/5/20). Despite being more powerful than ever, China has never invaded another country in over 40 years, whereas at least 800,000 people have been directly killed in the US’s ongoing post-9/11 wars.

As a Korean American, it’s not hard to see the parallels between today’s Sinophobic hysteria over China’s rise with historic white supremacist fears of nonwhite people seeking retribution, or inevitably becoming just as bad as their oppressors: from white slaveowners fearing revenge from newly freed slaves, to Western media paranoia about Black South Africans slaughtering white South Africans and Palestinians killing Jewish people upon ending apartheid (FAIR.org, 2/1/19). When one is aware that Western media spread the exact same Yellow Peril propaganda of deceptive and ruthless Chinese ambitions for global domination even while Western imperialist powers were dominating China during its Century of Humiliation—and before the Chinese Revolution brought the Communist Party of China to power—current speculations over China’s alleged desire for hegemony seem more like projections and an unfalsifiable thesis, rather than evidence-based fear.

While Western media like to self-present as “objective,” “impartial” and ideologically normative, FAIR has repeatedly criticized their bias in favor of white supremacy and the political and business establishment. And when we recall that US foreign policy has been designed by white supremacists, along with US newsrooms remaining predominantly white, it’s fair to question whether race is still a factor behind US foreign policy and Western media’s vilification of both the Chinese people and the Chinese government, especially when US journalists have held more hostile views towards China than the general public (Columbia Journalism Review, 11/5/18; Newsweek, 5/2/19). With US public opinion of China plummeting to all-time-lows as a result of the US’s expanded information warfare against China, it’s no surprise that Asian people are suffering from racist violence (Mintpress News, 5/18/20, 3/1/21).

It’s not inherently racist to criticize the Chinese government, but it is racist to insist on criticisms based on dubious evidence and outright falsehoods, or to prioritize hypocritical critiques of China when the West has committed more egregious atrocities than the worst Western media allegations against China (CounterPunch, 1/4/13; Mintpress News, 12/16/20). It’s racist to assume China is inherently dishonest, has nefarious motives behind all its actions, and presumed guilty of alleged wrongdoings without investigating the accuracy of Western media claims, or without critically considering non-Western views of China (e.g., Hankyoreh, 6/21/20; Medium, 10/26/20; South China Morning Post, 10/21/20). Yellow Peril and Red Scare propaganda has serious consequences for the Asian diaspora, as anti-Asian racism is spiking in Western countries as an inevitable result of Western imperialism (Time, 3/8/21).

Just as official condemnations of Islamophobia didn’t spare anyone perceived to be Muslim from state persecution and racist violence in the wake of the US’s post-9/11 wars, Asian people will continue to be targeted, despite disingenuous condemnations of anti-Asian racism, as long as the new Cold War against China continues. When many Westerners can’t even distinguish between hating the Chinese government and the Asian diaspora, it’s hard to believe familiar claims of only hating the Chinese government and not the Chinese people.

Featured image: Bloomberg illustration (5/21/20) of Chinese Covid policy.

(image: NIAID)

This week on CounterSpin: Between two and a half and three million people have died from Covid-19. That’s just what is reported. And we know the toll is so much greater, beyond even the more than 128 million people who have been infected by the virus, many with long-lasting and poorly understood repercussions.

That’s why a year after the WHO declared coronavirus a pandemic, protests demanding global access to vaccines were held around the world. At this point, media could ask how the global economy can recover if only parts of the globe are vaccinated…. But what if they went deeper and wondered: If we don’t learn from this pandemic that none of us can be healthy unless all of us are healthy, how many chances will we get? We’ll talk about global vaccination and what’s in the way of it with Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program.

Transcript: ‘It’s in the Interest of Everyone in the US to Vaccinate the World as Quickly as Possible’

Also on the show: There are more congressional hearings for Big Tech companies coming up—about their role in spreading misinformation about Covid along with, you know, racism and violent insurrection and stuff. We’ll see the congressional debate, assuming there is one, play out in the press. What we won’t necessarily see is how Big Tech companies are furiously working—by which I mean spending—behind the scenes to tilt things in their favor. We’ll talk about that part with Jane Chung, Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen and author of a new report on the subject.

Transcript: ‘We Really Can’t Take Anything These Companies Say at Face Value’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at past coverage of police murder trials.

The March 26, 2021, episode of CounterSpin included an archival interview that Steve Rendall conducted with journalist Robert Dreyfuss about Iraq War intelligence, originally aired February 27, 2004. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Human rights and antiwar advocates used the 18th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq to call for reparations to that country, for not only that eight-year invasion and occupation—in which US forces and contractors committed all manner of atrocities, including massacres, rapes and torture—but for some 30 years now of assault, including toxic weaponry that has devastated Iraq’s economy, infrastructure, and the health and well-being of its people.

US media seem to have a “not our problem” approach toward Iraq today, in part because they count on the US public to take their word that everyone at the time thought the invasion was justified because Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat to the United States. That intelligence turned out to be wrong, sad to say, but you can’t blame anyone for that.

And, have you heard? George W. Bush is a big softy, who likes to paint.

In February of 2004, CounterSpin spoke with investigative journalist Robert Dreyfus about that pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Dreyfus co-authored an article called “The Lie Factory” for MotherJones. Here’s Robert Dreyfus, talking with CounterSpin’s Steve Rendall in early 2004.

***

Steve Rendall: Robert, when David Kay announced that he didn’t think they’d find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he was adamant that the administration was misled by the CIA, and that intelligence was not shaped or distorted by the Bush administration. Much of the media discussion followed that same line, but your article suggests that there’s a lot more to the story. Tell us a little bit about what you found.

Robert Dreyfuss: “The idea that they were invading Iraq based on faulty intelligence has it exactly backwards. They had already decided they wanted to invade Iraq. So the intelligence was then used to justify a pre-existing policy.”

Robert Dreyfuss: I think the most important thing is that while the CIA probably did not get very much right about Iraq, they were at least convinced, most of the intelligence agencies, that there was a lot of doubt, that there were a lot of things they didn’t know. The doubts got completely erased in the policymaking circles, and in particular the Pentagon—which set up its own little sort of rump intelligence unit, called the Office of Special Plans, under Douglas Feith at the Pentagon bureaucracy—not only was responsible for deleting these doubts, but they had some value added, too.

They added in their own spin and their own intelligence, part of which came from Iraqi exiles, part of which came from their own staff, which was doing its own intelligence. And they created talking papers that ended up wildly exaggerating the threat that Iraq allegedly posed to both the United States and to its neighbors, and that information went directly to Vice President Cheney’s office and to the White House, and it led the administration in the direction of going to war, because that was a war they already wanted.

In other words, the idea that they were invading Iraq based on faulty intelligence has it exactly backwards. They had already decided they wanted to invade Iraq. So the intelligence was then used to justify a pre-existing policy.

And so for Bush to argue, or anyone else to argue, that the administration went to war based on faulty intelligence is just plain silly. They would have gone to war in any case, but they were afraid to make the argument that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy and therefore, for reasons of national strategy, for reasons of oil, for reasons of Middle East policy and protecting Israel, for all of these reasons, we’re going to invade Iraq. That probably wouldn’t have sold, either to the American public or to Congress, so instead they picked on this “Iraq is a threat” argument.

Mother Jones (1–2/04)

SR: So, Robert Dreyfuss, can I assume that the “lie factory” referred to in the title of your piece refers to this internal Pentagon Office of Special Plans?

RD: Yeah. It started right after 9/11; within a month of 9/11, they set this unit up. It wasn’t called the Office of Special Plans then; it had a different name. It went from being something like two or three people, and it expanded, and brought in contractors and consultants, and eventually took the name Office of Special Plans, which incorporated this intelligence unit. That’s what became, basically, the war planning office at the Pentagon.

SR: And from what you report, they pushed out analysts that weren’t going along with the program to some degree.

RD: They really purged anybody who wasn’t part of the zealous team of missionaries that believed in the war. These people were forced into retirement, they were transferred to other offices; some of them just quit in disgust. And they brought in people, ironically, who were not intelligence experts, people who were ideologues, but who were not particularly skilled at either intelligence collection or analysis.

So what they did is they took these piles and piles of information, with thousands of little data bits, and they picked out the ones that supported the case for going to war, and they discarded all the rest.

And any intelligence conclusion is based on evaluating all of the information, a lot of which is going to be contradictory. Some of it’s based on forged documents, on lies, on misinformation, on just plain old honest human mistakes. So all of that information isn’t going to agree, and the job of an intelligence analyst or a professional is to look at it all and say, “Here’s my conclusion, and here’s the reasons why my conclusion isn’t 100%, so I give this a certain percent validity.”

Well, this office didn’t do that at all; they just basically said, “We’re gung ho for war, and Iraq is an enormous threat to American national security.” And all of the junk that we heard about unmanned aerial vehicles striking the United States, and Iraq building its nuclear program and importing WMD-related materials, all of that was a crock.

Washington Post (2/15/04)

SR: Robert Dreyfuss, at this point, it seems that some very good reporting has come out of mainstream media, particularly from the Washington Post. But some critics suggest the Post hasn’t pushed its reporting to the front page often enough. Even Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler wrote recently, “Make sure you read Page A17, or wherever the next piece of the puzzle appears.” What do you think of the priority the media has given to this story so far?

RD: I think it has gotten somewhat lost for two reasons. One is it got lost because the aftermath of the war was so catastrophically bad, with an insurgency and a complete mess and a seemingly completely bumbling US administration over there, that that’s become the main story.

And then, second, it’s sort of obvious that Bush and Cheney were saying “WMD” for months and months and months, and we got over there and they weren’t there. So what else can you say except, “Well, we didn’t find them, and they were wrong?” So I think they sort of lost the handle on how to investigate the wrongdoing.

I think the core of the problem is the media is unwilling to look at the government and say that there’s conscious malfeasance happening. They much prefer to say this was a mistake, or this was just, you know, incompetence or conflict of interest, or all kinds of other things that are more, I guess, easier to swallow, than to say that someone was out there deliberately manufacturing evidence.

I mean, one of the most obvious cases is, no one has really investigated who forged those uranium documents. There’s no argument that those documents were deliberately forged by someone. It wasn’t a mistake. And finding out what we know about who forged them—and I believe that somebody in the intelligence system here knows—is something that reporters ought to be just leaping into, and I don’t see that too many people are even asking the question.

And there are other questions like that that I think have just been ignored, and in part because reporters follow the official investigations, and now there have been several efforts by the Republicans in Congress to intimidate investigations and say, “Well, there’s nothing there.” The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee has pretty much said that point blank. So I think to the extent that the official investigations are turning into coverups, then I think the media is finding it difficult to get these more explosive charges onto the front page.

***

Janine Jackson: That was Robert Dreyfuss speaking with CounterSpin’s Steve Rendall in February of 2004. The article “The Lie Factory,” by Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, can still be found on MotherJones.com.

Janine Jackson interviewed Guns Down America’s Igor Volsky about ending gun violence for the March 26, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

New Press (2019)

Janine Jackson: Other countries have misogyny and racism, untreated mental illness and bar fights and robberies. What they don’t have are weeks like that just passed, in which Americans, reeling from the murders of eight people in Atlanta, woke up to news of 10 people killed in Boulder.

It’s the guns. The difference is the guns.

More and more people in this country seem ready right now to think big about responses to violent law enforcement, inadequate healthcare and onerous student debt. Can we also shift the conversation and the political terrain on gun control?

Here to help us think about that is Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, and author of the book Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Igor Volsky.

Igor Volsky: Thank you so much for having me

JJ: When we hear about horrible things like the killing in Atlanta, in Boulder, in all of the places that we could name, there’s a tendency—journalistic, and maybe just human—to seek more information, more details: What were the circumstances? The motivations? Who is this individual?

Somewhere along the way, one gets the sense that the problem of gun violence is too complicated to address. Whatever measure is being suggested “wouldn’t have prevented Atlanta,” and that’s somehow not a reason that it’s not enough, but a reason to abandon the whole project.  I’m wondering, first of all, does pushing past that hopelessness call for a different way of thinking, new goals, or maybe just clarity about what our goals are?

IV: You’re absolutely right. There’s really this sense, oftentimes in the press, that this problem is just too hard, that we already have 400 million guns in circulation, and there’s nothing we can do about it, that we somehow have to pay the price of 100 people dying every day from gun violence because we have a Second Amendment.

And the reality is that none of that is true, that we know exactly what needs to be done in order to save lives. And we know that because states across America have strengthened their gun laws, have invested in communities that are suffering from cyclical everyday gun violence, and have seen significant reductions in their gun suicide rates and in their gun homicide rates.

So these models of democracy, or these “laboratories” of democracy, as Republicans in particular often like to point to, really serve as an example of what we need to do on the national level, in order to have a standard that fits the entire country.

And, secondly, we just need to look overseas at some of our great allies, who have dramatically reduced gun violence by doing three basic things: by, No.1, ensuring that gun manufacturers and gun dealers are actually regulated, and can’t produce incredibly powerful weapons for the civilian market. Those countries raise the standard of gun ownership by requiring gun owners to register their firearm, to get a license to have a firearm in the first place. And they’ve also addressed the root causes of gun violence: things like employment opportunities, housing security, healthcare. So we have the blueprint; we just need to follow it.

JJ: You will hear that “Assault weapon bans don’t help, because most murders happened with handguns,” or “Background checks don’t help, because there’s a lot of resales,” and, “Well, it’s a lot of suicides.”

But if you spell it out to the goal being fewer guns, if you make that the goal, well then that addresses all of those things. And it sounds like what you’re saying has worked in other places: It has a goal of just there being fewer guns out there.

IG: Yeah, the reason why the United States has a death rate that’s about 25% higher than our other peer nations is exactly what you just identified: We have way too many guns, and they are way too easy to get. And until our media and our leaders can have the courage, the political courage, to recognize that reality, and to begin communicating about it to the American people, it’s going to be a challenge to meet the goal of saving lives.

And I have to say: We now have a president in the White House who has done this work before; who—when he was running for the presidency—released one of the boldest gun-violence prevention programs of any presidential candidate; who promised us that his experience in Washington, DC, gave him the skills to work with Democrats and Republicans to get big things done. And so he has a heavy responsibility to follow through on those promises, to address the nation fully about this crisis, and then to work through Congress, diligently and aggressively, to get tighter gun laws across the finish line.

JJ: Let me just bring you back to media for a second. When media tend to move from incident coverage to policy coverage, then reporting on gun control gets often into this kind of static frame, where you hear from opponents and proponents of a particular measure; they both get quoted, sometimes they get quoted in equal amounts.  But there’s this kind of backdrop, which is that in this country any restrictions on individual gun ownership face an uphill battle, because it’s enshrined in the law, because the lobby is all-powerful and because this country just loves its guns. These are presented as blanket impediments to change. But how true is that? Is that really an accurate, current depiction of the lay of the land?

Igor Volsky: “Regurgitating claims that the Second Amendment somehow impedes us from doing anything about this problem is a real hindrance, I think, to the kind of conversations we have publicly about this issue.”

IV: Yeah, this false balance that you’re identifying is that you often see in media stories this effort to perpetuate, really, what is a myth about the NRA’s great power and abilities. And this notion of just regurgitating claims that the Second Amendment somehow impedes us from doing anything about this problem is a real hindrance, I think, to the kind of conversations we have publicly about this issue, to the kind of conversations we have with our friends and families, particularly some of them [who] are gun owners, or more politicized gun owners. And the truth of the matter is, the kind of coverage we need on this issue, the kind of press we need on this issue, is one that reflects the science, and the real history.

The overwhelming science in the gun violence space tells us one simple truth: Where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths. And that’s really it. That’s the reality that you have to start from.

So any kind of argument about, “If you have gun restrictions, you’re disarming the good guys,” or, “If you have gun restrictions, that means it will only harm the good guys, because the bad guys will never follow it”—that kind of argument, that the NRA has so successfully gotten the press to parrot for decades, is a real hindrance.

And so I think we hopefully, hopefully, have reached a point where gun violence is so ubiquitous, and support for actually doing something is so widespread, that we will hopefully see less of this effort to just pretend that “Well, nothing at all is possible,” right?

And just a second on the Second Amendment: The history of this is very intriguing to me, because for decades and decades and decades, really up to about 1972, it was hard to find anybody in the press, or within even the gun community, who argued that the Second Amendment is somehow an impediment to gun regulation.

That argument is actually quite new, and it was developed through NRA-funded researchers and NRA-funded lawyers. They birthed this idea that the Second Amendment somehow prevents us from doing what we know we need to do. And oftentimes the media just parrot that invented notion, without actually recognizing that it is certainly not what the Founding Fathers intended, but also doesn’t reflect the reality of how most courts—the Supreme Court to some degree, but also courts across the country—have ruled repeatedly that the amendment allows for pretty significant regulation. And so my hope here is that we can have a different kind of conversation about this issue.

Extra! (9–10/96)

JJ: That was one of the points that scholar Howard Friel made in an important piece for Extra!, for FAIR’s magazine, back in 1996: that media seem to feel they’re charting some middle ground when they say, “They could allow for some restrictions on gun ownership,” and the other point is, “No, there should be no restrictions whatsoever.” And they kind of chart a middle course. Friel’s point is they’re ignoring all of that legislative, judiciary history that you just mentioned, which actually says, “No, there’s no conflict between the Second Amendment and some measures of gun control.”

Let me ask you, finally, I know that at Guns Down, you know that legislation isn’t all there is; you see it as a multifront battle to get us to a safer place with fewer guns. You talked about things that Biden could do. Is there particular legislation afoot that you see moving things forward? What, in general, do you see as roles for the public here? Where can we get involved in making change on this?–

IV: We’re constantly in this cycle of—a gun event happens; usually it’s a mass shooting that grabs headlines. We all talk about, “Oh, things need to be done,” right? We get a lot of press coverage, some of it good, some of it not, about that event. And then we all take a breath and we move on, usually in a matter of days, sometimes, really, in a matter of hours. And the question is, how do we break that cycle?

And I think there are roles for the general public, and there are roles for leadership, right? I think the president needs to actually lead. The kind of enthusiasm and vigor and hard work that he and his administration put into passing the recovery plan, they need to apply to getting background checks across the finish line, they need to apply to getting an assault weapons ban across the finish line. They’ve shown what they can do when they’re motivated and dedicated. And they need to do that.

And to make sure that happens, all of us across the country have to keep the pressure on, have to communicate in any way we can, whether it be on social media, or making calls, or organizing friends and neighbors to do larger pushes, to ensure that the president hears from us. Politicians who’ve been talking about this issue for years, who support reform but haven’t actually pushed hard enough to follow it through, they need to hear from us. And then, of course, we need to also push those lawmakers who aren’t there on the issue yet.

But what I always think is, to first identify what is the path to actually getting something done; to me, that’s getting rid of the filibuster in the Senate, and passing through the reforms I mentioned, with a simple majority vote. And to move the individuals, to target your advocacy at lawmakers and officials who actually have an incentive to listen to what you’re saying, and to make progress. (And I suspect that many of the congressional members on the Republican side don’t have any incentive to compromise on anything, no matter how popular it is in their home states or districts.) So I would ask folks to be targeted in how they do this work.

But I am confident that if all of this aligns, that if we have a president who is committed to acting as he promised, and a public that is cheering him on and pushing him on, we will finally get to a place where we begin to make some serious progress on saving lives in this country.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Igor Volsky, of the group Guns Down America. The book is Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns, out from the New Press. Thank you so much, Igor Volsky, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

IV: Thank you.