Truthout (11/9/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media use at least a couple of largely unexplored lenses through which to present US human rights violations. One is: The US does not commit human rights violations, except by accident, or as unavoidable collateral for an ultimately net-gain mission, be that international or domestic.

The other is: They aren’t violations if the US does them, because we’re in a civilization war, a fight of good over evil, so all battles are holy, and you can’t commit human rights violations against non-humans, after all, so where’s the problem? Again, the narrative covers global and at-home violations.

Elite media have trouble navigating the place of the US in a global context, and the media-consuming public suffers as a result. There’s a new report from the UN about this country and human rights. We’ll hear about it from Jamil Dakwar, director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU.

Transcript: ‘You Cannot Preach on Human Rights When You Are Not Doing Enough at Home’

House Speaker Mike Johnson (CC photo: Gage Skidmore)

Also on the show: Headlines tell us that the US public don’t know a lot about Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House of Representatives. That’s true as far as it goes, but isn’t it also a kind of admission of failure for a press corps that really should be actively involved in informing us about the person third in line for the presidency—like maybe his idea that some of the people he’s nominally representing should just burn in Hell?

Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, will give us some things to consider as we see coverage of Mike Johnson unfold.

Transcript: ‘A True Believer in Heinous Ideas’