KPFA - CounterSpin

This week on CounterSpin:

We talk about what just happened, and corporate media’s role in it, with Julie Hollar, senior analyst at the media watch group FAIR, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas.

We also hear some of an important conversation we had with political scientist Dorothee Benz the day after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at non-presidential election results.

The post Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas on Placing Blame for Trump appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Reading the news today, you might not believe it, but there was a time, not long ago, in which it was acceptable to say out loud that immigration is a boon to this country, and immigrants should be welcomed and supported. Now, news media start with the premise of immigration itself as a “crisis,” with the only debate around how to “stem” or “control” it. That the conversation is premised on disinformation about crime and wages and the reasons U.S. workers are struggling is lost in a fog of political posturing. But immigration isn’t going away, no matter who gains the White House. And children torn from parents, families sent back to dangerous places, workers’ rights denied based on status, won’t be any prettier a legacy, no matter who it’s attached to.

Journalist Nicole Foy reports on immigration and labor at ProPublica. She wrote recently about the life and death of one man, Elmer De Leon Perez, as a sort of emblem of this country’s fraught, dishonest, and obscured treatment of people who come here to work and make a life.

The post Nicole Foy on Immigration and Labor appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Dropped by her law firm after being exposed as an advisor on the post-2020 election call where Donald Trump told Georgia officials to “find” him some votes, Cleta Mitchell has leaned in on the brand of “election integrity.” Platformed on right-wing talk radio, she’s now saying that Democrats are “literally getting people to lie” to exploit laws that allow overseas citizens to vote, so she’s bringing lawsuits. Does she have evidence? No. Is evidence the point? Also no. We speak this week with media law attorney and reporter Shawn Musgrave, who serves as counsel to the Intercept, about how Trump’s “Big Lie” attorneys are not so much returning to the field, but actually never left.

In 2018, elite media had apparently moved beyond the kneejerk reportorial pairing of documentation of voter suppression with hypothetical claims of voter fraud. But they were still doing faux-naive reporting of those fraud claims as something other than themselves a deliberate suppression campaign. Then, the shiny object was Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach trying to change registration laws in the state. We return to our talk with Orion Danjuma, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program.

The post Shawn Musgrave and Orion Danjuma: Vote Fraud Hoax as Voter Suppression appeared first on KPFA.

The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases. In Palestine, the death toll is exacerbated by displacement; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRWA), one of very few humanitarian organizations working in the region.

A real accounting will also include not just those we don’t yet know are dead but the maimed, the orphaned, the starved, the homeless. Democracy Now! recently spoke with a doctor from Gaza who said  he wishes “Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.”

As media critics, we look to Palestinians to represent Palestinian views, but it’s crucial that we not see the present moment as something happening to Other People, Somewhere Else. The repression of simple anti-genocide calls, the censorship, the firings, the disinformation, the malforming of concepts like “antisemitism” — these are problems for all of us, about all of us, that will influence all of us forever.

Defending Rights & Dissent has started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday. Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a journalist, a researcher and a longtime activist. He led a successful campaign to defeat a proposed unconstitutional anti-boycott bill in Maryland.

The post Chip Gibbons on Gaza First Amendment Alert appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

For many people and for media, the idea of “racial discrimination in housing” invokes an image of individual landlords refusing to rent or sell homes to black and brown people. But that understanding is so incomplete as to be harmful. A new book doesn’t just illuminate the thicket of effects of systemic racism as it affects where people live; it reframes the understanding of the role of housing — connecting housing injustice with health inequities and wealth disparities, as well as lifting up work that connects those “mutually constitutive” elements of what the author calls an “unjust, destructive and even deadly racial order.”

George Lipsitz is research professor emeritus of Black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He’s author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and How Racism Takes Place, among other titles. He joins us to talk about his new book, The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the port strike.

The post George Lipsitz on the Impacts of Housing Discrimination appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

“How Hurricane Helene Could Impact Florida’s Home Insurance Crisis” was a recent Newsweek headline, on a story with a source saying smaller insurers were “especially in danger.” A layperson might wonder why events we pay insurance for should present a crisis for the industry we pay it to. Writer and historian Derek Seidman joins us to help understand what’s happening and how folks are resisting.

If it comes to issues that many unaffected people are told to care strongly about, immigration from the southern border is high on the list. But how seriously should we attend to a public conversation where believing that your Haitian neighbors want to eat your pets is not a bar to entry? We’ll talk about building a humane dialog on immigration and asylum policy with Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice and the director of Vera Action.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at media coverage of the TikTok ban.

The post Derek Seidman on Insurance and Climate / Insha Rahman on Immigration Conversation appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

On September 17, thousands of handheld pagers exploded simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria. The next day, it was hundreds of walkie-talkies — part of an Israeli attack, intended for Hezbollah, that Israel’s defense minister called “the start of a new phase in the war.” Media dutifully reported the emerging toll of dead and wounded, including many civilians, including children. Harder to capture is the life-altering impact of such a terror attack on those it doesn’t kill.

As every day brings news of new carnage, U.S. citizens have a duty not to look away, given our government’s critical role in arming Israel and ignoring its crimes, and in misleading us about what they know and intend. Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, a journalism professor at New York University, and former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday. He joins us to talk about the latest events and media response.

Plus, Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Rashida Tlaib, banned books, and deportation.

The post Mohamad Bazzi on Israeli Terror Attacks appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Springfield, Ohio schools are facing bomb threats because some people believe that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating dogs and cats. According to candidates for the country’s highest offices, and the KKK flyers showing up around town, this means that these legal immigrants should be pushed out of the country — or, in the minds of inspired vigilantes, much worse.

We spoke with filmmaker, activist and author Jen Senko in April 2023. The Brainwashing of My Dad — Jen Senko’s film and the book based on it — are an effort to engage the effects of that yelling, punching down, reactionary media. We hear that conversation with her this week.

The post Jen Senko on The Brainwashing of My Dad appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Corporate U.S. news media continue to report things like Israel’s recent strike on the Gaza Strip, which killed at least 19 people in an area designated a “refuge” for Palestinians, and to include warnings of a possible wider war in the region. But there’s little sense of urgency, of something horrible happening that U.S. citizens could have a role in preventing. We’ll talk about that with media critic, activist, and teacher Gregory Shupak.

U.S. corporate media have a similar “another day, another tragedy” outlook on gun violence. It happens, we’re told, but all reporters need to do is quote people saying it’s bad yet oddly unavoidable, and they’re done. We’ll hear from Robert Spitzer, a historian of gun regulation and gun rights, about some spurious reasons behind the impasse on gun violence.

That studied lack of urgent concern about human life — is that journalism? Why do the press corps need a constitutional amendment to protect their ability to speak if all they’re going to say is, “oh well”?

The post Gregory Shupak on Palestinian Genocide / Robert Spitzer on Gun Rights and Rules appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Corporate economic news can be so abstract that it’s disinforming even when it’s true. The big idea is that there’s something called “the U.S. economy” that can be doing well or poorly, which obscures the reality that we are differently situated, and good news for the stock market, say, may mean nothing, or worse, for me. A people-centered press corps would spell out the meaning of economic “indicators,” not just in terms of their impact on different communities, but in relation to where we want to go as a society that has yet to address deep historical and structural harms.

A new report on the current state of the Black economy takes up these questions. We hear from its co-authors:

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The post Dedrick Asante-Muhammad & Algernon Austin on the Black Economy appeared first on KPFA.