This week on CounterSpin:

A number of federal agencies rushed to make clear they would be scrubbing activities and events that “celebrate cultural awareness” in an effort to stay on the good side of the weird new White House. Trump and his abettors’ anti-anti-discrimination agenda is as subtle as a sledgehammer. “DEI hire,” for instance, is super-complicated code for the idea that if a person who isn’t white, cis, and male got a job, that can only mean a better qualified white cis man was unfairly denied it. That’s just, Trump says, “common sense.”

The irony is not lost that history itself is seen as being manipulated for political purpose when it comes to Black History Month — because we know that history is constantly invoked, if implicitly, as a way of justifying present-day unfairness. White supremacy can be presented as natural if white people invented everything, discovered everything, created all the wealth, and defined civilization.

What people try to silence tells us what they fear. So what is so scary about everyone, not just Black people, acknowledging the particular circumstances, and responses to those circumstances, of Black people in these United States — our experience, challenges, accomplishments? Is it that history — real history, and not comforting tall tales — connects the past with the present in ways that are powerful, grounding, and inspiring?

In March 2021, a hitherto no-name right-wing activist openly declared an intention to mislead around racism and to vilify any questioning of enduring racial inequities: “The goal,” wrote Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory’.” He bragged that he had “successfully frozen” the “brand” of critical race theory, and was “steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”

A self-respecting press corps would have taken that as a shot across the bow. The corporate news media we have dutifully signed on to present a campaign openly defined as uninterested in truth or humanity and concerned only with rolling back the clock on racial equity as a totally valid, “grassroots” perspective, deserving respectful inclusion in national conversation.

That was a jumping-off point for our conversation with law professor Luke Charles Harris, co-founder with Kimberle Crenshaw of the African American Policy Forum. We hear that important conversation again this week.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Venezuela, Elon Musk, and ICE.

The post Luke Charles Harris on Critical Race Theory (2021) appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

We know that once corporate news label something “controversial,” we’re in for reporting with a static “some say / others differ” frame — even if one “side” of the “controversy” is a relatively small group of people who don’t believe in science or human rights or democracy. As the Trump White House comes out fast and furious against transgender people, their weird hatefulness lands in a public arena that generally rejects discrimination, but also in an elite media climate in which the very lives of transgender people have long been deemed “subject to debate.” We’ll hear about the current state of things from civil rights attorney Ezra Young.

When the New York Times reported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s revelation that parasites have eaten part of his brain, Kennedy, running for president at the time, offered to “eat five more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.” We’re reminded of such “jokes” now, as Kennedy looks likely to be head of Health and Human Services, along with his claims that vaccines cause autism and chicken soup cures measles. But to resist Kennedy, we need to understand what fuels those who, even if they don’t like him, believe he might be a force for good in their lives. Anne Sosin is a public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College, who encourages looking around RFK Jr. to the communities that imagine he’s speaking for them.

The post Ezra Young on Trans Rights Law / Anne Sosin on RFK Jr. and Rural Health appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

You may remember the testimony: former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz pouting to a Senate hearing on the company’s union-busting in which he was referred to as a billionaire that using that “moniker constantly is unfair”: “Yes, I have billions of dollars — I earned it. No one gave it to me. And I’ve shared it constantly with the people of Starbucks.”

The delusion that a billionaire “earned” every penny of it, or that it is shared equitably with workers, may be special to billionaires, but the broader notion — that “the government only helps some people; other people do it on their own” is conveyed throughout corporate media’s narrative, even as it’s corrosive to an understanding of democracy, much less the fight for it. The increasing influence of not merely the rich, but the super rich, on the politics and policy we all have to live with is an urgent story, if not a new one. Yet somehow, elite media seem less and less interested in it.

We’ll talk with David Kass, executive director of the Americans for Tax Fairness campaign, about that on this week’s show.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Trump’s illegal funding freeze, immigration raids and the Gaza death toll.

The post David Kass on Billionaire Election-Buying appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Those with a beating heart can see the horror of Trump’s plans to deputize wannabe vigilantes to denounce community members they suspect “don’t belong here,” to send ICE into schools and churches to round folks up — police records or no — and ship them to detention centers, to ride roughshod over time-honored concepts of sanctuary. But on immigration, as on other things, corporate news media have shaped their narrative around right-wing frames, such that immigration itself is now not a human rights story, or even an economic one, but yet another story about “their” crimes and “our” safety. Horrible crimes attachable to brown and Black people? You don’t have to ask the press corps twice! It was bad enough when the narrative was about distinguishing “good” immigrants from “bad” immigrants; we’ve now gone beyond that to “all immigrants” vs. “everyone else” — and if MAGA is now driving that train, elite media have been fueling it up for years.

We’ll talk about the attack on immigrants — and about the resistance to it — with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of oligarchs and the Washington Post‘s new mission statement.

The post Silky Shah on the Attack on Immigrants appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

While the New York Times rolls out claptrap about how both “the left and the right” have ideas about causes behind the devastating Los Angeles wildfires — the right blame DEI hires, while the left blame climate change — many people have moved beyond that sort of stultifying nonsense to work that directly confronts the fossil fuel companies, and their political enablers, for the obvious role that fossil fuels play in climate disruption, and that climate disruption plays in extreme weather events. Many are also now calling out insurance companies that take folks’ money but then hinder their ability to come out from under when these predictable and predicted crises occur.

Would you be surprised to hear that these powerful industries — fossil fuels and insurers — are intertwined? We talked about it last year with writer and historian Derek Seidman.

Did you see the coverage of how people with disabilities are dealing with the California fires’ impact? Probably not, given that the place of people with disabilities in elite media coverage ranges roughly from afterthought to absent. We talked about that last year with disability rights advocate and policy analyst Ariel Adelman, in the wake of a Supreme Court case that considered dismantling civil rights protections for people with disabilities by criminalizing the ways that we learn about whether those protections are actually real. We’ll hear that too.

The post Derek Seidman on Insurance and Climate (2024) / Ariel Adelman on Disability Civil Rights (2024) appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s December 17 piece, headlined “How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve U.S.-China Relations,” contained some choice Friedmanisms, like: “More Americans might get a better feel for what is going on there if they simply went and ordered room service at their hotel.”

We’ll talk about China trade policy with Dean Baker, co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of Luigi Mangione.

The post Dean Baker on China Trade Policy appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Among many other things, 2024 was a series of reminders that corporate news media, tasked primarily with enriching the rich and shoring up entrenched institutions, will not, today or ever, do the liberatory, illuminating work of independent journalism — that boldly speaks truth to power, that stands up for the societally voiceless, that provides space for the debates and discussions we need to move society forward — for those of us who believe that U.S. society needs to change.

New calendar years are symbolic, but they can also offer a fresh start. Why not see 2025 as a much needed opportunity to acknowledge, support, create, and grow independent journalism?

We talk about that this week with two people who are and have been doing not just critical, dissident, uplifting journalism, but the thinking and advocating around why we need it: Sonali Kolhatkar, from Rising Up! With Sonali, and Laura Flanders from Laura Flanders and Friends.

The post Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders on Independent Media and the Year Ahead appeared first on KPFA.

This is the time of year when we listen back to some of the conversations from the past year that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us — in part by showing how elite media are clouding them.

It’s not to say Big Media always get the facts wrong; but that what facts they point us toward, day after day, whose interpretation of those facts they suggest we credit, what responses we’re told are worth pursuing — all of that serves media’s corporate owners’ and sponsors’ bottom line, at the expense of all of our lives and our futures. An important part of the work we do — as producers and as listeners — is to help create and support different ways to inform ourselves and stay in conversation.

Guests featured on this year’s Best of CounterSpin include Chip Gibbons, Svante Myrick, Monifa Bandele, Aron Thorn, Evlondo Cooper, Joe Torres, Colette Watson, Greg Shupak and FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas.

As always, we are deeply thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters, and advocates who appear on the show.

The post The Best of CounterSpin 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Writing for a DC court of appeals, Douglas Ginsburg said yes, banning the wildly popular platform TikTok does raise concerns about First Amendment freedoms; but it’s still good, because in pushing for the ban, the U.S. government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.” If that’s clear as mud to you, join the club. We’ll get an update on the proposed ban on TikTok — in the service of free speech — from Yanni Chen, policy counsel at the group Free Press.

We’re all familiar with the “if it bleeds, it leads” credo of, especially but not only, local TV news. But just because we’re aware of it, doesn’t mean the phenomenon isn’t still impacting our lives in negative ways. Richard Mendel is senior research fellow for youth justice at the Sentencing Project. He joins us to talk about new research showing how news media coverage actively harms young people of color, as well as our understanding and policy-making around youth and crime.

The post Yanni Chen on TikTok Ban, Richard Mendel on Youth and Crime appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

The New York Times says that Amnesty International recently became “the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza.” That makes sense if you ignore the other human rights groups and international bodies that have said Israel’s actions in the wake of Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 meet that definition.

The Times account notes that genocide is hard to prove because it involves showing the specific intent to destroy a group, “in whole or in part” — something that, they say, Israeli leaders have persistently denied is their intent in Gaza. Declarations like that by Israeli President Isaac Herzog that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” appear nowhere in the piece.

The Times tells readers that Amnesty’s “contention” and “similar allegations” have been “at the heart of difficult debates about the war around the world.” So far, 14 countries have joined or signaled they will join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the World Court.

Gallup polling from March found that the majority of the U.S. public — 55%, up from 45% last November — say they disapprove of Israel’s siege of Gaza. And that support for Israel is dropping among all political affiliations.

A May survey from a private Israeli think tank says nearly a third of Jewish people in the U.S. agree with the charge of “genocide,” and 34% view college campus protests as anti-war and pro-peace, compared with 28% who see them as primarily “anti-Israel.” More recently, the Israel Democracy Institute reports its survey from late November, finding that the majority of Jews in Israel — 52% — oppose settlement in Gaza, while 42% express support.

There is absolutely debate around the world about Israel’s actions; outlets like the Times make that debate more “difficult” by misrepresenting it.

While not the first to ask us to see the assault on Palestinians as genocide, Amnesty’s report offers an opening, for those journalists who are interested, to ask why some are so invested in saying it isn’t. Iman Abid is the director of advocacy and organizing at the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). We talk with her today.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the minimum wage.

The post Iman Abid on Israeli Genocide appeared first on KPFA.