This week on CounterSpin:

CNN’s Jake Tapper is mad about college students protesting their institutions’ and their government’s support for Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza — because they’re preventing him, by his account, from covering Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Tapper and CNN, we’re to understand, are powerless to decide what they cover, and incapable of understanding that the clear, core demand of students protesting is that government (and media) not just chat about but act to change U.S. enabling of Israel’s genocidal assault.

People, in media and elsewhere, who are used to unequivocal U.S. support for Israel’s actions, are seeing the ground shift, and they’re shook. What happens now is critical — first for Palestinians and Israelis, of course, but also for the U.S. press and their handlers.

We talk about latest developments in Gaza with Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at protester/press relations, “outside agitators” and TikTok censorship.

The post Ahmad Abuznaid on Rafah Invasion appeared first on KPFA.

We’re now seeing the impacts of the reality that corporate media, as well as corporate-funded universities, will always side with official power — as they present students sitting quietly in tents in protest of genocide as violent terrorists. But in fact, we’ve been seeing it for decades, as corporate media spin narratives about people of color as both violent and lazy, and the socio-economic status quo as the best possible option, even as millions of people increasingly recognize that it means a terrible life for them.

Many people, at the same time, are deeply interested in how different media, telling different stories, can change our understanding of our past, our present, and our future. Joseph Torres is currently senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press and co-author with Juan Gonzalez of News for All the People. Writer, musician and communications strategist Collette Watson is with Black River Life. They both are part of the project Media 2070, which aims to highlight how media can serve as a lever for racial justice, and how that includes changing entrenched media narratives about Black people.

Their co-authored article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm,” appears in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (5/23).

The post Joseph Torres & Collette Watson on Media for Social Justice appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Many college students appear to believe that learning about the world means not just gaining knowledge but acting on it. Campuses across the country — Rutgers, MIT, Ohio State, Boston University, Emerson, Tufts, and on and on — are erupting in protest over their institutions’ material support for Israel’s war on Palestinians and for the companies making the weapons. And the colleges’ official responses are gutting the notion that elite higher education entails respect for the free expression of ideas. Students for Justice in Palestine is working with many of these students. We talk with Sam from National SJP about unfolding events.

Then, app-based companies, including Uber and DoorDash, are adding new service fees and telling customers they have to, because of new rules calling on them to improve wages and conditions for workers. The rather transparent hope is that, with a lift from lazy media reporting on worry about more expensive coffee, folks will get mad and blame those greedy bicycle deliverers. We ask Sally Dworak-Fisher, senior staff attorney at National Employment Law Project, to break that story down.

Plus, host Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the TikTok ban.

The post Sam on Students for Justice in Palestine / Sally Dworak-Fisher on Delivery Workers appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuses of Iraqi detainees during the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia, with Al-Shimari v. CACI. Since the case was first filed in 2008, military contractor CACI has pushed some 20 times to have it dismissed. We got a reading on the case last year from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Historians tell us that the Cold War is over, but the framing persists in news media that love a simple good guy versus bad guy story. Telling history through actual human beings makes it harder to come up with slam-dunk answers but can raise questions that are ultimately more useful for those seeking a peaceful planet. A new book provides a case study; it tells the story of Ted Hall who, as a young man, shared nuclear secrets from Los Alamos with the then–Soviet Union. Veteran investigative journalist Dave Lindorff has reported for numerous outlets and is author of Marketplace Medicine and This Can’t Be Happening, among other titles. We talk with him about his latest, Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World.

The post Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Lawsuit / Dave Lindorff on Spy for No Country appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

U.S. corporate media’s story about Haiti is familiar. Haiti, according to various recent reports, has “whipped from one calamity to another.” The country is a “cataclysm of hunger and terror,” “teetering on the brink of collapse,” “spiraling deeper into chaos” or else “descending into gang-fueled anarchistic chaos.” It’s “become a dangerously rudderless country.” According to one Florida paper’s editorial, “Haiti’s unrest” is now “becoming our problem,” as Floridians and the U.S. “struggle to help people in Haiti, although history suggests there are no answers.”

According to The Washington Post, there is one answer. They made space for a former ambassador to explain that 20 years ago in Haiti, “the worst outcomes were avoided through decisive American intervention. Today’s crisis might require it as well.”

We talk about what has to change — including Western media presentations that ignore or erase even recent history — with Chris Bernadel, from the Black Alliance for Peace‘s Haiti/Americas Team and Haitian grassroots group Moleghaf.

The post Chris Bernadel on Haiti appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

In the final quarter of 2023, after-tax corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion. As reported by Popular Information, corporate profit margins were at a level not seen since the 1950s, as increases in prices have outpaced increases in costs. Capitalism 101 says this shouldn’t happen, because competing companies will step in with lower prices and grab some market share, right? What’s different now? Abject greed, abetted by policy, and whistled past by the press corps. As one economist put it, “If people are paying $3 for a dozen eggs last week, they’ll pay $3 this week. And firms take advantage of that.” One reason we have details on “greedflation” is the work of the Groundwork Collaborative. We spoke with their economist and managing director of policy and research, Rakeen Mabud, a few months back.

Advocates warned that overturning Roe v. Wade would not be the end, and it wasn’t. The court is now entertaining challenge to the legality of the abortion medication mifepristone, used safely and effectively for decades, including invoking the 1873 Comstock Act, about sending “obscene materials” through the mail. The Washington Post has described it as a “confusing legal battle,” but CounterSpin got clarity from the Guttmacher Institute’s Rachel K. Jones last year.

The post Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation / Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

A senior UN human rights official told the BBC that there is a “plausible” case that Israel is using starvation in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is a war crime. Meanwhile, US citizens struggle to make sense of White House policy that seems to call for getting aid to Palestinians while pursuing a course of action that makes that aid necessary, if insufficient.

Phyllis Bennis is senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, an international advisor with Jewish Voice for Peace and a longtime UN-watcher. She joins us with thoughts on the evolving situation.

As reporter Alex Sammon outlined five years ago in the American Prospect, the Boeing scandal is an exemplar of the corporate crisis of our age. Putting resources that should’ve been put into safety into shareholder dividends and stock buybacks, selling warning indicators that alert pilots to problems with flight-control software as optional extras, and outsourcing engineering to coders in India making $9 an hour — these weren’t accidents; they were choices, made consciously, over time. So why are media so excited about Boeing’s CEO stepping down, as though his “taking one for the team” means changing the playbook? We hear from Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.

The post Phyllis Bennis on Gaza Ceasefire Resolution / Robert Weissman on Boeing Scandal appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Climate disruption is the prime mover of a cascade of interrelated crises. We’re told that, when it comes to problems people need solved, rule number 1 is “follow the money.” Yet even as elite media talk about the climate crisis, they still … can’t … quite …connect images of floods or fires to the triumphant shareholder meetings of the fossil fuel companies.

Narrating the nightmare is not enough. We’ll talk about the latest research on climate coverage with Evlondo Cooper, senior writer at Media Matters.

Part of what FAIR’s been saying since our start in 1986 — when it was a fringe idea, that meant you were either alarmist or benighted or both — is that there is an inescapable conflict between media as a business and journalism as a public service. For a while, it was mainly about “fear and favor” — the ways corporate owners and sponsors influence the content of coverage. It’s more bare-knuckled now: Mass layoffs and takeovers force us to see how your local newspaper is really just an “asset” in a megacorporation’s portfolio, and will be treated that way — with zero evidence that a source of vital news and information is any different from a soap factory.

Rick Goldsmith’s new film is called Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. We’ll hear from him about the film and the change it hopes to part of.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent coverage of Israel’s flour massacre.

The post Evlondo Cooper on Climate Coverage / Rick Goldsmith on Stripped for Parts appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

About this time seven years ago, John Deere was arguing, with a straight face, that farmers shouldn’t really “own” their tractors, because if they had access to the software involved, they might pirate Taylor Swift music. Things have changed since then, though industry still gets up and goes to court to say that even though you bought a tractor or a washing machine or a cellphone, it’s not really “yours,” so you can’t fix it if it breaks. Even if you know how, even if you can’t afford to buy a new one. More and more people, including lawmakers, are thinking that’s some anti-consumer, and anti-environment, nonsense. We get an update from Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association.

“Former President of Honduras Convicted in US of Aiding Drug Traffickers” is the current headline. You’d never guess from the reporting that Juan Orlando Hernández was a US ally, that the US supported the 2009 coup that went a long way toward creating Honduras’s current political landscape. We discuss that and more with Suyapa Portillo Villeda, advocate, organizer, and associate professor of Chicana/o–Latina/o transnational studies at Pitzer College, as well as author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras.

The post Gay Gordon-Byrne on Right to Repair / Suyapa Portillo Villeda on Honduran Ex-President Conviction appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Donald Trump, if he should become president again, could order the Department of Justice to drop any charges against him stemming from his fomenting of an insurrection aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 election. That’s just been enabled by the Supreme Court, which put off until April the legal case wherein Trump declares himself immune to criminal prosecution. We speak with Vox Court-watcher Ian Millhiser, who says he tries to reserve his “this is an exceptionally alarming decision” voice, but this occasion calls for it.

Then, we look at the anti-elder narrative promulgated by corporate news which says, “Keep up or you’re in the way,” and, “if you aren’t working 40 to 60 hours a week, you’re a societal drain.” Alfredo Lopez is a longtime organizer and activist, and a founder of the new group Radical Elders. We talk with him about the space the group seeks to fill.

The post Ian Millhiser on Supreme Court Trump Protection / Alfredo Lopez on Radical Elders appeared first on KPFA.