(image: Drug Enforcement Agency)

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media tend to take the State of the Union address as an opportunity to talk about messaging, and whether the president’s message is landing well with, first of all, other legislators, and then, somewhere in there, the US public. A better mediaverse would start with the impact of official actions, not just on the people who donate or even the people who vote, but on everyone whose lives are shaped by government policy.

So, on just a couple of points: To the extent that most of us are hearing about fentanyl, it’s likely to be news stories saying that just touching the drug is enough to lay you out or, more recently, stories about Mexico and China, and why “they” want to “poison” “us.” What elite media and politicians aren’t having yet is a conversation about drug use and harm, and whether saying really loudly how far under the prison you want to put “dealers” is really an admission of a failure to address a public health issue as a public health issue, to put human beings over table-thumping rhetoric that goes nowhere. We’ll hear from Maritza Perez Medina, director of the Office of Federal Affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance.

Transcript: ‘Punitive Enforcement Does Not Save Lives, or Reduce Drug Supply’

Washington Post (2/5/23)

Also on the show: The Washington Post editorial board says a “discussion” on Social Security “needs to happen sometime, and sooner rather than later.” Because these “entitlements,” they say, “already account for about a third of federal spending,” and are on “unsustainable trajectories”! When’s the last time you heard the Defense Department’s unending trillions described as “unsustainable”? Why is it just about whether your grandfather, who paid in his entire life, should maybe get ready to get nothing at all? Elite media seem ever stumped why they can’t sell their and Republicans’ image of Social Security as a weird communist mistake to a public that just doesn’t see it like that. So once more with feeling, we’ll revisit the reality vs. the fantasy of Social Security, with parts of an ever-relevant 2018 conversation with Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works.

Transcript: ‘The American People Overwhelmingly Oppose Cuts to Social Security’

Transcript: “‘The American People Overwhelmingly Oppose Cuts to Social Security'”

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of the Japanese-American incarceration.