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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. -
Saknas det avsnitt?
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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. -
This week on CounterSpin:
The country’s largest and second-largest grocery store chains want to merge and, surprising no one, they claim that giving them that tremendous market power will lead to lower prices, better quality food, and better conditions for workers. The FTC says, hold on a second, how does that square with on-the-record statements that Kroger is currently raising the prices of things like eggs and milk above inflation rates, simply because they can get away with it — a practice known as price-gouging? The response, dutifully reported in corporate news media is: We won’t do that anymore! And if you try to stop us, that’s illegal!
It could hardly be clearer that the public — consumers and workers — needs advocates willing to go behind talking points to enforceable law. Freddy Brewster is a writer and journalist; his report on the possible Kroger/Albertsons megamerger, its implications, and the behind the scenes shenanigans attendant to it, appears on LeverNews.com.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Golan Heights bombing.
The post Freddy Brewster on Kroger-Albertsons merger appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
One of many things wrong with corporate news media is the way they hammer home the idea that the current system is the only system. If you don’t see yourself and your interests reflected in either of the two dominant parties, the problem is you. On the other hand, independent media gives us new questions to ask. For example, How do we acknowledge the fact that many people’s opinions are shaped by messages that are created and paid for by folks who work hard to hide their identity and their interests? If we’re in an open debate about what’s best for all of us, why can’t we see who pays you?
We’ll talk about “dark money” with Steve Macek. He’s professor and chair of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois. His recent piece “Dark Money Uncovered” appeared on TheProgressive.org.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Phil Donahue.
The post Steve Macek on Dark Money appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
Climate disruption is outpacing many scientists’ understanding of it, and it’s undeniably driving many harms we are facing: extreme heat, extreme cold, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes. News media are giving up pretending that these extreme weather events are just weird and not provably driven by the continued use of fossil fuels. But fossil fuel companies are among the most powerful players in terms of telling lawmakers how to make the laws they want to see — public interest be damned. We’ll hear about what you are very definitely not supposed to hear from reporter Emily Sanders from ExxonKnews.
Not everyone is lying down and accepting that we’re going to die from a climate crisis that is avoidable, but since companies don’t want to talk about it, let’s not. A county in Oregon is saying, deaths from high heat are in fact directly connected to conscious corporate decision-making. We’ll hear about that potentially emblematic story from Victoria St. Martin, longtime journalist and journalism educator, now reporting on health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News.
The post Emily Sanders on Criminalizing Pipeline Protest / Victoria St. Martin on Suing Fossil Fuel Companies appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
You don’t hear the phrase “free market capitalism” so much anymore, but the idea still tacitly undergirds much of what you do hear about why products and services are the way they are. We all know about corruption and cronyism, but we still accept that the company that “wins” — “cornering the market” — does so because people simply prefer what they sell. The anti-monopoly ruling against Google challenges that idea of how things work. We hear about it from Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.
A recent news report offered the familiar construction that the attacks of September 11, 2001 “plunged the U.S.” into decades of war. Of course that’s not right: choices were made, unpopular choices, about how to respond to the attacks. Choices were made to not bring assailants to trial for the crime, but instead to detain people without charge and hold them indefinitely in a prison designed to be outside U.S. law. Now the Defense secretary has stepped in to overturn plea agreements that, while they wouldn’t have closed Guantánamo, would’ve brought some measure of closure to the cases against the alleged directors of the September 11 attacks. We get an update from Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Plus, Janine Jackson takes a look at recent press coverage of Sinclair Broadcasting.
The post Lee Hepner on Google Monopoly / Shayana Kadidal on Guantanamo Plea Deal appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
Dog whistles are supposed to be silent except for those they’re intended to reach. But as listeners know, the right wing has gotten much more overt and loud about their intention to defeat the prospect of multiracial democracy. We unpack the latest weaponized trope — the “DEI hire” — with anti-racism educator and author Tim Wise.
Trying to help unhoused people and trying to make them invisible are different things. Keith McHenry, cofounder of Food Not Bombs, joins us to talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling that gave state authorities more power to dismantle the encampments in which many people live, with no guarantee they will land anywhere more safe.
The post Tim Wise on ‘DEI Hires’ / Keith McHenry on Criminalizing the Unhoused appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
Donald Trump said, on Fox & Friends in 2020, that if voting access were expanded, meaning easing of barriers to voting for disabled people, poor people, rural people, working people … if voting were made easier, Trump said, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Why wouldn’t news media label that stance anti-democratic and shelve any so-called good-faith partisan debate? Call for the multiracial democracy we need? Illuminate the history that shows why we aren’t there yet?
Ari Berman has been tracking voter rights — and why “one person, one vote” is not the thing to memorize as a definition of U.S. democracy — for many years now. He’s the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. His new book, which we discuss, is called Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It.
The post Ari Berman on Minority Rule appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
In March, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”
But as Greg Shupak writes, even as evidence accumulates, denial is becoming socially and journalistically acceptable. Soon after the UN special rapporteur on the right to food asserted that Israel’s forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza was genocidal, Jonah Goldberg took to the LA Times to assure readers that Israel’s actions do not “amount to genocide,” and such claims are based on “Soviet propaganda” and Holocaust denial.
Years from now, we’ll hear about how everyone saw the nightmare and everyone opposed it. But history is now, and the world is watching. We’ll talk about real-time efforts to address the war on Palestinians with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Plus, Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the shooting of Donald Trump.
The post Phyllis Bennis on Israel’s War on Palestinians appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
At some point, we will get tired of hearing news reports on “record heat” — because the “records” will continue to be broken, and “heat” will have stopped meaning what it once may have meant. Media play a role in moving us from questions about where to buy a good air conditioner to what stands in the way of addressing a public health catastrophe. One obstacle is utility companies. In February of last year, we spoke with Shelby Green at Energy and Policy Institute and Selah Goodson Bell at the Center for Biological Diversity, about their research on the topic.
Some listeners will know that veteran labor organizer and author Jane McAlevey died recently. The tributes are coming in, but I have little doubt in saying that McAlevey would care less for attention to her life in particular than to those of people she worked for, inside and outside of unions. CounterSpin spoke with her in 2018, when the #metoo campaign was coming to fore. We’ll hear some of that conversation.
The post Shelby Green and Selah Goodson Bell on Utility Profiteering / Jane McAlevey on #MeToo and Labor appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
The power of the algorithm is ever clearer in our lives, even if we don’t understand it. Algorithms don’t just guess at what you might like to buy: sometimes they’re determining whether you get a job, or keep it. Some 40 million people in the U.S. use online platforms to find work. The algorithms these platforms use create an environment where organizations enact rules for workers’ behavior, reward and sanction them based on that, but never allow workers to see these accountancies that make their lives unpredictable, much less work with them to develop measurements that would be meaningful.
Hatim Rahman has been working on this question. He’s assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and he’s author of a new book about it: Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, forthcoming in August from University of California Press.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of climate disruption.
The post Hatim Rahman on Algorithms’ “Invisible Cage” appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
Headlined “The Cash Monster Was Insatiable,” a 2022 New York Times piece reported insurance companies gaming Medicare Advantage, originally presented as a “low-cost” alternative to traditional Medicare. One company pressed doctors to add additional illnesses to the records of patients they hadn’t seen for weeks: Dig up enough new diagnoses, and you could win a bottle of champagne. Some companies cherry-picked healthier seniors for enrollment.
Such maneuvers don’t lead to good health outcomes but serve the real goal: netting private insurers more money. Here to discuss new research on the problem and the response is David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and co-author of this new analysis of Medicare Advantage.
You may get the impression from media that marijuana is legal everywhere now, that it’s moved from blight to business, if you will. It’s not as simple as that, and many people harmed by decades of criminalization have yet to see any benefit from decriminalization. Our guest Tauhid Chappell has tracked the issue for years now; he teaches the country’s first graduate-level course on equity movements in the cannabis industry, at Thomas Jefferson University.
But first, Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Julian Assange.
The post David Himmelstein on Medicare Dis-Advantage / Tauhid Chappell on Cannabis Equity appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote dozens of pages justifying his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, stating the Constitution does not confer the right to determine whether or when to give birth. None of those pages mention his intention to make the United States “a place of godliness,” or his belief that there can be no compromise on such concerns, because “one side or the other is going to win.” Yet those are thoughts Alito freely expressed with a woman he thought was just a stranger at a public event. Will elite news media now suggest we just go back to considering the Supreme Court a neutral body, deserving of life terms because they’re above the fray of politics? Jim Naureckas is editor of FAIR.org and the newsletter Extra!. We talk to him about this.
The news that “the economy” is doing great on paper doesn’t square with the tone-deaf messaging from food companies about mysteriously stubborn high prices. Nothing suggests a media universe that takes seriously the widespread struggle to meet basic needs. This may explain the failure to find the story in the upsurge in dollar stores, supposedly filling a void for low-income people, but actually just another avenue for ripping them off. We talk about that with Kennedy Smith from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
The post Jim Naureckas on Secret Alito Tape / Kennedy Smith on Dollar Store Invasion appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
Donald Trump told a Las Vegas crowd earlier this month that, if elected, the “first thing” he would do would be to end the IRS practice of taxing tips as part of workers’ regular income. Unfortunately, Trump can count on a general haziness in the public mind on the impact of “tipped wages,” more helpfully labeled subminimum wages. That’s partly due to a corporate press corps who, through the decades-long fight on the issue, always give pride of place to the industry narrative that, as a Chicago Sun-Times headline said, “Getting Rid of Tipped Wages in Illinois Would Be the Final Blow to Many Restaurants.”
As president of the group One Fair Wage, Saru Jayaraman is a leading mythbuster on the history, practice, and impact of tipping. CounterSpin talked with her in November 2015. We’ll hear that conversation again today, when much of what she shares is still widely unexplored and misunderstood.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of child labor.
The post Saru Jayaraman on Taxing Tipped Wages appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
Surprising no one, Donald Trump and his sycophants responded to his 34-count conviction on charges of lying in business records by claiming that the trial was “rigged,” the judge and jury corrupt, and that it was somehow Joe Biden’s doing. We’ll talk with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, about press response to the trial and the verdict.
For some people the violent police crackdown on peaceful college students protesting their schools’ investments in Israel’s war on Palestinians has been eye-opening. For others, it’s one more example of the employment of law enforcement to brutally enforce corporate power. The fight led by Indigenous women against the Dakota Access pipeline is not long enough ago to have been forgotten. We’ll hear a bit from an August 2017 interview with North Dakota organizer Kandi Mossett.
The post Matt Gertz on Trump Trial Verdict / Kandi Mossett on Dakota Access Struggle appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
In 2023, the California legislature passed legislation that said that big corporations doing business in the state have to tell the public how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. But this past January, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups challenged those laws, claiming that making companies disclose the impact of their actions — in this case, their emissions — would force them to publicly express a “speculative, noncommercial, controversial and politically charged message.” That supposedly would make the laws a “pressure campaign” aimed at shaping company behavior.
Unfortunately, some courts are indulging this notion that regulation should be illegal because it forces companies to say stuff they’d rather not say. Fortunately, other courts are calling this self-serving nonsense self-serving nonsense. Public information, our right to know, is on the line here.
Katherine Li addresses this issue in a recent piece for the Lever, where she is an editorial fellow.
The post Katherine Li on Corporations’ First Amendment Dodge appeared first on KPFA. -
This week on CounterSpin:
As an historic catastrophe, the deep and myriad impacts of Israel’s assault on Palestinians will not be fully understood until years from now, if then. That only adds urgency to present-day resistance to the collateral assault — on the ability to witness, to record, and to remember.
When we spoke with historian Ellen Schrecker in 2017, she noted that the power of the movement associated with Joseph McCarthy was not the man himself but the “collaboration of the employers, of the mainstream media, of the legal system, you name it, to go along with this anti-Communist purge.” And while many people feel comforted that McCarthy the man was eventually censured by the Senate, the truth is, “the American political spectrum narrowed [and] a whole bunch of ideas and causes kind of disappeared from American political discourse and American political life.”
We hear again today from historian and author Ellen Schrecker, co-editor of the new book The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, from Beacon Press.
The post Ellen Schrecker on the Attack on Academic Freedom appeared first on KPFA. - Visa fler
