CounterSpin, FAIR’s weekly radio show, provides a critical examination of the major stories every week, and exposes what the mainstream media might have missed in their own coverage.
This week on CounterSpin: “In Primetime Speech, Trump Doesn’t Provide Evidence for Illegal Voting” was the temperate headline NPRput on a story about Trump’s recent East Room speech that, they allowed, “included many baseless claims” about election integrity. They told us that “many of the documents the White House posted online during the speech did not appear to fully support sweeping claims the president made,” and even got to the point of calling his contention that he won the 2020 election “a lie.”
What the story didn’t do was show, with urgency, how voting in the upcoming midterms and beyond will be materially affected by the use of state power to promote ideas that they’re saying are, yeah, for sure, not true.
Obstacles to voting don’t have to be valid to have impact. Black people know that better than anyone. And it isn’t just Trump’s lies, that media keep repeating, even as they call them lies; the Supreme Court’s June decision in Louisiana v. Callais makes the terrain different, in ways people need to understand and confront.
Nine of the Prairieland protesters received sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years; one received a 30-year sentence for moving a box of zines. (Photo: DFW Support Committee)
This week on CounterSpin: Are you upset about ICE agents using your tax dollars to detain and deport people because they have a quota to fill – and to kill anyone who doesn’t “comply”? Are you bothered by women losing not just the right but the ability to access abortion for whatever reason they might have? Do you care that fossil fuel-created climate disruption is rearranging the planet? Well, my friend, you might be a terrorist.
Last September, Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) that added a whole lot of folks to a list of “domestic terrorists”. All of us are now officially, by challenging or questioning the Trump White House and their acolytes, “the enemy within.”
When Trump pushed through NSPM 7 last fall, folks like Hina Shamsi at the ACLU told us: it’s a scare tactic – “domestic terrorism organization” as applied to a wide range of groups that are, in the memo’s language “anti-americanism, anti-capitalism, anti christianity” does not create new federal crimes or powers. The president, even if it’s Trump, cannot rewrite the Constitution.
Which, Shamsi explained, doesn’t mean it isn’t scary, despite being a “fever dream of conspiracies, outright falsehoods and the president’s distorted equation of criticism of his policies by real or perceived political opponents with ‘criminal and terroristic conspiracies’.
We have to stand up where we can, how we can, right now. And right now could have started years ago but it can at the least start with getting prison time for moving zines.
We’ll talk about the Prairieland case and what it means for you, with Dorothee Benz, who wrote recently about it all for FAIR.org
This week on CounterSpin: Protests are ongoing in southern Maine, where Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was killed by an ICE agent on July 13. The Maine Monitorsays folks are “expressing rage, fear and questions about what occurred.”
Protestors also showed up at Houston City Hall, calling out ICE operations there that killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Houston Public Mediasaid:
Each speech inside the council chambers was echoed by the raucous chants of dozens of protestors outside who stood for hours during the public comment session, making demands for accountability and transparency.
Here in Manhattan’s Foley Square, one protester told NY1: “I think it’s gone past the point of we need to abolish ICE. I think we need a thorough investigation and, if appropriate, trials, prosecutions.” Said another: “For me, this past week is a reminder that we should all be out here.”
Corporate media are narrating this nightmare, but do their, will their questions ever go deep enough to drive actual change? Right now, the focus seems heavy on the notion that we need to “humanize” the victims of racist state violence, rather than challenge the humanity of those who enact it.
(Oh, but you’ll be happy to know Snopes is on top of the question of whether Joan Sebastián Durán’s three-year-old daughter actually saw her father be shot to death by state agents. Don’t want to get it twisted.)
We talk about ICE murders, and the bigger system that encourages and absolves them, with Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project.
This week on CounterSpin: One outlet says “it’s unclear if war is back on”; another says “Trump mulls restarting war”—as though you can start and stop the harm bombs bring, to people, to power plants, bridges, airports, hospitals. US corporate news report the US war on Iran as if it were a playground altercation. And the Washington Postcalls the illegal violation of another sovereign state a “political problem” Trump “can’t shake.”
If war were a football match, we could have a different conversation, and who takes the L would be a different story. But war is not a sport, and dead people are not afterthoughts.
As a corollary, people worry that the war on Iran has pushed the genocide in Gaza out of corporate media’s attention. But media outlets make their own choices about what to present to us.
And: Media attention isn’t change. Being on the front page guarantees nothing. There will never be a substitute for our learning about what’s being done in our name and with our resources, and if your paper of record isn’t doing that, you should seek other sources.
This week on CounterSpin: A former UK Prime Minister famously sniffed:
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand, “I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!” Or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the government must house me!” And so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women, and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people, and people look to themselves first.
That idea, from Margaret Thatcher, seems important to keep in mind as we watch corporate news reporters whistle past a directive from the Trump administration’s Department of Justice that says: That whole thing about policies encouraging disabled people to be able to live in community, with family, with friends—yeahh, you don’t need to do that. You can just lock ’em up.
Why are establishment news reporters uninterested in this memo from the Office of Legal Counsel that says that no laws “require states to treat mentally disabled patients in the most integrated setting appropriate to their needs”? The memo, as folks like those at Disability Scoopremind us, does not alter current law, but could impact how federal agencies enforce it. But is that the reason that elite media don’t care? Or are disabled people, their lives, their possibilities, just off the screen? When states start forcing folks into institutions because they’ve been told they don’t need to provide services, will it be a story then? And what kind of story will that be?
We talk about it with Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress.
This week on CounterSpin: Do you disagree with anything that the Trump administration is doing? Are there other people that share that view? Do you think you should get together and use your voices to say something? Well, you might be a terrorist!
Do you think we’re joking? Do you want to test that?
We talk about the criminalizing of dissent with Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, this week on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: The way we hear about the stock market is quite different from the vision many people still hold: that businesses strive to serve people’s real needs or desires, and investors are rewarded by that metric—not by convincing people that they might make a lot of money in the future, or by conspiring with powerful entities to ensure that shareholders profit, by whatever means.
This longstanding confusion and conflict are being showcased right now in the unasked-for push of artificial intelligence into so many aspects of our lives, and the aggressive build-out of energy-gobbling data centers to serve it—whether communities want them or not.
Now, questions are arising around whether the promises of endless growth of the AI industry actually make any sense. Is there an AI bubble? How would we know? And what happens, and to whom, when it bursts?
A new project engages questions, not just about price-to-earnings ratios, and historical comparisons, but about the predictable impacts—on, for example, workers’ retirement accounts—when the AI exuberance falls to earth.
This week on CounterSpin: PBS Newstold its audience “What to Know About the Protests and Arrests Outside a New Jersey Detention Center.” What to know, evidently, is that protesters “say they are showing up in solidarity with detainees inside over accusations of poor living conditions.”
Maybe they aren’t showing up in solidarity; that’s just what they say. And poor “living” conditions?—because it’s their home now?—that’s also just an “accusation.” Why can’t we see what’s true? Oh, because reporters who try to see what’s happening are being kept from doing so with rubber bullets and tear gas. But for PBS News, that means: We just can’t know!
“Delaney Hall detainees say they are being given moldy and expired food,” the article (from AP) reads. But you know what? “President Donald Trump and his deputies have defended the center’s operations and denied there is any hunger strike, abuse or poor conditions inside.” We hear from Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin: “The fact is, we’re giving them the calories they want.” And we get a quote from Tom Homan, described as “Trump’s border czar,” saying he got to visit, and “the spaghetti was good.”
PBS News tells readers that Attorney General Todd Blanche “shared images of bloody wounds and bruises” sustained by ICE officers. There is not a single quote from a protester, an immigrant rights advocate, or even a journalist who says that people should be able to see what is being carried out in their name. But PBS News assures: That’s “What to Know”!
We’ll have a different conversation about what’s happening at Delaney Hall, and the bigger systems and structures in back of it, with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network.
And: Yes, times like these make you wish for brave reporters who go to where the darkness is and shine a light. And we have them. They just aren’t at the traditional media you may have learned to look to. We’ll talk about the crucial role of frontline reporting with Vanessa Maria Graber, senior director of journalism and media education at the group Free Press.
This week on CounterSpin: Luddites didn’t hate machines: Historian (and online educator) Casey Fiesler reminds us that the Luddites, who were 19th century English textile workers, were not anti-technology, they
were anti the unaccountable deployment of technology by those who stood to profit from it at the expense of those with less power…. They were anti the use of technology to deskill labor, to take work that took years of craft knowledge and render it performable by anyone, who was then dispensable. They were anti the imposition of technology on communities who had no say in how it was deployed, or who would bear its costs.
Words to keep in mind as commencement speakers and politicians and pundits tell you that artificial intelligence is a train leaving the station, and your only choice is to pick your seat. But also yeah, democratic decision-making is still a thing, why do you ask? Also, if you ask, your name goes on a list.
We talk about the proliferation of data centers that are very much brick and mortar—against the backdrop of press coverage that suggests that artificial intelligence all happens in the ether somewhere—with Melissa Garriga, communications and media relations manager at the feminist grassroots organization CODEPINK.
This week on CounterSpin: It’s a safe bet that a majority of US citizens know that “we” are currently at “war” with Iran. I am equally confident that very few people could explain why. Or what “war” means. Or what it has to do with their day-to-day life, much less how it could possibly make it better. That’s a problem of this boldly anti-intellectual administration, and the, let’s say, incurious posture of so much of US corporate news media—the ones tasked with telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may.
We have alternative sources of information, that we need to seek out and support, perhaps no time more importantly than when “we” are “at war”—when not only US lives, if that’s all you care about, are at risk, but also many other human lives, as well as the standing of the United States on the world stage (which evidently is super important to many supporters of this war.)
Why is the US at war with Iran? What is the hoped-for outcome? Who is hoping for it? And will we hear from any of the millions who got something they didn’t hope for?
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