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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.
 
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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.
 
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This week on CounterSpin:
Steven Rosenfeld reports on election transparency, among other electoral issues, for Voting Booth. We hear from him about kinds of election interference we ignore at our peril.
Some elite media-designated “smart people” have determined, “Citizens United, what? It’s folks who give ten bucks to a candidate that are really messing up the system.” We explore that notion with Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel for the Elections & Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
 
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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.
 
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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).
 
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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.
 
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