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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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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.
 
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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.
 
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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.
 
 
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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.
 
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