Media
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Polls Showed Sanders Had a Better Shot of Beating Trump–but Pundits Told You to Ignore Them
There was a debate last spring, when the Sanders/Clinton race was at its most heated, as to whether Bernie Sanders’ consistently out-polling Hillary Clinton was to be taken as a serious consideration in favor of his nomination. Before, during and after the race was competitive, this was the Vermont senator’s strongest argument: He was out-polling… Continue reading
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The Comey Non-Story and the Problem of Meta-Scandals
On October 28, FBI Director James Comey dropped a “bombshell” on Clinton, informing congressional committee chairs that his agency had found more emails “pertinent to the investigation” of her private email server, and was looking into the matter. Just like that, chaos broke out, and the entire presidential election hung in the balance. Continue reading
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‘Our Identity Is Often What’s Triggering Surveillance’
Janine Jackson: The civil rights director of the Oregon state Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against his employer. It seems the department got a new computer program that lets them search social media, and to test it out, they looked for hash tags related to Black Lives Matter and activism against police violence,… Continue reading
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NYT’s Kristof Blames Poverty on Too Many TVs, Not Too Little Money
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for giving “voice to the voiceless” on international social justice issues, wrote an op-ed in yesterday’s Times (10/30/16) arguing for increased government action on poverty. His calls for heightened attention to economic deprivation, though, were buried in a larger message that… Continue reading
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At DAPL, Confiscating Cameras as Evidence of Journalism
While elite media wait for the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline to go away so they can return to presenting their own chin-stroking as what it means to take climate change seriously, independent media continue to fill the void with actual coverage. Continue reading
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Media Roll Out Welcome Mat for ‘Humanitarian’ War in Syria
Beyond the opinion pages, media figures are pushing the “humanitarian” approach with varying degrees of subtlety. Meet the Press host Chuck Todd (10/16/16) recently pressed Vice President Joe Biden on the lack of a no-fly zone over Aleppo, suggesting that the Obama administration will “look back and wonder what if? What if? What if? What… Continue reading
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‘Drug Dependence Hasn’t Been Stopped by 45 Years of the War on Drugs’
Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States, a study from Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, is a multi-level, cradle-to-grave if you will, look at the myriad impacts of the criminalization—selective criminalization—of drug possession on the people caught up in the system. Continue reading
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'Nothing to See Here' Is Pundit Takeaway on DNC Leaks
Leaks from Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails have been trickling in for the past week. The leaks—along with previous DNC emails—provide intimate details about the inner workings of the campaign that may well soon elect the most powerful person on Earth. The response from some journalists has been to analyse, dissect and find the most newsworthy… Continue reading
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Charges Dropped Against Amy Goodman–No Thanks to Corporate Media
After Goodman reported on the use of pepper spray and attack dogs against Native American demonstrators opposing the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (Democracy Now!, 9/4/16), North Dakota State’s Attorney Ladd Erickson charged her with criminal trespassing. Realizing that he couldn’t make that charge stick, he sought to charge her instead with participation in… Continue reading
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Hiding US Role in Yemen Slaughter So Bombing Can Be Sold as ‘Self-Defense’
US destroyers in the Gulf of Aden launched airstrikes against Houthi rebels, a Shia insurgent group currently withstanding a massive bombing campaign from a Saudi-led coalition in a year-and-half conflict between largely Shia rebels and the Saudi-backed Sunni government in Yemen. The Pentagon insisted that cruise missiles had been fired onto the USS Mason on… Continue reading
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NYT Declares Snowden a Thief–and Journalism a Crime
The problem with all this talk about the “theft” and “stealing” of secrets is that while Snowden, one of the most prominent whistleblowers of the modern era, has indeed been charged by the federal government with theft—along with two violations of the Espionage Act—he’s been convicted of no crime. Continue reading
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Big Papers Want Foreign Companies, Not War Crime Victims, to Sue US
The New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today are saying that exposing American military and intelligence personnel to foreign liability is per se bad—a nativism so casual and matter-of-fact one might hardly notice it until circumstances force them to explicitly state it. No account is taken of the 7 billion non-Americans or their rights.… Continue reading
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A Cop Killed a Black Man–Then Things Got ‘Ugly’
23 September 2016 — FAIR From the New York Times (9/20/16): About 16 police officers in Charlotte, N.C., were injured when a standoff between law enforcement and demonstrators turned ugly overnight after an officer fatally shot a black man on Tuesday afternoon. Funny—some might say that the turn toward ugliness occurred in the afternoon, when… Continue reading
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Brazil Coup: ‘They Let Everybody Know the US Was on the Side of This Coup’
Janine Jackson interviewed Mark Weisbrot about the ouster of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff for the September 9, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. Continue reading
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‘We Are Criminalizing Transparency to Protect Illegitimate Uses of Power’
Janine Jackson: If the expression “I can’t breathe” holds power for you, it’s because of Ramsey Orta. He’s the one who held his cellphone camera steady while New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo choked the life out of Eric Garner in July of 2014. Continue reading
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Media Undermine Democracy by Speculating Wildly About Undermining Democracy
The relentless drumbeat of Trump–as–Russian agent takes hasn’t ceased since the news broke of a likely Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee in June—and it probably won’t stop until Election Day. One sub-genre of this line of thinking however—that Russia will literally hack our election process and throw the US into a dystopian constitutional… Continue reading
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NYT: Corbyn Has Marginalized Labour With His Popular Positions
It’s probably true that Corbyn is more skeptical of the United States and NATO than the average Brit. But it’s hard not to get the impression that certain positions are identified by Erlanger as problematic not because they’re unpopular with Corbyn’s constituents—but because they’re unpopular with the New York Times. Continue reading
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'Invisibilizing the Workers Who Actually Do the Work'
Janine Jackson assembled some of CounterSpin‘s best segments on workers and media for a special September 2, 2016, episode for Labor Day. This is a lightly edited transcript. Continue reading
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This Guardian Piece Touting Bill Gates' Education Investment Brought to You by… Bill Gates
What the piece failed to note—other than the fact that Rhee’s tenure left DC’s schools “worse by almost every conceivable measure” (Truthout, 10/23/13)—is that multi-billionaire Bill Gates is both the major investor of the company administering the Liberian education overhaul and the principal of the Gates Foundation, sponsor of the Guardian’s Global Development vertical, where… Continue reading
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PR Firm Says It Ghost-Wrote Thousands of Op-Eds in Major US Papers
PR Firm Says It Ghost-Wrote Thousands of Op-Eds in Major US Papers. The Wall Street Journal put Bill Ingram’s name on an op-ed–but a PR firm says it actually wrote it. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 