New York Times Twists Stats To Insist We Need More Policing

The New York Times handed over its popular The Morning daily newsletter on January 18 to new hire German Lopez, formerly of Vox. His debut edition of the data-driven newsletter (usually helmed by David Leonhardt) was headlined “Examining the Spike in Murders.”

As criminal justice activist and expert Alec Karakatsanis (Twitter, 1/18/22) pointed out, the analysis presented as indisputable the notion that a rise in homicides demands a police-based solution—a position that is, in fact, highly disputed, and worth debunking in detail, since it’s a popular one these days, both in the Times and in other prominent outlets (FAIR.org, 6/24/21, 7/20/21). Lopez describes an increase in the murder rate over 2020 and 2021 (which, it’s worth pointing out, is still lower than it was from 1970 through 1996) and explains that victims are disproportionately Black, framing his analysis in terms of racial justice

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How Politicians Are Papering Over Social Problems Caused By Capitalism

The declines of U.S. capitalism and of its imperial position provoke fear among its mainstream politicians. Their response, in large part, has been to deny that any such decline is happening. These politicians do this partly by acting as though the U.S. remains in the globally dominant position it occupied in the second half of the 20th century. Thus, to maintain this illusion, they start wars in the Middle East, maintain military bases in dozens of countries, intervene in other countries at will and describe the U.S. as the global guarantor of peace, security, and democracy.

Yet these U.S. politicians also sense what the population feels: that decline of capitalism and U.S. hegemony is actually happening. So repeated denials, while comforting the citizens of the country, do not suffice to control popular opinion and thereby common sense.

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The Pressure Campaign On Spotify To Remove Joe Rogan

American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by “liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).

For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of “hate speech” to mean “views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech.”

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Media Beats War Drums With Russia While US/Saudis Kill Hundreds In Yemen

Journalists Benjamin Norton and Alan MacLeod join Mnar Adley to discuss how the mainstream media spent the last week beating drums of war with Russia over Ukraine with headlines and talking heads funded and sponsored by Lockheed Martin and NATO.

Meanwhile, there wasn’t a single article covering how the US-Saudi-UAE coalition cut off the internet to Yemen for several days while dropping hundreds of bombs on civilians resulting in hundreds dead and over a thousand injured. Guess which story CNN covered? Both conflicts were brought to you by weapons manufacturers.

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Ukraine And US War Propaganda

The corporate media always carry water for the state, and they are never more dangerous than when the nation is on a war footing. Right now the United States government is sending weapons to Ukraine. One wouldn’t know that because of constant references to “lethal aid.” The euphemisms and subterfuge are necessary for a very simple reason. Everyone except the Washington war party knows that provoking war with Russia is extremely dangerous.

Joe Biden is picking up where he left off, as Barack Obama’s Ukraine viceroy. He and his incompetent foreign policy team have spun a tale about a pending Russian attack on Ukraine. In reality, it is the U.S. that is ginning up war by provoking the Ukrainians to start a fight that they can’t win.

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Activists Target Public Relations Groups For Greenwashing Fossil Fuels

Duncan Meisel used to help climate activists tell their stories, as a communications adviser to environmentalists trying to convince the public that oil and gas companies must change to avert a climate crisis. Now he is putting pressure on consultants shaping those industries’ own messages.

Clean Creatives, the group Meisel helped found, is at the vanguard of a new tactic in the environmental movement: to target advisers who, activists claim, help fossil fuel companies continue polluting and slow government action by distorting climate debates.

Last September, Clean Creatives published an “F-List” of advertising and public relations groups it accused of spreading “climate misinformation” on their clients’ behalf.

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Russian Training Exercises Bad, Facilitating British And US Imperialism Good

As the COVID-19 mainstream media narrative steadily disappears from news headlines around the world, following the highly coincidental timing of last week’s Davos Agenda virtual event held by the World Economic Forum, the corporate media has now, in lockstep, moved onto what many commentators predicted they would – an escalation in the current Ukraine crisis, in which Russia has been accused of planning an ‘imminent’ invasion of its smaller Western neighbour, with Kiev having come under the control the US-EU aligned governments of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky since the 2014 CIA and MI6-orchestrated Euromaidan colour revolution was launched in response to then-President Viktor Yanukoych’s November 2013 decision to suspend a trade deal with Brussels in order to pursue closer ties with Moscow.

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Scientists Tell Advertising Industry To End ‘Complicity’ In Climate Crisis

On Wednesday, a group of more than 450 scientists called on advertising agencies to cut off their fossil fuel clients and to end their ties with an ongoing misinformation campaign that has time and again killed progress on addressing the climate crisis.

In a joint letter, the scientists say that they are “consistently faced with a major and needless challenge” of having to correct false information and rebut the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to downplay the severity of climate change. The expensive and glossy ad campaigns “represent one of the biggest barriers to the government action science shows is necessary to mitigate the ongoing climate emergency,” the letter stated.

The letter was sent to advertising companies WPP, Edelman, and IPG, as well as some of their clients, including Unilever, Amazon and Microsoft, which all have announced various climate and sustainability pledges.

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Blaming The Victims—Not The System—For Bronx Fire Deaths

Was it the space heater on the third floor? The open door on the 15th floor? The faulty fire alarms that went off frequently? The nonexistent sprinkler system? Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the library?

As local and national corporate media covered the devastating fire in the Bronx that killed 17 people on January 9, two culprits were somehow never on the list of what and who was responsible: the landlord and the city’s Housing, Preservation and Development (HPD) department, which is responsible for making sure landlords comply with housing codes. Always under suspicion were the tenants themselves, who were implicitly blamed throughout the coverage.

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Telling Lies On An International Scale

The mainstream media have been replete with stories of a new Tory “red meat” initiative of right-wing policies.

“Government sources” briefed the media that Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Home Secretary Priti Patel were in talks with their counterparts in Ghana and Rwanda about setting up internment camps to receive asylum seekers deported from the U.K.

Apart from the fact it would be entirely illegal to deport Syrians or Afghans to Africa, I knew it to be simply impossible the story was true. I have had the pleasure of being friends with President Nana Akufo Addo of Ghana, and with many of his family, for 20 years. Nana would never agree to such a thing; his background is as a human rights lawyer and activist.

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Meet The Real Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson, the co-founder of Gonzo journalism best known for his book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” is a legend in American letters. His reporting for Rolling Stone, in which he developed the subgenre of New Journalism that later became known as Gonzo because of his willingness to insert himself into the stories he was reporting, is studied in journalism schools across the country.

Other significant works by Thompson include his early iconic piece “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” as well as “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,” a collection of his Rolling Stone coverage of Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign—in which he made no secret of his support for progressive candidate George McGovern—and his 1967 book about riding with the Hells Angels motorcycle gang.

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Hawkish Pundits Downplay Threat Of War, Ukraine’s Nazi Ties

With the United States and Russia in a standoff over NATO expansion and Russian troop deployments along the Ukrainian border, US corporate media outlets are demanding that Washington escalate the risk of a broader war while misleading their audiences about important aspects of the conflict.

Many in the commentariat called on the US to take steps that would increase the likelihood of war. In the New York Times (12/10/21), retired US Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman wrote that “the United States must support Ukraine by providing more extensive military assistance.” He argued that “the United States should consider an out-of-cycle, division-level military deployment to Eastern Europe to reassure allies and bolster the defenses of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” even while calling for a strategy that “avoids crossing into military adventurism.”

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NED Provided $1.2 Million To Help Kazakhstan Spark A Color Revolution

The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets depicted the violence as a result of the doubling of fuel prices and unhappiness with political authoritarianism and corruption.

Kazakhstan’s president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, has been widely condemned for carrying out large-scale human rights abuses, with Russian backing. Secretary of State Antony Blinken referred to Russia as an occupying power.

Russia has indeed sent troops into Kazakhstan in support of Tokayev. On January 5th, Tokayev invoked article four of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russia-led alliance of former Soviet states that includes Belarus, Tajikistan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan, which agreed to provide Kazakhstan with military assistance and defense.

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#Ethiopia #TigrayGenocide #ExcuseForRegimeChangeWar

The #TigrayGenocide Twitter campaign first appeared on November 4, 2020, the same day that Tigrayan soldiers within the Ethiopian National Defense Force surprise attacked their fellow soldiers in the country’s Northern Command Base in Tigray Region. There’s no way the Ethiopian government could have mounted a genocidal response in a matter of hours, but #TigrayGenocide was already trending. The Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and its supporters had obviously been prepared to seize the narrative, claiming victimhood and blaming the Ethiopian army that they had just attacked.

CNN and its foreign correspondent Nima Elbagir then launched an all–out campaign to convince the world that the Ethiopian government was committing genocide against the Tigrayan people.

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CounterSpin Interview With Craig Aaron On Local Journalism

More than one in five local papers in the US have closed in just the last 15 years or so. And, yes, people are moving away from print as a form. But who is filling the void of regular, relevant, local reporting, informing people at the level at which most people engage?

Activists are tired of lamenting rampant consolidation, and the exclusion of new and diverse voices in news media. They’re working around the country on projects that both demand accountability from existing institutions and envision new systems, new processes, new ways of doing journalism that more accurately reflect and support communities.

We’re joined now by Craig Aaron, co-CEO with Jessica Gonzalez of the group Free Press. He joins us now by phone from Maryland. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Craig Aaron.

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