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CounterSpin
Counterspin is FAIR's weekly radio show, hosted by Janine Jackson, Steve Rendall and Peter Hart. It's heard on more than 125 noncommercial stations across the United States and Canada. Counterspin 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: When the New York Times wants to write about the plights and travails of low-wage workers, they can tug a heartstring with the best of them. When it comes to reporting about “the economy”—serious, fact-based stuff, not “human interest”—we get things like the piece the paper ran in late July, with the lead on how “analysts expect the strong economy and Trump administration’s tax cuts to lead to another batch of knockout earnings reports.” One blot on the landscape: “wage growth.” “Rising labor costs can cut into profits, muting the impact of a robust economy,” the Times warns, citing a trucking firm where “driver pay and retention costs” were described as “outlays that nibbled away at the benefits of higher prices and booming volumes.”
Like the “health of the economy” being somehow severed from the livelihood of most people, there are certain economic ideas and values that corporate media either leave unchallenged or aggressively promote. We explore some of those on this week’s CounterSpin.
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Restaurant worker (cc photo: Viewmaster)
(cc photo: Viewmaster)
First up, the idea that some people just don’t deserve to earn a wage—that entire sectors of the workforce can be reliant on the variable noblesse oblige of customers. We talked about the bizarre retention of the tipped wage with author and activist Saru Jayaraman a couple of years ago. We’ll hear part of that conversation.
The same media that largely ignore the sub-minimum wage rarely question the overall belief in social mobility, and in particular the idea that if you can only get a “good job,” US society is set up to guarantee economic success. We disrupted that vision last year with researcher Dedrick Asante Muhammad, talking about a new report on the racial wealth divide.
Finally, the big myth: that the way the US economy is organized is the best or maybe the only way a democratic society can do things—that harms like inequality shadow it, but don’t define it. Economist Richard Wolff took that on in a conversation earlier this year.
