Jake Johnston on Haiti Intervention, Jeannie Park on Harvard Affirmative Action

  New York Times (10/21/19) This week on CounterSpin: In 2019, the New York Times reported on Haiti’s hardships with a story headlined “‘There Is No Hope’: Crisis Pushes Haiti to Brink of Collapse.” The “no hope” phrase was a real, partial quote from a source, a despairing young woman in one of Haiti’s most difficult areas. And the story wasn’t lying about babies dying in underserved hospitals or schools closed or people killed in protests, or people with jobs going unpaid, roadblocks, blackouts, hunger and deep, deep stress in a country in severe crisis. But further into the story was another quote, from that young woman’s mother, who told the Times, “It’s not only that we’re hungry for bread and water. We’re hungry for the development of Haiti.” As we noted at the time, there’s a difference between “there is no hope” and “there is no hope under this system”—and to the extent that US news media purposefully ignore that difference, and portray Haiti as a sort of outside-of-time tragic case, and ignore the role that US “intervention” has played throughout history in order to push for the same sort of intervention again—well, that’s where you see the difference between corporate media and the independent press corps we need. We’ll talk to Jake Johnston from the Center for Economic and Policy Research about what elite media are calling for right now as response to Haiti’s problems, versus what Haitians are calling for. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221104Johnston.mp3 Transcript: “‘Intervention Is Actively Destabilizing the Situation'” Time (10/27/22) Also on the show: Is racial discrimination over in the United States? Do universities and colleges already reflect the range of inclusion and diversity a democracy demands, such that they should stop even thinking about whether they’re admitting the sort of students they expressly excluded just decades ago? These questions are in consideration at the Supreme Court, though you might not know it from media coverage. Instead, you may have heard about a fair-minded white guy who just, in his heart, wants Asian Americans to get a fair shot at the Ivy League—against all those undeserving Black kids unfairly leveraged by affirmative action. We’ll talk about SFFA v. Harvard with Jeannie Park, founding president of the Asian American Journalists Association in New York and co-founder of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221104Park.mp3 Transcript: “‘This Case Was Never About Defending Asian Americans'”