Jacobin Radio

From the very start of the Gaza genocide, Western media outlets were happy to repeat the most outlandish claims from Israeli government officials. One of the most notorious examples was the allegation that dozens of Israeli babies were beheaded on October 7, 2023, a story amplified by CNN and promoted by the former US president, Joe Biden, who claimed to have seen “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.” Of course, Biden was lying — it never happened.

This failure to ask any serious questions before reporting the most inflammatory claims set the tone for media coverage of Gaza, right up to the present day.

Adam Johnson joins Long Reads to discuss a pattern of journalistic malpractice by some of the world’s most prestigious newspapers and broadcasters. Adam is a media critic and the author of a new book about Gaza and the US media, How to Sell A Genocide. It chronicles how influential media outlets, instead of reporting on the crimes Israel was committing in Gaza, helped the Biden administration whitewash them.

Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s writers. Hosted by features editor Daniel Finn. Produced by Conor Gillies with music by Knxwledge.

“Men in hard hats were once the heart of America’s working class. Now it is women in scrubs,” says historian Gabriel Winant, author of The Next Shift, who joins Suzi to explain how deindustrialization made health care the country’s largest employer, but the jobs are lower paid, understaffed, and more precarious.

That’s playing out now at UVM Medical Center, where Vermont's own regulator found the nonprofit hospital was over-earning. Its response? Cut union jobs while nineteen top executives split $3 million in bonuses. Three union leaders — Melissa LaVallee, Teagan Cook, and Emma Galvin — from AFT Vermont, a branch of the American Federation of Teachers, describe the fight from inside for safe staffing and common-good demands. Their contract expires midnight on August 13th. The stakes are national.

Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman features conversations with leading thinkers and activists, with a focus on labor, the economy, and protest movements.

Aditya Nigam looks at the “Cockroach” protest movement in India. Then, Gerald Epstein and Juliet Schor outline a detailed set of proposals to transform the US economy.

Read their papers here: https://peri.umass.edu/gamechangers/

Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global.

Featuring Molly Crabapple on her book Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. The first episode of a two-part interview.

Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig.

Buy Unions of Our Own and Femmephilia at Haymarketbooks.org.

The Dig goes deep into politics everywhere, from labor struggles and political economy to imperialism and immigration. Hosted by Daniel Denvir.

Libertarian thinkers like Milton Friedman like to say that capitalism not only gave birth to democracy but also is the ideal economic system to complement democracy. But while capitalism may have created the conditions for democracy, it’s actually the main obstacle to securing full democratic rights.

On this latest episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber and Melissa Naschek examine the worker struggles central to the rise of democracy, and why, in a system built around profit, the ruling class opposes it.

The latest issue of Catalyst is out and you can subscribe for just $20 using the code CONFRONTINGCAPITALISM: https://catalyst-journal.com/subscribe/?code=CONFRONTINGCAPITALISM

Have a question for us? Write to us by email: confronting.capitalism@jacobin.com

Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and published by Jacobin. Music by Zonkey.