Guests: Mark Weisbrot on Mexican election; James Zogby on Gaza crisis
This week on CounterSpin: The still-unresolved presidential election in
Mexico is a lot of things to the US press: a test of the appeal of trade
deals like NAFTA, or a referendum on left-wing populism. It’s no surprise
that the consensus media favorite among is conservative candidate Felipe
Calderon. But what’s missing from the reporting? And when leftist candidate
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador calls for counting every vote, why do some in
the press consider that a problem? We’ll ask Mark Weisbrot of the Center for
Economic and Policy Research.
Also on CounterSpin today, a major newspaper ran a recent column complaining
that in Gaza, Israel is causing electricity blackouts, laying sieges,
bombing and shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding
civilians, including children and babies, in horrifying numbers, and
justifying it with the schoolyard line, "they started it". If that sounds
surprising, you should know that the paper was not a US one, but an Israeli
one. How does US coverage of Gaza look in comparison? We’ll hear from James
Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute.