FAIR

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250829.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Other Words (7/30/25) This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption and its predicted, measurable, life-altering impacts provides a clear example of an instance where countries and industries and science could come together: Here’s this problem that’s facing literally all of us. How do we cut it off at the source, and mitigate its obviously unequal fallout? “We have the technology.” But the people using jets to ferry them from one state to another are not the same people who can’t escape the heat in treeless communities. The CEOs of fossil fuel companies can move home any time they want; they don’t have to care that communities are newly exposed to droughts or floods or storms. Climate change, according to elites, is a “sucks to be you” sort of problem. So much so that they can spend time ginning up arguments about how it isn’t even happening, so as to get more money out of the money machine while they can. And for the kicker, corporate media will recite those arguments and hold them up alongside science and humanity, as though we can and should choose what to believe as it suits us. One obvious stress point of this institutional dystopia is insurance. You buy insurance in case something bad happens—like a fire, or a flood. But if that fire or flood is driven by climate disruption? Well, wait a minute. Turns out you’re no longer covered. And the fact that your insurance company is deeply invested in the fossil fuel companies that are driving the disaster? Well, that is neither here nor there. We need journalism that would help us connect those obvious dots and act on what we learn. We’ll talk about that today with Cathy Cowan Becker, responsible finance campaigns director at the group Green America. Transcript: ‘Insurance Companies Are Moving to Protect Their Profits in a Short-Term Way’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250829Becker.mp3   Beacon Broadside (1/13/16) Also on the show: As we go into Labor Day weekend, we’ll revisit a conversation we had about the simple power of including worker voices in reporting—and, maybe more so, the power of silencing them. In 2016, the Boston Globe brought a story to its own doorstep with the decision to contract out its subscriber delivery service. We heard about it from Aviva Chomsky, history professor and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University, and author of, among other titles, Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal. We’ll hear part of that conversation this week. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250829ChomskyReEdit.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250822.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Objective (7/18/25) This week on CounterSpin: Trump’s threats to media corporations are laying bare what many already knew: Media corporations are reliant on government for policies that benefit them as profit-driven corporations, because they are primarily profit-driven corporations, even though we may still see them as the journalistic institutions whose job is to inform us about the world and one another—without, as is sometimes quaintly referenced, “fear or favor.” But while many are meaningfully and rightfully engaged in this White Houses’ harmful overreach and gross predations on the First Amendment, there is less attention to the role of the 14th Amendment—meant to secure basic rights of equal protection and due process for formerly enslaved people. That’s in play here too; if, like our guest, you are able to contextualize this retrograde White House’s assaults on the press corps as part of, and not ancillary to, their direct assaults on Black and brown people, on the policies that aim to afford us equal rights, on the programs that allow us to enter the country as immigrants, on the laws that resist active discrimination against us on jobsites, in public accommodations, in housing, on the street, at the bank. They don’t actively, aggressively, despise Black and brown people over here, but then just have some sort of principled problem with news reporters, separately, over there; it’s all of a piece. And that piece has a history that we’d do well to learn—not only because of the ongoing, institutional harms it helps us see, but also the hope and resistance that’s there in that history, as well. We get into it with Joseph Torres, senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press, co-creator of the project Media 2070, and co-author, with Juan Gonzalez, of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. Transcript: ‘The FCC Is Trying to Roll Back Protections Won Over the Past 60 Years’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250822Torres.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trump and TikTok. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250822Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250815.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Mother Jones (8/6/25) This week on CounterSpin: In July last year, CounterSpin recalled a statement from Donald Trump on Fox & Friends in 2020, that if voting access were expanded—meaning easing of barriers to voting for disabled people, poor people, rural people, working people—if voting were made more widely accessible, Trump said, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Many of us wondered at the time why news media wouldn’t call that out as anti-democratic, and talk up the multivocal, multiregional, multiracial democracy we’ve always said we’re aspiring to. But here we are, dealing with the fallout of, among many things, that news media failure—now including the possible erasure of the landmark Voting Rights Act. Ari Berman is national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and his new book is called Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. We talk about that with him this week. Transcript: ‘It’s Really a Full-On Attack on the Voting Rights Act’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250815Berman.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Trump’s DC occupation and starvation in Gaza. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250815Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250808.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Jacobin, (7/30/25) This week on CounterSpin: When the Washington, DC, city council voted to gut plans to raise wages for tipped workers, they weren’t just stiff-arming restaurant and hospitality workers; they were overturning the express will of the public, who had voted overwhelmingly, for the second time, to raise those wages. They were telling the electorate: You just don’t matter to us as much as the restaurant lobby. They say no, so we say no. It’s obviously a story about a rigged game that goes well beyond restaurant workers, but it’s also a story about restaurant workers, and how elite news media serve as frictionless transmitters for this weird worldview that it’s appropriate for overwhelmingly women and people of color to have to please and appease patrons in order to survive. We’ll hear from worker advocate Raeghn Draper from the CHAAD Project; their recent piece about the rise-up of efforts for a better wage system for restaurant workers appears in Jacobin magazine. Transcript: ‘People Don’t Know the Deep Inequities Baked Into the Tipped Wage’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250808Draper.mp3   ABC News, (7/21/25) Also on the show: Media reported on how “Trump Threatens Washington Stadium Deal Unless NFL Team Readopts Redskins Name.” and some, like ABC News, dutifully noted that there is no “deal” that Trump himself is involved in, and so it’s not clear what restriction he could actually put in place. Would that these outlets showed equal interest in interrogating the threats and disinformation from other sources that led to the DC city council’s approval of a plan that exempts a profitable enterprise from property taxes and leases the land underneath the stadium for just $1 a year over some 30 years. Sales taxes from the stadium don’t even go to DC, but to a “reinvestment fund” for the stadium’s maintenance and upgrades. The Commanders and their owner don’t need millions of dollars from a district where some 14% of the population live in poverty, and the people of the district said they didn’t want to give it to them. They got it anyway. That’s the story. But it’s a story that predates and will post-date Trump, so apparently it doesn’t rate. Pete Tucker reports on government and media from the Washington, DC, area, including for FAIR.org and his own Substack. He joins us this week to talk about that. Transcript: ‘DC’s Not Making Money Here, DC Is Paying Billions’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250808Tucker.mp3

Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR contributor Ari Paul about genocide in Gaza for the August 1, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250801Paul.mp3 Janine Jackson: The International Rescue Committee, among other groups, is declaring that Israel’s starvation of Gaza has reached a “tipping point”: “The window to prevent mass death is rapidly closing, and for many, it’s already too late.” Famine historian Alex de Waal describes Israel’s food distribution sites as “not just death traps…[but] an alibi.” New York Times, 7/24/25 Meanwhile, the New York Times describes Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians trying to access those food sites “a crude form of crowd control.” The epic horror of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been abetted at every turn by a US press corps too compromised, corrupt and complicit to mount a serious defense of basic human rights or international law. In the face of overwhelming public disapproval, and Senate Democrats trying and failing to block weapons sales to Israel, will anything in media coverage change? And will that matter? Joining us now is independent reporter and frequent FAIR.org contributor, Ari Paul. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ari Paul. Ari Paul: Thanks for having me. JJ: We could start anywhere, but you have just written about the recent increase in the use of the word “genocide” in some elite outlets’ reporting. How meaningful is that in the scale of things in July 2025, do you think? AP: I think it’s been very frustrating for people who have been sounding the alarm ever since October of 2023. It’s been very clear in a lot of Israel’s public statements, from public officials and army officials, military officials, in the press that there’s certainly genocidal intent, or an intent to commit horrific war crimes, throughout Gaza. And I think, seeing over the years, the destruction of hospitals, the destruction of educational facilities, the inability to function as a society, not just bombing sites, but making it an impossible place to live, the type of humanitarian crisis that isn’t just a humanitarian crisis; it reaches the level of worry that we’re reaching a genocidal moment. And activists all over the world have been sounding the alarm about this. And so when it’s seen now, I think there is some sliver of hope, for people who care about what’s happening in Gaza, that this might bring about some sort of end to it, but given the horrific slaughter of people, the starvation, and just the fact that a once-functioning society has now been reduced to rubble, it feels a little too late for a lot of people watching this. JJ: Right. And it’s kind of uncanny to hear media suggesting that now people are starting to say this might be a genocide. It is just a kind of blithe, rhetorical erasure of those people who’ve been saying this for a while, and who media have marginalized and worse, all along. But the idea is: now it’s real, because important people are saying it might be real. AP: Yeah, I think one thing that a lot of people who have been worried about the Gaza situation have pointed out is that it’s very reminiscent of what Nigeria had done to Biafra several decades ago, that they had surrounded this area, that they had the military upper hand, but also kept food out of going into this area, which caused mass starvation. Now, this incident in Biafra had been, for the Western world, this moment where everyone kind of dropped what they were doing and said, ”Oh my gosh, this is just horrible. How could anything like this happen?” And that, given the control that Israel has always had over Gaza, the potential for just shutting everything off and just letting it die, while raining missiles and conducting raids, was just always so obviously there, that from day one, when this started two years ago, it’s just been impossible to ignore the catastrophe that was waiting to happen, especially when you had people all throughout the Israeli government saying things like that they wanted another Nakba, that they wanted to destroy Gaza, that no one is innocent, things like this. These are the things that were said in places like Rwanda or Bosnia before the worst things happened. And so I think there were a lot of people on the activist left, the pro-Palestine community, who were taunted as, at best, catastrophists or, at worst, they were derided as antisemitic, blood libel. But the fact of the matter is that these were predictions that were all too real, and now we’re looking at it. New York Times, 7/28/25 JJ: I was struck by a line in a New York Times report from July 29 that was “Leading Israeli Rights Groups Accuse Israel of Committing Genocide in Gaza.” First of all, I know a lot of listeners will know that you can get a lot more critical information about Israel in the Israe

Janine Jackson interviewed the ACLU’s Scout Katovich about forced institutionalization of poor and disabled people for the August 1, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250801katovich.mp3 Janine Jackson: Poverty and homelessness—and their confluence with mental health challenges, including addiction—reflect societal and public health failures. But rather than take on rising rents and home prices, unlivably low wages and the retraction of social services and healthcare, the Trump White House has issued an executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” that calls for involuntary institutionalization and the elimination of federal support for evidence-based lifesaving programs. Oh, and also increased “data collection” on unhoused people. As Southern Legal Counsel puts it, the order is a “continuation of [this administration’s] strategy of depicting anyone whose rights they seek to take away as inherently dangerous.” This White House is what it is, but this development also trades on years of media coverage that defines poverty, and the cascade of harms attendant to it, as a “crisis” not so much for the people who experience it, as for those made uncomfortable by being exposed to it. Scout Katovich is senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality. She joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome to CounterSpin, Scout Katovich. Scout Katovich: Thank you, I’m happy to be here. JJ: There’s been some coverage of this July 24 executive order, but I know that many listeners won’t have heard about it. Could you just please tell us what this order says, and what it calls for? SK: Absolutely. So this order came out last week, and it is somewhat wide-ranging in terms of the mechanisms that it puts in place, but the gist of it is that it’s taking aim at people who are at the intersection of homelessness, mental health disabilities and substance use. And what it does is it directs federal agencies to use the power they have over funding, as well as over technical assistance, to encourage states and local governments to criminalize people for living on the streets, to push people into involuntary treatment and civil commitment, including lowering standards to get there, and to destroy programs like housing first and harm reduction that we know save lives. So the way that the Trump administration is trying to go about this remains a bit to be seen, because it’s directing agencies to take certain actions. And so we’ll see what those agencies do. But it is really troubling in terms of the entire framing of pushing for criminalization and institutionalization as a “solution” to homelessness. We know that’s not a solution. We know that that only makes homelessness, mental illness, substance abuse worse, and it’s really troubling to see this coming out from the federal government, though I can’t say it’s too much of a surprise. JJ: The order basically says, “Let’s get them into treatment,” which sounds good as a phrase, if you are just blissfully ignorant of anything to do with unhoused people or the history of involuntary warehousing. But for a lot of folks, it sounds like, “Well, golly, just help them.” What do people who think “get them into treatment,” what do they need to understand? SK: That’s a great point. And this is not the first time that compassion has been co-opted. We actually see this on the left as well, as Governor Newsom in California pushed for the CARE Courts as this compassionate solution, and, really, it was doing a lot of the same thing: targeting unhoused people perceived as having mental illness for forced treatment and institutionalization. And what this kind of cloaking in care does is it obscures the fact that involuntary treatment is not effective. If you care about providing people who need help with help, the most effective way to do that is by providing accessible, voluntary services that match a person’s need. And it’s really disingenuous for the federal government to be saying this now, saying people need care, while at the same time blasting Medicaid, and stripping all the voluntary mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, that actually works. The Register Citizen (7/29/25) JJ: The University of New Haven journalism professor Susan Campbell, in one of the few media pieces that I’ve seen so far, describes this order as essentially “fact-free.” And she was noting some kind of baseline falsehoods, like it starts out saying the “overwhelming majority of individuals [who are unhoused] are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both.” And it also says both federal and state governments “have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root cau

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250801.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   New York Times (7/22/25) This week on CounterSpin: The mainstream US media debate on the starvation and violence and war crimes in Gaza still, in July 2025, makes room for Bret Stephens, who explains in the country’s paper of record that Israel can’t be committing genocide as rights groups claim, because if they were, they’d be much better at it. Says Stephens: It may seem harsh to say, but there is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal—if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans—why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly? “It may seem harsh to say” is a time-honored line from those who want to note but justify human suffering, or excuse the crimes of the powerful. It looks bad to you, is the message, because you’re stupid. If you were smart, like me, you’d understand that your empathy is misplaced; these people suffering need to suffer in order to…. Well, they don’t seem to feel a need to fully explain that part. Something about democracy and freeing the world from, like, suffering. It’s true that corporate media are now gesturing toward engaging questions of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. But what does that amount to at this late date? We’ll talk about corporate media’s Gaza coverage with independent reporter and frequent FAIR.org contributor Ari Paul. Transcript: ‘The Fact That It’s Happening Shouldn’t Be a Surprise’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250801Paul.mp3   Disability Scoop (8/1/25) Also on the show: The Americans with Disabilities Act is generally acknowledged in July, with a lot of anodyne “come a long way, still a long way to go” type of reporting. There’s an opening for a different sort of coverage this month, as the Trump administration is actively taking apart laws that protect disabled people in the workplace, and cutting off healthcare benefits, and disabled kids’ educational rights, and rescinding an order that would have moved disabled workers to at least the federal minimum wage; and, with a recent executive order, calling on localities to forcibly institutionalize any unhoused people someone decides is mentally ill or drug-addicted or just living on the street. Does that serve the hedge funds pricing homes out of reach of even full-time workers? Yes. Does it undercut years of evidence-based work about moving people into homes and services? Absolutely. Does it aim to rocket us back to a dark era of criminalizing illness and disability and poverty? Of course. But Trump calls it “ending crime and disorder,” so you can bet elite media will honor that viewpoint in their reporting. We’ll get a different view from Scout Katovich, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality. Transcript: ‘Criminalizing Homelessness Only Perpetuates It’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250801katovich.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250725.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   PBS NewsHour (7/18/25) This week on CounterSpin: The Trump administration is funding a genocide in Gaza—never mind headlines like July 24’s Washington Post: “Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza as Deaths From Hunger Rise.” (No, it’s actual human beings stalking Gaza, who could right now choose to act differently.) The White House is deploying masked men to disappear people out of job sites and courtrooms, and offering them salaries orders of magnitude more than those paid teachers or nurses. They’re daylight-robbing hard-earned benefits from everyone, with the most vulnerable first; operating wild grifts for Trump himself; and shutting down any openings for dissent. None of this, while we acknowledge individual regretters, has radically shaken the MAGA base. But now that group, we’re told, may be fracturing, around the Epstein files. To tell this as a tale about two uniquely bad men, one of whom mysteriously died in prison while the other mysteriously became president, is a terrible disservice to a story of thinly veiled institutional, professional machinery employed in the systemic criminal victimization of women. But how can we expect elite news media to tell that story when they’re busy wasting ink on Trump denials as though they were something other than nonsense? There’s a lot going on here; we’ll talk about just some of it with Thom Hartmann, radio host and author of, most recently, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink. Transcript: ‘Everything Makes Sense if You Get That Most of the MAGA Base Are Members of a Cult’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250725Hartmann.mp3   Ken Saro-Wiwa Also on the show: Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has just announced a posthumous pardon for Nigerian writer, teacher and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged in November 1995, along with eight of his comrades in the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Their crime was nonviolent protest against the exploitation of their land and their people by oil industry giant Royal Dutch Shell. CounterSpin covered it at the time—and then in 2009, we caught up on still-ongoing efforts to bring some measure of accountability for those killings, and Shell’s unceasing human rights and environmental violations, with Han Shan, working with what was then called the ShellGuilty campaign, a coalitional effort from Oil Change International, Friends of the Earth and Platform/Remember Saro-Wiwa. In light of this pardon, which is being acknowledged as necessary but insufficient, we’re going to hear that conversation with Han Shan again this week. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250725Shan.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250718.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Truthout (6/11/25) This week on CounterSpin: The US official stance about the UN is, basically, they’re not the boss of us. But: If it looks like they can make hay with it, then sure. That’s why Secretary of State Marco Rubio is declaring “sanctions” against Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, following an unsuccessful pressure campaign to force the UN to remove her from her post. Albanese has long been clear in calling on the international community to halt Israel’s genocide of Palestinians—but the thing that broke US warmongers was her naming in a recent report of corporations that are profiting from that genocide. We’ll talk about why talking about profiteering is so key with Iman Abid, director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Transcript: ‘People Don’t Want to Be Complicit in War Crimes’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250718Abid.mp3   New York Times (7/2/25) Also on the show, and to the point: Victor Pickard will join us to talk about corporate actions that make sense as business deals—but, because this country has chosen to run the democratic lifeblood of journalism as just another business, affect everyone relying on news media to tell us about the world. Victor Pickard is professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he codirects the Media, Inequality & Change Center. He’s the author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism? from Oxford University press. Transcript: ‘The Current Commercial System Will Always Fail Democracy’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250718Pickard.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250711.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Intercept (7/8/25) This week on CounterSpin: Along with many other hate-driven harms, the budget bill puts Stephen Miller’s cruel and bizarre mass deportation plan on steroids. $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers; that’s a 62% larger budget than the entire federal prison system. The goons hiding their faces and IDs while they snatch people off the street? ICE’s “enforcement and deportation operations” get $30 billion. $46 billion for a “border wall,” because that’s evidently not a cartoon. And in a lesser-noticed piece: While courts are backlogged with immigrants complying with legal processes to access citizenship, the bill caps the number of immigration judges to 800, ensuring more people will be kept in vulnerable legal status. The Economic Policy Institute tells us that increases in immigration enforcement will cause widespread job losses for both immigrant and US-born workers, particularly in construction and childcare: “While Trump and other conservatives claim that increased deportations will somehow magically create jobs for US-born workers, the existing evidence shows that the opposite is true: They will cause immense harm to workers and families, shrink the economy, and weaken the labor market for everyone.” That’s without mentioning how ICE is telling people they’re being moved from Texas to Louisiana and then dumping them in South Sudan, as the Intercept’s Nick Turse reports. Or the puerile delight Republicans find in holding people in an alligator swamp, and forbidding journalists and public officials from seeing what goes on there. It’s important to see that Donald Trump, while especially craven, is using tools he was given, in terms of the apparatus for mass deportations, including in the acceptance of prisons as economic boons for struggling localities. So the fight can’t be just anti-Trump, but must be rooted in policy and practice and law—and most of all, in community and shared humanity. We’ll talk about standing up for human beings because they’re human beings with Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network. Transcript: ‘ICE Operates Within a Broader Apparatus Around Criminalization and the Deportation Machine’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250711Shah.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the Texas floods. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250711Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250704.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   (photo: Jim Naureckas) This week on CounterSpin: White supremacy, Islamophobia and antisemitism are irreducible dangers in themselves. They are also tools that powerful, wealthy people take up to protect their power and wealth, and to deflect everyone’s attention from who is, actually, day to day, threatening all of our well-being. That brazenness (everything is in peril!)—and that skullduggery (you know who’s the problem? your different-looking neighbor!)—are both in evidence in corporate media’s hellbent, throw-it-all-at-the-wall campaign against democratic socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. We’ll talk about how elite news media are Trojan-horsing their hatred for any ideas that threaten their ill-gotten gains, via very deep, very serious “concerns” about Mamdani as a person, with Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, longtime political activists, writers and co-founders of the emphatically nonpartisan group RootsAction. Transcript: ‘Media and Corporate Power Structures See Genuine Democracy as a Terrible Danger’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250704CohenSolomon.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Gaza massacres. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250704Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250627.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Column (6/22/25) This week on CounterSpin: Prosecutors at the 1946 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared: War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. After the Trump administration dropped bombs on Iran last weekend, without congressional approval, the media debate wasn’t about legality, much less humanity. The Wall Street Journal offered a video series on The Massive Ordnance Penetrator, “The 30,000-Pound US Bomb That Could Destroy Iran’s Nuclear Bunkers.” But it’s not just boys excited by toys; the very important Wall Street Journal is “examining military innovation and tactics emerging around the world, breaking down the tech behind the weaponry and its potential impact.” Most big media are consumed right now with whether those bunker busters did their bunker busting or maybe the US needs to buy bigger, better bombs to…do what, exactly? Well, now you’re asking too many questions. Things you should not question? Statements like that of Sen. John Fetterman that Iran is the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror. US corporate media in war mode are a force to reckon with. We do some reckoning with media analyst Adam Johnson, co-host of the podcast Citations Needed, Substack author at the Column, and co-author, with In These Times contributing editor Sarah Lazare, of some relevant pieces at InTheseTimes.com. Transcript: ‘The Goal Is to Put the Words “Iran” and “Nuclear” in the Same Sentence’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250627Johnson.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250620.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   CEPR (3/3/25) This week on CounterSpin: We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities—brown immigrant communities—around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also. But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question—“Why is anyone trying to come to the US anyway?”—by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from. We’ll talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Transcript: ‘To Address Migration Requires a Reorientation of How the US Relates to the Global South https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250620Galant.mp3   Inequality.org (5/29/25) Also on the show: Anyone who pays attention and cares can see that the Trump budget bill is a brazen transfer of resources from those that are trying to meet basic needs to those that can’t remember how many houses they own. But corporate reporting rarely breaks out economic policy in terms of how it affects different people—especially how it affects communities for whom they show no consistent concern. Economic policy is itself racialized, gendered, regionalized, targeted. Humanistic journalism would help us see that. LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.” Transcript: ‘This Isn’t Just About Policy, It’s About What Kind of Nation We Want to Be’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250620Parker.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250613.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   (Creative Commons photo: Diane Krauthamer) This week on CounterSpin: Media are focused on public protests in LA, but seem less interested in what’s making people angry. That’s in part about the federal government’s stated bid to capture and eject anyone they determine “opposes US foreign policy.” Protesters and witnesses and journalists in LA aren’t being shot at and thrown around and sent to the hospital because they disagree with US policy, we’re told, but because they’re interfering with the federal agents carrying out that policy. See how that works? If you don’t, and it worries you, you’re far from alone. We hear from Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent, about the critical case of Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil, held without warrant in a detention facility in Louisiana since March, for voicing support for Palestinian lives. There’s an important legal development, but how meaningfully Khalil’s case ultimately translates—just like with ICE sweeps around the country—will have to do with us. Other Words (6/4/25) Transcript: ‘Their Goal Is to Equate Protests for Palestine With Support for Terrorism’   Also on the show: If the problem were to “get rid of” unhoused people, the answer would be to house them. It’s cheaper than jailing people for being homeless, so if it’s those “taxpayer dollars” you care about, this would be plan A. Why isn’t it? We hear from Farrah Hassen, policy analyst, writer and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona. Transcript: ‘Housing Unaffordability Is the Primary Cause of Homelessness’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250613Hassen.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250606.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   White House photo (5/30/25) of Elon Musk’s farewell press conference with President Donald Trump. This week on CounterSpin: An email we got this week tells us: “The radical left is up in arms about DOGE. Just think about it—DOGE has exposed BILLIONS in wasteful spending, and is rooting out fraud and corruption at every turn. They’re making the government work for the people of this great nation once again, as the founders intended, and that is why the left simply can’t stand DOGE.” The ask is that we fill out a survey that represents “our once-in-a-lifetime chance to slash the bloated, woke and wasteful policies in the federal government. Thank you, and God Bless, Speaker Mike Johnson. (Paid for by the NRCC and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.)” Reports are that Elon Musk is leaving government, going back to make Tesla great again or something. But if that’s true, why did we get this weird, sad email? We’ll talk about how to miss Musk when he won’t go away with Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project. Transcript: ‘Trump and Musk Are Attacking the Ability of Government to Protect Ordinary People’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250606Hauser.mp3   Lever (5/17/24) Also on the show: The New York Times has its stories on the Boeing “non-prosecution agreement” in the “Business” section, suggesting that whether planes drop out of the sky is mostly a concern for investors. A huge corporation paying money to dodge criminal charges is evidently not a general interest story. And the families and friends of the hundreds of people dead because of Boeing’s admittedly knowing malfeasance? They’re just another county heard from. If you want reporting that calls crimes “crimes,” even if they’re committed by corporations, you need to look outside of corporate media. We’ll hear about Boeing from independent journalist Katya Schwenk. Transcript: ‘The Families Wanted Boeing to Face Real Accountability’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250606Schwenk.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of trans youth in sports and gender-affirming care. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250606Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250530.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Tom Morello at Occupy Wall Street (CC photo: David Shankbone) This week on CounterSpin: Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé and…Oprah? They’re among the entertainers in Trump’s ALLCAPS sights for, it would seem, endorsing Kamala Harris in the election? And/or maybe saying something unflattering about him or his actions—which, in his brain, and that of the minions who’ve chosen to share that brain, constitutes an illegal political contribution to his opponents, wherever they may lurk. At a moment when politicians who swore actual oaths are throwing over even the pretense of democracy, or public service—or basic human decency—many of us are looking to artists to be truth-tellers and spirit lifters; to convey, maybe, not so much information as energy: the fearless, collective, forward-looking joy that can sustain a beleaguered people in a threatening time. There’s a deep history of protest music and music as protest, and our guest is very intentionally a part of it. Tom Morello is a guitarist; part of Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave, Prophets of Rage and The Nightwatchman, among many other projects. His music has always been intertwined with his activism and advocacy for social, racial, economic justice; so we talk about the work of artists in Trumpian times with Tom Morello, this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘Dangerous Times Demand Dangerous Music’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250530Morello.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the embassy shootings, a lawmaker’s arrest and commencement protests. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250530Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250523.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Common Dreams (5/14/25) This week on CounterSpin: On a Sunday night, not when officials do things they’re most proud of, House Republicans passed a plan to give more money to rich people by taking it from the non-rich. Call it what you will, that’s what’s ultimately happening with the plan to cut more than $700 billion from Medicaid in order to “offset,” as elite media have it, the expense of relieving millionaires from contributing to public coffers. Even the feint they’re using—we’re not cutting aid, just forcing recipients to work, like they should—is obvious, age-old and long-disproven, if evidence is what you care about. Thing is, of the millions of people at the sharp end of the plan, most are children, who have no voice corporate media feel obliged to listen to. We’ll nevertheless talk about them with independent journalist Bryce Covert. Transcript: ‘Work Requirements Have Produced the Same Results Over and Over Again’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250523Covert.mp3   Washington Post (5/11/25) Also on the show: You may have seen an editorial in the Washington Post indicating that, despite what you have heard for years, from trans people and from doctors and medical associations that work with trans people, maybe it’s OK for you to still entertain the notion that, weirdly, on this occasion, it’s not science but talkshow hosts who have it right, and trans kids are just actually mentally ill. We’ll talk about that with journalist and trans rights activist Erin Reed, of Erin in the Morning. Transcript: ‘The HHS Report Was Put Out to Give Cover to Oppose Transgender Healthcare’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250523Reed.mp3

  It seems like an odd moment for the US media to do a hit job on Brazil’s coffee industry. Protective tariffs have been used since the 1800s in the US to protect domestic industry and increase employment. As Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado and other economists influential on Latin America’s “Pink Tide” argued, tariffs are also fundamental for Global South nations to escape from the prison of agricultural commodity export dependence, by enabling them to industrialize through import substitution. Regardless of heterodox economists’ arguments in favor of import tariffs, however, there seems to be little sense in the US government imposing tariffs on products that can never be produced nationally, like bananas or coffee. This is what it did on April 2—the day after April Fool’s day—when President Trump announced new, blanket tariffs on all imports from 57 countries around the world. Compared to other countries (like Cambodia or Madagascar) in the Global South, Brazil, which had a trade deficit with the United States in 2024, got off relatively easy, with 10%. One sector that will hurt, however, is coffee. Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world, and its largest export market is the United States. Brazil exported $1.8 billion, or 15% of its total coffee production, to the United States in 2024. In 2025, US consumers will have to foot the bill for a 10% tariff on a product whose price has already increased by 6.9% this year, due to the effects of climate change weather events on last year’s harvest cycle. ‘Harvested by trafficked slaves’ AP (4/24/25): “Eight Brazilian coffee workers…allege… they were put in filthy housing and the cost of their transportation, food and equipment was deducted from their pay.” The US’s new tariffs on Brazil came into effect on April 5. Nineteen days later, a Delaware-based NGO named Coffee Watch, which provides no funding transparency on its website, conducted a media blitz against Brazil’s coffee industry. It issued a letter to the US Customs and Border Protection, demanding a halt on all Brazilian coffee imports to the United States. On April 24, the New York Times, Guardian and AP, which sells content to hundreds of sites and newspapers, ran simultaneous articles on Coffee Watch’s campaign. Coffee Watch built on the stories of eight workers rescued by Brazilian federal labor inspectors from what the Brazil’s government called “slave-like conditions.” These workers came from five of Brazil’s 330,000 coffee farms. Coffee Watch and other quoted experts extrapolated from their cases to advocate for a complete halt of Brazilian coffee exports to the United States—itself a country where hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants work on farms under conditions that could be categorized as “slave-like” within Brazil’s legal framework. The New York Times article (4/24/25), headlined “Forced Labor Taints Brazilian Coffee, Say Complaints to US Authorities,” detailed a lawsuit filed against Northern companies, including Starbucks, Nestlé and Dunkin’, on behalf of eight workers from five of the 19,000 farms affiliated with the Cooxupé cooperative. The article, by the Times‘ Ephrat Livni, went on to describe Coffee Watch’s efforts to force the US Customs and Border Protection to block all coffee entering from Brazil. “This isn’t about a few bad actors,” the Times quoted Etelle Higonnet, the founder and director of Coffee Watch. “We’re exposing an entrenched system that traps millions in extreme poverty and thousands in outright slavery.” The subheading of the Guardian article (4/24/25) read, “Brazil has been the world’s leading coffee producer due to the forced labor of enslaved Africans and Afro-Brazilians.” AP (4/24/25) quoted International Rights Advocates founder Terry Collingsworth, who is representing the plaintiffs, saying, “Consumers are paying obscene amounts for a cup of Starbucks coffee that was harvested by trafficked slaves.” More labor rights than US New York Times (4/24/25): “The laborers end up…harvesting coffee under conditions not so different from those of their enslaved forebears.” From reporting like this, the casual reader might think that Brazil’s coffee industry is based on slave labor, and that many or most of the people who work picking coffee are enslaved. This is a greatly misleading depiction of the very real labor issues in Brazil. Although landless agricultural workers in Brazil, like nearly everywhere else in the world, suffer from low wages, lack of job stability and oppressive labor conditions, Brazil’s coffee farm workers have significantly better labor rights than farm workers in the United States. Nearly half of the US farm workforce are undocumented immigrants with no labor rights whatsoever, in fear of being arrested, imprisoned

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250516.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Reuters (5/2/25) This week on CounterSpin: As part of its deadly denial of food, water and medicine to Palestinian people, Israel attacked a civilian aid ship endeavoring to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, setting it on fire, injuring crewmembers, cutting off communications. The ship was called the Conscience. Millions around the world ask every day what it will take to awaken the conscience of leaders to stop the genocide of Palestinians, instead of trying to silence the outcry. Corporate media are complicit, with please-don’t-think-about-it headlines like NBC News‘ “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.” We talk about attacks on aid delivery and media’s role with Mara Kronenfeld, executive director at UNRWA USA (UNRWA being the UN Relief & Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA USA being the partner group amplifying and grounding that work). Transcript: ‘I’m Not Seeing the Horror Reflected in Corporate Media’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250516Kronenfeld.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Gaza’s starvation and the MOVE bombing. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250516Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250509.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   $Trump marketing website. This week on CounterSpin: They say ignorance is bliss, but I know that, for myself and others, our lack of knowledge of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency will only hurt us in our response to the effects that the dealings around that stuff are having on our lives. Bartlett Naylor breaks it down for us; he works at Public Citizen, as a financial policy advocate at their project Congress Watch. Transcript: ‘Crypto Is the Biggest Corruption Issue With Trump’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250509Naylor.mp3   Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (photo: Judith Slein) Also on the show: Billionaires don’t need tax cuts; they already have a system designed to appease them. But it’s not enough! Part of the budget bill to give more to those who have everything is an effort to sell off public land for exploitation for fossil fuel companies, who are determined to die taking the last penny from our fingers. Pulling up the covers and waiting for better times isn’t the way; if we stay focused, we can save critical elements of, in this case, unspoiled wild places in this country. Ashley Nunes is public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. We hear from her this week about that. Transcript: ‘This Budget Would Give Polluters the Green Light’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250509Nunes.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson looks back on an interview with the late Robert McChesney. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250509Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250502.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Ruby Bridges challenged US segregation in 1960. This week on CounterSpin: You can say someone ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to vote, or to have our experience and history recognized—as though that were a passive descriptor; she ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to be seen and heard. The website of the Kairos Democracy Project has a quote from John Lewis, reminding us: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.” Tanya Clay House is board chair at Kairos and a longtime advocate for the multiracial democracy that the Trump White House seeks to denounce and derail—in part by erasing the history of Black people in this country. As part of that, she’s part of an ongoing project called Freedom to Learn and its present campaign, called #HandsOffOurHistory. We hear from Tanya Clay House about that work this week. Transcript: ‘Black History Is American History’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250502House.mp3   Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin Also on the show: Corporate news media evince lofty principles about the First Amendment, but when people actually use it, the response is more telling. When USA Today covered activism in Seattle around the WTO, it reported: “Little noticed by the public, the upcoming World Trade Organization summit has energized protesters around the world.” You see how that works: If you’re the little-noticing “public,” you’re cool; but if you band together with other people and speak out, well, now you’re a “protester,” and that’s different—and marginal. Whatever they say in their Martin Luther King Day editorials, elite media’s day-to-day message is: “Normal people don’t protest.” In 2025, there’s an ominous addendum: “Or else.” Danaka Katovich is co-director of the feminist grassroots anti-war organization CODEPINK, currently but not for the first time at the sharp end of state efforts to silence activists and activism. We hear from her this week. Transcript: ‘Our Position on Palestine Is Not Fringe’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250502Katovich.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250418.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   The Nation (3/27/25) This week on CounterSpin: CBS News on April 14 said: We’re following new violence in the Middle East. Israeli strikes hit a major hospital in northern Gaza. At least 21 people were reportedly killed. The emergency room is badly damaged. Israel accused Hamas of using the hospital to hide its fighters. Meanwhile, Houthi militants in Yemen said they fired two ballistic missiles at Israel. The Israeli military initially said two missiles were launched and one was intercepted, but later said only one missile had been fired. There’s information in there, if you can parse it; but the takeaway for most will be that framing: “violence in the Middle East,” which suggests that whatever happened today is just the latest round in a perennial battle between warring parties, where you and I have no role except that of sad bystander. When it comes to Yemen, elite media’s repeated reference to “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” not only obscures the current fighting’s political origins and recent timeline, it erases the Yemeni people, who are paying the price both for the fighting and for the distortions around it, from political elites and their media amplifiers. We get some grounding from Khury Petersen-Smith; he’s the Michael Ratner Middle East fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Transcript: ‘Yemen Has Been a Place the US Has Seen Fit to Bomb With Little Public Discussion’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250418Petersen-Smith.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a look back at some recent press coverage of fossil fuel companies and climate change. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250418Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250411.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Intercept (4/8/25) This week on CounterSpin: We’re learning from Jonah Valdez at the Intercept that the Trump administration is now revoking visas and immigration statuses of hundreds of international students under the Student Exchange and Visitor Program—not just those active in pro-Palestinian advocacy, or those with criminal records of any sort. It is, says one immigration attorney, “a concerted effort to go after people who are from countries and religions that the Trump administration wants to get out of the country.” It is disheartening to see a report like one in Newsweek, about how Trump “loves the idea” of sending US citizens to prisons outside of US jurisdiction, that feels it has to start by explaining “Why It Matters.” But things as they are, we have to be grateful for what straight reporting we get—at a time when some outlets are signing on to shut up if it buys them a moment of peace, which it won’t—and a moment in which staying informed, paying attention, learning what’s happening and how we can stop it, is what we have to work with. Dara Lind is senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. She joins us this week on the show. Transcript: ‘They’re Doing Their Best to Turn People Who Have Not Committed Any Crime Into Criminals’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250411Lind.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of the Hands Off! protests. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250411Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250404.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   New York Times (11/14/24) This week on CounterSpin: If “some people believe it” were the criterion, our daily news would be full of respectful consideration of the Earth’s flatness, the relationship of intelligence to the bumps on your head, and how stepping on a crack might break your mother’s back. News media don’t, in fact, use “some people think it’s true” as the threshold for whether a notion gets talked about seriously, gets “balanced” alongside what “data suggest.” It’s about power. Look no further than Robert Kennedy Jr. When he was just a famously named man about town, we heard about how he dumped a bear carcass in Central Park for fun, believes that children’s gender is shaped by chemicals in the water, and asserts that Covid-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” while leaving “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” immune. But once you become RFK Jr., secretary of health and human services in a White House whose anger must not be drawn, those previously unacceptable ideas become, as a recent New York Times piece has it, “unorthodox.” Kennedy’s unorthodox ideas may get us all killed while media whistle. We hear from Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about that. Transcript: ‘The Great Educator, Sadly, Is Going to Be These Viruses’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250404Offit.mp3   Free Press (3/18/25) Also on the show: For many years, social justice advocates rather discounted the Federal Communications Commission. Unlike the Federal Trade Commission or the Food and Drug Administration, whose actions had visible impacts on your life, the FCC didn’t seem like a player. That changed over recent years, as we’ve seen the role the federal government plays in regulating the power of media corporations to control the flow of information. As the late, great media scholar Bob McChesney explained, “When the government grants free monopoly rights to TV spectrum…it is not setting the terms of competition; it is picking the winner.” We’ll talk about the FCC under Trump with Jessica González, co-CEO of the group McChesney co-founded, Free Press. Transcript: ‘This Is an All-Out War on the First Amendment’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250404Gonzalez.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250328.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Mondoweiss (3/18/25) This week on CounterSpin: Israel has abandoned the ceasefire agreement and restarted its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, a war that has destroyed the region and killed tens of thousands of human beings. The ceasefire, as Gaza-based writer Hassan Abo Qamar among others reminds, still allowed Israel to deprive Palestinians in Gaza of “food, water, medical care, education and freedom of movement.” But it wasn’t enough and, as Belén Fernández writes for FAIR.org, Israel’s US-endorsed resumption of all-out genocide killed at least 404 Palestinians right off the bat, but was reported in, for instance, the New York Times as “Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages.” We know that elite media will tell us someday that the whole world was horrified by the genocide of Palestinians, and that journalists decried it. But someday is not today. We need reporters who aren’t not afraid they will be targeted, but who may be afraid and are nevertheless bearing witness. Reporters like Hossam Shabat, 23-year-old Palestinian correspondent for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, targeted and killed March 24, and not even the first Israeli journalist assassination for the day: Hours earlier, Palestine Today reporter Mohammad Mansour was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza. The genocide of Palestinians is a human rights emergency, and also a journalism emergency. US reporters who don’t treat it as such are showing their allegiance to something other than journalism. A key part of their disservice is their ignoring, obscuring, marginalizing, demeaning and endangering the many people who are standing up and speaking out. Pretending protest isn’t happening is aiding and abetting the work of the silencers; it’s telling lies about who we are and what we can do. We build action by telling the stories powerful media don’t want told. We’ll talk about that with reporter Michael Arria, US correspondent for Mondoweiss and the force behind their new feature called “Power & Pushback.” Transcript: ‘Momentum Is on the Side of the People Protesting on Behalf of Palestine’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250328Arria.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of transphobia, and remembers FAIR board member Robert McChesney. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250328Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250321.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Public Information (3/17/25) This week on CounterSpin: News site Popular Information alerted us to new Social Security Administration policy effectively requiring tens of thousands of recipients, by the agency’s own estimation, to travel to a field office to verify their ID. An internal memo predicts the shift will create “service disruption,” “operational strain” and “budget shortfalls” – unsurprising, given concurrent staffing cuts and field office closures. The inevitable harms will no doubt be declared part of a necessary attempt to purge “fraud” from the system that has disbursed earned benefits to elderly and disabled people for generations. Journalists have choices. They can, as did the Record-Journal of Meriden, Connecticut, report that the cuts derive from repeated claims of fraud from Elon Musk that are “without evidence,” that Trump echoes Musk’s “unfounded statements,” quote a retiree advocate noting that accusations of loads of dead folks collecting benefits are “baseless, ” and put the words “fact sheet” in appropriate irony quotes when describing a missive from the White House. Or you can go the route of the Arizona Republic, and lead with the notion that the interference in Social Security is most importantly part of Musk’s “implementing…measures to trim costs throughout the government.” Mention that the actions have “stirred a range of emotions, from cautious hope that the federal government might finally bring its deficit spending under control, to frantic fears that benefit cuts could undermine the financial or health security of millions of Americans,” go on to ask earnestly, “Where does Trump stand on Social Security and other benefits?” and begin with a White House statement “reiterating that the president supports these programs.” In paragraph 19, you might throw in that public polling shows that “most Americans would favor revenue increases rather than benefit cuts to Social Security,” which would include “requiring high-income individuals to pay taxes on more of their earnings.” In short, easily verified facts, along with “most Americans,” can be centered or tangential in your reporting on the drastic, opaque changes aimed at the program that keeps the wolf from the door for millions of people, but for Musk/Trump represents yet another pile of money they feel belongs to them and theirs. All that’s in the balance are human lives and health, and the ability of working people to plan for our futures. We’ll talk about the new, yet also old, attacks on Social Security with Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works. Transcript: ‘A Small Group of People Wanted to Do Away With Social Security From the Beginning’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250321Altman.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Mahmoud Khalil, deportations and the FTC.   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250321Altman.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250314.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   This week on CounterSpin: In early February, when Rep. Maxwell Frost tweeted that he and Rep. Maxine Waters were denied access to the Department of Education, Elon Musk responded on the platform he owns: “What is this ‘Department of Education’ you keep talking about? I just checked and it doesn’t exist.” That, we understand, was the shadow president skating where the puck’s gonna be, as they say—because a month later, we learned that indeed newly appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon is tasked not with running but with erasing the department. Elite media have talked about the political machinations, how this was expected, how it fits with Trump/Musk’s grand schemes. When it comes to what will happen to the under-resourced schools, and the students with disabilities for whom the DoE supported access and recourse for discrimination? Media seem happy with McMahon’s handwaving about how that stuff might be better off in a different agency. The impacts of policy on people with disabilities are overwhelmingly an afterthought for corporate media, even though it’s a large community, and one anyone can join at any moment. We talked, on March 5, with journalist and historian David Perry about the threats McMahon and MAGA pose to people—including students—with disabilities. Transcript: ‘Anti-Disability Rhetoric and Policy Lies at the Heart of the Second Trump Administration’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250314Perry.mp3   Also on the show: You wouldn’t know it from what comes out of the mouths of today’s “leaders,” but there has long been a widely shared view in this country that people with disabilities deserve full human rights, but don’t have them. July 2023 marked the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And, as happens every year, a dismaying amount of the anniversary coverage was about buildings or spaces coming into compliance with the ADA—as though complying with a decades-old law was a feel-good story, and despite the relative absence of feel-bad stories about decades of noncompliance. CounterSpin spoke at the time with Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder of New Disabled South, about what’s lost when the public conversation around disability justice revolves around abiding by a baseline law, rather than a bigger vision of a world we can all live in. We revisit that conversation this week on CounterSpin. Trasncript: ‘Disabled People Are Whole People; We Need to See Media Address That Reality’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250314Wilson.mp3   Featured Image: A protester at a disability rights protest in May 2022 in New York City. Credit: FollowingNYC from Pexels

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250307.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Reuters (3/6/25) This week on CounterSpin: A NASA official warned workers to maybe think about not wearing their badges in public, to protect themselves from harassment against people identifiable as federal workers by MAGA randos who feel deputized by Trump and Musk to do…well, whatever it is Trump and Musk suggest. It’s early days of the Trump/Musk federal smash and grab, and the harms are already piling up. But so too is the resistance. And federal workers, presumed to be easy targets—based in part on years of corporate media coverage telling us government is fat and lazy and the private sector does everything better—are also on the front lines of the fightback. We talk about the power of workers—with or without a union—with labor activist and organizer Eric Blanc. He’s assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, and author of the new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. Transcript: ‘These Strikes Are a Good Example of Why We Shouldn’t Just Succumb to Despair’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250307Blanc.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trump’s congressional speech, “DOGE” and town hall repression. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250307Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250228.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   EarthRights (2/20/25) This week on CounterSpin: Just because we might witness the daylight robbery of the social benefits we’ve been paying for and counting on for the entirety of our working lives, and just because Black people are no longer officially allowed to even mentor Black people coming in to fields they’ve been historically excluded from, and just because any program receiving public funding will now have to pretend there are “two genders”—doesn’t mean the environment isn’t still in immediate peril. It is. But the lawsuits of deep-pocketed fossil fuel corporations against any and everyone who dares challenge their profiteering destruction are really also about our ability as non-billionaires to use our voice to speak out about anything. Not speaking out is increasingly a non-option. So where are we? We’ll learn about a case that is “weaponizing the legal system” against anyone who wants a livable future from Kirk Herbertson, US director for advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International. Transcript: ‘If Energy Transfer Prevails, This Could Really Embolden Other Corporations’   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250228Herbertson.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the FCC, the Washington Post and Medicaid. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250228Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250221.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   CNN (2/21/25) This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump has declared that the US is going to “take over” the Gaza Strip, that the Palestinians who live there will be “permanently” exiled. Asked whether Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza under his scheme, Trump said “no.” But even those corporate media who aren’t actually endorsing this illegal, inhumane plan still can’t seem to find it in themselves to call it what it is: ethnic cleansing. Media critic, activist and teacher Gregory Shupak has been looking into big media’s systematic refusal to use appropriate language about the human rights crimes unfolding before our eyes in Palestine. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and he’s author of the book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books. Transcript: ‘We Have a Widespread Failure to Properly Name This Plan for Ethnic Cleansing’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250221Shupak.mp3   Color of Change/Better IRS (3/24) Also on the show: There is a deep, if muddled, sense that the US tax system is unfair. The little guy pays too much and rich folks and corporations find loopholes and offshore accounts. And then, on a different page, there’s a story about how “we” as a country just don’t have “enough resources” to allow school kids to eat lunch, because that would mean the dreaded higher taxes! But we will shell out another billion for a fighter plane, and shut up about that. Media outlets that fail to make meaningful connections—between those clever offshore accounts and the supposed inability to fund school lunch; between cutting funding for the IRS and doubling down on people who use the Earned Income Tax Credit—are certainly not the ones to look to for an understanding of the racial impacts of supposedly neutral tax policy and practices, however demonstrable those impacts may be. We’ll talk about that with Portia Allen-Kyle, interim executive director at Color of Change and author of the report Preying Preparers. Transcript: ‘Millionaires, Corporations? They’re Not Going to H&R Block’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250221Allen-Kyle.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250214.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   New York Times (1/29/25) This week on CounterSpin: A number of federal agencies rushed to make clear they would be scrubbing activities and events that “celebrate cultural awareness” in an effort to stay on the good side of the weird new White House. Trump and his abettors’ anti-anti-discrimination agenda is as subtle as a sledgehammer. “DEI hire,” for instance, is super-complicated code for the idea that if a person who isn’t white, cis and male got a job, that can only mean a better qualified white cis man was unfairly denied it. That’s just, Trump says, “common sense.” The irony is not lost that history itself is seen as being manipulated for political purpose when it comes to Black History Month—because we know that history is constantly invoked, if implicitly, as a way of justifying present-day unfairness. White supremacy can be presented as natural if white people invented everything, discovered everything, created all the wealth, and defined civilization. That lies back of many public and media conversations…so just saying Charles Drew invented blood banks is disruptive! What if Black people aren’t subhuman? What people try to silence tells us what they fear. So what is so scary about everyone, not just Black people, acknowledging the particular circumstances, and responses to those circumstances, of Black people in these United States—our experience, challenges, accomplishments? Is it that history—real history, and not comforting tall tales—connects the past with the present in ways that are powerful, grounding and inspiring? In March 2021, a hitherto no-name right-wing activist openly declared an intention to mislead around racism and to vilify any questioning of enduring racial inequities: “The goal,” wrote Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” He bragged that he had “successfully frozen” the “brand” of critical race theory, and was “steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” A self-respecting press corps would have taken that as a shot across the bow. The corporate news media we have dutifully signed on to present a campaign openly defined as uninterested in truth or humanity and concerned only with rolling back the clock on racial equity as a totally valid, “grassroots” perspective, deserving respectful inclusion in national conversation. That was a jumping-off point for our conversation with law professor Luke Charles Harris, co-founder with Kimberle Crenshaw of the African American Policy Forum. We’ll hear that important conversation again this week. Transcript: ‘We Can’t Fight for Racial Justice if We Can’t Learn About Racial Injustice’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250214Harris.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Venezuela, Elon Musk and ICE. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250214Banter.mp3  

  Donald Trump is back in the White House, and faux opposition is once again the order of the day for the Western media and the Democratic Party. Whether it comes to criminalizing migrants (FAIR.org, 1/25/25), maintaining US “soft power” via USAID, downplaying anti-democratic power grabs (FAIR.org, 2/4/25) or whitewashing Nazi salutes (FAIR.org, 1/23/25), the centrist establishment seems quite content to normalize Trump or even outflank him from the right. There is, of course, no area of greater consensus than US imperial grand strategy, from waging genocidal war in Palestine (FAIR.org, 1/30/25) to recolonizing Washington’s “backyard” south of the Rio Grande. Accumulation by laying waste to the societies of the global South via carpet bombing and/or economic siege warfare is, according to anti-imperialist political economist Ali Kadri, the name of the game. Venezuela is no exception to this multi-pronged onslaught. And the US empire’s “paper of record,” the New York Times, proudly leads the charge, most recently advocating the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “through coercive diplomacy if possible or force if necessary.” High on his own (imperial) supply Bret Stephens (New York Times, 1/14/25): “Ending Maduro’s long reign of terror is a good way to start [the Trump] administration—and send a signal to tyrants elsewhere that American patience with disorder and danger eventually runs out.”In a column belligerently titled “Depose Maduro,” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (1/14/25) made an overt case for US military intervention to topple Venezuela’s government. He hailed this textbook crime of aggression as “overdue, morally right and in our national security interest.” For the Times’ self-described “warmongering neocon,” that last point is characteristically paramount. Specifically, he asserted that US “national security” requires “putting an end to a criminal regime that is a source of drugs, mass migration and Iranian influence in the Americas.” The irony that during the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency actually facilitated the trafficking of cocaine to working-class Black communities in the context of the Iran/Contra scandal (FAIR.org, 12/29/24) was evidently lost on the Times columnist. Then as today, the principal drug routes to the United States cut across the Pacific rather than the Gulf of Mexico (FAIR.org, 9/24/19). A 2017 DEA report found that less than 10% of US-bound cocaine flowed through Venezuela’s eastern Caribbean corridor, with WOLA reaching a similar conclusion in a 2020 study. Not only does the bulk of drug trafficking flow through US-allied countries, but the US government itself is broadly complicit in the perpetuation of the multi-billion dollar contraband, as evidenced in its support for narco puppet regimes in Afghanistan (New York Times, 7/27/08) and Honduras (FAIR.org, 3/20/24; Covert Action, 3/14/24). In marked contrast, the US has levied “narco-terrorism” charges against top Caracas officials, going as far as to place a bounty on Maduro’s head, without providing a shred of evidence, since Western outlets are happy to take US officials’ word, no questions asked (BBC, 1/10/25; New York Times, 1/10/25; Washington Post, 1/10/25; AP, 1/10/25). Stephens lamented that Washington’s murderous economic sanctions “didn’t work” and that its bounty “also won’t work.” The columnist conveniently ignored that the unilateral coercive measures, described aptly by US officials as “maximum pressure,” were quite effective in deliberately gutting Venezuela’s economy, in the process killing at least tens of thousands, and spurring the migrant exodus he pointed to as justification for his proposed military adventure. Such omission regarding US responsibility for Venezuelan migration is by now a staple of corporate media coverage (New York Times, 1/31/25; PBS, 1/31/25; CBS, 2/2/25). Indeed, support for Washington’s economic terrorism against Venezuela has been fairly uniform across the US political spectrum for years (FAIR.org, 6/4/20, 6/4/21, 5/2/22, 6/13/22). Common tactics include describing sanctions as merely affecting Maduro and allies (New York Times, 1/6/25; NPR, 1/10/25; Al Jazeera, 1/6/25; Financial Times, 1/31/25) or portraying their consequences as merely the demonized leader’s opinion (New York Times, 1/31/25; BBC, 1/10/25; Reuters, 1/27/25). The Iranian bogeyman Stephens cites a story (Infobae, 1/10/25) about an Iranian “drone development base” in Venezuela that offers as its only source for the claim that “there is information” about such a base. It is no surprise, either, that in Stephens’ casus belli, Iran appears alongside the familiar conservative tropes of Latin American migrant hordes and narcotics threatening the US (white settler) body politic. Stephens’ Orientalist fixation with the Iranian bogeyman is notable, if hardly novel. Western media have in recent years circulated baseless rumors

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250207.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   (CC photo: Ted Eytan) This week on CounterSpin: We know that once corporate news label something “controversial,” we’re in for reporting with a static “some say/others differ” frame—even if one “side” of the “controversy” is a relatively small group of people who don’t believe in science or human rights or democracy. So as the Trump White House comes out fast and furious against transgender people, their weird hatefulness lands in a public arena that generally rejects discrimination, but also in an elite media climate in which the very lives of transgender people have long been deemed “subject to debate.” We’ll hear about the current state of things from civil rights attorney Ezra Young. Transcript: ‘There’s More Going On in Our Fight Than Being Reactive to Nonsense Executive Orders’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250207Young.mp3   New York Times (5/8/24) Also on the show: When the New York Times reported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s revelation that parasites have eaten part of his brain, Kennedy, running for president at the time, offered to “eat five more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.” We’re reminded of such “jokes” now, as Kennedy looks likely to be head of Health and Human Services, along with his claims that vaccines cause autism and chicken soup cures measles. But to resist Kennedy, we need to understand what fuels those who, even if they don’t like him, believe he might be a force for good in their lives. Anne Sosin is a public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College, who encourages looking around RFK Jr. to the communities that imagine he’s speaking for them. Transcript: ‘We Need to Understand the Political Economy That’s Given Rise to RFK’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250207Sosin.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250131.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Tech billionaires at Trump’s second inauguration: Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and X‘s Elon Musk (image: C-SPAN) This week on CounterSpin: You may remember the testimony: former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz pouting to a Senate hearing on the company’s union-busting in which he was referred to as a billionaire that using that “moniker constantly is unfair”: “Yes, I have billions of dollars—I earned it. No one gave it to me. And I’ve shared it constantly with the people of Starbucks.” The delusion that a billionaire “earned” every penny of it, or that it is shared equitably with workers, may be special to billionaires, but the broader notion—that “the government only helps some people; other people do it on their own” is conveyed throughout corporate media’s narrative, even as it’s corrosive to an understanding of democracy, much less the fight for it. The increasing influence of not merely the rich, but the super rich, on the politics and policy we all have to live with is an urgent story, if not a new one. Yet somehow, elite media seem less and less interested in it. We’ll talk with David Kass, executive director of the Americans for Tax Fairness campaign, about that on this week’s show. Transcript: ‘We’ve Seen This Incredible Flow of Billionaire Money Into Campaigns’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250131Kass.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Trump’s illegal funding freeze, immigration raids and the Gaza death toll. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250131Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250124.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Detention Watch Network This week on CounterSpin: Those with a beating heart can see the horror of Trump’s plans to deputize wannabe vigilantes to denounce community members they suspect “don’t belong here,” to send ICE into schools and churches to round folks up—police records or no—and ship them to detention centers, to ride roughshod over time-honored concepts of sanctuary. But on immigration, as on other things, corporate news media have shaped their narrative around right-wing frames, such that immigration itself is now not a human rights story, or even an economic one, but yet another story about “their” crimes and “our” safety. Sure, it serves racist xenophobes and will harm all of us, but: horrible crimes attachable to brown and Black people? You don’t have to ask the press corps twice! It was bad enough when the narrative was about distinguishing “good” immigrants from “bad” immigrants; we’ve now gone beyond that to “all immigrants” vs. “everyone else”—and if MAGA is now driving that train, elite media have been fueling it up for years. We’ll talk about the attack on immigrants—and about the resistance to it—with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network. Transcript: ‘Because There Was Economic Insecurity, Immigrants Became an Easy Scapegoat’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250124Shah.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of oligarchs and the Washington Post‘s new mission statement. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250124Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250117.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   New York Times (1/9/25) This week on CounterSpin: While the New York Times rolls out claptrap about how both “the left and the right” have ideas about causes behind the devastating Los Angeles wildfires—the right blame DEI hires, while the left blame climate change—many people have moved beyond that sort of stultifying nonsense to work that directly confronts the fossil fuel companies, and their political enablers, for the obvious role that fossil fuels play in climate disruption, and that climate disruption plays in extreme weather events. Many are also now calling out insurance companies that take folks’ money, but then hinder their ability to come out from under when these predictable and predicted crises occur. Would you be surprised to hear that these powerful industries—fossil fuels and insurers—are intertwined? We talked about it last year with writer and historian Derek Seidman. We’ll hear that conversation on this week’s show. Transcript: ‘The Insurance Industry Is the Fossil Fuel Industry’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250117Seidman.mp3   19th (12/6/23) Also on the show: Did you see the coverage of how people with disabilities are dealing with the California fires’ impact? Probably not, given that the place of people with disabilities in elite media coverage ranges roughly from afterthought to absent. We talked about that last year with disability rights advocate and policy analyst Ariel Adelman, in the wake of a Supreme Court case that considered dismantling civil rights protections for people with disabilities, by criminalizing the ways that we learn about whether those protections are actually real. We’ll hear that too. Transcript: ‘Disenfranchised, Under-Resourced Populations Are Burdened With Enforcing Major Federal Regulation’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250117Adelman.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250110.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). New York Times (12/17/24) This week on CounterSpin: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s December 17 piece, headlined “How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve US-China Relations,” contained some choice Friedmanisms, like: “More Americans might get a better feel for what is going on there if they simply went and ordered room service at their hotel.” (Later followed quaintly by: “A lot of Chinese have grown out of touch with how China is perceived in the world.”) But the big idea is that China has taken a “great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing” because of Donald Trump, who a source says “woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort.” And if the US doesn’t respond to China’s “Sputnik” moment the way we did to the Soviet Union, “we will be toast.” The response has to do with using tariffs on China to “buy time to lift up more Elon Musks” (described as a “homegrown” manufacturer), and for China to “let in more Taylor Swifts”—i.e., chances for its youth to spend money on entertainment made abroad. Secretary of State Tony Blinken evidently “show[ed] China the way forward” last April, when he bought a Swift record on his way to the airport. OK, it’s Thomas Friedman, but how different is it from US media coverage of China and trade policy generally? We’ll talk about China trade policy with Dean Baker, co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Transcript: ‘The Idea That China Growing Wealthier Is a Threat to Us Is Wacky’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250110Baker.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of Luigi Mangione. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250110Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250103.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders on Laura Flanders and Friends (10/20/23) This week on CounterSpin: Among many other things, 2024 was a series of reminders that corporate news media, tasked primarily with enriching the rich and shoring up entrenched institutions, will not, today or ever, do the liberatory, illuminating work of independent journalism—that boldly speaks truth to power, that stands up for the societally voiceless, that provides space for the debates and discussions we need to move society forward—for those of us who believe that US society needs to change. New calendar years are symbolic, sure, but they can also offer a fresh start. Why not see 2025 as a much needed opportunity to acknowledge, support, create and grow independent journalism? We talk about that this week with two people who are and have been doing not just critical, dissident, uplifting journalism, but the thinking and advocating around why we need it: Sonali Kolhatkar, from Rising Up! With Sonali, and Laura Flanders from Laura Flanders and Friends. Transcript: ‘Right Beneath the Surface Is This Level of Fury at the Way Things Are, and a Willingness to Act’

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241227.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   CounterSpin host Janine Jackson CounterSpin is your weekly look behind the headlines of the mainstream news. This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations from the past year that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us—in part by showing how elite media are clouding them. It’s not to say Big Media always get the facts wrong; but that what facts they point us toward, day after day, whose interpretation of those facts they suggest we credit, what responses we’re told are worth pursuing—all of that serves media’s corporate owners’ and sponsors’ bottom line, at the expense of all of our lives and our futures. An important part of the work we do—as producers and as listeners—is to help create and support different ways to inform ourselves and stay in conversation. Guests featured on this year’s Best of CounterSpin include Chip Gibbons, Svante Myrick, Monifa Bandele, Aron Thorn, Evlondo Cooper, Joe Torres, Colette Watson, Greg Shupak and FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas. As always, we are deeply thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. Transcript: ‘Media Institutions Have Played a Direct Role in Undermining Democracy’

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241220.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Free Press (12/6/24) This week on CounterSpin: Writing for a DC court of appeals, Douglas Ginsburg said yes, banning the wildly popular platform TikTok does raise concerns about First Amendment freedoms; but it’s still good, because in pushing for the ban, the US government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.” If that’s clear as mud to you, join the club. We’ll get an update on the proposed ban on TikTok—in the service of free speech, doncha know—from Yanni Chen, policy counsel at the group Free Press. Transcript: ‘There’s No Public Evidence of the Kind of Manipulation TikTok Is Accused Of’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241220Chen.mp3   Sentencing Project (12/11/24) Also on the show: We’re all familiar with the “if it bleeds, it leads” credo of, especially but not only, local TV news. But just because we’re aware of it, doesn’t mean the phenomenon isn’t still impacting our lives in negative ways. Richard Mendel is senior research fellow for youth justice at the Sentencing Project. He joins us to talk about new research showing how news media coverage actively harms young people of color, yes, but also all of our understanding and policy-making around youth and crime. Transcript: Baltimore Media ‘Create a False Impression That Youth Are Responsible for a Lot of Very Dangerous Crime’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241220Mendel.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241213.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   New York Times (12/5/24) This week on CounterSpin: The New York Times says that Amnesty International recently became “the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza.” That makes sense if you ignore the other human rights groups and international bodies that have said Israel’s actions in the wake of Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, meet that definition. The Times account notes that genocide is hard to prove because it involves showing the specific intent to destroy a group, “in whole or in part”—something that, they say, Israeli leaders have persistently denied is their intent in Gaza. Declarations like that by Israeli President Isaac Herzog that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” appear nowhere in the piece. The Times tells readers that Amnesty’s “contention” and “similar allegations” have been “at the heart of difficult debates about the war around the world.” So far, 14 countries have joined or signaled they will join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the World Court. Gallup polling from March found the majority of the US public—55%, up from 45% last November—saying they disapprove of Israel’s siege of Gaza. And that support for Israel is dropping among all political affiliations. A May survey from a private Israeli think tank says nearly a third of Jewish people in the US agree with the charge of “genocide,” and 34% view college campus protests as anti-war and pro-peace, compared with 28% who see them as primarily “anti-Israel.” More recently, the Israel Democracy Institute reports its survey from late November, finding that the majority of Jews in Israel—52%—oppose settlement in Gaza, vs. 42% in support. There is absolutely debate around the world about Israel’s actions; outlets like the Times make that debate more “difficult” by misrepresenting it. While not the first to ask us to see the assault on Palestinians as genocide, Amnesty’s report offers an opening, for those journalists who are interested, to ask why some are so invested in saying it isn’t. Iman Abid is the director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). We’ll talk with her today. Transcript: ‘That Amnesty Is Claiming This Is Genocide Is Profound and Necessary’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241213Abid.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the minimum wage. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241213Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241206.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Progressive International (11/25/22) This week on CounterSpin: Few corporations have changed the US business and consumer model more than Amazon. So when that corporate behemoth buys one of the country’s national newspapers—it’s a conflict writ large as can or should be. But things as they are, reporting on Amazon has in general looked more like representing that conflict than confronting it. Good Jobs First monitors megacompanies like Amazon and their impact on our lives. Their database, Violation Tracker Global, notes more than $2.4 billion in misconduct penalties for Amazon since 2010. The most expensive of those fines have been connected to the company’s anti-competitive practices; the most frequent offenses are related to cheating workers out of wages and jeopardizing workers’ health and safety. Arlene Martinez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. We’ll talk to her about the effort to #MakeAmazonPay. Transcript: ‘Regulatory Agencies Need to Make Sure Amazon Is Broken Up or Contained’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241206Martinez.mp3   Amazon Seattle HQ (cc photo: kiewic) Also: A few years back, Amazon, like it does, dangled the prospect of locating a headquarters in New York City. And the city, like it does, eagerly offered some $3 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to entice the wildly profitable company to bring its anti-union, environmentally exploitative self to town. The deal fell through for reasons, one of which was informed community pushback. We talked about it with journalist Neil deMause, co-author of the book Field of Schemes. We’ll hear just a little of that conversation today. Transcript: ‘It Was a Remarkably Successful Grassroots Campaign to Target Amazon’s Credibility’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241206DeMause.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241129.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Intercept (11/12/24) This week on CounterSpin: It wasn’t the horrific abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, but the pictures of it, that forced public and official acknowledgement. The Defense Department vehemently resisted the pictures’ release, with good reason. Yet when, after the initial round, Australian TV put out new images, Washington Post executive editor Len Downie said they were “so shocking and in such bad taste, especially the extensive nudity, that they are not publishable in our newspaper.” The notion that acts of torture by the US military and its privately contracted cat’s paws are, above all, distasteful may help explain corporate media’s inattentiveness to the efforts of victims of Abu Ghraib to find some measure of justice. But a federal jury has just found defense contractor CACI responsible for its part in that abuse, in a ruling being called “exceptional in every sense of the term.” The Center for Constitutional Rights has been behind the case, Al Shimari v. CACI, through its long rollercoaster ride through the courts—which isn’t over yet. We hear about it from CCR senior staff attorney Katherine Gallagher. Transcript: ‘At Abu Ghraib, There Was a Conspiracy to Torture’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241129Gallagher.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the ICC’s Israel warrants. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241129Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241122.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Lever (10/24/24) This week on CounterSpin: Passed by a whisker in Missouri on November 5, legal sports gambling is the apple of the eye of many corporate and private state actors—but how does it affect states, communities, people? Our guest wrote in-depth on the question ahead of the election. Journalist Amos Barshad is senior enterprise reporter for the Lever, and author of the book No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World, from Abrams Press. We hear from him on this week’s show. Transcript: On Sports Gambling, ‘Are We Just Going to Let Companies Write the Rule Book?’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241122Barshad.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trump’s nominees and a Nazi march. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241122Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241115.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Fascists march in Charlottesville, 2017 (cc photo: Tony Crider) This week on CounterSpin: We revisit the conversation we had in August 2017 in the wake of the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Writer and podcaster Adam Johnson had thoughts about the way so-called “mainstream” news media responded to a straight-up celebration of white supremacy. Transcript: ‘Media’s First Instinct Is to Strip Ideology From the Conversation’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241115Johnson.mp3   (cc photo: Sasha Patkin) Also on the show: If we’re to believe the chest-thumping, high on Trump’s agenda will be the enforced criminalization of immigration. We talked about that in July 2018 with Jacinta Gonzalez, senior campaign organizer at Mijente. Transcript: ‘We Point to the Need to Decriminalize Migration’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241115Gonza_lez.mp3   The past is never dead, it’s not even past: This week on CounterSpin. Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press about Chris Matthews’ “morning after,” the New York Times‘ promoting white resentment, and Israel’s assassination of journalists. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241115Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241108.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   This week on CounterSpin: We talk about what just happened, and corporate media’s role in it, with Julie Hollar, senior analyst at the media watch group FAIR, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas. Transcript: ‘MAGA Republicans and Corporate Media Share a Strategy: Fear Sells’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241108HollarNaureckas.mp3   Washington Post (7/25/21) We also hear some of an important conversation we had with political scientist Dorothee Benz the day after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Transcript: ‘This Violent Piece of Insurrection Was Planned Openly on Unencrypted Channels’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241108Benz.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at non-presidential election results. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241108Banter.mp3 Featured image: Women’s March to the White House, November 2, 2024 (Creative Commons photo: Amaury Laporte)  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241101.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   ProPublica (10/22/24) This week on CounterSpin: Reading the news today, you might not believe it, but there was a time, not long ago, in which it was acceptable to say out loud that immigration is a boon to this country, and immigrants should be welcomed and supported. Now, news media start with the premise of immigration itself as a “crisis,” with the only debate around how to “stem” or “control” it. That the conversation is premised on disinformation about crime and wages and the reasons US workers are struggling is lost in a fog of political posturing. But immigration isn’t going away, no matter who gains the White House. And children torn from parents, families sent back to dangerous places, workers’ rights denied based on status, won’t be any prettier a legacy, no matter who it’s attached to. Journalist Nicole Foy reports on immigration and labor at ProPublica. She wrote recently about the life and death of one man, Elmer De Leon Perez, as a sort of emblem of this country’s fraught, dishonest and obscured treatment of people who come here to work and make a life. We hear that story this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘You See Just How Many Immigrants Are Dying on the Job’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241101Foy.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a look back at recent press coverage of NPR‘s overseers and the Washington Post‘s non-endorsement. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241101Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241025.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Intercept (10/17/24) This week on CounterSpin: Dropped by her law firm—or, excuse me, resigning from her law firm—after being exposed as an advisor on the post–2020 election call where Donald Trump told Georgia officials to “find” him some votes, Cleta Mitchell has leaned in on the brand of “election integrity.” Platformed on right-wing talk radio, she’s now saying that Democrats are “literally getting people to lie” to exploit laws that allow overseas citizens to vote, so she’s bringing lawsuits. Does she have evidence? No. Is evidence the point? Also no. We speak this week with media law attorney and reporter Shawn Musgrave, who serves as counsel to the Intercept, about how Trump’s “Big Lie” attorneys are not so much returning to the field, but actually never left. Transcript: ‘The Point Is to Sprinkle a Little Doubt About the Election’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241025Musgrave.mp3   CounterSpin (3/16/18) Also on the show: In 2018, elite media had apparently moved beyond the kneejerk reportorial pairing of documentation of voter suppression with hypothetical claims of voter fraud. But they were still doing faux-naive reporting of those fraud claims as something other than themselves a deliberate suppression campaign. Then, the shiny object was Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach trying to change registration laws in the state. We talked then with Orion Danjuma, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program. Transcript: ‘They Don’t Want Certain Voters to Participate in the Political Process’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241025Danjuma.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241018.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Gaza First Amendment Alert (10/16/24) The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases. In Palestine, the death toll is exacerbated by displacement; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRWA), one of very few humanitarian organizations working in the region. A real accounting will also include not just those we don’t yet know are dead, but the maimed, the orphaned, the starved, the homeless. Democracy Now! recently spoke with a doctor from Gaza who said that he wishes that “Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.” The New York Times has deemed such images too graphic to print. Too horrific, in other words, to run alongside reporting that suggests, implies or outright states that those deaths are justified, make sense or, minimally, are not worth stopping eating your buttered toast about. As media critics, we look to Palestinians to represent Palestinian views, but it’s crucial that we not see the present moment as something happening to Other People, Somewhere Else. The repression of simple anti-genocide calls, the censorship, the firings, the disinformation, the malforming of concepts like “antisemitism”—these are problems for all of us, about all of us, that will influence all of us forever. Defending Rights & Dissent has started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday. Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a journalist, a researcher and a longtime activist. He led a successful campaign to defeat a proposed unconstitutional anti-boycott bill in Maryland. Transcript: ‘We’re Witnessing This Global Tidal Wave of Repression’

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241011.mp3   Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   UC Press (2024) This week on CounterSpin: For many people and for media, the idea of “racial discrimination in housing” invokes an image of individual landlords refusing to rent or sell homes to Black and brown people. But that understanding is so incomplete as to be harmful. A new book doesn’t just illuminate the thicket of effects of systemic racism as it affects where people live; it reframes the understanding of the role of housing—connecting housing injustice with health inequities and wealth disparities, as well as lifting up work that connects those “mutually constitutive” elements of what the author calls an “unjust, destructive and even deadly racial order.” George Lipsitz is research professor emeritus of Black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He’s author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and How Racism Takes Place, among other titles. He joins us to talk about his new book: The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth. Transcript: ‘Housing Discrimination Is Collective, Cumulative, Continuing’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241011Lipsitz.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the port strike. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241011Banter.mp3