CounterSpin

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261106.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   New York Times (11/5/26) Many people, including “liberals,” have accepted that there is no such thing as hypocrisy when it comes to US actions in other countries. What we call “universal” principles just apply differently to different people! And “we’re good, they’re bad” is a legitimate overarching idea for foreign policy—that thinking people must accept and internalize and propagate. The midterm elections, and all the years of work leading up to them—because this wasn’t a flash in the pan—tell us that many people are thinking past simplistic headlines, and are thinking about the human beings living in the places on the map we’re being told it’s OK to blow apart. We’ll talk about Iran with Sina Toossi, senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261106Toossi.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261030.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   New York Times (10/25/26) This week on CounterSpin: You can smell what US corporate press are cooking with the New York Times headline that the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was “a blow to Brazil’s right.” Would you feel differently if the New York Times in its headline called Lula’s victory a win for Brazil’s poor, and elderly, and working people? Based on their record, the Times imagines and expects that you would. We talk about Lula’s win—and why your corporate news outlet might tell you to fear it—with Brian Mier. He’s an editor at Panamerican Dispatch and Brazil correspondent for TeleSur English. He didn’t parachute in; he’s lived in Brazil for decades. We hear from him this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261030Mier.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261023.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Pluto Press (2026) Disinformation has been a key part of Israel’s US-supported war on Palestinians since before October 7, 2023, but it has been amped up since. Yet as various state and media claims are proven false, it hasn’t changed US media’s respectful centering of the same sources. Israeli media actually provide a less contorted view. Adam Johnson is a media analyst, and cohost (with Nima Shirazi) of the podcast Citations Needed. He has also written for us here at FAIR. His book is called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, out from Pluto Press. We  hear from Adam Johnson, this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261023Johnson.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at FCC threats against broadcasters and inadvertent Republican honesty. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261023Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261016.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   “Electrocution,” George Bellows (1917) Donald Trump has apparently called off plans to livestream an execution. It’s impossible to imagine that Trump—the guy who thought it was cute to post video of a tiger killing a man, video that international press had withheld out of human decency, followed by an AI-generated video of himself wrestling the tiger—did any of what anyone else would call introspection. The firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan is still set for December 3. About 7,000 people were executed in the US between 1900 and 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, and some 1,700 people after 1976. The group recently described the “failed execution,” if you can take in those words, of Christa Pike, as unprecedented, and possibly changing the conversation around lethal injection—which we’ve been told to think of as the clinical, tidy way for the state to murder people. CounterSpin has spoken about the death penalty and the way it’s meted out. We hear again this week a conversation from 2014 with journalist Dahlia Lithwick, about the Oklahoma execution of Clayton Lockett, and one from 2020 with journalist Liliana Segura about the death penalty itself and media coverage of it. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261016Executions.mp3   Also on the show: “But had she been drinking? And what about their futures?” Yes, they are the oldest, stalest, most hateful things said about women who are violently assaulted by men. And yet here we are. Again. CounterSpin spoke in 2016 with writer and activist Soraya Chemaly about the myriad costs of downplaying and misunderstanding domestic violence, and in 2021 with Women’s Equal Justice project director Jane Manning about the justice system’s failures. We’ll hear from them again today as well. An unfortunate understanding that the past is not even past, this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261016Domestic.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261009.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Fortune (9/13/26) This week on CounterSpin: When Fortune magazine is telling you “corporations are raking in cash, but American workers are reaping less and less of the rewards,” something is afoot. The not-notoriously capitalist-critical magazine reported recently on the measurable fact that working people in this country are taking home the smallest percentage of economic output since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it in 1947. And they didn’t try to separate that from the fact that, at the same time, corporate profits have, in their word, “exploded.” Simple acknowledgement is welcome, but how different would public conversation be if we always understood that the corporations corporate media lionize are getting to those wonderful profits by abjectly exploiting their employees—and those they won’t acknowledge as employees? Such that those workers still need government assistance to stay alive? And then the corporations attack government assistance? Can we talk about how this isn’t a sustainable model for a humane society? Terri Gerstein is a longtime labor watcher. She’s director of the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative, at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. We hear from her this week on the show. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261009Gerstein.mp3