CounterSpin

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251226.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   AAPF (10/25) This week on CounterSpin: After every police killing of a Black person, every announced policy singling out Black immigrants as the cause of crime and disorder, every declaration, like that from Arlington National Cemetery, that as of now materials on Black and female service people will be scrubbed from the website—we hear from corporate media about how, boy, this country is for sure “reckoning” with “racism.” But then: If we reckoned with racism every time elite media claimed this country was “reckoning” with racism, seems like we ought to be fully “reckoned” by now. US corporate media have a white supremacy problem (and you see how that term lands differently than “racism”): They decide who they think, and hence you should think, is worth talking to, based on an accepted conflation of power with worthiness. They decide whose ideas are taken for granted and whose deemed marginal, and they tell us how to define progress: Is it moving toward actual equity, or just things quietening down? Who needs to be reassured, and whose lives is it OK to disrupt, whose basic humanity is it OK to question, day after day after day? A new report titled Anti-Blackness Is the Point, from the African American Policy Forum, engages this age-old if ever-morphing narrative. Kimberle Crenshaw is a leading legal scholar and justice advocate, the force behind the transformative ideas of intersectionality and critical race theory. She’s co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, as well as a professor of law at both Columbia and UCLA. We talk with Kimberle Crenshaw this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251226Crenshaw.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at nonprofits and diversity, equity and inclusion. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251226Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251219.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Truthout (12/8/25) This week on CounterSpin: Forbes reports the Starbucks workers strike as you might expect: “The company claims it already offers the ‘best job in retail.’ … Yet the union is demanding….” “The company says, ‘We’re ready to return to the bargaining table whenever the union is.’ But as of yet, the union is holding out for the company to present a contract that meets demands….” You get the idea: One party is generous, the other is ornery. But even Forbes has to acknowledge that even as the strike “drags” into a second month, “global support grows.” Derek Seidman has been following the strike. He’s a writer, researcher and historian who contributes to Little Sis and to Truthout, where he recently reported on the Starbucks strike and…what Walmart has to do with it? https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251219Seidman.mp3   Politico (12/17/25) Also on the show: Sen. Bernie Sanders is the latest to join a broad group of more than 200 environmental and economic justice advocates that just sent a letter to Congress, calling for a moratorium on the construction of new data centers, the energy sources powering the boom (and, as some would say, predictable bust) of artificial intelligence, until, as Sanders says, democracy “has a chance to catch up.” Turns out as people learn more, opposition grows, and so, Politico notes, “The industry is taking out ads and funding campaigns to flip the narrative and put data centers in a positive light—spinning them as job creators and economic drivers rather than resource-hungry land hogs.” The letter to Congress was spearheaded by Food & Water Watch. We’ll hear from the group’s deputy director, Mitch Jones. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251219Jones.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Bondi Beach. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251219Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251212.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Popular Information (12/8/25) This week on CounterSpin: If you see no problem in news outlets reporting on desperately horrific conditions in Gaza, and what various political entities are doing or could do to address them, while a ticker at the bottom of the screen offers you an opportunity to gamble—for money—on whether or not “famine” in the region will be officially declared, this episode is not for you. We’re learning about the deal just struck by “news” outlets CNN and CNBC with the “prediction market operator” (evidently what we’re calling them now) Kalshi Inc. We’ll hear from Judd Legum—founder and author at the newsletter Popular Information—and from author and analyst Adam Johnson, of Substack‘s the Column and the podcast Citations Needed. Judd Legum’s interview: https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251212Legum.mp3   Adam Johnson’s interview: https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251212Johnson.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251205.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   CEPR (12/2/25) This week on CounterSpin: A militarized US Drug Enforcement Administration force declared they’d taken out drug traffickers in the Caribbean, killing some of them in what was sold as a successful operation. Locals on the ground reported differently, saying these people weren’t drug traffickers, just human beings who happened to be on the river and got shot up by US forces who were not attacked, as they claimed, but just killed innocent people because they were given orders to kill them. It should sound familiar—but this isn’t today in Venezuela; it’s 2012 in Honduras. An inspector general review from the State Department and the Justice Department found that, no, this was not a Honduran operation, or a “joint operation” the DEA were helping with; it was a DEA operation, and it killed four innocent people and injured others in a remote, Afro-Indigenous part of Honduras. The story that the DEA pushed on Congress and the press corps was just a lie. But you’d hardly know that history reading current coverage of Honduras, where, as we record on December 4, the presidential election is still in question. Not in question: the US’s long history of intervening—violently, dramatically, unaccountably—in Honduras. We’ll talk about it with Alex Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251205Main.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of the murder of Amber Czech. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251205Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251128.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Opening ceremony for COP30 in Belem, Brazil (photo: Palácio do Planalto) This week on CounterSpin: US media didn’t exactly mince words: “Climate Summit Viewed as Flop by Many” was the headline the LA Times put on an AP report. The subhead explained: “The COP30 talks held in Belem, Brazil, end without a timeline for reducing fossil fuels.” The future of climate disruption, if not pulled off course, is devastating, but the present is bad enough, if you are placed, or inclined, to see it. So how could a global climate conference that doesn’t put demands on fossil fuel producers at the center be anything but a flop? The answer is not to absolve COP30 or polluting countries, much less industries, of their responsibility. But focusing some conversation on what people, including those most harmed, are doing, along with what’s being done to them, could help move debate off an outdated dime—onto the kind of work that stands a chance of helping us all. We hear from Jean Su, senior attorney and director of the energy justice program at the Center for Biological Diversity. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251128Su.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a look at coverage of the Tulsa Race Massacre. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251128Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251121.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Foodtank (7/25) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate news media have vilified people who use public assistance, and lied about why they need it, almost like it’s their job. Today is nothing new. But here’s a fun fact, as noted by Michael Klinski from South Dakota News Watch: Ziebach County has the sixth-highest percentage of residents who receive SNAP benefits in the country, at 43.5%, and doesn’t have a single retailer that accepts food stamps. What if SNAP weren’t a story about major political party back-and-forthing, and were instead a story about people who need food? So they can go to their job? And feed their children so they can go to school? Wouldn’t that be something? What if that were the story? It’s a dream, but we’ll talk about it with Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center. Transcript: ‘We Need to Recommit to Building a Nation Free From Hunger’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251121FitzSimons.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Trump corruption. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251121Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251114.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   CNN (11/11/25) This week on CounterSpin: The palace intrigue around the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte, soft-launching the idea of a 50-year mortgage suggests the reveal was perhaps mistimed, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reflective of the sort of policy the Trump White House is intent on. And though the idea of extending payments over time under the guise of making home ownership more accessible seems to have landed poorly with economists right, left and center, much of corporate news media were willing to give it a reflexively respectful whirl. Housing and home ownership represent a critical vector in the project of a multi-racial democracy, and we’ve talked about that a lot on the show.  This week we revisit relevant, informed conversations with veteran housing analysts and advocates: Gene Slater, Richard Rothstein and George Lipsitz. Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of Donald Trump’s 50-year mortgage scheme. Transcript: ‘Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251114Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251107.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Balls & Strikes (10/13/25) This week on CounterSpin: There is an argument evidently compelling to some: Yes, Black people have been enslaved and excluded and discriminated against for decades, such that today they are born in a hole in terms of wealth, of housing equity, of jobs. If we acknowledge that their discrimination was and is race-based, that would be saying race matters—but haha! Didn’t you all say you don’t want race to matter? It’s an argument so specious a third grader could call it out. But if it comes from the Supreme Court majority, we are forced to consider it as serious, and enjoined to believe it is based in good faith. The history on these efforts helps us see a way forward. Madiba Dennie is deputy editor and senior contributor at the legal analysis site Balls and Strikes, and author of The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back. Transcript: ‘They Are Creating the Opportunity to Shrink Democracy More’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251107Dennie.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at some recent press coverage of Zohran Mamdani. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251107Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251031.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Union of Concerned Scientists (10/28/25) This week on CounterSpin: Responsible journalism would make clear that climate policy is not a backburner issue, just because many other terrible things are happening. Climate disruption is an active present—not just future—nightmare, intertwined with everything we care about: lives and livelihoods, human rights, health, governance. It’s as much of an “abstract issue” as the hurricane tearing Jamaica and Cuba apart right now. Rachel Cleetus is senior policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. We hear from her about why acknowledging and addressing corporate and government failures doesn’t mean giving up on ourselves and our shared future. But it does require news media locate the fight—not just among dolphins and icebergs—but in the boardrooms of greedy people perversely trying to wring every last dime from our shared inheritance and future. Transcript: ‘The Trump Administration Needs to Be Isolated in Its Anti-Science Actions’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251031Cleetus.mp3   Beat the Press (10/27/25) Also on the show: Isn’t Donald Trump a mean, stupid person? OK, sure. Isn’t this whole presidency so silly? No, not at all. Corporate news media’s notion that time-to-time winking about how Trump is weird somehow amounts to meaningful resistance to the myriad harms of his administration is a monumental failure—from which we have to take lessons, not just about the White House, but about the press corps. We hear from Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, whose recent piece, “Trumponomics: The Economics of Crazy,” appears in his Beat the Press blog on their site CEPR.net. Transcript: ‘Trump Clearly Has No Idea What He’s Doing When It Comes to the Economy’   https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251031Baker.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251024.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   AP (via WTTW, 9/10/25) This week on CounterSpin: Some outlets report that the White House’s designation of people in boats in the Caribbean, and now in the Pacific, as “drug smugglers,” therefore “unlawful combatants,” therefore targets in the “war on terror,” therefore undeserving of due process, “raises legal questions.” That’s corporate mediaspeak for “We’re going to wait till the White House comes up with some language we can report as making some kinda sense, so we can pose it against everyone else who says, what the actual hell is going on here?” Even the resignation of the head of US Southern Command, which oversees US military operations in Latin America, didn’t move corporate reporters beyond scratching their heads over how this bombing campaign might be legal, rather than discussing what tools we have to respond to wildly illegal actions by government officials. We talk with Jeffrey Stein, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, about efforts for, minimally, transparency on these lethal actions that look to be expanding by the day. Transcript: ‘The Government’s Own Disclosures Demonstrate These Strikes Are Not Lawful’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251024Stein.mp3   Truthout (8/7/25) Also on the show: When it comes to airlines and other companies mining your personal data to suss out how much you can possibly pay so they can charge you precisely that and no less, media have a choice. They can write, like USA Today, about how “AI might make airline pricing more complex”—an explainer that explains that, in answer to how airlines price tickets, “a shrugging emoticon is appropriate,” and ends with, no joke, “trust your gut.” Or you can do what our guest is doing: ask why industries are talking about saving consumers money with AI surveillance pricing, while at the same time telling investors how they’re maximizing revenue by pushing consumers to their “pain point.” How does that square? And who’s standing up for consumers, since it doesn’t? We hear from reporter Katya Schwenk on that story. Transcript: ‘They Are Trying to Maximize the Amount of Money They Can Get Any Given Consumer to Pay’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251024Schwenk.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251017.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Drop Site (10/3/25) This week on CounterSpin: Trump and his enablers have a plan: to officially define anyone who opposes an agenda of white supremacy, imperialism, patriarchy—any dissenters—as “terrorists,” the “enemy within.” The question is no longer if that’s happening, but how we respond, and that response is enriched by understanding the history.  We’re in a fight for our right to speak up, and out—but it’s not the first time. We’ll learn from Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent, about the old in the new “counterterrorism” project. Transcript: ‘Decades of National Security Policy Have Gotten Us to Where We Are’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251017Gibbons.mp3   CBPP (9/29/25) Also on the show: The Department of Agriculture says they’re defunding the annual survey on food security, just as the largest-ever cuts to food assistance through SNAP hit families, and as food prices continue to rise. It doesn’t mean the predictable harms won’t happen, just that policymakers will have less information to use to respond to them. Is that the plan? We’ll hear about that from Cara Brumfield, vice president for housing and income security at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Transcript: ‘These Changes Are Reducing Our Power to Effect Positive Change for Families’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251017Brumfield.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251010.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Al Jazeera (10/7/25) This week on CounterSpin: In the immediate wake of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel in October 2023 that killed some 1,200 people, the Washington Post editorial board was warning that it was unacceptable to suggest that the attack “should be considered in context with previous actions by Israel”—those actions including decades of occupation, dispossession, deprivation, harassment and fatal violence. Even now, two years on, as NBC News’ “What to Know” feature includes the information that Israel’s actions, denoted as “in retaliation” for October 7, have killed more than 67,000 people in Gaza—with many more wounded and maimed—US corporate media still twist themselves in knots trying to say that, yes, something very wrong is happening in Gaza—but somehow trying to stop it is worse than enabling and prolonging it. They do this in part by saving respectful space for someone like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton to flatly declare there is “no famine in Gaza,” that “Palestine is a made-up fiction,” and that there is an “international media and political chorus…try[ing] to bully Israel into submission.” Academic and writer Gregory Shupak, author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, has been looking at the tactics major media deploy to suggest that we use something other than our own eyes and judgment and humanity to assess the situation, and how to act in the face of it. We hear from him this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘You Had US Media Carrying Out Incitement to Genocide, and Then Shifting to Genocide Denial’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251010Shupak.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at CBS‘s coverage of the Supreme Court’s Amy Coney Barrett. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251010Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250926.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   MediaJustice (9/9/25) This week on CounterSpin: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports new rules from St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer about building data centers in the city, basically calling on builders to address their impact: “Will they support artificial intelligence or cryptocurrency mining? How much energy and water will they consume? How many permanent jobs will they provide? How will they limit pollution and noise?” The questions might sound weird to people who don’t understand that something so vaguely named as a “data center” is actually a physical thing in real neighborhoods affecting real people. Mayor Spencer says, “We want to be open for business…. But we do want to be thoughtful in the regulation that we’re putting forward.” That’s a rule we could use reporters to follow, but it’s a safe bet that many people relying solely on the press don’t understand what’s involved materially, much less what’s at stake, with what the Post-Dispatch describes as “an industry that is at once driving development and prompting backlash across the country.” The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South, is a new report from the group MediaJustice. They keep an eye on developments in media and technology, and try to center conversations about the inequities around them in the voices of communities most harmed. We spoke with Jai Dulani from Media Justice, and with Vivek Bharathan from the No Desert Data Center Coalition in Tucson, Arizona. Transcript: ‘Media Need to Report on the Real Cost of Data Centers’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250926Bharanthan_Dulani.mp3   Also on the show: While media were seeing who to fire for their insufficient worship of a racist, a Fox host called for killing homeless people, said oopsie, and went right back to his job. News media are comfortable talking about killing unhoused people, in large part because they never talk with them as human beings, or about homelessness as something that could happen to anyone. We learned from Keith McHenry last summer; he’s an activist, author and artist, and the co-founder of Food Not Bombs. We’ll hear part of our conversation with him this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250926McHenry.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250919.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Exposed by CMD (9/9/25) This week on CounterSpin: The reason those of us not directly on the sharp end of the violence of ICE agents disappearing brown people off the streets know about it is because we see it. Because people—journalists, but also regular folks—are recording these actions and sharing them with those of the public who care to look. Witness testimony is the reason we are able to resist official testimony about people “attacking officers” or “resisting arrest.” And you can tell how much it matters by the efforts to shut it down. We’ll talk about making it a crime to record ICE being ICE with Matthew Cunningham-Cook, writer and researcher, working with the Center for Media and Democracy. Transcript: ‘Kristi Noem Is Actually Claiming Videotaping DHS Officers Is Violent’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250919Cunningham-Cook.mp3   Charlie Kirk Also on the show: You could spend a lot of energy trying to make sense of the notion that anyone criticizing Charlie Kirk is more of a threat to the country than Kirk himself. But the fact that quoting Kirk’s own words is enough to get you fired, get your professor to state that “we will hunt you down,” get your show cancelled, get your group sanctioned—tells you we are not in a good faith debate. And that the prominent news media aren’t here to help. Judging by the New York Times, the Trump who promotes the idea that Joe Biden was “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone, should be described as having “a penchant for sharing debunked or baseless theories online.” So why not offer the same respect given to his “ideas” about transgender mice to his “ideas” about the First Amendment? It comes down to whose ideas we get to hear, which in turn comes down to: Who gets to own the media outlets we look to? We’ll talk about where structure meets content with Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the group Free Press. Transcript: ‘The White House Is Shaking Down Media Owners to Get Them to Follow the Trump Agenda’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250919Karr.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250912.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Image of the boat released by Donald Trump on social media. This week on CounterSpin: The US ordered a lethal strike on a small boat in the southern Caribbean that, we’re told, carried Venezuelan drug cartel members on their way to poison this pristine country of ours. How do we know that? We don’t. Who were they? We don’t know. Does it matter? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? News media have basic questions to address on behalf of the US people: Can the Trump administration, or any administration, declare people guilty and treat them as criminals, absent the transparent legal processes we all understand as fundamental? Can they summarily kill people based on that declaration? And can they aim that illegal nightmare overwhelmingly at brown people and “enemy nations” without any principled interrogation on journalists’ part? We hear about the killing in the southern Caribbean, and its various contexts, from Alex Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Transcript: ‘Media Really Took at Face Value What Trump Said About This Boat and Its Occupants’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250912Main.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250905.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   New York Times (9/1/25) This week on CounterSpin: Multiple previous heads of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention wrote for the New York Times that “what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done to the CDC and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months—culminating in his decision to fire Susan Monarez as CDC director days ago—is unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.” Kennedy, they wrote, fired thousands of federal health workers, and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of US support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Sounds like speaking truth to power, facing fascist fantasy with fact, like…journalism. Except that the country’s so-called paper of record labeled it “opinion.” It’s only an opinion, the Times says, that it’s wrong that the leadership of our federal health agency is a guy without a medical degree who claims he can diagnose children he walks past at the airport. For a lot of folks, that’s A-OK! And they deserve to be heard! Corporate journalism is failing us at every turn, and the only upside is that every day they make it more obvious, and re-direct us to other sources. On RFK Jr., one of those sources is the group Defend Public Health. We’ll hear from a founding member, Elizabeth Jacobs, on this week’s show. Transcript: ‘Kennedy Is Not a Skeptic. He Is an Anti-Vaccination Enthusiast’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250905Jacobs.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of genocide and starvation. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250905Banter.mp3

  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