CounterSpin

  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people, including those most harmed, are doing, along with what’s being done to them, could help move debate off an outdated dime—onto the kind of work that stands a chance of helping us all.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

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 Israeli media than you can here, on many occasions. But I was struck by a line in that piece that said that statements from these rights groups are “adding fuel to a passionately fought international debate over whether the death and destruction there have crossed a moral red line.” So let’s just take a breath and acknowledge the idea that death and destruction can be ok…except up until some indeterminate point they cross a moral red line. I just found it such a weird construction.  And then it also doesn’t even say what happens once that line is crossed. It’s as though, for media, it’s all just shadows on the cave wall. It’s all just a story, and not a reality. AP: Yeah, I think one of the problems is that Israel, and those who support what Israel, have been very successful in framing this all as, well, there’s a legitimate goal here to destroy Hamas, that Hamas started this all on October 7, that it’s a terrorist organization, and it’s authoritarian, and it must be eradicated in the same way that many wars are justified, that the Vietnam War kept being justified in the pursuit of destroying the Vietnamese insurgency. So that’s all there, as a kind of “this is the legitimate goal, and all these things are awful. All these things are happening, and they’re awful. But the goal is still important.” And this sort of legitimizes what Israel is doing in Gaza. But by all accounts, the effort to destroy Hamas has been futile, the actual military gains that the Israelis have made are small or almost nonexistent, that for every fighter they kill, they recruit more. And there’s an obvious reason for that, when you really think about it, that if you see this Goliath army destroy everything in Palestinian society, Palestinians will eventually want to fight back. Whatever one might say about Hamas, all of this doesn’t make them less attractive to the people who want to fight what Israel is doing there. So there’s a framing that Israel is on this legitimate path to eradicate Hamas when, even by its own standards, it’s not doing that. So the only thing people really can see out of all this, they don’t see any real military gains, any light at the end of the tunnel–that, again, a phrase that US military officials used about fighting the war in Vietnam–that they don’t see a “light at the end of the tunnel” in terms of military perspective. All they see is this carnage on the civilian population. And so I think one reason why you’re seeing more and more people talk about this in the mainstream press is it’s harder to ignore that. JJ: I guess that might answer my question, because I think many people are wondering: Israel has restricted food into Palestinian lands for a long time now, but this obviously mass starvation, starvation on this grand scale, where it seems very clear what the intentionality is, this seems to be the thing that’s going to be a turning point for people.  And it goes back to what you just said isn’t the point, or shouldn’t it be, that Israel has the ability to starve Palestinians, rather than, “Hey, look, they’re actually doing it.” They have the tool, and that’s the problem in itself. And yet the conversation only seems to be shifting when people are literally looking at pictures of emaciated children. I don’t quite get why this is the moment for so many people. AP: Yeah, I mean, again, I think it’s a success of Israel’s control of the narrative that sometimes it’s really not well understood that the occupation is central to all this, that this isn’t a conflict in the same way Russia and Ukraine is a war; I mean, sure, one side is bigger than the other, but these are two flagged nations that are sovereign, fighting with militaries that are fighting each other in trenches. It’s not a civil war, in the sense that there’s an insurgency in one part of the country fighting the government, say in Syria, until the regime collapsed there. This is a country that completely controls every aspect of life of this Arab population, the Palestinian Arab population: how they can move, how they can receive food, how their economy is structured. There’s curfews, things like that. All of this has always been heavily controlled by Israeli occupation. In a sense, they’re under martial law in perpetuity. So I think sometimes when we read the media coverage of all this, it’s framed as a bit like, “Well, there’s a struggle between two sides, in which there’s a kind of balance,” and when in all these other cases of war that are going on in this world, there’s really very few other things like that in that sense that you just said, that Israel just has the ability to do this, and it always has. So therefore, the fact that it’s happening shouldn’t be a surprise. But, unfortunately, it is. And I think that speaks to the power of the narrative and the propaganda. JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally, what you think better coverage, and we know there is good reporting out there, often in independent media, of course, but what would be the elements of what better looking coverage, if journalists–we know that mainstream journalists are going to say, N

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 causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats,” which is another thing.  I know it’s a lot. But it seems like there are some undergirding ideas for this measure that are simply without foundation. SK: That’s absolutely correct. The idea that homelessness is caused by individual failures or individual conditions is just absolutely false. We know that we have an affordable housing crisis in this country, and there are, in addition to the nearly 1 million people who are homeless on any given night, there are millions more Americans who are spending over half of their income on rent.  We can’t close our eyes and pretend that this is an issue that’s just about an individual’s inability to get treatment for themselves. We have a structural problem here that we need to address, and without addressing the underlying housing crisis, we are not going to solve homelessness. JJ: Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi is no doubt speaking for many in saying, “Don’t law-abiding citizens have a right to live without Boston Globe (7/30/25) stepping over needles or encountering violence in front of their homes?” in an op-ed that is headlined, “Involuntary Commitment Should Be on the Table in the Opioid Crisis.”  Alright, I have thoughts. Not for nothing, but the words “Purdue” or “Sackler” appear nowhere in the piece. Still, it’s playing on this idea of public safety, and don’t we all deserve to feel safe? There’s something powerful at work in that narrative. SK: Yeah. Look, I agree that we all deserve to feel safe, and that includes us all having a safe place to sleep. That includes us having a safe place where we can get treatment that’s appropriate for us. The pitting against each other of people who lack housing and people who have housing is so insidious and counterproductive. The goal is not to just have there never be enough housing, affordable housing, for people to be able to live inside, and to tolerate that. No, of course not. The idea is for everyone to have access to safe, affordable housing, and to services that allow them to be healthy, without it being something that’s pushing them into institutions or criminalizing them. JJ: Yeah, we talk about ending homelessness, but if that’s genuinely your goal, then criminalizing unhoused people just doesn’t work. So I think we just have to accept the idea that some of the people who talk about ending homelessness, that’s not their goal. It has to do with something else, and we need to peel that apart, to understand the difference between punitive responses and responses that actually have been shown to be effective, if ending homelessness, or if helping folks with mental health conditions, if that is genuinely your goal. SK: Yeah, I think that’s accurate. We know that criminalizing homelessness only perpetuates it, and it’s logical, if you think about it, if you have someone who doesn’t have housing, who’s trying to get into housing, and then you give them a criminal record, that’s only going to make it harder to get housing. So it’s really counterproductive.  But I think what is attractive about it to politicians is that it’s a quick way to push people out of sight. It isn’t something that’s going to take a long-term investment, which is what we need right now. It’s something that you’re going to be able to say to your constituents at the next election, “See, look at how clean our streets are.” And that’s because you’ve pushed people into institutions, oftentimes while violating their rights. So, yes, maybe someone is temporarily pushed out of sight, and you don’t have to confront the massive problems we have as a society with poverty and inequality, but that’s not a solution. JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, what forward-looking media reporting would look like? What would it include that is maybe not included now? What might they toss out that they’ve been entertaining? What would you look for from journalists on this set of issues? SK: I think it’s really important to understand the humanity of individuals who find themselves living on the street, and to show that this is not about needles, this is about human beings, and the devastating effects that a lot of these punitive policies can have on these human beings, that sets them back, that hurts all of us. I think it’s so important to lift that up.  I think in terms of this executive order, I also think there’s a need to encourage states and local governments not to feed in, and not to comply with the tenor of this executive order, and to do what they can to stay the course, or start on the course, of adopting policies that are actually effective: affordable housing, housing first, voluntary accessible services. There’s room for courage here, and I think states and local governments have the opportunity to take it. JJ: All right, then. We’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Scout Katovich from the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality. Thank you so much, Scout Katovich, for joining us this week on CounterSpin. SK: Thank you.

  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