KPFA - CounterSpin

Many people, including “liberals,” have accepted that there is no such thing as hypocrisy when it comes to US actions in other countries. What we call “universal” principles just apply differently to different people! And “we’re good, they’re bad” is a legitimate overarching idea for foreign policy—that thinking people must accept and internalize and propagate. The midterm elections, and all the years of work leading up to them—because this wasn’t a flash in the pan—tell us that many people are thinking past simplistic headlines, and are thinking about the human beings living in the places on the map we’re being told it’s OK to blow apart. We’ll talk about Iran with Sina Toossi, senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy.   CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin – Sina Toossi on Iran and the Midterms appeared first on KPFA.

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin – November 1, 2026 appeared first on KPFA.

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin – Adam Johnson on How to Sell a Genocide appeared first on KPFA.

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

This week on CounterSpin: When Fortune magazine is telling you “corporations are raking in cash, but American workers are reaping less and less of the rewards,” something is afoot. The not-notoriously capitalist-critical magazine reported recently on the measurable fact that working people in this country are taking home the smallest percentage of economic output since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it in 1947. And they didn’t try to separate that from the fact that, at the same time, corporate profits have, in their word, “exploded.” Simple acknowledgement is welcome, but how different would public conversation be if we always understood that the corporations corporate media lionize are getting to those wonderful profits by abjectly exploiting their employees—and those they won’t acknowledge as employees? Such that those workers still need government assistance to stay alive? And then the corporations attack government assistance? Can we talk about how this isn’t a sustainable model for a humane society? Terri Gerstein is a longtime labor watcher. She’s director of the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative, at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. We hear from her this week on the show.   CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin – Terri Gerstein on Gig Workers’ Rights appeared first on KPFA.