Episodes

Guardian (10/20/22) This week on CounterSpin: This midterm is a big-picture election. It’s not just about the laws and policies and priorities governing our lives, not merely about whether we can control our own bodies or the environment has a future, the possibility of racial justice, or whether you can make rent with a full-time job. It’s about all of that, plus how we’re positioned to fight for the system that’s supposed to give each of us a say in those decisions. OK, but here are the elite...

Janine Jackson interviewed San Francisco State University’s John Logan about Amazon and Starbucks organizing for the October 7, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221007Logan.mp3 Janine Jackson: Between well-paid people telling you that the solution to high prices is unemployment, and the news of the latest weather catastrophe separated by several pages from the news about how fossil...

This week on CounterSpin: Media watchers may know that Katie Halper was fired from her job at Hill TV because she did a thing you can’t do in elite US news media, which is make a statement critical of the state of Israel. Halper described Israel as an apartheid state—a designation supported by the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, as well as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Classroom memorial for Rayyan Suleiman (Middle East Eye, 10/3/22; photo: Shatha Hammad). Her firing, along...

This week on CounterSpin: Amazon, the seemingly insatiable megacorporation, still refuses to acknowledge the union at its Staten Island facility known as JFK8, even as the National Labor Relations Board has rebuffed its attempt to overturn that union victory. Now Amazon has suspended dozens of JFK8 workers who refused to go to work after a fire that left the air smelling of chemicals and many feeling unsafe; 10 of those suspended were union workers. Jacobin (9/28/22) The reality that workers ar...

(New York, 9/22/22) This week on CounterSpin: As Puerto Rico struggles under another “natural” disaster, we’re seeing some recognition of what’s unnatural about the conditions the island faces, that determine its ability to protect its people. We’re even getting some critical mumblings about “finance bros”—people from the States who go to the island to exploit tax laws designed to reward them wildly. New York magazine described “a wave of mostly white mainlanders” that “has moved to Puerto Rico,...

Newspaper ad from the Freedom on the Move database. This week on CounterSpin: If US news media never used the terms “wake-up call” or “racial reckoning” again, with regard to the latest instance of institutional white supremacy brought to light, that would be fine. Far better would be for them to do the work of not just acknowledging that US news media have supported and inflicted racist harms throughout this country’s history, but shedding critical light on the hows and whys of those harms—and ...

CNN‘s John Miller This week on CounterSpin: Journalist-turned-cop-turned-journalist-turned-cop-turned-journalist John Miller makes a blur of the revolving door. For years, he’s been back and forth between the New York Police Department (and the FBI) and news media like ABC. And now he’s the new hire at CNN. Don’t miss the message: For corporate media, being a paid flack for the police in no way disqualifies you to offer what viewers will be assured is a dry-eyed analysis of law enforcement patte...

In its latest move to the right, CNN recently hired former NYPD flack John Miller as its “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst.” As Josmar Trujillo observed more than five years ago (FAIR.org, 6/21/17), Miller “has spun the revolving door between law enforcement and media like perhaps no one else,” moving back and forth between jobs at the NYPD, FBI, ABC and CBS. Just last year, while working for the NYPD, Miller falsely testified that there was “no evidence” the department had spied ...

Fox News (7/19/22) This week on CounterSpin: In May of this year, a white supremacist killed ten people in Buffalo, New York. He made clear that he wanted to kill Black people, because he believes there is a plot, run by Jews, to “replace” white people with Black and brown people. News media had an opportunity then to deeply interrogate the obvious spurs for the horrific act, including of course the media outlets and pundits and politicians who repeatedly invoke this white replacement idea, but ...

From the film Powerlands. This week on CounterSpin: It is meaningful that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has formally apologized to Sacheen Littlefeather, the Apache and Yaqui actress and activist who in 1973 refused the best actor award on behalf of her friend Marlon Brando, because of Hollywood’s history of derogatory depiction of Native Americans. Some cheered, but a lot of the audience booed, some complete with “tomahawk chops,” and John Wayne evidently had to be physically ...

Israeli soldiers raiding the offices of Defense for Children International/Palestine. This week on CounterSpin: Corporate news media have a particularly frozen narrative on Palestine and Israel. You could recite it: Palestinians act violently; Israel responds in self defense. There are “clashes” of implicitly equally empowered forces. Palestinians have squandered their opportunities for autonomy because they overreach. And, finally: if you have any problem with the actions of the state of Israel...

In These Times (8/2/22) This week on CounterSpin: The Biden administration says it’s making progress toward its goal to slow migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador by addressing the causes of that migration. The White House “Call to Action” foregrounds private sector “investments” as key to creating economic opportunity and to rooting out corruption in the region. And companies like Microsoft and PepsiCo have stepped up to do…well, what exactly? And how does this differ from the supp...

CT Insider (7/14/22) This week on CounterSpin: A Texas court has told Alex Jones to pay some $49 million dollars in damages for his perverse, accusatory talk about the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre being a “big hoax”—the jury evidently not believing Jones’ tale that he was suffering a weird and weirdly profitable “psychosis” when he told his followers that no one died at Sandy Hook because none of the victims ever existed, nor were they evidently moved by his subsequent claim that he did...

This week on CounterSpin: The crises we face right now in the US—a nominally democratic political process that’s strangled by white supremacist values, a corporate profiteering system that mindlessly overrides human needs to treat the environment as just another “input”—are terrible, but not, precisely, new. People have fought against these ideas in various forms before; and some strategies have been useful, others less so. The front line for us now is the fact that we have powerful actors who d...

NBC Nightly News (6/10/22) This week on CounterSpin: In what is being reported as an “abrupt” or “surprise” development, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, whose shtick relies heavily on legislative roadblocking, has agreed to sign on to a package that includes some $369 billion for “climate and energy proposals.” The New York Times reports that the deal represents “the most ambitious climate action ever taken by Congress”—a statement that cries out for context. The package is hundreds of pages long...

Nora Benavidez This week on CounterSpin: The internet has changed the way we communicate, access information and even organize, which means concerns about digital privacy are concerns about privacy, period. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, allowing for the criminalization of abortion, our ability to safely access information and health care online is in danger. How are tech companies responding? We’ll hear from civil rights attorney Nora Benavidez, senior counsel an...

This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court’s reversal on abortion rights is so actually and potentially devastating that it’s hard to know where to look. It’s worth tracing things back—Katherine Stewart in the Guardian, among others, walks us through how, at a time when most Protestant Republicans, including the Southern Baptist Convention, hailed the liberalization of abortion law represented by Roe, Christian nationalists, motivated by a desire to protect school segregation and tax exemptions...

Janine Jackson revisited CounterSpin‘s July 2005 interview with Adele Stan and Elliot Mincberg about John Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court for the July 8, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://fair.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/CounterSpin220708StanMincberg.mp3 Politico (6/25/22) lamented that Roberts’ “middle of the road” effort to allow states to ban abortions after 15 weeks failed to sway his ultra-conservative colleagues. Janine Jackson: “The Lo...

From the film’s website. WNET, the PBS station distributing the 2021 documentary feature Amen-Amen-Amen: A Story of Our Times, called it the story of the first Jewish community formed in a Muslim country in centuries (in Dubai), and a historic gift of a Torah scroll dedicated to the memory of an Arab-Muslim ruler, the late Sheikh Zayed, the founding father of the United Arab Emirates. The Boston Globe featured Amen-Amen-Amen in its documentary events program, GlobeDocs. The Globe hosted filmma...

John Roberts This week on CounterSpin: When disastrous things happen, like the US invasion of Iraq or the Supreme Court dismissal of basic human rights, the undercurrent of a lot of news media is: Why didn’t we see this coming? How could we all have gotten it wrong? It’s—to use a maybe overused term—gaslighting, in which elite news media spin a tale that everyone, all of some presumed “us,” were blindsided by: in this case, a John Roberts–led Supreme Court gutting multiple legally and societally...

Coach Joseph Kennedy’s “private, personal prayer” (photo: Sotomayor dissent). This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion on Kennedy v. Bremerton that “the Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike.” The case was about whether there was a problem with a Washington state assistant football coach leading prayers—Christian prayers, lest yo...

(cc photo: Joe Flood) This week on CounterSpin: Elite news media are saying that Biden has to go to Saudi Arabia in July despite his pledges to make the country a “pariah” for abuses including the grisly murder of a Washington Post contributor, because…stability? Shaking hands with Mohammed bin Salman makes sense, even in the context of denying Cuba and Venezuela participation in the Americas Summit out of purported concerns about their human rights records, because…gas prices? It’s hard to pars...

Vincent Chin (1955-1982) This week on CounterSpin: The New York Times didn’t address the brutal 1982 murder of Chinese-American Vincent Chin until 1983, in response to ongoing protest centered in Detroit’s Asian-American community, about the killing and the lack of justice—at which point the paper ran a story with a lead claiming that when “two men were quickly charged and prosecuted…the incident faded from many memories.” One, the process was hardly that tidy. And two, whose memories, exactly? ...

AP (6/2/22) reported that “the government seems intent on wiping the landscape clean of any organization it does not control.” President Daniel Ortega’s government in Nicaragua is “laying waste to civil society,” according to the Associated Press (6/2/22). The Guardian (6/2/22) called it a “sweeping purge of civil society,” while for the New York Times (2/14/22), Nicaragua is “inching toward dictatorship.” According to the Washington Post‘s Spanish edition (5/19/22), the country is already “a di...