Episodes

A New York Times article (1/12/22) assailed China for following a zero Covid policy, “no matter the human costs”—without ever mentioning the human costs of not containing the coronavirus. The New York Times report (1/12/22) on the response to an outbreak of Covid-19 in the Chinese city of Xi’an featured over-the-top hand-wringing about “authoritarianism” and a complete erasure of the dangers of the coronavirus. Had this article been about Covid-19 response in Europe or the United States, one cou...

Prisoners of Guantánamo (photo: Shane T. McCoy/US Navy) This week on CounterSpin: As we pass the grim milestone of 20 years of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, even Michael Lehnert, the Marine general who set the camp up, calls for it to close, says it shouldn’t have opened, that it’s an affront to US values. And yet here we are. The number of Muslim men and boys in Guantánamo has shrunk from some 800 to 39—that’s meaningful. But when you read an offhand reference to those men as “a...

(Image: Free Press) This week on CounterSpin: At FAIR, we say you can change the channel all you want, but you can’t turn on what isn’t there. The loss of an information source—a particular place for debate, for conversation, on issues relevant to you—is incalculable, but very real. We talked about the loss of local journalism, and why we can still be hopeful, with Craig Aaron of the group Free Press. Transcript: ‘The Commercial System Isn’t Providing the Local News We Need’ https://media.blubr...

Janine Jackson interviewed ID’s Suyapa Portillo Villeda about the Honduran election for the December 24, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211224Portillo.mp3 University of Texas Press (2022) Janine Jackson: Lots of excitement right now around Chile, where the election of Gabriel Boric indicates what the Wall Street Journal laments as a “hard left turn” for the country. Boric, who wi...

New York Times (10/8/21): “The Battle at Lake Changjin was made with government support and guidance, underscoring the lengths the authorities will go to shape popular culture.” To coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Communist Party, the powerful Chinese Central Propaganda Department commissioned a blockbuster film that depicts a US defeat in the Korean War. Under fire from US bombs, the heroic People’s Army fights a brutal ground battle and emerges victorious. Bra...

This week on CounterSpin: the best of CounterSpin for 2021. We call it the “best of,” but this annual round-up is just a reflection of the kinds of conversations we hope have offered a voice or context or information that might help you interpret the news you read. We’re thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They help us see the world more clearly and see the role we can play in changing it. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard While it came in the m...

AP (11/30/21) This week on CounterSpin: When Xiomara Castro won a historic victory in Honduras last month—the country’s first woman president, winning with the most votes in history, in a decisive rebuke to the many-years dominant National Party—Associated Press suggested that while that might “present opportunities” for the US, “there will be some painful history to overcome, primarily the US government’s initial sluggishness in calling the ouster of Castro’s husband Manuel Zelaya in 2009 what ...

Truthout (11/10/21) This week on CounterSpin: Even if we don’t see a written-out master plan, the banning of books, the attacks on teaching real US history, the efforts to push out professors with views that transgress official US policy…. In their myriad forms, these tell us that it’s important to powerful people to restrict what ideas people can access. It’s the land of the free and home of the brave, except if you want to know what’s happened and happens here, or to tell people about it. It a...

Harvard Institute of Politics (12/1/21) This week on CounterSpin: Research from Harvard’s Institute of Politics finds young people worried about the state of US democracy and even the possibility of civil war. Yet US corporate journalists seem to feel nothing truly new is needed beyond the same old counsel: The “system” basically works, the US leads the world in rights and liberties, and “centrism” between the two dominant political parties is the wisest course, regardless of the content of thei...

Washington Post (10/31/21) This week on CounterSpin, two archival interviews: As the year nears its end, it’s hard not to think back to how it started—with the violent assault on the Capitol by a crowd intent on preventing the declaration of Joe Biden as president. We spoke with organizer and strategist Dorothee Benz the next day about the import of the events of January 6. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211203Benz.mp3 Transcript: ‘This Violent...

Guardian (11/10/21) This week on CounterSpin: What do we want? Multiracial democracy. When do we want it? Now. What stands in the way? White supremacy that has disregarded, derailed and violently defied that democracy at multiple turns. Those anguished over the Rittenhouse acquittal, depressed by racist police brutality, unnerved by the failure to take seriously the January 6 insurrection, and worried about systemic predations on voting rights are sometimes led to say: “This isn’t America!” If ...

“Oh please, dear? For your information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint,” a patriotic Walter Sobchak tells a diner waitress after she implores him to keep his voice down in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski. So iconic is this pop culture reference to American jurisprudence that it was actually cited by a Texas judge in a First Amendment case (Business Insider, 9/5/14). John Goodman as Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski: “Oh please, dear? For your information, the Supreme Cour...

The Wall Street Journal (2/3/21) explains inflation. This week on CounterSpin: If you read a paper, you know that inflation is a dire, important thing right now, a problem for the Biden administration, for economic policymakers, and for…regular folks who want to buy milk? You don’t need to understand it, elite media seem to say, but you do need to be mad about it, and direct blame for it toward…yourself? Jon Schwarz writes about elite media’s confusing and conflicting instructions around inflati...

Janine Jackson interviewed the Black Alliance for Just Immigration’s Nekessa Opoti about Haitian refugees for the November 5, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211105Opoti.mp3 New York Times (9/21/21) Janine Jackson: People around the world were appalled to see pictures of US Border Patrol officers on horseback wielding reins like whips in the effort to corral and capture Haitian re...

New York Times (11/9/21) This week on CounterSpin: We’ve talked on this show about how drugs and medicines are researched and developed by the government (on the public dime, if you will), and then pharmaceutical companies get patents on them and sell them back to the public at literally life-altering, or life-ending, prices. If you think, “But surely everything is different in a pandemic that’s killed 800,000 people in this country, one of every 400 people, and more than 5 million worldwide”—sa...

(cc photo: Doug Peters/British government) This week on CounterSpin: The impacts of climate disruption are not theoretical; they are happening. Those already worst off are facing the worst of it, and those who profit from it continue to profit. There are finer points, but that’s reality. And it’s fair to measure journalism not by its cleverness, or by demonstrated balance between the voices of various power players—because when it comes to climate change, power players are the problem—but by the...

(cc photo: Adam Schultz / Biden for President) This week on CounterSpin: An early October survey showed that while 60% of those polled knew that the Build Back Better legislative package was “$3.5 trillion,” only 10% had any sense of what was in it. That is many things, but preeminently a failure of news media—the demonstrably harmful effect of months of reporting that never failed to note the presumed “costs” of a plan to address devastating national crises of healthcare, climate and infrastruc...

USA Today‘s front-page obituary for Colin Powell (10/19/21) called him “a Warrior, Diplomat and ‘Great American.” Accompanying stories called him “A Man Trusted by Presidents and the Public Alike,” and “Always Willing to Stand Against Racism.” The only hint of criticism was a story that said that “Iraq Tarnished [His] Storied Career.” Former Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Colin Powell received virtually wall-to-wall adulation in corporate media coverage of his death last week...

The Washington Post (8/10/21) editorializes that “experts are more certain than ever that dire consequences are coming” from climate change—but still allows its pundits to argue for inaction on the basis of uncertainty. Upon the release of the latest dire report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (8/9/21), the Washington Post (8/10/21) published a strongly worded editorial under the headline, “Climate Doubters Lose One of Their Last Remaining Arguments.” In it, the editorial ...

Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis about AT&T and OAN for the October 15, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin211015Lewis.mp3 Reuters (10/6/21) Janine Jackson: Corporate owners tend to be conservative, we know. We know they support causes and projects, including media outlets, that further their goals. CBS and Viacom head Sumner Redstone told Time magazine, back in ...

Steven Donziger (right) in Ecuador. This week on CounterSpin: When Steven Donziger and other attorneys sued Chevron for polluting the soil and water in Lago Agrio in Ecuador, Chevron moved to have the case held in Ecuador, where they don’t have jury trials. When that court ruled against them, they sued against the lawyers that won the verdict, and accused one, Steven Donziger, of corruption, including bribing the judge. When the judge later recanted his testimony, that was somehow not important,...

Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen (9/30/21) says that Sen. Joe Manchin “correctly reads public opinion.” That’s more than you can say for Henry Olsen. Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen (9/30/21) lauded Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package being considered by Congress, because Manchin “correctly reads public opinion.” That opinion, Olsen asserted, does not support the “radical change” that the reconciliation package, known as the Build Back Better bil...

OAN logo This week on CounterSpin: “If you have 12 Americans being fed a diet of untruth, that’s 12 too many.” So says John Watson, an American University journalism professor specializing in ethics and media law. He’s talking about OAN, or One America News Network, and its audience, which has been told, among other things, that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election and that chemical cocktails are a better response to Covid-19 than government-authorized vaccines. We’ll talk about how we got ...

(image via BillMoyers.com) This week on CounterSpin: The thing about the US Postal Service: Low-income people get the same service as the rich; rural people get their prescriptions and paychecks and ballots in the same timeframe as those in big cities. The idea has always been that postal service is a public good, not to be mined for profit, and not tiered to give the wealthy yet another leg up. USPS is the second-largest employer in the country, traditionally offering opportunities for people o...