Episodes
Dec. 19, 2025
Derek Seidman on Starbucks Strike, Mitch Jones on AI vs. Environment
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 co...
Dec. 12, 2025
Judd Legum and Adam Johnson on Gambling on the News
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 ...
Dec. 5, 2025
Alex Main on Honduran Election
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 b...
Nov. 28, 2025
Jean Su on Challenging COP30 Narratives
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 f...
Nov. 21, 2025
Crystal FitzSimons on SNAP and Public Understanding
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 receiv...
Nov. 14, 2025
Gene Slater (2022), Richard Rothstein (2015) and George Lipsitz (2024) on Housing and Media
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 extend...
Nov. 7, 2025
Madiba Dennie on Voting Rights Act in Danger
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...
Oct. 31, 2025
Rachel Cleetus on Climate Culpability, Dean Baker on Trumponomics
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, huma...
Oct. 24, 2025
Jeffrey Stein on Trump’s Boat Attacks, Katya Schwenk on AI Surveillance Pricing
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 med...
Oct. 17, 2025
Chip Gibbons on Trump’s Blueprint to Crush the Left, Cara Brumfield on Erasing Federal Data
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 ...
Oct. 10, 2025
NYT Sidelines LGBTQ Youth Again in Conversion Therapy Case
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in Chiles v. Salazar, a challenge on free speech grounds to Colorado’s ban on LGBTQ “conversion therapy” for children under 18. Kaley Chiles is a Colorado therapist and evangelical Christian who argues the state’s 2019 law that bans this discredited and dangerous treatment, which seeks to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, is a violation of her First Amendment rights. The other side of the case is the state of Colorado, rep...
Oct. 10, 2025
Gregory Shupak on Gaza Genocide Denial
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 decad...
Sept. 26, 2025
Jai Dulani and Vivek Bharathan on Data Center Opposition, Keith McHenry (2024) on Homeless Policy
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...
Sept. 19, 2025
Matthew Cunningham-Cook on Criminalizing Witness, Tim Karr on Media Compliance
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 lo...
Sept. 12, 2025
Alex Main on Venezuelan Boat Assault
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?...
Sept. 5, 2025
Elizabeth Jacobs on RFK Jr. and Public Health
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 ...
Aug. 29, 2025
Cathy Cowan Becker on Insurance and Climate Disasters, Aviva Chomsky (2016) on Workers’ Voices
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 uneq...
Aug. 22, 2025
Joseph Torres on the FCC and Structural Racism
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 insti...
Aug. 15, 2025
Ari Berman on Voting Rights Erasure
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 nev...
Aug. 8, 2025
Raeghn Draper on Tipped Workers, Pete Tucker on DC Stadium
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 telli...
Aug. 7, 2025
‘The Fact That It’s Happening Shouldn’t Be a Surprise’: CounterSpin interview with Ari Paul on genocide in Gaza
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.” Fa...
Aug. 7, 2025
‘Criminalizing Homelessness Only Perpetuates It’: CounterSpin interview with Scout Katovich on criminalizing poverty
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 h...
Aug. 1, 2025
Ari Paul on Genocide in Gaza, Scout Katovich on Criminalizing Poverty
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 i...
July 25, 2025
Thom Hartmann on Epstein & MAGA, Han Shan (2009) on Ken Saro-Wiwa
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 m...