Episodes

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250207.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). (CC photo: Ted Eytan) This week on CounterSpin: We know that once corporate news label something “controversial,” we’re in for reporting with a static “some say/others differ” frame—even if one “side” of the “controversy” is a relatively small group of people who don’t believe in science or human rights or democracy. So as the Trump White House...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250131.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Tech billionaires at Trump’s second inauguration: Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and X‘s Elon Musk (image: C-SPAN) This week on CounterSpin: You may remember the testimony: former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz pouting to a Senate hearing on the company’s union-busting in which he was referred to as a billionaire that using that “mon...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250124.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Detention Watch Network This week on CounterSpin: Those with a beating heart can see the horror of Trump’s plans to deputize wannabe vigilantes to denounce community members they suspect “don’t belong here,” to send ICE into schools and churches to round folks up—police records or no—and ship them to detention centers, to ride roughshod over ti...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250117.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). New York Times (1/9/25) This week on CounterSpin: While the New York Times rolls out claptrap about how both “the left and the right” have ideas about causes behind the devastating Los Angeles wildfires—the right blame DEI hires, while the left blame climate change—many people have moved beyond that sort of stultifying nonsense to work that dir...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250110.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). New York Times (12/17/24) This week on CounterSpin: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s December 17 piece, headlined “How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve US-China Relations,” contained some choice Friedmanisms, like: “More Americans might get a better feel for what is going on there if they simply went and ordered room service at t...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250103.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Sonali Kolhatkar and Laura Flanders on Laura Flanders and Friends (10/20/23) This week on CounterSpin: Among many other things, 2024 was a series of reminders that corporate news media, tasked primarily with enriching the rich and shoring up entrenched institutions, will not, today or ever, do the liberatory, illuminating work of independent jou...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241227.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). CounterSpin host Janine Jackson CounterSpin is your weekly look behind the headlines of the mainstream news. This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations from the past year that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us—in part by showing how elite media are clouding them. It’s not to say Big Media a...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241220.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Free Press (12/6/24) This week on CounterSpin: Writing for a DC court of appeals, Douglas Ginsburg said yes, banning the wildly popular platform TikTok does raise concerns about First Amendment freedoms; but it’s still good, because in pushing for the ban, the US government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.”...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241213.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). New York Times (12/5/24) This week on CounterSpin: The New York Times says that Amnesty International recently became “the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza.” That makes sense if you ignore the other human rights groups and international bodies that have said Israel’s actions i...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241206.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Progressive International (11/25/22) This week on CounterSpin: Few corporations have changed the US business and consumer model more than Amazon. So when that corporate behemoth buys one of the country’s national newspapers—it’s a conflict writ large as can or should be. But things as they are, reporting on Amazon has in general looked more lik...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241129.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Intercept (11/12/24) This week on CounterSpin: It wasn’t the horrific abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, but the pictures of it, that forced public and official acknowledgement. The Defense Department vehemently resisted the pictures’ release, with good reason. Yet when, after the initial round, Australian TV put out new images, Was...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241122.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Lever (10/24/24) This week on CounterSpin: Passed by a whisker in Missouri on November 5, legal sports gambling is the apple of the eye of many corporate and private state actors—but how does it affect states, communities, people? Our guest wrote in-depth on the question ahead of the election. Journalist Amos Barshad is senior enterprise report...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241115.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Fascists march in Charlottesville, 2017 (cc photo: Tony Crider) This week on CounterSpin: We revisit the conversation we had in August 2017 in the wake of the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Writer and podcaster Adam Johnson had thoughts about the way so-called “mainstream” news media responded to a straight-up celebration o...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241108.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). This week on CounterSpin: We talk about what just happened, and corporate media’s role in it, with Julie Hollar, senior analyst at the media watch group FAIR, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas. Transcript: ‘MAGA Republicans and Corporate Media Share a Strategy: Fear Sells’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/Cou...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241101.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). ProPublica (10/22/24) This week on CounterSpin: Reading the news today, you might not believe it, but there was a time, not long ago, in which it was acceptable to say out loud that immigration is a boon to this country, and immigrants should be welcomed and supported. Now, news media start with the premise of immigration itself as a “crisis,” ...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241025.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Intercept (10/17/24) This week on CounterSpin: Dropped by her law firm—or, excuse me, resigning from her law firm—after being exposed as an advisor on the post–2020 election call where Donald Trump told Georgia officials to “find” him some votes, Cleta Mitchell has leaned in on the brand of “election integrity.” Platformed on right-wing talk ra...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241018.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Gaza First Amendment Alert (10/16/24) The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases. In Palest...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241011.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). UC Press (2024) This week on CounterSpin: For many people and for media, the idea of “racial discrimination in housing” invokes an image of individual landlords refusing to rent or sell homes to Black and brown people. But that understanding is so incomplete as to be harmful. A new book doesn’t just illuminate the thicket of effects of systemi...

At midnight on October 1, over 45,000 port workers across the Eastern US began a strike that was to last for three days. This labor action was only the latest in a series of high-profile confrontations between workers and bosses in North America, but corporate media never seem to get better at reporting on such disputes. In this particular case, the workers’ main demands were pay increases and assurances that automation will not replace them. But strikes in general have one straightforward aim:...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241004.mp3 Download this episode Newsweek (9/27/24) This week on CounterSpin: “How Hurricane Helene Could Impact Florida’s Home Insurance Crisis” was a recent Newsweek headline, on a story with a source saying smaller insurers were “especially in danger.” A layperson might wonder why events we pay insurance for should present a crisis for the industry we pay it to. The unceasing effects of climate disruption will o...

Ken Klippenstein, an independent reporter operating on Substack and an investigative alum of the Intercept, announced (Substack, 9/26/24) that he had been kicked off Twitter (now rebranded as X). His crime, he explained, stemmed from posting the 271-page official dossier of Republican vice presidential candidate’s J.D. Vance’s campaign vulnerabilities; the US government alleges that the information was leaked through Iranian hacking. In other words, the dossier is a part of the “foreign meddling...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240927.mp3 Al Jazeera (9/20/24) This week on CounterSpin: On September 17, thousands of handheld pagers exploded simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria. The next day, it was hundreds of walkie-talkies—part of an Israeli attack, intended for Hezbollah, that Israel’s defense minister called “the start of a new phase in the war.” Media dutifully reported the emerging toll of dead and wounded, including many civilians...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240920.mp3 The Brainwashing of My Dad (2016) This week on CounterSpin: Springfield, Ohio, schools are facing bomb threats because some people believe that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating dogs and cats. According to candidates for the country’s highest offices, and the KKK flyers showing up around town, this means that these legal immigrants should be pushed out of the country—or, no doubt, in the minds o...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240913.mp3 New York Times (9/10/24) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate US news media continue to report things like Israel’s recent strike on the Gaza Strip that killed at least 19 people in an area designated a “refuge” for Palestinians, and to include warnings of a possible wider war in the region—but there’s little sense of urgency, of something horrible happening that US citizens could have a role in preventin...