Episodes

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240906.mp3 CEPR (8/26/24) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate economic news can be so abstract that it’s disinforming even when it’s true. The big idea is that there’s something called “the US economy” that can be doing well or poorly, which obscures the reality that we are differently situated, and good news for the stock market, say, may mean nothing, or worse, for me. A people-centered press corps would spell ou...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240830.mp3 Lever (8/26/24) This week on CounterSpin: The country’s largest and second-largest grocery store chains want to merge and, surprising no one, they claim that giving them that tremendous market power will lead to lower prices, better quality food and better conditions for workers. The FTC says, hold on a second, how does that square with on-the-record statements that Kroger is currently raising the prices...

The New York Times (8/19/24) insinuated that Phil Donahue attributed to politics a cancellation that was really caused by low ratings. If I were teaching a class called “How to Slime People in a Subtle, Scuzzy Way in the New York Times,” this paragraph from the Times‘ obituary (8/19/24) of Phil Donahue—written by Clyde Haberman, Maggie’s father—would be part of the curriculum: In 2002, Mr. Donahue tried a comeback with a nightly talk show on MSNBC. Barely six months in, the program was canceled...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240823.mp3 This week on CounterSpin: One of many things wrong with corporate news media is the way they hammer home the idea that the current system is the only system. If you don’t see yourself and your interests reflected in either of the two dominant parties, the problem is you. Part of the value of independent media is that the people they listen to give us new questions to ask. For example: How do we acknowled...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240816.mp3 ExxonKnews (6/17/24) This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption is outpacing many scientists’ understanding of it, and it’s undeniably driving many harms we are facing: extreme heat, extreme cold, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes. News media are giving up pretending that these extreme weather events are just weird, and not provably driven by the continued use of fossil fuels. But fossil fuel compan...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240809.mp3 This week on CounterSpin: You don’t hear the phrase “free market capitalism” so much anymore, but the idea still tacitly undergirds much of what you do hear about why products and services are the way they are. We all know about corruption and cronyism, but we still accept that the company that “wins,” that “corners the market,” does so because people simply prefer what they sell. The anti-monopoly rulin...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240802.mp3 This week on CounterSpin: Dog whistles are supposed to be silent except for those they’re intended to reach. But as listeners know, the right wing has gotten much more overt and loud and yes, weird, about their intention to defeat the prospect of multiracial democracy. We unpack the latest weaponized trope—the “DEI hire”—with anti-racism educator and author Tim Wise. Transcript: ‘DEI Has Become the New ...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240726.mp3 Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2024) This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump said, 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 easier, Trump said, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Why wouldn’t news media label that stance anti-democratic, an...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240719.mp3 Electronic Intifada (7/15/24) This week on CounterSpin: In March, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.” But as Greg Shupak writes, even as evidence accumulates, denial is becoming socially and journalistically acceptable. Soon after the UN sp...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240712.mp3 CNN (6/6/24) This week on CounterSpin: At some point, we will get tired of hearing news reports on “record heat”—because the “records” will continue to be broken, and “heat” will have stopped meaning what it once may have meant. Media play a role in moving us from questions about where to buy a good air conditioner to what stands in the way of addressing a public health catastrophe? One obstacle is utili...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240705.mp3 University of California Press (2024) This week on CounterSpin: The power of the algorithm is ever clearer in our lives, even if we don’t understand it. You might see it as deciding what you see on social media sites, where maybe they get it wrong: You don’t actually want to see a lot of horror movies, or buy an air fryer; you just clicked on that once. But algorithms don’t only just guess at what you m...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628.mp3 Common Dreams (6/10/24) This week on CounterSpin: Headlined “The Cash Monster Was Insatiable,” a 2022 New York Times piece reported insurance companies gaming Medicare Advantage, presented as a “low-cost” alternative to traditional Medicare. One company pressed doctors to add additional illnesses to the records of patients they hadn’t seen for weeks: Dig up enough new diagnoses, and you could win a bottl...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240621.mp3 Chicago Sun-Times (4/8/24) This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump told a Las Vegas crowd earlier this month that, if elected, the “first thing” he would do would be to end the IRS practice of taxing tips as part of workers’ regular income. “For those hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy,” he said. Labor advocates were quick to call it out as unserious pandering, particula...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240614.mp3 Rolling Stone (6/10/24) This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote dozens of pages justifying his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, stating the Constitution does not confer the right to determine whether or when to give birth. None of those pages mention his intention to make the United States “a place of godliness,” or his belief that there can be no compromise on such concerns, beca...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240607.mp3 Yahoo (5/31/24) This week on CounterSpin: Surprising no one, Donald Trump and his sycophants responded to his 34-count conviction on charges of lying in business records by claiming that the trial was “rigged,” the judge and jury corrupt, that it was somehow Joe Biden’s doing, and “you know who else was persecuted? Jesus Christ.” Trump publicly calling the judge a “devil,” and Bible-thumping House Speake...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240531.mp3 The Lever (5/23/24) This week on CounterSpin: In 2023, the California legislature passed legislation that said that big corporations doing business in the state have to tell the public, investors, how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. It’s knowable information, and people have a right to know it, right? The same way restaurants here in New York City have to tell potential cus...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240524.mp3 Law enforcement at UCLA looks on as student peace protesters are attacked by a right-wing mob (CNN, 5/16/24). This week on CounterSpin: As an historic catastrophe, the deep and myriad impacts of Israel’s assault on Palestinians will not be fully understood until years from now, if then. That only adds urgency to present-day resistance to the collateral assault—on the ability to witness, to record and to ...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240517.mp3 (image: Voting Booth) This week on CounterSpin: You and I may know that the 2020 election was not stolen from Donald Trump through various mysterious sorts of skullduggery. That does not mean that we can whistle past the fact that many people who vote do believe that. Many of those people are activated in a way that goes beyond easily ignorable segments on OAN, and has meaning for November. Steven Rosenf...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240510.mp3 This week on CounterSpin: CNN’s Jake Tapper is mad about college students protesting their institutions’ and their government’s support for Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza—because they’re preventing him, by his account, from covering Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Tapper whined recently: “We’re covering these protests and covering free speech versus security on campu...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240503.mp3 Media 2070 We’re now seeing the impacts of the reality that corporate media, as well as corporate-funded universities, will always side with official power—as they present students sitting quietly in tents in protest of genocide as violent terrorists. But the fact is, we’ve been seeing it for decades, as corporate media spin narratives about people of color as both violent and lazy, and the socio-economi...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240426.mp3 Columbia encampment (CC photo: Pamela Drew) This week on CounterSpin: Lots of college students, it would appear, think that learning about the world means not just gaining knowledge, but acting on it. Yale students went on a hunger strike, students at Washington University in St. Louis disrupted admitted students day, students and faculty are expressing outrage at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240419.mp3 Time (4/14/24) This week on CounterSpin: The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuse of Iraqi detainees during the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia, with Al-Shimari v. CACI. Since the case was first filed in 2008, military contractor CACI has pushed some 20 times to have it dismissed. Time magazine unwittingly told the tale with the recent headline: “Abu Ghraib Mili...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240412.mp3 Washington Post (3/25/24) This week on CounterSpin: US corporate media’s story about Haiti is familiar. Haiti, according to various recent reports, has “whipped from one calamity to another.” The country is a “cataclysm of hunger and terror,” “teetering on the brink of collapse,” “spiraling deeper into chaos” or else “descending into gang-fueled anarchistic chaos.” It’s “become a dangerously rudderless c...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240405.mp3 Popular Information (4/4/24) This week on CounterSpin: In the final quarter of 2023, after-tax corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion. As reported by Popular Information, corporate profit margins were at a level not seen since the 1950s, as increases in prices have outpaced increases in costs—which Capitalism 101 says shouldn’t happen, because competing companies are supposed to step...