Episodes

“A free press for free people” boldly champions the censorship of dangerous foreign ideas (Free Press, 11/1/23). Axios (10/31/23) reported that in a two-week period, TikTok saw “nearly four times the number of views to TikTok posts using the hashtag #StandwithPalestine globally compared to posts using the hashtag #StandwithIsrael.” As a result, the conservative outrage machine kicked into high gear. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wisc.), who serves on the House select committee investigating China’s Co...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231110.mp3 Truthout (11/9/23) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media use at least a couple of largely unexplored lenses through which to present US human rights violations. One is: The US does not commit human rights violations, except by accident, or as unavoidable collateral for an ultimately net-gain mission, be that international or domestic. The other is: They aren’t violations if the US does them, because...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231103.mp3 New York Times (6/5/22) This week on CounterSpin: Elite media are fond of saying that the US is resetting its Middle East policy. During the 2020 campaign, the New York Times explained, Joe Biden pledged, if elected, to stop coddling Saudi Arabia, after the brutal murder of prominent dissident and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. “We are not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them,” Bide...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231027.mp3 Paxlovid tablets This week on CounterSpin: Advertising critics have long noted that a company’s PR tells you, inadvertently but reliably, exactly what their problems are. The ad features salmon splashing in crystalline waters? That company is for sure a massive polluter. That’s the lump of salt with which to take the recent announcement from the US Department of Health and Human Services that their new ...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231020.mp3 (USDA, 1939) This week on CounterSpin: Government-supplied food assistance has been around in various forms since at least the Great Depression, but never with the straightforward goal of easing hunger. 1930s posters about food stamps declare, “We are helping the farmers of America move surplus foods”; that link between agriculture industry support and nutrition assistance continues to this day—which par...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231013.mp3 BBC (10/11/23) This week on CounterSpin: In the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas and the ensuing bombing campaign from Israel on the Gaza Strip, many people were surprised that CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria aired an interview with a Palestinian activist who frankly described the daily human rights violations in Gaza, the right of Palestinians to resist occupation and apartheid, and how any tools of resistan...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin231006.mp3 This week on CounterSpin: The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik is one of vanishingly few national reporters to suggest that if media care about crime, if they care about people having things stolen from them—maybe they could care less about toasters and more about lives? As in, the billions of dollars that are snatched from working people’s pockets every payday by companies, in the form of wage theft—paying les...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230929.mp3 New York Times (9/27/23) This week on CounterSpin: You can’t say elite US news media aren’t on the story of the federal indictment of Robert Menendez, Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But articles like the New York Times’ “As Menendez’s Star Rose, Fears of Corruption Cast a Persistent Shadow” represent media embrace of the “great man of history” theme: The story is mostly about...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230922.mp3 Photo: UAW This week on CounterSpin: An unprecedented labor action is underway as thousands of Midwest autoworkers working for the Big 3—Ford, GM and Stellantis (which used to be Chrysler)—went on strike at the same time. Some things workers are calling for may sound familiar: a pay raise for workers that bears relation to raises that owners have generously given themselves; reinstatement of cost-of-livi...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230915.mp3 (Broadleaf Books, 2023) This week on CounterSpin: New Yorkers who were here 22 years ago remember the proliferation of signs and stickers reading “our grief is not a cry for war”—and then the way that voice was shouted over by corporate news media, calling for war crimes with US flags on their lapels. Hosting old general after old general, as peace and human rights activists and the overall public begged...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230908.mp3 Liberation (9/3/23) This week on CounterSpin: The White House has announced it’s extending the ban on people using US passports to go to North Korea. Corporate media seem to find it of little interest; who wants to go to North Korea? Which fairly reflects media’s disinterest in the tens of thousands of Korean Americans who might want to visit family in North Korea, along with their overarching, active di...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230901.mp3 (CC photo: Paul Hart) This week on CounterSpin: It is back to school week in the US. Schools—pre-K to college—have been on the front burner for at least a year now, but education has always been a contested field in this country: Who has access? What does it teach? What is its purpose? Do my kids have to go to school with those kids? So while what’s happening right now is new, it has roots. And it does n...

(image: New Disabled South) This week on CounterSpin: “We’ve come a long way but there’s a long way to go” is a familiar, facile framing that robs urgency from fights for justice. It’s the frame that tends to dominate annual journalistic acknowledgement of the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed 33 years ago in late July. Like Black history month, the ADA anniversary is a peg—an opportunity for journalists to offer information and insight on issues they might not have felt there was space f...

Do Palestinians deserve to be free? “A complex and controversial issue,” says ChatGPT (Twitter, 5/8/23). Do Israelis deserve to be free? “Yes, like all people.” “This is quite something,” remarked Nadi Abusaada in a May 8 tweet. As many of us have done, the Palestinian academic found himself experimenting with the seemingly boundless powers of OpenAI’s ChatGPT software. But during this activity, he uncovered something disturbing. “I asked @OpenAI whether Palestinians deserve to be free,” he sai...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230818.mp3 Victim of US torture at Abu Ghraib, 2003 This week on CounterSpin: For corporate news media, every mention of the Iraq War is a chance to fuzz up or rewrite history a little more. This year, the New York Times honored the war’s anniversary with a friendly piece about how George W. Bush “doesn’t second guess himself on Iraq,” despite pesky people mentioning things like the torture of innocent prisoners at...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230811.mp3 New York Times (8/6/23) This week on CounterSpin: Why was Detroit mother Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, arrested and held 11 hours by police accusing her of robbery and carjacking? Because Woodruff was identified as a suspect based on facial recognition technology. The Wayne County prosecutor still contends that Woodruff’s charges—dismissed a month later—were “appropriate based upon the facts.” ...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230804.mp3 Washington Post (7/25/23) This week on CounterSpin: As contract negotiations went on between UPS and the Teamsters, against a backdrop of a country ever more reliant on package deliveries and the people who deliver them, the New York Times offered readers a lesson in almost-but-not-quite subtext, with a piece that included the priceless line: “By earning solid profits with a largely unionized workforce, ...

Janine Jackson interviewed The Nation‘s Dave Zirin about the elimination of the New York Times‘ sports section for the July 28, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin3230728Zirin.mp3 New York Times (10/23/17) Janine Jackson: Earlier this month, the New York Times made an announcement: The paper has a plan, they said, to “become a global leader in sports journalism.” Weirdly, the statem...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230728.mp3 Houston Chronicle (7/11/23) This week on CounterSpin: Listeners may have heard that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott installed barrels wrapped in razor wire in some parts of the Rio Grande to block migrants from crossing and harm those that try. As revealed by the Houston Chronicle, Texas troopers have been ordered to push people back into the river, and to deny them water. The cruelty is obvious; the Department o...

Janine Jackson interviewed the African American Policy Forum’s Kevin Minofu about Say Her Name for the July 21, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230721Minofu.mp3 Janine Jackson: Like most powerful exercises, it’s a simple one. Professor and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw asks audience members to stand as she lists names of Black people killed by law enforcement in this country, an...

(Haymarket Books, 2023) This week on CounterSpin: If corporate news media didn’t matter, we wouldn’t talk about them. But elite, moneyed outlets do, of course, direct public attention to some issues and not to others, and suggest the possibility of some social responses, but not others. It’s that context that the African American Policy Forum hopes folks will bring to their new book, based on years of research, called Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence. It’...

After its embarrassing town hall with Donald Trump, which helped precipitate the downfall of chair and CEO Chris Licht (FAIR.org, 6/8/23), CNN has doubled down on the format—at least for Republican candidates. Since Trump’s May 10 appearance, the network has featured GOP candidates Nikki Haley (6/4/23), Mike Pence (6/7/23) and Chris Christie (6/12/23), with more promised. Curiously, however, no offers to Democratic or third party candidates have been announced, which prompts the question: What p...

Good Jobs First (7/6/23) This week on CounterSpin: Media talk about “the economy” as though it were an abstraction, somehow clinically removed from daily life, instead of being ingrained & entwined in every minute of it. So white supremacy and economic policy are completely different stories for the press, but not for the people. Our guest’s recent work names a simple, obvious way development incentives exacerbate racialized inequality: by transferring wealth from the public to companies led by ...

“Recession” and “inflation” have dominated headlines (Reuters, 12/7/22); “recovery,” “jobs,” not so much. By a wide range of metrics, the US is in the midst of a historic economic rebound. In January of this year, the unemployment rate hit a 53-year low of 3.4%. Two months later, prime-age (25–54) employment surpassed its pre-recession peak, putting to shame the sluggish job growth that followed the Great Recession of 2007–09, when it took a full 12 years for prime-age employment to return to it...