Episodes

Common Dreams (7/5/23) This week on CounterSpin: The Earth recorded its hottest day ever July 3, with an average global temperature of 17.01°C. The record was broken the next day, with 17.18°C. Common Dreams‘ Jake Johnson (7/5/23) collected international responses, including a British scientist calling it a “death sentence for people and ecosystems”; and reported (7/5/23) IMF estimates that world governments dished out nearly $6 trillion in fossil fuel subsidies in 2020, and those giveaways are ...

(CC photo: Ted Eytan ) This week on CounterSpin: The US public’s belief in and support for the Supreme Court has plummeted with the appointment of hyper-partisan justices whose unwillingness to answer basic questions, or answer them respectfully, would make them unqualified to work at many a Wendy’s, and the obviously outcome-determinative nature of their jurisprudence. Key to that drop in public support was last year’s Dobbs ruling, overturning something Americans overwhelmingly support and had...

New Republic (6/14/23) This week on CounterSpin: 70% of House Republicans belong to the Republican Study Committee, which just released a budget that calls for curtailing programs supporting racial equity and LGBTQ rights, natch—and also for increased cuts and access hurdles for Social Security and Medicare. It’s a tale as old as time, how some people want to take resources explicitly designated for seniors and disabled people and funnel them to rich people, in supposed service of “saving” those...

Venezuela’s Maduro government has slowly and steadily regained its diplomatic standing in recent years, overcoming US endeavors to turn the country into a pariah state as part of its regime-change efforts. Reading coverage of Venezuela in outlets like the Washington Post (5/30/23), it’s good to remind yourself that Nicolás Maduro is president because he got the most votes. Nevertheless, Washington remains hell-bent on ousting the democratically elected Venezuelan authorities, and has kept its d...

(City Lights, 2023) This week on CounterSpin: The stories news media tell are something different than the facts they report. The facts may say what happened where; the stories tell us who’s the hero and who’s the villain, how important the fight is, and whether we should care about the ending. It’s not always easy to discern, but it’s critical—which is why narrative has been taken up as an important tool by folks looking to change the world for the better, in part by changing the stories we tel...

(image: PCBA) This week on CounterSpin: This country has a long history of weaponizing drug laws against Black and brown communities. Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, ran an anti-marijuana crusade in the 1930s, saying, “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” Concerns are justified about what the legalization, and profitizing, of marijuana means for the people and communities most harmed by its criminalization. We hear about that from ...

NBC (11/2/22) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media have never been the right place to look for thoughtful, inclusive consideration of affirmative action. For them it’s an “issue,” a political football, rather than a long effort to address the real historical and ongoing discrimination against non-white, non-male people in multiple aspects of US life. But when it comes to the role that anti-discrimination, pro-equity efforts have had on Asian-American communities, there are particular layer...

GQ (5/5/23) This week on CounterSpin: Going on strike is something that people with no personal experience are comfortable depicting as frivolous and selfish. That extends to many corporate news reporters, who appear unable to present a labor action as other than, first and foremost, an unwonted interruption of a natural order. However else they explain the issues at stake, or humanistically portray individual strikers, the overarching narrative is that workers are pressing their luck, and that ...

An earlier Daily News headline (5/2/23) was “Brawling NYC Subway Rider Dies After Chokehold, NYPD Says.” Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused Black man, appeared to be in the throes of a mental health crisis and asking for money on a New York City subway train when another passenger—a 24-year-old white man—put him in a chokehold for several minutes, killing him. The dozens of other passengers in the car of the northbound F-train did not stop the attack, although in a witness video, one bystande...

Time (5/4/23) This week on CounterSpin: Do you care about environmental degradation? Then you care about Cop City. Do you care about violent overpolicing of Black and brown communities? Then you care about Cop City. Do you care about purportedly democratic governance that overrides the actual voice of the people? Then you care about Cop City. But be aware: Your concern about Cop City, and its myriad impacts and implications, may get you labeled a domestic terrorist. The official response to pop...

In the early days of Lula’s presidency, the New York Times (2/10/23) stressed what he had in common with Joe Biden (attempts to overthrow their governments) over what divided them (the Ukraine War). A front-page article (4/30/23) in the Sunday, April 30, edition of the New York Times served as a hit job against Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST), one of the most important historic allies of President Lula da Silva’s Brazilian Workers Party. ...

USA Today (5/6/23) This week on CounterSpin: USA Today reported that, “as it heads into the final stretch of its current term, the Supreme Court is on defense following a series of revelations about gifts, property sales and disclosure.” That, you might say, is putting it mildly. The recent revelations are not about trinkets, but millions of dollars’ worth of benefits, vacations, jobs—and not from nowhere in particular, but from powerful parties with express interest in shaping the Court’s decis...

CT Mirror (2/2/23) Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont proposed on February 2 to purchase and forgive roughly $2 billion in medical debt owed by state residents. Along with similar proposals in other jurisdictions, the plan offers desperately needed relief from stress and fear to thousands of people who are struggling to pay their current outstanding medical bills. Unfortunately, these programs will do nothing to prevent millions more Americans from falling into the country’s healthcare financial meat g...

(The Nation, 4/28/23) This week on CounterSpin: Economist James Galbraith wrote a few months ago: “It is in the nature of articles about the debt ceiling that no matter how often one tries to set the record straight, nothing ever gets through.” Elite media’s fundamental misrepresentation of the debt ceiling would be troubling enough if it were just a bad history lesson. But current Republican brinkmanship could have devastating impacts for millions of people—along with the harm to public underst...

Kansas City Star (4/20/23) This week on CounterSpin: The grandson of the elderly white man who shot a Black teenager in the head for ringing his doorbell told the Kansas City Star that their relationship had unraveled as his grandfather began watching “Fox News all day, every day,” and sank into a “24-hour news cycle of fear, of paranoia.” Those words had a poignant resonance for many people who feel they’ve lost family members and friends to a kind of cult, that’s not secret, but pumped into th...

Washington Post (4/19/23) This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court has briefly punted their decision on restricting access to medication abortion drug mifepristone. The American Medical Association said that the recent ruling by a Texas federal judge revoking the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, which has been in widespread use for more than two decades, “flies in the face of science and evidence and threatens to upend access to a safe and effective drug.” For the Washington Post, that’s part ...

Fat cat pays a pittance in taxes to Uncle Sam in vintage cartoon. This week on CounterSpin: It is tax season in the US, when some of us wonder why the government, which knows how much we earn, requires us to guess, with the threat of prison if we guess wrong. And leads some of us to ponder what we get in return for our resources—streets and stop signs, to be sure, but also wars and wheelbarrows of money doled out those who already have plenty. We’ve talked about taxes and tax policy a lot on Co...

Readers should have very low confidence in the Wall Street Journal‘s assumption (2/26/23) that classified intelligence reports are helpful gauges of scientific questions. The Wall Street Journal (2/26/23) broke the news that classified documents show the US Energy Department believes Covid emerged from a lab leak in China, which sent shockwaves through the rest of the media. Such a statement by the Energy Department “would be significant despite the fact that, as the report said, the agency made...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230407.mp3 (CC photo: Elliot Stoller) This week on CounterSpin: Former President Donald Trump was arrested this week, but we’re going to talk about another kind of crime: the slow, steady drip drip of crime that doesn’t leap out to reporters—the day-to-day crushing of workers’ attempts to organize themselves to have a voice in the workplace, not just about their pay, but their well-being and their dignity. Crushing...

Ciudad Juárez detention center fire This week on CounterSpin: There are a number of issues or realities where good-hearted people are overwhelmed and frankly misled about how isolated they are in their view, and what levers of power they may have to pull on. We can live in a better world! And we should interrogate those who say, “Oh no, you don’t get it; we’re smarter and we say you just can’t.” One such story is migration, or immigration—or, to be real, do Black and brown people have a right t...

New York Times (3/18/23) This week on CounterSpin: In the immediate wake of the September 1, 2001, attacks, a military official told the Washington Post of the newly minted “war on terror”: “This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine. . . . We’re going to lie about things.” If reporters don’t evidence skepticism after a declaration like that, it says more about them than anyone or anything else. But US elite news media did the opposite of what you would hope for from an independ...

(CC photo: Chad Davis) This week on CounterSpin: If there are ideas, tools or tactics that are part of both this country’s horror-filled past, and some people’s vision for its dystopic future, they are at work in Cop City. Over-policing, racist policing, paramilitarization, the usurping of public resources, environmental racism, community voicelessness, and efforts to criminalize protest (that’s some kinds of protest)—it’s all here. Add to that a corporate press corps that, for one thing, disagg...

Judy Heumann This week on CounterSpin: “I wanna see feisty disabled people change the world.” So declared disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who died last weekend at age 75. As a child with polio, Heumann was denied entry to kindergarten on grounds that her wheelchair was a fire hazard. Later, she was denied a teachers license for reasons no more elevated. She sued, won and became the first teacher in New York to use a wheelchair. Media love those kinds of breakthroughs, and they matter. H...

(Image: Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition) This week on CounterSpin: Media are certainly following the story of the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio—giving us a chance to see how floods of reporters can get out there and print a lot of words about a thing…and still not ask the deepest questions and demand the meaningful answers that might move us past outrage and sorrow to actual change. Are there not forces meant to protect people from this sort of harm? Is it awkward for reporters t...