Episodes

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230224.mp3 Tucker Carlson on Fox News (7/6/21) This week on CounterSpin: If you care about free expression, and freedom generally, there is much to talk about right now. It is good to anchor ourselves in that conversation when we talk about books being banned and efforts to erase entire concepts, and then folks trying to inoculate themselves by saying they weren’t even talking about those concepts, until they learn...

(image: Drug Enforcement Agency) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media tend to take the State of the Union address as an opportunity to talk about messaging, and whether the president’s message is landing well with, first of all, other legislators, and then, somewhere in there, the US public. A better mediaverse would start with the impact of official actions, not just on the people who donate or even the people who vote, but on everyone whose lives are shaped by government policy. So, on j...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230210.mp3 (image: Fight for the Future) This week on CounterSpin: Why does it matter to me, a media consumer, internet user, a person concerned with social justice—why does a 2–2 deadlock at the FCC matter to me? What could be happening if Biden’s long-languishing nomination of public interest advocate Gigi Sohn were put through? Net neutrality, an anti-discrimination law around broadband access that isn’t written...

Bailout Watch et al. (1/30/23) This week on CounterSpin: Powerless in the United States: How Utilities Drive Shutoffs and Energy Injustice is an ongoing project from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Energy and Policy Institute and Bailout Watch. It tracks utility service disconnections and corporate profiteering—because, it turns out, they’re flip sides of a coin. You and I may think that in disastrous weather conditions (with no signs of stopping), and a pandemic and low wages and a hi...

“Liking” a post on social media might not seem like a high-impact action. But nonprofit media groups actually depend a great deal on their readers’ online engagement. When people like, comment, share and click on the links of independent media posts on a site like Facebook, it tells Facebook‘s algorithm that this is content it should show to others. This increases the amount of people the post will reach. Without these engagements, it is safe to assume that Facebook would show these posts to ha...

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230127Mechanic.mp3 This week on CounterSpin: If repeated messaging about how we “can’t afford” public goods but we should always be “cutting taxes” isn’t discordant enough, corporate media’s guiding yet unspoken theory has some corollaries—one of which is that because wealthy people pay large (if not proportionate) amounts of money in taxes, they should get policies that reward them, including those allowing them t...

Janine Jackson interviewed Friends of the Congo’s Maurice Carney about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba for the January 20, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230120Carney.mp3 Patrice Lumumba Janine Jackson:  CounterSpin listeners will have heard a number of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. this past week—a few searching, many shallow. Importantly, the King holiday usually incl...

Patrice Lumumba, 1960 (photo: Harry Pot) This week on CounterSpin: US media elites have gotten comfy with what writer Adam Johnson calls their “wall calendar version” of Martin Luther King, in which he represents the “good” left, unmoved by racial nationalism and Marxist ideology. With Patrice Lumumba, assassinated by the CIA on January 17, 1961, as newly elected leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the story is different. Look up Lumumba on the anniversary of his murder and you’ll find—...

The New York Times (10/31/15) used to think taking away “the only tool citizens have to fight illegal or deceitful business practices” was a bad thing. “Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice” was a headline on a groundbreaking New York Times report (10/31/15) from 2015. Reporters Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Robert Gebeloff looked into the fine-print “agreements” that people sign, usually without reading them, as a requirement for obtaining credit card memberships or cellphone con...

Lever (1/8/23) This week on CounterSpin: US reporters used to talk, even brag, about telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may, and more acutely, about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable—in other words about using their special, constitutional power to look behind curtains most of us can’t, and bring us meaningful information we could gain no other way. Not stories that might amuse us, which are fine, but more centrally, the sort of stories that might help ...

(NBC News, 12/29/22) This week on CounterSpin: Media criticism is, at its heart, consumer advocacy. There’s an unarticulated underpinning to elite media conversation that goes: As a citizen you may have rights, but as a consumer, you don’t have anything called a “right”; the market is an arrangement—the best possible arrangement—but still, you can only hope you’re on the right side of it where it’s profitable to serve you. And if it isn’t, well, too bad. It’s a kind of caveat emptor, devil-take-...

All year long, CounterSpin brings you a look, as we say, behind the headlines of the mainstream news. We hope both to shine some light on aspects of news events—perspectives of those out of power, relevant but omitted history—important things that might be pushed to the side or off the page entirely in elite media reporting. But it’s also to remind us to be mindful of the practices and policies of corporate news media that make it an unlikely arena for an inclusive, vital debate on issues that m...

Image from January 6 Report (photo: Jon Cherry/Getty Images) This week on CounterSpin: The House committee on the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol heard more than 1,000 witness interviews and held multiple public hearings, resulting in criminal referrals to the Justice Department for Donald Trump, lawyer John Eastman and others involved in violent efforts to override the results of Trump’s electoral loss. The committee released transcripts showing some two dozen witnesses invoking thei...

Truthout (11/12/22) This week on CounterSpin: Those listeners who have heard about Haaland v. Brackeen will know that that Supreme Court case is about considering the Indian Child Welfare Act—which is aimed at keeping Native communities together—to be “race-based,” and therefore unfair and unconstitutional. Opposing the actual mission of those who want to eliminate the Indian Child Welfare Act is just…reality: the reality that made the Act necessary in the first place, and the reality that will ...

For some time now, news media have been conflating crime, homelessness and mental illness, demonizing and dehumanizing people without homes while ignoring the structural causes leading people to sleep on subways and in other public spaces. With New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ latest announcement that he would hospitalize, against their will, unhoused people with mental health conditions—even those deemed to pose no risk to others—in the name of “public safety,” the local papers once again reveal...

Dissent (11/22/22) This week on CounterSpin: Former CIA director Mike Pompeo recently said with a straight face that Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was “the most dangerous person in the world.” “It’s not a close call,” he said. “If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teachers unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids.” More evidence, were it needed, that the current struggle for pay and dignity by teaching a...

New York Times (1/31/60) This week on CounterSpin: According to Techcrunch, before its ignominious flameout, the cryptocurrency firm FTX had acquired more than 100,000 customers in Africa. Evidently, FTX—led by wunderkind-turned-object lesson, with not much actual learning in evidence in-between, Sam Bankman-Fried—built a following in part by capitalizing on unstable banking access on the continent. Media like the New York Times and Bloomberg abetted Bankman-Fried’s scheming, with rose-colored s...

Today, you probably know who Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX are, and the details of why he and his company are front-page news are emerging at an amazing pace. Here’s the short version: Bankman-Fried—a boyish-looking cryptocurrency baron known commonly as SBF—announced that his lauded cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, had lost at least $1 billion in client funds, sending the crypto market into a tailspin (Fox Business, 11/16/22). The company, once the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange (AP, 11/16/22),...

ABC World News Tonight (10/30/22) This week on CounterSpin: ABC World News Tonight told viewers what it thought they needed to know: “Bolsonaro Loses Brazilian Election, Leftist Former President Wins by Narrow Margin.” The victor of Brazil’s consequential presidential race has an actual name; it’s not “leftist former president”…or “former shoeshine boy,” as the New York Times had it–or even “savior,” as CNN suggests supporters view him. He’s a person, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, a...

For the Western press, the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party offered a number of signals which—if read in good faith—could have been perceived as reassuring. Instead, establishment outlets reverted to familiar narratives regarding China’s Covid mitigation strategy and tied these into renewed predictions of a long-prophesied economic disaster—one that would inevitably befall China as a result of its government’s decision to forsake the orthodoxy of open markets. More than an...

New York Times (6/24/22) This week on CounterSpin: As Eric Horowitz noted at FAIR.org, a lot of elite media coverage of housing problems has focused on the idea that landlords of supposedly modest means are being squeezed; or that people living without homes pose a threat to the lives and property of homeowners, as well as to the careers of politicians who dare to defend them—besides, you know, dragging down the neighborhood aesthetics. New views are needed, not only about the impacts of the af...

New York Times (10/21/19) This week on CounterSpin: In 2019, the New York Times reported on Haiti’s hardships with a story headlined “‘There Is No Hope’: Crisis Pushes Haiti to Brink of Collapse.” The “no hope” phrase was a real, partial quote from a source, a despairing young woman in one of Haiti’s most difficult areas. And the story wasn’t lying about babies dying in underserved hospitals or schools closed or people killed in protests, or people with jobs going unpaid, roadblocks, blackouts, ...

Janine Jackson interviewed Prison Radio‘s Noelle Hanrahan for a Mumia Abu-Jamal update for the October 28, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin221028Hanrahan.mp3 Janine Jackson: TV snake oil salesman and Republican Pennsylvania candidate Mehmet Oz began a recent debate with opponent John Fetterman with reference to Maureen Faulkner, the widow of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faul...

This week on CounterSpin: A 1995 Washington Post story led with a macabre account from the widow of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, about how when her husband’s bloody shirt was held up in court, his accused killer Mumia Abu-Jamal turned in his chair and smiled at her. An evocatively sinister report, which the paper printed untroubled by the fact that the court record showed that Abu-Jamal wasn’t in court when the shirt was displayed. Mumia Abu-Jamal (BayView, 7/11/19) ABC‘s invest...