CounterSpin

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Fortune (9/13/26)

This week on CounterSpin: When Fortune magazine is telling you “corporations are raking in cash, but American workers are reaping less and less of the rewards,” something is afoot. The not-notoriously capitalist-critical magazine reported recently on the measurable fact that working people in this country are taking home the smallest percentage of economic output since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it in 1947. And they didn’t try to separate that from the fact that, at the same time, corporate profits have, in their word, “exploded.”

Simple acknowledgement is welcome, but how different would public conversation be if we always understood that the corporations corporate media lionize are getting to those wonderful profits by abjectly exploiting their employees—and those they won’t acknowledge as employees? Such that those workers still need government assistance to stay alive? And then the corporations attack government assistance? Can we talk about how this isn’t a sustainable model for a humane society?

Terri Gerstein is a longtime labor watcher. She’s director of the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative, at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. We hear from her this week on the show.

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Institute for Policy Studies

This week on CounterSpin: It may sound awkward, but there’s a reason that some of us refer to the lethal attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as “September 11, 2001.” It’s because those who have reference to a wider world know that “September 11”  is not a trademark the US has on meaningful horror.

September 11, 1973, saw a coup d’etat in Chile, when military officers, directed by Augusto Pinochet, seized power from the democratically elected President Salvador Allende—and ushered in an era of devastating suppression of leftist opposition, including exile, torture and murder. The US saw Chile as a Cold War ally at the time—and so, while some will debate how much this country’s leadership actively, in real time, abetted the coup and the ensuing violence, or whether they just actively laid the ground for it and welcomed and supported it—that’s a distinction without a difference.

The history is reactivated this time every year, when we acknowledge the political murders of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt—killed in a car bomb in Washington, DC, on September 21, 1976, while they were engaged in work at the Institute for Policy Studies, illuminating the abuses taking place in Pinochet’s Chile and their relationship to US actions and inactions.

Some people will only be hearing about all of this now—50 years out—because at least one of the people identified as participating in the car bombing, a Cuban exile, is up for deportation. It seems worth underscoring that seeking accountability for the political murders directed by Pinochet does not require co-signing the Trump administration’s people-disappearing machinery—particularly as we know that will involve silencing things we need to hear, and that it is in no way in service to the kind of democratic life Chilean people were seeking with Allende’s election.

We talk about the killing of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt with Sarah Anderson. She directs the Global Economy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies, and co-edits the site Inequality.org.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at how media looked back at the “Global War on Terror.”

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Verso Books (2022)

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media sell a lot of messages, but perhaps the overarching one is: This is how it is. You can be mad about it; we’ll give you a personal profile, maybe. But, hey, this is just how it is, and how it is: There were 34.5 million people living in poverty ​in 2025, according to the Census Bureau. The United States has the second-highest poverty rate among major developed nations in the OECD.

Wait, you aren’t happy with that? Well, welcome to corporate media’s echo chamber—where you are naive at best.

When people try to fight for something better, we get a lot of noise about how that can’t work, won’t work, and you know who else wanted social change? Communists! Socialists! The idea is that we will be frightened off from wanting healthcare because, you know what? Russia!

The good news is that ever-increasing numbers of people just aren’t buying what elite media are selling—which is the same old, top-down, racist, “why would you even speak up?” blather that we’ve been listening to for decades. And then the narrating of the nightmare that we’re living through.

It’s not that DSA—Democratic Socialists of America—are the answer. But ask yourself: Why won’t corporate media engage the questions they pose?

We’ll hear from Raina Lipsitz, author of The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics, from Verso Books—and author of a range of pieces, including some on socialism, for FAIR.org.

Featured image: Photo by Janine Jackson of anti-Mamdani graffiti in Manhattan’s Chelsea.

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Corporate Crime Reporter (8/3/26)

This week on CounterSpin: FAIR, the nonprofit collective that produces CounterSpin, had a T-shirt early on that called for the “separation of press and state.” That’s still meaningful, of course, but it feels a little odd now to talk about media bias without using the word “corporation.” Interrogating the role of profit-driven corporations in today’s journalism is crucial, but it’s important to see it as another part of a deep-going questioning of corporations’ power over our lives in general.

We talk this week with a veteran of that work. Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.–based Corporate Crime Reporter, and editor and writer at Capitol Hill Citizen. He joins us this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of “Alligator Alcatraz.”

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HarperCollins (2006)

This week on CounterSpin: Some 3,000 people died when planes hit the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. One hundred twenty-five people died at the Pentagon in Virginia, and at least 265 people were killed—passengers and crew—on the planes used to carry out the attacks. It was a day of horror and grief. But then it became an excuse for more horror and more grief, inflicted “in the names of” people who were no longer here to say whether that was what they would want.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is currently striving for relevance by declaring that current Mayor Zohran Mamdani should not attend commemorative ceremonies. We hear about what Giuliani did when he was mayor with a 2007 interview with Wayne Barrett, then senior editor at the Village Voice and co-author, with Dan Collins, of Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11.

Broadleaf Books (2023)

Also on the show: Giuliani isn’t alone in saying that New York city’s mayor should stay away from anything to do with September 11, 2001, because, because, well because, you know! The same reason no Germans are allowed in the Holocaust Museum. And no white Americans are allowed in the South. Hatred, fear, accusations against Muslims have been around forever, but some people—and some media—leapt on that day’s crime to use as cover for a bigotry they always harbored, now free to weaponize wherever they chose. CounterSpin talked about Islamophobia many times with writer and organizer Maha Hilal, author of Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11. We hear just one of those conversations this week.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Donald Trump’s sanity.

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CCR (7/30/26)

This week on CounterSpin: No humor intended: Listening to this show might make you a domestic terrorist. Yes, the Trump White House is trying to make anyone a “terrorist” who speaks out publicly, or co-signs silently, against their plans or policies. That for sure means anyone who signs up on lists in support of outlets like this one, that make such dissent a core concern. At a time where we’re being told that speaking out in criticism of those in power is a crime, we need news media that do more than just narrate that nightmare. But that’s not what we have. The net is widening; which side are you on?

Samer Araabi is the associate director of political education and research at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He wrote recently about how Trump is employing “counterterrorism” as an effort to target anyone who dissents at all in the face of the stuff they’re doing.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of modern-day lynching, erasure of history and the lethal impact of targeting immigrants.

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New Republic (8/24/26)

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate news media obscure it, almost like it’s their job, but we still understand that laws and policies land on differently situated people differently. I can believe that there are millionaire congressmembers who genuinely cannot imagine pushing through a sickness, or ignoring a health concern, because they can’t afford the doctor visit…people who haven’t even ever waited for an appointment, or struggled to fit it around a work schedule. But that’s the reality of millions of us, most of us.

So current corporate media talking about how universal care, or Medicare for All, is, as Forbes magazine puts it, “a brand, not a plan”? Media who elitesplain that “oh, you don’t want to live in Canada, just trust me on that”? They don’t speak for the most of us, who just want to see a doctor, in a regular way, please. But they can speak OVER us.

We’ll talk about Medicare for All—and the things you’re likely to read about it—with Abdullah Shihipar, public health researcher and writer, from the Brown University School of Public Health.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of press pool censorship and “reverse surgery.”

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New York Times (8/15/26)

This week on CounterSpin: The US news media marked the anniversary of August 2021’s nominal withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. A New York Times story explained that Taliban flags were “flying high along the streets of Kabul,” but that the deeper truth is that “the Taliban are holding Afghan society in a chokehold that spares no one.” But, the paper alleges, “The Taliban know the world wants a stable Afghanistan—one that isn’t a source of refugees, drugs or terrorism.” I don’t have enough breath to describe the hypocritical fantasizing in that sort of statement.

But CounterSpin has hosted numerous reporters, researchers and activists over the course of the decades of devastating US intervention in Afghanistan—which did not, in fact, suddenly and righteously begin in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. We’ll hear some of those conversations this week.

And I will say, there has been some attention rightfully paid to the abandonment of Afghans who, at great danger to themselves, helped US troops, and who are now treated as yet more brown hordes seeking to sneak into the US. But those historical, human rights–based conversations are being overwhelmed by storylines like that from the Times, that talks about Afghanistan’s “fragile peace” being “already at risk,” every bit as though the United States hasn’t played a monumental role in making that peace impossible.

And while we’re reimagining history, please recall Dan Rather, on David Letterman on September 17, 2001, describing his definition of his job as journalist: “George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions, and, you know, as just one American, if he wants me to line up, just tell me where.”

We’re going to hear from Phyllis Bennis from the Institute for Policy Studies; from Matthew Hoh, senior fellow with the Center for International Policy; and Sonali Kolhatkar, host/producer of Rising Up With Sonali, and author—most recently—of Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism. And there is much more about Afghanistan on FAIR.org.

Phyllis Bennis:

Matthew Hoh:

Sonali Kolhatkar:

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Al Jazeera (8/12/26)

This week on CounterSpin: It was not a shock when Donald Trump’s Justice Department greenlit the merger of Paramount—owned by the scion of the Trump-adjacent Ellison family—with Warner Bros Discovery. Who cares if a single entity (that loves Donald Trump and all he stands for) controls a vast empire of the movies, cable TV and streaming services we have access to? It turns out a lot of people care, and that’s why the merger, presented as a done deal weeks ago, is actually on the ropes. We’ll get a state of play from Jessica Gonzalez, co-CEO of the public advocacy group Free Press.

Extra! (12/08)

Also on the show: A sitting congressperson stated publicly: “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic. We refuse to be silent.” The fig leaf, if there were one, is off. Folks are just out here saying all Muslims (well, except for Dr. Oz) are devils, criminals, evil—and woe betide anyone who doesn’t sign up for that perverse, hateful view. News media could declare such racist, ignorant, ahistorical, anti-democratic—did i say racist?—they could call all that out, and remove anyone spouting it from respectful public conversation. But: We have the media we have, so people who hate Muslims because they’re Muslim have a seat at the grown-up table, and a microphone.

Islamophobia in media is not new. It wasn’t new when FAIR produced a report about it in 2008. We’ll hear today a conversation we had around that report, which we called Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Fear, Bigotry and Misinformation, with former FAIR staffers Isabel MacDonald and Steve Rendall.

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CT Mirror (7/30/26)

This week on CounterSpin: If you look for media coverage about the Farm Bill that’s currently passing through Congress, you can find it–at sites like agriculture.com or agri-pulse.com, or those outlets that have “ag” sections. If you look for coverage of SNAP, the largest food assistance program in the country, you can find that lots of other places. And while some of those headlines are about “Deadbeat Parents” and “SNAP Fraud,” these days many more say things like “Nearly 19K State Kids Have Lost SNAP Benefits Over Past Year” (that’s Connecticut) or “Illinois Launches New Program to Provide Food Benefits to People Who Lost SNAP,” or “Small Grocery Stores Cutting Inventory, Considering Layoffs as SNAP Dollars Decline.”

Overwhelmingly, local reporters are documenting how cuts to SNAP are hurting people and communities. But the lack of major media stories linking the program to the Farm Bill seem somehow emblematic of the opacity around this country’s lawmaking on critical questions around food.

We get an update from Gina Plata-Nino, director of SNAP policy and advocacy at the Food Research & Action Center.

Also on the show: People who rely on food benefits programs have long been a punching bag for both right-wing ideologues and their corporate media enablers. Claiming people working full time jobs that don’t provide enough to feed their families are really just grifters living high on your dime is a time-honored tactic, no matter how far it falls afield of reality. We talked about that last year with the president of Food Research & Action Center, Crystal FitzSimons; we add a little of that conversation as well.