Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Jacobin, (7/30/25)

This week on CounterSpin: When the Washington, DC, city council voted to gut plans to raise wages for tipped workers, they weren’t just stiff-arming restaurant and hospitality workers; they were overturning the express will of the public, who had voted overwhelmingly, for the second time, to raise those wages. They were telling the electorate: You just don’t matter to us as much as the restaurant lobby. They say no, so we say no. It’s obviously a story about a rigged game that goes well beyond restaurant workers, but it’s also a story about restaurant workers, and how elite news media serve as frictionless transmitters for this weird worldview that it’s appropriate for overwhelmingly women and people of color to have to please and appease patrons in order to survive.

We’ll hear from worker advocate Raeghn Draper from the CHAAD Project; their recent piece about the rise-up of efforts for a better wage system for restaurant workers appears in Jacobin magazine.

ABC News, (7/21/25)

Also on the show: Media reported on how “Trump Threatens Washington Stadium Deal Unless NFL Team Readopts Redskins Name.” and some, like ABC News, dutifully noted that there is no “deal” that Trump himself is involved in, and so it’s not clear what restriction he could actually put in place.

Would that these outlets showed equal interest in interrogating the threats and disinformation from other sources that led to the DC city council’s approval of a plan that exempts a profitable enterprise from property taxes and leases the land underneath the stadium for just $1 a year over some 30 years. Sales taxes from the stadium don’t even go to DC, but to a “reinvestment fund” for the stadium’s maintenance and upgrades.

The Commanders and their owner don’t need millions of dollars from a district where some 14% of the population live in poverty, and the people of the district said they didn’t want to give it to them. They got it anyway. That’s the story. But it’s a story that predates and will post-date Trump, so apparently it doesn’t rate.

Pete Tucker reports on government and media from the Washington, DC, area, including for FAIR.org and his own Substack. He joins us this week to talk about that.

Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR contributor Ari Paul about genocide in Gaza for the August 1, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: The International Rescue Committee, among other groups, is declaring that Israel’s starvation of Gaza has reached a “tipping point”: “The window to prevent mass death is rapidly closing, and for many, it’s already too late.” Famine historian Alex de Waal describes Israel’s food distribution sites as “not just death traps…[but] an alibi.” 

New York Times, 7/24/25

Meanwhile, the New York Times describes Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians trying to access those food sites “a crude form of crowd control.” The epic horror of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been abetted at every turn by a US press corps too compromised, corrupt and complicit to mount a serious defense of basic human rights or international law. In the face of overwhelming public disapproval, and Senate Democrats trying and failing to block weapons sales to Israel, will anything in media coverage change? And will that matter? Joining us now is independent reporter and frequent FAIR.org contributor, Ari Paul. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ari Paul.

Ari Paul: Thanks for having me.

JJ: We could start anywhere, but you have just written about the recent increase in the use of the word “genocide” in some elite outlets’ reporting. How meaningful is that in the scale of things in July 2025, do you think? 

AP: I think it’s been very frustrating for people who have been sounding the alarm ever since October of 2023. It’s been very clear in a lot of Israel’s public statements, from public officials and army officials, military officials, in the press that there’s certainly genocidal intent, or an intent to commit horrific war crimes, throughout Gaza. And I think, seeing over the years, the destruction of hospitals, the destruction of educational facilities, the inability to function as a society, not just bombing sites, but making it an impossible place to live, the type of humanitarian crisis that isn’t just a humanitarian crisis; it reaches the level of worry that we’re reaching a genocidal moment. 

And activists all over the world have been sounding the alarm about this. And so when it’s seen now, I think there is some sliver of hope, for people who care about what’s happening in Gaza, that this might bring about some sort of end to it, but given the horrific slaughter of people, the starvation, and just the fact that a once-functioning society has now been reduced to rubble, it feels a little too late for a lot of people watching this.

JJ: Right. And it’s kind of uncanny to hear media suggesting that now people are starting to say this might be a genocide. It is just a kind of blithe, rhetorical erasure of those people who’ve been saying this for a while, and who media have marginalized and worse, all along. But the idea is: now it’s real, because important people are saying it might be real.

AP: Yeah, I think one thing that a lot of people who have been worried about the Gaza situation have pointed out is that it’s very reminiscent of what Nigeria had done to Biafra several decades ago, that they had surrounded this area, that they had the military upper hand, but also kept food out of going into this area, which caused mass starvation. Now, this incident in Biafra had been, for the Western world, this moment where everyone kind of dropped what they were doing and said, ”Oh my gosh, this is just horrible. How could anything like this happen?” 

And that, given the control that Israel has always had over Gaza, the potential for just shutting everything off and just letting it die, while raining missiles and conducting raids, was just always so obviously there, that from day one, when this started two years ago, it’s just been impossible to ignore the catastrophe that was waiting to happen, especially when you had people all throughout the Israeli government saying things like that they wanted another Nakba, that they wanted to destroy Gaza, that no one is innocent, things like this. 

These are the things that were said in places like Rwanda or Bosnia before the worst things happened. And so I think there were a lot of people on the activist left, the pro-Palestine community, who were taunted as, at best, catastrophists or, at worst, they were derided as antisemitic, blood libel. But the fact of the matter is that these were predictions that were all too real, and now we’re looking at it.

New York Times, 7/28/25

JJ: I was struck by a line in a New York Times report from July 29 that was “Leading Israeli Rights Groups Accuse Israel of Committing Genocide in Gaza.” First of all, I know a lot of listeners will know that you can get a lot more critical information about Israel in the Israeli media than you can here, on many occasions. But I was struck by a line in that piece that said that statements from these rights groups are “adding fuel to a passionately fought international debate over whether the death and destruction there have crossed a moral red line.”

So let’s just take a breath and acknowledge the idea that death and destruction can be ok…except up until some indeterminate point they cross a moral red line. I just found it such a weird construction. 

And then it also doesn’t even say what happens once that line is crossed. It’s as though, for media, it’s all just shadows on the cave wall. It’s all just a story, and not a reality.

AP: Yeah, I think one of the problems is that Israel, and those who support what Israel, have been very successful in framing this all as, well, there’s a legitimate goal here to destroy Hamas, that Hamas started this all on October 7, that it’s a terrorist organization, and it’s authoritarian, and it must be eradicated in the same way that many wars are justified, that the Vietnam War kept being justified in the pursuit of destroying the Vietnamese insurgency. So that’s all there, as a kind of “this is the legitimate goal, and all these things are awful. All these things are happening, and they’re awful. But the goal is still important.” And this sort of legitimizes what Israel is doing in Gaza.

But by all accounts, the effort to destroy Hamas has been futile, the actual military gains that the Israelis have made are small or almost nonexistent, that for every fighter they kill, they recruit more. And there’s an obvious reason for that, when you really think about it, that if you see this Goliath army destroy everything in Palestinian society, Palestinians will eventually want to fight back. Whatever one might say about Hamas, all of this doesn’t make them less attractive to the people who want to fight what Israel is doing there.

So there’s a framing that Israel is on this legitimate path to eradicate Hamas when, even by its own standards, it’s not doing that. So the only thing people really can see out of all this, they don’t see any real military gains, any light at the end of the tunnel–that, again, a phrase that US military officials used about fighting the war in Vietnam–that they don’t see a “light at the end of the tunnel” in terms of military perspective. All they see is this carnage on the civilian population. And so I think one reason why you’re seeing more and more people talk about this in the mainstream press is it’s harder to ignore that.

JJ: I guess that might answer my question, because I think many people are wondering: Israel has restricted food into Palestinian lands for a long time now, but this obviously mass starvation, starvation on this grand scale, where it seems very clear what the intentionality is, this seems to be the thing that’s going to be a turning point for people. 

And it goes back to what you just said isn’t the point, or shouldn’t it be, that Israel has the ability to starve Palestinians, rather than, “Hey, look, they’re actually doing it.” They have the tool, and that’s the problem in itself. And yet the conversation only seems to be shifting when people are literally looking at pictures of emaciated children. I don’t quite get why this is the moment for so many people.

AP: Yeah, I mean, again, I think it’s a success of Israel’s control of the narrative that sometimes it’s really not well understood that the occupation is central to all this, that this isn’t a conflict in the same way Russia and Ukraine is a war; I mean, sure, one side is bigger than the other, but these are two flagged nations that are sovereign, fighting with militaries that are fighting each other in trenches. It’s not a civil war, in the sense that there’s an insurgency in one part of the country fighting the government, say in Syria, until the regime collapsed there. This is a country that completely controls every aspect of life of this Arab population, the Palestinian Arab population: how they can move, how they can receive food, how their economy is structured. There’s curfews, things like that. All of this has always been heavily controlled by Israeli occupation. In a sense, they’re under martial law in perpetuity.

So I think sometimes when we read the media coverage of all this, it’s framed as a bit like, “Well, there’s a struggle between two sides, in which there’s a kind of balance,” and when in all these other cases of war that are going on in this world, there’s really very few other things like that in that sense that you just said, that Israel just has the ability to do this, and it always has. So therefore, the fact that it’s happening shouldn’t be a surprise. But, unfortunately, it is. And I think that speaks to the power of the narrative and the propaganda.

JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally, what you think better coverage, and we know there is good reporting out there, often in independent media, of course, but what would be the elements of what better looking coverage, if journalists–we know that mainstream journalists are going to say, No. 1, “We were always against this.” They’re going to point to the critical articles that they did do, and they’re going to whitewash their coverage of this all along. But what would actual, genuine, critical coverage include? What would it look like?

The Guardian, 9/2/15

AP: I think it’s starting to come out, I mean, just the footage of the carnage that I think has the ability to change minds and move hearts. We’ve seen that in previous cases. One case I’m thinking of was, during the Syrian migrant crisis, there was a photograph, I believe, by a wire photographer, that was widely shared, of a small child’s body washing up on a beach in Turkey. And this captured the world’s attention to how bad the crisis, not just the situation in Syria, but the ability of migrants to get to where they needed to go, how bad the situation was. And I think it rattled people to its core. 

I think that’s beginning to happen, just with the images and the descriptions, of not just the starvation, but the attacks on people at aid sites. I’m hoping that that isn’t continuing to happen, but again, it’s coming at a point where so much suffering and death has occurred, that even if there was some happiness that that might bring about a change, it almost seems like we’ve just reached a point of no return.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with reporter Ari Paul. You can find his work many places, but I would personally recommend FAIR.org. Ari Paul, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AP: Thank you.

Janine Jackson interviewed the ACLU’s Scout Katovich about forced institutionalization of poor and disabled people for the August 1, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Poverty and homelessness—and their confluence with mental health challenges, including addiction—reflect societal and public health failures. But rather than take on rising rents and home prices, unlivably low wages and the retraction of social services and healthcare, the Trump White House has issued an executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” that calls for involuntary institutionalization and the elimination of federal support for evidence-based lifesaving programs. Oh, and also increased “data collection” on unhoused people. 

As Southern Legal Counsel puts it, the order is a “continuation of [this administration’s] strategy of depicting anyone whose rights they seek to take away as inherently dangerous.” 

This White House is what it is, but this development also trades on years of media coverage that defines poverty, and the cascade of harms attendant to it, as a “crisis” not so much for the people who experience it, as for those made uncomfortable by being exposed to it. 

Scout Katovich is senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality. She joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome to CounterSpin, Scout Katovich.

Scout Katovich: Thank you, I’m happy to be here.

JJ: There’s been some coverage of this July 24 executive order, but I know that many listeners won’t have heard about it. Could you just please tell us what this order says, and what it calls for?

SK: Absolutely. So this order came out last week, and it is somewhat wide-ranging in terms of the mechanisms that it puts in place, but the gist of it is that it’s taking aim at people who are at the intersection of homelessness, mental health disabilities and substance use. And what it does is it directs federal agencies to use the power they have over funding, as well as over technical assistance, to encourage states and local governments to criminalize people for living on the streets, to push people into involuntary treatment and civil commitment, including lowering standards to get there, and to destroy programs like housing first and harm reduction that we know save lives. 

So the way that the Trump administration is trying to go about this remains a bit to be seen, because it’s directing agencies to take certain actions. And so we’ll see what those agencies do. But it is really troubling in terms of the entire framing of pushing for criminalization and institutionalization as a “solution” to homelessness. We know that’s not a solution. We know that that only makes homelessness, mental illness, substance abuse worse, and it’s really troubling to see this coming out from the federal government, though I can’t say it’s too much of a surprise.

JJ: The order basically says, “Let’s get them into treatment,” which sounds good as a phrase, if you are just blissfully ignorant of anything to do with unhoused people or the history of involuntary warehousing. But for a lot of folks, it sounds like, “Well, golly, just help them.” What do people who think “get them into treatment,” what do they need to understand?

SK: That’s a great point. And this is not the first time that compassion has been co-opted. We actually see this on the left as well, as Governor Newsom in California pushed for the CARE Courts as this compassionate solution, and, really, it was doing a lot of the same thing: targeting unhoused people perceived as having mental illness for forced treatment and institutionalization. 

And what this kind of cloaking in care does is it obscures the fact that involuntary treatment is not effective. If you care about providing people who need help with help, the most effective way to do that is by providing accessible, voluntary services that match a person’s need. And it’s really disingenuous for the federal government to be saying this now, saying people need care, while at the same time blasting Medicaid, and stripping all the voluntary mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, that actually works.

The Register Citizen (7/29/25)

JJ: The University of New Haven journalism professor Susan Campbell, in one of the few media pieces that I’ve seen so far, describes this order as essentially “fact-free.” And she was noting some kind of baseline falsehoods, like it starts out saying the “overwhelming majority of individuals [who are unhoused] are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both.” And it also says both federal and state governments “have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats,” which is another thing. 

I know it’s a lot. But it seems like there are some undergirding ideas for this measure that are simply without foundation.

SK: That’s absolutely correct. The idea that homelessness is caused by individual failures or individual conditions is just absolutely false. We know that we have an affordable housing crisis in this country, and there are, in addition to the nearly 1 million people who are homeless on any given night, there are millions more Americans who are spending over half of their income on rent. 

We can’t close our eyes and pretend that this is an issue that’s just about an individual’s inability to get treatment for themselves. We have a structural problem here that we need to address, and without addressing the underlying housing crisis, we are not going to solve homelessness.

JJ: Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi is no doubt speaking for many in saying, “Don’t law-abiding citizens have a right to live without

Boston Globe (7/30/25)

stepping over needles or encountering violence in front of their homes?” in an op-ed that is headlined, “Involuntary Commitment Should Be on the Table in the Opioid Crisis.” 

Alright, I have thoughts. Not for nothing, but the words “Purdue” or “Sackler” appear nowhere in the piece. Still, it’s playing on this idea of public safety, and don’t we all deserve to feel safe? There’s something powerful at work in that narrative.

SK: Yeah. Look, I agree that we all deserve to feel safe, and that includes us all having a safe place to sleep. That includes us having a safe place where we can get treatment that’s appropriate for us. The pitting against each other of people who lack housing and people who have housing is so insidious and counterproductive. The goal is not to just have there never be enough housing, affordable housing, for people to be able to live inside, and to tolerate that. No, of course not. The idea is for everyone to have access to safe, affordable housing, and to services that allow them to be healthy, without it being something that’s pushing them into institutions or criminalizing them.

JJ: Yeah, we talk about ending homelessness, but if that’s genuinely your goal, then criminalizing unhoused people just doesn’t work. So I think we just have to accept the idea that some of the people who talk about ending homelessness, that’s not their goal. It has to do with something else, and we need to peel that apart, to understand the difference between punitive responses and responses that actually have been shown to be effective, if ending homelessness, or if helping folks with mental health conditions, if that is genuinely your goal.

SK: Yeah, I think that’s accurate. We know that criminalizing homelessness only perpetuates it, and it’s logical, if you think about it, if you have someone who doesn’t have housing, who’s trying to get into housing, and then you give them a criminal record, that’s only going to make it harder to get housing. So it’s really counterproductive. 

But I think what is attractive about it to politicians is that it’s a quick way to push people out of sight. It isn’t something that’s going to take a long-term investment, which is what we need right now. It’s something that you’re going to be able to say to your constituents at the next election, “See, look at how clean our streets are.” And that’s because you’ve pushed people into institutions, oftentimes while violating their rights. So, yes, maybe someone is temporarily pushed out of sight, and you don’t have to confront the massive problems we have as a society with poverty and inequality, but that’s not a solution.

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, what forward-looking media reporting would look like? What would it include that is maybe not included now? What might they toss out that they’ve been entertaining? What would you look for from journalists on this set of issues?

SK: I think it’s really important to understand the humanity of individuals who find themselves living on the street, and to show that this is not about needles, this is about human beings, and the devastating effects that a lot of these punitive policies can have on these human beings, that sets them back, that hurts all of us. I think it’s so important to lift that up. 

I think in terms of this executive order, I also think there’s a need to encourage states and local governments not to feed in, and not to comply with the tenor of this executive order, and to do what they can to stay the course, or start on the course, of adopting policies that are actually effective: affordable housing, housing first, voluntary accessible services. There’s room for courage here, and I think states and local governments have the opportunity to take it.

JJ: All right, then. We’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Scout Katovich from the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality. Thank you so much, Scout Katovich, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SK: Thank you.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

New York Times (7/22/25)

This week on CounterSpin: The mainstream US media debate on the starvation and violence and war crimes in Gaza still, in July 2025, makes room for Bret Stephens, who explains in the country’s paper of record that Israel can’t be committing genocide as rights groups claim, because if they were, they’d be much better at it. Says Stephens:

It may seem harsh to say, but there is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal—if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans—why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?

“It may seem harsh to say” is a time-honored line from those who want to note but justify human suffering, or excuse the crimes of the powerful. It looks bad to you, is the message, because you’re stupid. If you were smart, like me, you’d understand that your empathy is misplaced; these people suffering need to suffer in order to…. Well, they don’t seem to feel a need to fully explain that part. Something about democracy and freeing the world from, like, suffering.

It’s true that corporate media are now gesturing toward engaging questions of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. But what does that amount to at this late date? We’ll talk about corporate media’s Gaza coverage with independent reporter and frequent FAIR.org contributor Ari Paul.

Disability Scoop (8/1/25)

Also on the show: The Americans with Disabilities Act is generally acknowledged in July, with a lot of anodyne “come a long way, still a long way to go” type of reporting. There’s an opening for a different sort of coverage this month, as the Trump administration is actively taking apart laws that protect disabled people in the workplace, and cutting off healthcare benefits, and disabled kids’ educational rights, and rescinding an order that would have moved disabled workers to at least the federal minimum wage; and, with a recent executive order, calling on localities to forcibly institutionalize any unhoused people someone decides is mentally ill or drug-addicted or just living on the street.

Does that serve the hedge funds pricing homes out of reach of even full-time workers? Yes. Does it undercut years of evidence-based work about moving people into homes and services? Absolutely. Does it aim to rocket us back to a dark era of criminalizing illness and disability and poverty? Of course. But Trump calls it “ending crime and disorder,” so you can bet elite media will honor that viewpoint in their reporting. We’ll get a different view from Scout Katovich, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

PBS NewsHour (7/18/25)

This week on CounterSpin: The Trump administration is funding a genocide in Gaza—never mind headlines like July 24’s Washington Post: “Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza as Deaths From Hunger Rise.” (No, it’s actual human beings stalking Gaza, who could right now choose to act differently.)

The White House is deploying masked men to disappear people out of job sites and courtrooms, and offering them salaries orders of magnitude more than those paid teachers or nurses. They’re daylight-robbing hard-earned benefits from everyone, with the most vulnerable first; operating wild grifts for Trump himself; and shutting down any openings for dissent.

None of this, while we acknowledge individual regretters, has radically shaken the MAGA base. But now that group, we’re told, may be fracturing, around the Epstein files.

To tell this as a tale about two uniquely bad men, one of whom mysteriously died in prison while the other mysteriously became president, is a terrible disservice to a story of thinly veiled institutional, professional machinery employed in the systemic criminal victimization of women. But how can we expect elite news media to tell that story when they’re busy wasting ink on Trump denials as though they were something other than nonsense?

There’s a lot going on here; we’ll talk about just some of it with Thom Hartmann, radio host and author of, most recently, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink.

Ken Saro-Wiwa

Also on the show: Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has just announced a posthumous pardon for Nigerian writer, teacher and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged in November 1995, along with eight of his comrades in the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Their crime was nonviolent protest against the exploitation of their land and their people by oil industry giant Royal Dutch Shell. CounterSpin covered it at the time—and then in 2009, we caught up on still-ongoing efforts to bring some measure of accountability for those killings, and Shell’s unceasing human rights and environmental violations, with Han Shan, working with what was then called the ShellGuilty campaign, a coalitional effort from Oil Change International, Friends of the Earth and Platform/Remember Saro-Wiwa.

In light of this pardon, which is being acknowledged as necessary but insufficient, we’re going to hear that conversation with Han Shan again this week.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Truthout (6/11/25)

This week on CounterSpin: The US official stance about the UN is, basically, they’re not the boss of us. But: If it looks like they can make hay with it, then sure. That’s why Secretary of State Marco Rubio is declaring “sanctions” against Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, following an unsuccessful pressure campaign to force the UN to remove her from her post. Albanese has long been clear in calling on the international community to halt Israel’s genocide of Palestinians—but the thing that broke US warmongers was her naming in a recent report of corporations that are profiting from that genocide. We’ll talk about why talking about profiteering is so key with Iman Abid, director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

New York Times (7/2/25)

Also on the show, and to the point: Victor Pickard will join us to talk about corporate actions that make sense as business deals—but, because this country has chosen to run the democratic lifeblood of journalism as just another business, affect everyone relying on news media to tell us about the world. Victor Pickard is professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he codirects the Media, Inequality & Change Center. He’s the author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism? from Oxford University press.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Intercept (7/8/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Along with many other hate-driven harms, the budget bill puts Stephen Miller’s cruel and bizarre mass deportation plan on steroids. $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers; that’s a 62% larger budget than the entire federal prison system.

The goons hiding their faces and IDs while they snatch people off the street? ICE’s “enforcement and deportation operations” get $30 billion. $46 billion for a “border wall,” because that’s evidently not a cartoon. And in a lesser-noticed piece: While courts are backlogged with immigrants complying with legal processes to access citizenship, the bill caps the number of immigration judges to 800, ensuring more people will be kept in vulnerable legal status.

The Economic Policy Institute tells us that increases in immigration enforcement will cause widespread job losses for both immigrant and US-born workers, particularly in construction and childcare: “While Trump and other conservatives claim that increased deportations will somehow magically create jobs for US-born workers, the existing evidence shows that the opposite is true: They will cause immense harm to workers and families, shrink the economy, and weaken the labor market for everyone.”

That’s without mentioning how ICE is telling people they’re being moved from Texas to Louisiana and then dumping them in South Sudan, as the Intercept’s Nick Turse reports. Or the puerile delight Republicans find in holding people in an alligator swamp, and forbidding journalists and public officials from seeing what goes on there.

It’s important to see that Donald Trump, while especially craven, is using tools he was given, in terms of the apparatus for mass deportations, including in the acceptance of prisons as economic boons for struggling localities. So the fight can’t be just anti-Trump, but must be rooted in policy and practice and law—and most of all, in community and shared humanity.

We’ll talk about standing up for human beings because they’re human beings with Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the Texas floods.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

(photo: Jim Naureckas)

This week on CounterSpin: White supremacy, Islamophobia and antisemitism are irreducible dangers in themselves. They are also tools that powerful, wealthy people take up to protect their power and wealth, and to deflect everyone’s attention from who is, actually, day to day, threatening all of our well-being. That brazenness (everything is in peril!)—and that skullduggery (you know who’s the problem? your different-looking neighbor!)—are both in evidence in corporate media’s hellbent, throw-it-all-at-the-wall campaign against democratic socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

We’ll talk about how elite news media are Trojan-horsing their hatred for any ideas that threaten their ill-gotten gains, via very deep, very serious “concerns” about Mamdani as a person, with Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, longtime political activists, writers and co-founders of the emphatically nonpartisan group RootsAction.

Transcript: ‘Media and Corporate Power Structures See Genuine Democracy as a Terrible Danger’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Gaza massacres.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Column (6/22/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Prosecutors at the 1946 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared:

War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

After the Trump administration dropped bombs on Iran last weekend, without congressional approval, the media debate wasn’t about legality, much less humanity. The Wall Street Journal offered a video series on The Massive Ordnance Penetrator, “The 30,000-Pound US Bomb That Could Destroy Iran’s Nuclear Bunkers.” But it’s not just boys excited by toys; the very important Wall Street Journal is “examining military innovation and tactics emerging around the world, breaking down the tech behind the weaponry and its potential impact.”

Most big media are consumed right now with whether those bunker busters did their bunker busting or maybe the US needs to buy bigger, better bombs to…do what, exactly? Well, now you’re asking too many questions.

Things you should not question? Statements like that of Sen. John Fetterman that Iran is the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror.

US corporate media in war mode are a force to reckon with. We do some reckoning with media analyst Adam Johnson, co-host of the podcast Citations Needed, Substack author at the Column, and co-author, with In These Times contributing editor Sarah Lazare, of some relevant pieces at InTheseTimes.com.

Transcript: ‘The Goal Is to Put the Words “Iran” and “Nuclear” in the Same Sentence’

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

CEPR (3/3/25)

This week on CounterSpin: We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities—brown immigrant communities—around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also. But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question—“Why is anyone trying to come to the US anyway?”—by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from. We’ll talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Transcript: ‘To Address Migration Requires a Reorientation of How the US Relates to the Global South

Inequality.org (5/29/25)

Also on the show: Anyone who pays attention and cares can see that the Trump budget bill is a brazen transfer of resources from those that are trying to meet basic needs to those that can’t remember how many houses they own. But corporate reporting rarely breaks out economic policy in terms of how it affects different people—especially how it affects communities for whom they show no consistent concern. Economic policy is itself racialized, gendered, regionalized, targeted. Humanistic journalism would help us see that.

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.”

Transcript: ‘This Isn’t Just About Policy, It’s About What Kind of Nation We Want to Be’