CounterSpin

CounterSpin episodes:

• 04.19.2024

  Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Lawsuit, Dave Lindorff on Spy for No Country

  The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuse of Iraqi detainees in the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia.

  
• 04.12.2024

  Chris Bernadel on Haiti

  What needs to change in Haiti includes Western media presentations that ignore or erase even recent history.

  
• 04.05.2024

  Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation, Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone

  Corporate profit margins are at a level not seen since the 1950s, as abject greed was whistled past by the press corps.

  
• 03.29.2024

  Phyllis Bennis on Gaza Ceasefire Resolution, Robert Weissman on Boeing Scandal

  A senior UN human rights official says there is a "plausible" case that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, a war crime.

  
• 03.22.2024

  Evlondo Cooper on Climate Coverage, Rick Goldsmith on Stripped for Parts

  Elite media still can’t quite connect images of floods or fires to the triumphant shareholder meetings of the fossil fuel companies.

  
• 03.15.2024

  Gay Gordon-Byrne on Right to Repair, Suyapa Portillo Villeda on Honduran Ex-President Conviction

  Industry still argues that that cellphone isn't really "yours," in the sense that you can't fix it if it breaks.

  
• 03.08.2024

  Ian Millhiser on Supreme Court Trump Protection, Alfredo Lopez on Radical Elders

  Donald Trump could declare himself above the law—and that’s just been enabled by a recent Supreme Court ruling.

  
• 03.01.2024

  Victor Pickard on the Crisis of Journalism

  If we don’t ask different questions about what we need from journalism, we will arrive at the same old unsatisfactory responses.

  
• 02.23.2024

  Gregory Shupak and Trita Parsi on Gaza Assault

  As the US falls more out of step with the world, many in the US press seem divorced from the idea of US responsibility.

  
• 02.16.2024

  Ariel Adelman on Disability Civil Rights

  Acheson v. Laufer is another example of “weaponizing the courts to dismantle labor protections, housing rights and health guidelines.”

  
• 02.14.2024

  Media That Benefit From Inequality Prefer to Talk About Other Things

  The rapid rise in inequality over recent decades should have generated deep alarm in news media. But there’s little sign of distress.

  
• 02.09.2024

  Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation

  The same people who earn wages also buy groceries, and pretending that we’re pitted against one another is not just mis- but disinformation.

  
• 02.02.2024

  Aron Thorn on Texas Border Standoff

  What if there isn’t a "border crisis" so much as an absence of historical understanding, of empathy, of community resourcing?

  
• 01.26.2024

  Monifa Bandele on Reimagining Public Safety, Svante Myrick on Roadblocks to Voting

  Communities are hard at work reimagining public safety without punitive policing. There’s new work on those possibilities.

  
• 01.19.2024

  Gregory Shupak on Gaza and Genocide

  How does the New York Times’ assertion that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life” stand up now?

  
• 01.12.2024

  Sebastian Martinez Hickey on Minimum Wage, Saru Jayaraman on History of Tipping

  Elite reporters are so removed from daily reality that they assume a raise in wages means fast food employees have to lose their jobs.

  
• 01.05.2024

  Media Obsession With Inflation Has Manufactured Discontent

  Corporate media’s single-minded obsession with inflation has left the public with an objectively inaccurate view of the economy.

  
• 01.05.2024

  Chip Gibbons on the Right to Protest

  US journalists invoke the First Amendment a lot, but not so much when it extends to regular folks saying NO to the US government.

  
• 12.29.2023

  Best of CounterSpin 2023

  CounterSpin is thankful to all the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show to help us see the world more clearly.

  
• 12.22.2023

  Wadie Said on the New McCarthyism

  Powerful institutions, including the media, combine a selective understanding of free expression with a vehement desire to enforce it.

  
• 12.15.2023

  Richard Wiles & Matthew Cunningham-Cook on Climate Disruption Filtered Through Corporate Media

  We can't have a public conversation about how fossil fuels cause climate disruption in a corporate media moneyed by fossil fuel companies.

  
• 12.08.2023

  Sonya Meyerson-Knox on Jewish Voice for Peace

  The devastation of Gaza, and the vehement efforts to silence anyone who wants to challenge it, is the story for today.

  
• 12.01.2023

  Melissa Gira Grant on Abortion Rights & Politics

  Too many outlets seem to have trouble shaking the framing of abortion as a "controversy," or as posing problems for this or that politician.

  
• 11.24.2023

  Mark Weisbrot on Argentina’s Javier Milei

  Argentina's new president questions the death toll of the country's military dictatorship and calls climate change a “lie of socialism.”

  
• 11.17.2023

  For Cable News, a Palestinian Life Is Not the Same as an Israeli Life

  Cable news coverage of victims, war crimes and context show a double standard when it comes to US allies versus official US enemies.

  
• 11.17.2023

  Scott Burris on US v. Rahimi

  The question is whether the Court’s conservative majority can use its special brand of backwards-looking to determine this country’s future.

  
• 11.10.2023

  Jamil Dakwar on US & Human Rights, Matt Gertz on Mike Johnson

  Shouldn't the press corps be actively involved in informing us about the person third in line for the presidency?

  
• 11.03.2023

  Raed Jarrar on Biden & Saudi Arabia, Joe Torres on Tulsa Massacre

  “The newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

  
• 10.27.2023

  Peter Maybarduk on Paxlovid, Maya Schenwar on Grassroots Journalism

  Paxlovid's "transition" to the commercial market entails hiking the cost of the treatment to 100 times the cost of production.

  
• 10.20.2023

  Christopher Bosso on Food Assistance, Barbara Briggs on Workplace Disasters

  The primary food aid program, SNAP, while the constant target of the racist, drown-government-in-the-bathtub crowd, keeps on keeping on.

  
• 10.13.2023

  Phyllis Bennis on Gaza

  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...

  
• 10.06.2023

  Rodrigo Camarena on Wage Theft

  Corporate media tell us to be mad at the rando taking toilet paper from Walgreens, but not the executive who’s skimming your paycheck.

  
• 09.29.2023

  Stephen Zunes on Menendez Indictment

  The story is mostly about the political fortunes of an individual; the huge numbers of less powerful people impacted are, at best, backdrop.

  
• 09.22.2023

  Lisa Xu on Auto Workers Strike

  An unprecedented labor action is underway as thousands of Midwest autoworkers working for the Big 3 went on strike at the same time.

  
• 09.15.2023

  Maha Hilal on Innocent Until Proven Muslim

  September 11, 2001, is the exemplar of a past that isn’t dead, or even past, and for no one more particularly than Muslims.

  
• 09.08.2023

  Amanda Yee on Korean Travel Ban, Hyun Lee on Korea History

  Media have an active disinterest in telling the story of the Korean peninsula in anything other than static, cartoonish terms.

  
• 09.01.2023

  Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro on Education

  It does no disservice to the education battles of the current day to connect them to previous battles and conversations.

  
• 08.25.2023

  Kehsi Iman Wilson on Americans with Disabilities Act

  The ADA demands all kinds of attention, every day—not a once a year pat on the back about "how far we’ve come."

  
• 08.18.2023

  Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Torture Lawsuit, Thomas Germain on Online History Destruction

  Unlike elite media’s misty memories, the lawsuit is a stubborn indication that those responsible for Abu Ghraib haven't been called to account.

  
• 08.11.2023

  Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition

  Facial recognition, a technology that has been proven wrong, has been deemed harmful, in principle and in practice, for years now.

  
• 08.04.2023

  Teddy Ostrow on UPS/Teamsters Agreement, Matthew Cunningham-Cook on GOP Climate Sabotage

  Elite media are deeply accustomed to calling any union action a harm, and any company acknowledgment of workers’ value a concession.

  
• 07.28.2023

  Melissa Crow on Asylum Restrictions, Dave Zirin on NYT’s Vanishing Sports Section

  Advocates have long declared that Biden’s asylum restrictions are not just harmful but unlawful. And a federal judge has just agreed.

  
• 07.26.2023

  ‘We Need a Gender-Inclusive Understanding of Police Violence’

  "Not a lot of people would understand that Black women are often killed by the police when they actually ask for help."

  
• 07.21.2023

  Kevin Minofu on Say Her Name

  Say Her Name is about adding Black women to our understanding of police violence—to help make our response more meaningful and impactful.

  
• 07.14.2023

  Arlene Martínez on Corporate Subsidies, Florín Nájera-Uresti on Journalism Preservation

  White supremacy and economic policy are completely different stories for the press, but not for the people.

  
• 07.07.2023

  Emily Sanders on How Not to Interview an Oil CEO, Kaufman & Bozuwa on Fighting Climate Disrupters

  There is no way to fight climate disruption without fighting climate disrupters.

  
• 06.30.2023

  Taryn Abbassian and Others on Dobbs One Year Later

  The impacts of the Dobbs ruling are still reverberating, as is the organized pushback that we can learn about and support.

  
• 06.23.2023

  Nancy Altman on GOP Social Security Attack, Daniel Ellsberg Revisited

  When Daniel Ellsberg died, media burnished their own reputation as truth-tellers while somehow dishonoring the practice of truth-telling.

  
• 06.22.2023

  As Venezuela Mends Ties With Latin Neighbors, Western Media Turn Up the Propaganda

  Western outlets will stop at no length to defend Washington’s agenda, even if that means reheating debunked narratives.

  
• 06.16.2023

  Sonali Kolhatkar on the Power of Narrative

  Narrative is an important tool for folks looking to change the world for the better, in part by changing the stories we tell one another.