Jeff Cohen co-founded FAIR in 1986 and is the author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.

This week on CounterSpin: Listeners to this show may take it as a given that, if you care about social, racial, economic justice, you have to also care about media—because corporate news media promote narratives that shape public opinion, public policy and all of our lives. Now we understand that tales that mainstream news media tell every day—”Healthcare for everyone is too expensive,” “rich people contribute to the economy, while workers just take from it,” “the rest of the world sees the US as the exemplar of democracy”—are not demonstrable truths, but reflect the interests and priorities of media owners and sponsors.

But it wasn’t always this way; there was a time—not long ago—when folks would tell you if it’s in the paper it must be true, and media’s idea of the limits of political debate and political possibility ought to be your limits too, if you’re sensible. Undoing that myth—with criticism and activism and promoting alternative sources of information—has been the project of FAIR, the worker collective media watch group that produces this show, for 35 years now.

We’re celebrating that anniversary by working more, basically, but this week we take a look back at FAIR’s beginnings with founder Jeff Cohen. After starting FAIR with Martin Lee and Pia Gallegos in 1986, Jeff went on to be founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, and now co-founder and policy adviser at the online initiative RootsAction. In between, he was a pundit on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, and wrote the book Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.

Transcript: ‘The Media Are an Arena for Struggle’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look at media coverage of the Olympics.