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Objective (7/18/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Trump’s threats to media corporations are laying bare what many already knew: Media corporations are reliant on government for policies that benefit them as profit-driven corporations, because they are primarily profit-driven corporations, even though we may still see them as the journalistic institutions whose job is to inform us about the world and one another—without, as is sometimes quaintly referenced, “fear or favor.”

But while many are meaningfully and rightfully engaged in this White Houses’ harmful overreach and gross predations on the First Amendment, there is less attention to the role of the 14th Amendment—meant to secure basic rights of equal protection and due process for formerly enslaved people.

That’s in play here too; if, like our guest, you are able to contextualize this retrograde White House’s assaults on the press corps as part of, and not ancillary to, their direct assaults on Black and brown people, on the policies that aim to afford us equal rights, on the programs that allow us to enter the country as immigrants, on the laws that resist active discrimination against us on jobsites, in public accommodations, in housing, on the street, at the bank. They don’t actively, aggressively, despise Black and brown people over here, but then just have some sort of principled problem with news reporters, separately, over there; it’s all of a piece. And that piece has a history that we’d do well to learn—not only because of the ongoing, institutional harms it helps us see, but also the hope and resistance that’s there in that history, as well.

We get into it with Joseph Torres, senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press, co-creator of the project Media 2070, and co-author, with Juan Gonzalez, of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trump and TikTok.