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05.26.2024

Ellen Schrecker on the Attack on Academic Freedom

This week on CounterSpin: As an historic catastrophe, the deep and myriad impacts of Israel’s assault on Palestinians will not be fully understood until years from now, if then. That only adds urgency to present-day resistance to the collateral assault —...

05.19.2024

Steven Rosenfeld on Election Transparency / Ian Vandewalker on Small Donors

This week on CounterSpin: Steven Rosenfeld reports on election transparency, among other electoral issues, for Voting Booth. We hear from him about kinds of election interference we ignore at our peril. Some elite media-designated “smart people” have determined, “Citizens United, what? It’s...

05.12.2024

Ahmad Abuznaid on Rafah Invasion

This week on CounterSpin: CNN’s Jake Tapper is mad about college students protesting their institutions’ and their government’s support for Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza — because they’re preventing him, by his account, from covering Israel’s horrific attacks on...

05.05.2024

Joseph Torres & Collette Watson on Media for Social Justice

We’re now seeing the impacts of the reality that corporate media, as well as corporate-funded universities, will always side with official power — as they present students sitting quietly in tents in protest of genocide as violent terrorists. But in...

04.28.2024

Sam on Students for Justice in Palestine / Sally Dworak-Fisher on Delivery Workers

This week on CounterSpin: Many college students appear to believe that learning about the world means not just gaining knowledge but acting on it. Campuses across the country — Rutgers, MIT, Ohio State, Boston University, Emerson, Tufts, and on and on —...

04.21.2024

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

This week on CounterSpin: The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuses of Iraqi detainees during the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia, with Al-Shimari v. CACI. Since the case was first filed in 2008,...

04.14.2024

Chris Bernadel on Haiti

This week on CounterSpin: U.S. corporate media’s story about Haiti is familiar. Haiti, according to various recent reports, has “whipped from one calamity to another.” The country is a “cataclysm of hunger and terror,” “teetering on the brink of collapse,” “spiraling...

04.07.2024

Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation / Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone

This week on CounterSpin: In the final quarter of 2023, after-tax corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion. As reported by Popular Information, corporate profit margins were at a level not seen since the 1950s, as increases in prices...

03.31.2024

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

This week on CounterSpin: A senior UN human rights official told the BBC that there is a “plausible” case that Israel is using starvation in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is a war crime. Meanwhile, US citizens struggle to...

03.24.2024

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

This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption is the prime mover of a cascade of interrelated crises. We’re told that, when it comes to problems people need solved, rule number 1 is “follow the money.” Yet even as elite media talk about...

03.17.2024

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

This week on CounterSpin: About this time seven years ago, John Deere was arguing, with a straight face, that farmers shouldn’t really “own” their tractors, because if they had access to the software involved, they might pirate Taylor Swift music. Things...

03.10.2024

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

This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump, if he should become president again, could order the Department of Justice to drop any charges against him stemming from his fomenting of an insurrection aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 election. That’s...

03.03.2024

Victor Pickard on the Crisis of Journalism

This week on CounterSpin: Years ago, when media critics called attention to ways corporate media’s profit-driven nature negatively impacts the news, many would respond, “But what about the internet?” Nowadays, more people understand that constraints on a news outlet’s content have...

02.25.2024

Greg Shupak and Trita Parsi on the Assault on Gaza

Every day the US falls more out of step with the world in its support for Israel’s violent assault on Gaza. As International human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber said, US vetoes of ceasefires in the UN Security Council, after which...

02.18.2024

Ariel Adelman on Disability Civil Rights

People with disabilities are meant to be grateful, excited even, for whatever access or accommodation is made available for them to participate in daily life. Often, it’s implied that any violation of the rights of disabled people is an individual...

02.11.2024

Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation

This week on CounterSpin: The rate of inflation is down. Prices, though, are still high, and Americans are struggling to afford food, cars and housing. Speaking of people having trouble affording basic necessities, “cut up the credit cards” is the sort...

02.04.2024

Aron Thorn on Texas Border Standoff

This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court ruled that federal agents can remove the razor wire that Texas state officials have set up along parts of the US/Mexico border. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that ruling “allows Biden to continue...

01.28.2024

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

This week on CounterSpin: Elite media can give the impression that problems wax and wane along with their attention to them. So it is with police brutality. The news media has moved on, yet 2023 saw killings by law enforcement up from...

01.21.2024

Gregory Shupak on Gaza and Genocide

This week on CounterSpin: US corporate news media’s initial response to Israel’s terror campaign against Palestinians, unleashed in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas, was characterized largely by legitimization, a rhetorical blank check for whatever Israel might do....

01.14.2024

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

This week on CounterSpin: The journalists at Yahoo Finance tell us that a Connecticut McDonald’s charging $18 for a combo meal has “sparked a nationwide debate” on escalating prices in the fast food industry. The outrage, readers are told, is “partly...

01.07.2024

Chip Gibbons on the Right to Protest

This week on CounterSpin: It was a big deal when Jewish Americans who oppose US support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza filled New York’s Grand Central Terminal. But not big enough to make the front page of the local paper,...

12.31.2023

Best of CounterSpin 2023

Every week, CounterSpin presents a look “behind the headlines” of the mainstream news. Not because headlines are false, necessarily, but because the full story is rarely reflected there. Many — most — conversations we need to have, must happen around...

12.24.2023

Wadie Said on the New McCarthyism

People in the U.S., the story goes, value few things more than individual freedom and money. So you’d think the way an individual uses their money would be sacrosanct. A sign of where we’re at are currently congressional efforts to...

12.17.2023

Climate Disruption Filtered Through Corporate Media

This week on CounterSpin: UN Climate talks have ended with an agreement that, as New York Times headlines would suggest, “Strikes a Deal to Transition Away From Fossil Fuels.” Headlines, which are all that many people read, are often misleading, and...

12.10.2023

Sonya Meyerson-Knox on Jewish Voice for Peace

This week on CounterSpin: As we record on December 7, the news from Gaza continues to be horrific: The Washington Post reports, citing Gaza Health Ministry reports, that Israel’s continued assault throughout the region has killed at least 350 people in...

12.03.2023

Melissa Gira Grant on Abortion Rights & Politics

This week on CounterSpin: “Abortion Politics Reveal Concerns” was the headline one paper gave a recent Associated Press story, language so bland it almost discourages reading the piece, which reports how right-wing politicians and anti-abortion activists are seeking to undermine or...

11.26.2023

Mark Weisbrot on Argentina’s Javier Milei

This week on CounterSpin: The new president of Argentina opposes abortion rights, casts doubt on the death toll of the country’s military dictatorship, would like it to be easier to access handguns and calls climate change a “lie of socialism.” Many...

11.19.2023

Scott Burris on US v. Rahimi

This week on CounterSpin: Coverage of what is quite possibly not the most recent mass shooting, as we record the show, but the recent one in Lewiston, Maine, leaned heavily on a narrative of the assailant as a “textbook case” of a shooter, because...

11.12.2023

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

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate news media use at least a couple of largely unexplored lenses through which to present US human rights violations. One is this: The US does not commit human rights violations, except by accident, or as unavoidable...

11.05.2023

‘In the Middle East, We Are Hearing a New Set of Excuses to Justify the Same Old Policy’: interview with Raed Jarrar on Biden’s Saudi trip + Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are I

This week on CounterSpin: Elite media are fond of saying that the US is resetting its Middle East policy. During the 2020 campaign, the New York Times explained, Joe Biden pledged, if elected, to stop coddling Saudi Arabia, after the brutal murder of prominent...

10.29.2023

Peter Maybarduk on Paxlovid; Maya Schenwar on Grassroots Journalism

This week on CounterSpin: Advertising critics have long noted that a company’s PR tells you, inadvertently but reliably, exactly what their problems are. The ad features salmon splashing in crystalline waters? That company is for sure a massive polluter. That’s the lump of...

10.22.2023

Christopher Bosso on Food Assistance; Barbara Briggs on Workplace Disasters

This week on CounterSpin: Government-supplied food assistance has been around in various forms since at least the Great Depression, but never with the straightforward goal of easing hunger. 1930s posters about food stamps declare, “We are helping the farmers of America...

10.15.2023

CounterSpin – October 15, 2023

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin...

10.08.2023

Rodrigo Camarena on Wage Theft

This week on CounterSpin: The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik is one of vanishingly few national reporters to suggest that if media care about crime, if they care about people having things stolen from them—maybe they could care less about toasters and...

10.01.2023

Stephen Zunes on Menendez Indictment

This week on CounterSpin: You can’t say elite US news media aren’t on the story of the federal indictment of Robert Menendez, Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But articles like the New York Times’ “As Menendez’s Star Rose,...

09.24.2023

Lisa Xu on Auto Workers Strike

This week on CounterSpin: An unprecedented labor action is underway as thousands of Midwest autoworkers working for the Big 3—Ford, GM and Stellantis (which used to be Chrysler)—went on strike at the same time. Some things workers are calling for...

09.17.2023

Maha Hilal on Innocent Until Proven Muslim

This week on CounterSpin: New Yorkers who were here 22 years ago remember the proliferation of signs and stickers reading “our grief is not a cry for war”—and then the way that voice was shouted over by corporate news media,...

09.10.2023

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

This week on CounterSpin: The White House has announced it’s extending the ban on people using US passports to go to North Korea. Corporate media seem to find it of little interest; who wants to go to North Korea? Which fairly...

09.03.2023

Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro on Education

This week on CounterSpin: It is back to school week in the US. Schools—pre-K to college—have been on the front burner for at least a year now, but education has always been a contested field in this country: Who has access?...

08.27.2023

CounterSpin – August 27, 2023

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin...

08.20.2023

CounterSpin – August 20, 2023

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin...

08.13.2023

CounterSpin – August 13, 2023

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin...

08.06.2023

CounterSpin – August 6, 2023

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin...

07.30.2023

CounterSpin – July 30, 2023

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin...

07.23.2023

CounterSpin – July 23, 2023

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin...

07.16.2023

CounterSpin – July 16, 2023

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin...

07.09.2023

CounterSpin – July 9, 2023

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin...

07.02.2023

CounterSpin – July 2, 2023

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin...

06.25.2023

CounterSpin – June 25, 2023

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin...

06.18.2023

CounterSpin – June 18, 2023

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin...