KPFA - CounterSpin

This week on CounterSpin: The DEA made a high profile announcement of massive seizures of opium in Afghanistan, reminding us of the centrality of opium production to the country’s economy. But most stories on the occupation and on Afghan ‘hearts and minds’ include marginal mention of the narcotic. How would really understanding the role of opium shift our understanding of US policy in Afghanistan? We’ll hear from historian Alfred McCoy, author of the classic The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, now updated as The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.

Also on CounterSpin today, it's not hard to show that Fox News host and radio talker Glenn Beck is a bit wacky– he spends several hours every day demonstrating as much. But the paranoid theories he's espousing have real consequences. So where do they come from? Richard Kim from the Nation tried to track one of Beck's favorite conspiracies, and he'll join us to tell us how the White House's political strategy is based on an article published in the Nation 40 years ago. It all makes perfect sense

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This week on CounterSpin: Journalists are lining up to tout the Tea Party movement's relevance and strength, but show little interest in probing its deep contradictions or finding out what actually makes the activists tick. That's why they can describe as populist a movement closely, if fitfully, allied with the corporate-dominated GOP. In her report "Mainstream Media's Tea Party Tryst," Sikivu Hutchinson digs a little deeper. Hutchinson, the editor of BlackFemLens.org and a contributor to Black Agenda Report, will join us to talk about the Tea Party movement.

Also on CounterSpin today, before the recent snow storms hit Washington DC the talk was of a different sort of freeze—a spending freeze. The Obama White House announced that it was time to do something to rein in government spending; but military spending was conspicuously exempt from the belt-tightening. Carl Conetta from the Project on Defense Alternatives will join us to talk about the facts about Obama's military budget, and why this conversation doesn't have much of a place in the corporate media.

Guests:

Sikivu Hutchinson on Tea Party movement

Carl Conetta on Pentagon spending

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This week on CounterSpin: a special look at the state of the media in America. Every week on CounterSpin we talk mostly about what the media are getting wrong. But the big story inside the media business is the collapse of the business itself. What are the implications for citizens? What can we do about it? And how concerned should we be about the failures of corporate owners that have done so little to promote good journalism in the first place? We'll talk about all that and more with our guests Robert McChesney and John Nichols, co-authors of the new book ''The Death and Life of American Journalism: the Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again.'

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