CounterSpin

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 who frankly described the daily human rights violations in Gaza, the right of […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

What will the legalization, and profitizing, of marijuana mean for the people and communities most harmed by its criminalization?

Asian-American students are being used as the face of attempts to eliminate affirmative action or race-consciousness in college admissions.

Many corporate news reporters seem unable to present a labor action as other than an unwonted interruption of a natural order.

Some officials fully intend to treat anyone who stands in opposition to whatever they decide they want to do as enemies of the state.

Whether the Supreme Court gets away with its rejection of ethics depends in part on journalists' willingness to stick with the stories.

Republican brinkmanship could devastate millions of people—along with the harm to public understanding of what's actually going on.

Hate-fueled and hate-fueling media have political and historical impacts—and interpersonal, familial ones as well.

A Texas judge revoking FDA approval of mifepristone may be a "confusing legal battle" for media--but for most people, it's just frightening.

Tax season leads some of us to ponder what we get in return for our resources—streets and stop signs, to be sure, but also wars.

Crushing Starbucks workers' attempts to work together is against the law—but it's not the sort of crime elite media seem able to identify.

Do Black and brown people have a right to move freely in the world? The Ciudad Juárez fire and what it tells us about immigration policy.

What passes for debate about why we must remain at war with whomever is designated has roots in 2003 worth studying.

The corporate press corps seems intent on forcing a vital, important situation into old, tired and harmful frames.

Media interest in historic breakthroughs should extend to the barriers disabled people face in 2023, and how policies could address them.

Jackson, Mississippi, residents who have been harmed many times over are being told that the appropriate response is to take away their voice.

Our past has not been fully grappled with or understood, and that has everything to do with what’s happening now.

Saying how hard you want to be on "dealers" is really an admission of a failure to address a public health issue as a public health issue.

What could be happening if Biden's long-languishing nomination of public interest advocate Gigi Sohn were put through?

Electric utilities have disconnected US households more than 4 million times since the beginning of Covid, preceding the Ukraine War.

The message from many politicians and their media amplifiers: Cheating on taxes is a luxury only the rich can, or should be able to, afford.

Lumumba's assassination, judging by attention, has no lessons for US citizens or the press corps about the past, the present or the future.

The public still look to news media to give them accurate, independently sourced and documented information to help them make decisions.

There's an unarticulated underpinning to elite media conversation that as a consumer, you don't have anything called a "right."

CounterSpin is thankful to every activist, researcher, reporter and advocate who appeared on the show, of whom this is just a small selection.

The Very Smart People will tell us that what we really ought to do, what the intelligent people would do, is, well, nothing.

Those who want to eliminate the Indian Child Welfare Act are opposed by the reality that made the Act necessary in the first place.

The struggle for pay and dignity at the University of California is part of a bigger fight about whether educators are actual workers.

The African continent as a playing field for white people to test their theories, extract resources and stage proxy wars is time-tested.

It's hard not to imagine the use that a differently focused press corps might make of Brazil's change of direction.

The affordable housing crisis is not just capitalism run amok, because that doesn't happen without government involvement.

US news media ignore the role US intervention has played throughout Haitian history in order to push for the same sort of intervention again.

Overt, proud-of-it bias has shaped coverage of Mumia Abu-Jamal's case from the outset, and current mentions suggest little has changed.

Election coverage should be judged not by how reporters "treat" Democrats or Republicans, but about how they inform and engage the public.

Growing numbers of people have concerns, not just about uncritical US support for Israel, but also about the shutdown of critics.

With tens of thousands of workers walking out around the country, the notion that this is somehow not meaningful should be hard to maintain.

Tax giveaways to non–Puerto Ricans mean money not going to Puerto Rico's energy systems, schools, hospitals, housing.

US news media need to not only acknowledge inflicting racist harms, but take seriously the idea of repairing them.

For corporate media, being a paid flack for the police in no way disqualifies you to offer analysis of law enforcement.

News media missed an opportunity to interrogate the media outlets and politicians who repeatedly invoke the white replacement idea.

The film Powerlands covers Indigenous people around the world, and the resource extraction stealing their water, minerals and homelands.

The corporate media narrative on Israel/Palestine makes it hard to make sense of the recent assault by Israeli forces on the Gaza Strip.

We have some questions about the US government's claim that this time, they're really bringing stability and security to Central America.

Alex Jones' lawyer says talking about his white supremacism would "distract from the main issues." What are the "main issues" about Jones?

This week on CounterSpin: The crises we face right now in the US—a nominally democratic political process that’s strangled by white supremacist values, a corporate profiteering system that mindlessly overrides human needs to treat the environment as just another “input”—are terrible, but not, precisely, new. People have fought against these ideas in various forms before; […]

There's a way to tell the story of heat waves that connects to policy and planning, but that centers human beings.

This week on CounterSpin: The internet has changed the way we communicate, access information and even organize, which means concerns about digital privacy are concerns about privacy, period. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, allowing for the criminalization of abortion, our ability to safely access information and health care […]

This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court’s reversal on abortion rights is so actually and potentially devastating that it’s hard to know where to look. It’s worth tracing things back—Katherine Stewart in the Guardian, among others, walks us through how, at a time when most Protestant Republicans, including the Southern Baptist Convention, hailed the liberalization […]

A Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts has gutted multiple legally and societally established precedents.

This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion on Kennedy v. Bremerton that “the Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike.” The case was about whether there was a problem with a Washington […]

It's hard to parse corporate media coverage of Biden's Saudi visit, because that coverage obscures rather than illuminates what's going on.

It's 40 years since Vincent Chin's murder, with a depressingly resonant context of anti-Asian hatred and scapegoating,

There are people and policies, with names, preventing developing countries from accessing life-saving Covid vaccines.

While alternative media are up in arms about the Supreme Court's ruling, corporate news media don't seem to think there's much to see there.

This week on CounterSpin: CBS News‘ website featured a story about the “grim task” of planning funerals for 19 children—shot dead, along with two teachers, in a Texas elementary school on May 24—right next to a story about Oklahoma’s governor signing the country’s strictest abortion ban, the prominent sign behind him declaring “life is […]