CounterSpin

News media could help explain immigration by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from.

There's an important legal development in the case of student activist Mahmoud Khalil, held without warrant since March for voicing support for Palestinian lives.

Reports are that Elon Musk is going back to make Tesla great again. We'll talk about how to miss Musk when he won't go away.

Tom Morello's music has always been intertwined with his activism and advocacy for social, racial and economic justice.

The feint Congress is using to cut Medicare—we're just forcing recipients to work, like they should—is obvious, age-old and long-disproven.

The arguments advanced to justify banning coffee imports from Brazil to the US rely on outliers representing a tiny portion of the workforce, not the norm.

Millions around the world ask every day what it will take to awaken the conscience of leaders to stop the genocide of Palestinians.

Our lack of knowledge of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency will only hurt us in our response to the effects that the dealings around that stuff are having on our lives.

The Trump White House seeks to denounce and derail multiracial democracy—in part by erasing the history of Black people in this country.

The Yemeni people are paying the price both for the fighting and for the distortions around it, from political elites and their media amplifiers.

What can thinking, feeling human beings do now to protect fellow humans who are immigrants in this country?

Kennedy's unorthodox ideas may get us all killed while media whistle.

Pretending protest isn't happening is aiding and abetting the work of the silencers; it's telling lies about who we are and what we can do.

All that's in the balance are human lives and health, and the ability of working people to plan for our futures.

Policy impacts on people with disabilities are overwhelmingly an afterthought for corporate media, though it's a community anyone can join at any moment.

Federal workers, presumed to be easy targets, are also on the front lines of the fightback against the Trump/Musk federal smash and grab.

Fossil fuel corporations' lawsuits against those who challenge their destruction take aim at our ability to speak out about anything.

Corporate media can't bring themselves to call Trump's illegal, inhumane plan what it is: ethnic cleansing.

Corporate news media presented a campaign openly defined as uninterested in truth or humanity as a totally valid, “grassroots” perspective.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens made an overt case for US military intervention to topple Venezuela's government.

The Trump campaign against transgender people lands in an elite media climate in which trans lives have long been deemed "subject to debate."

The increasing influence of the super rich on the politics and policy we all have to live with is an urgent story, if not a new one.

Immigration itself is now not a human rights story, or even an economic one, but yet another story about “their” crimes and “our” safety.

Many are calling out insurance companies that take folks' money, but then hinder their ability to come out from under when these predictable and predicted crises occur.

How different is Thomas Friedman's insistence that China "let in more Taylor Swifts" from US media coverage of China and trade policy generally?

Corporate news media, tasked primarily with enriching the rich and shoring up entrenched institutions, will not do the liberatory, illuminating work of independent journalism.

This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations from the past year that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us.

Does banning TokTok threaten First Amendment freedoms? A judge says the government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.”

While not the first to ask us to see the assault on Palestinians as genocide, Amnesty's report offers an opening to ask why some are so invested in saying it isn't.

When a corporate behemoth like Amazon buys one of the country's national newspapers, it's a conflict writ large as can or should be.

A federal jury has just found military contractor CACI responsible for its part in Abu Ghraib abuse, in a ruling being called “exceptional in every sense of the term.”

Legal sports gambling is the apple of the eye of many corporate and private state actors—but how does it affect states, communities, people?

If we're to believe the chest-thumping, high on Trump's agenda will be the enforced criminalization of immigration.

We talk about what just happened, and corporate media's role in it, with Julie Hollar, senior analyst at the media watch group FAIR, and FAIR's editor Jim Naureckas.

News media start with the premise of immigration itself as a “crisis,” with the only debate around how to "stem" or "control" it.

Trump's “Big Lie” attorneys are not so much returning to the field, but actually never left.

Defending Rights & Dissent has started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday.

A new book doesn't just illuminate the thicket of effects of systemic racism as it affects where people live; it reframes the understanding of the role of housing.

The more a strike affects the economy, i.e., the more effective it is, the harder corporate media try to smear workers as selfish and destructive.

Why are events we pay insurance for a "crisis" for the industry we pay it to? The unceasing effects of climate disruption will only throw that question into more relief.

Musk's Twitter is keeping certain information out of the public view—information that just happens to damage the presidential ticket he supports.

As every day brings news of new carnage, US citizens have a duty not to look away, given our government's critical role in arming Israel and ignoring its crimes.

Jen Senko's film and the book based on it are an effort to engage the effects of that yelling, punching down, reactionary media.

Why do the press corps need a constitutional amendment to protect their ability to speak if all they're going to say is, “oh well”?

A people-centered press corps would spell out the meaning of economic “indicators” in relation to where we want to go as a society that has yet to address deep historical and structural harms.

Kroger is currently raising the prices of things like eggs and milk above inflation rates, simply because they can get away with it.

More than 20 years after the New York Times was catastrophically wrong on the Iraq War, the paper cannot forgive anyone who was right.

How do we acknowledge the fact that many people's opinions are shaped by messages that are created and paid for by folks who work hard to hide their identity and their interests?

The crickets you're hearing about efforts to eviscerate the right to protest the impacts of climate disruption? That's all intentional. 

Does the company that "corners the market" do so because people simply prefer what they sell? The anti-monopoly ruling against Google challenges that idea of how things work.

The right wing has gotten much more overt about their intention to defeat the prospect of multiracial democracy, as demonstrated by its latest weaponized trope—the “DEI hire.”