CounterSpin

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260501.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Yahoo Finance (4/25/26) This week on CounterSpin: A CNN headline a few months back told us that Instacart—which used to call itself a company that delivers groceries, but now, as its CEO told investors, is the “leading technology and enablement partner for the grocery industry”—was now using AI to “Gauge Customer Price Sensitivity.” “Price sensitivity” apparently means whether or not you care that you pay more for the same can of beans as another person—or, to be more clear, whether or not you notice. While some states look into banning it, so-called algorithmic or “dynamic” pricing is being presented by the corporate press as a fait accompli, the only question remaining being how to make sure consumers understand that they have no choice. We'll hear more from investigative reporter Derek Kravitz, from Consumer Reports. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260501Kravitz.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of the White House Correspondents Dinner attack. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260501Banter.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260424.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). NHLC (3/24/26) This week on CounterSpin: From the federal level on down, many laws and policies that claim to be about “ending homelessness” seem to be clearly more about hurting homeless people than changing their circumstance. Even if you, or anyone you know, has never been unhoused: How hard is it to understand the difference between charging poor people monetary fines they obviously can't pay, and then throwing them in jail when they don't—and addressing homelessness with, oh I don't know, housing? That would be a commonsense conversation, about what resources we have and how we deploy them; but instead we see power actors, with the support of the White House and the Supreme Court, telling us that “ending homelessness” means tearing up people's tents, throwing away their belongings; a new law in Kentucky says officials can use “stand your ground” laws to shoot homeless people that don't “cooperate” with their eviction from private or public land. So: Is this really about addressing homelessness? Because we know how to do that. And if it's not: What is it about? And can we have an honest conversation about that? Jesse Rabinowitz is the campaign and communications director at the National Homelessness Law Center. We hear from him this week. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260424Rabinowitz.mp3 Marijuana Moment (12/18/25) Also on the show: You may think weed is “legal” because you see so many people smoking it on the street. Including your grandma and your next-door neighbor who just a few years back would've called the cops. But just as the criminalization of marijuana affected different communities very differently, the current supposed de-criminalization continues to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. Though that is not at all the understanding you would get from a casual view, or for that matter from media coverage that makes it seem like the debate over weed is all over, and now we're all just talking about which strain is the best. Maritza Perez Medina is director of federal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. She joins us to talk about what the “rescheduling” of marijuana does and doesn't do. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260424Medina.mp3 With both homelessness and drug policy, it's useful to see how many current legislative measures, with a cultural backwind from corporate media, are fooling people that things have changed, while actually things are still harming the people who have always been harmed. So these moves are not something to “tweak”; we need conversation and action based on a different understanding of why things are as they are, and of how things can be.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260417.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Inequality.org (3/4/26) This week on CounterSpin:  Tesla reported $5.7 billion in US profits in 2025 and paid $0.0 in taxes. As Rebecca Crosby and Judd Legum at Popular Information report, there's little mystery to this miracle: Tesla used corporate tax breaks, proffered by Trump and co. in what reporters with straight faces call the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—including 100% bonus depreciation; and they exploited a long-standing deduction for executive stock options. At least 88 profitable corporations have reported paying $0 in federal income taxes last year, according to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. Citigroup, CVS, Walt Disney—they “made” billions but, weirdly it turns out, they somehow owe the federal government bupkis, whereas you and I are playing a chump's game, evidently. Cheaters cheat, grifters grift, but why do news media label companies “successful” when that success stems from cheating and grifting and, crucially, shafting their workers? Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits the site Inequality.org. She's written a new report that gets to the heart of America's “Low-Wage Employers and the Affordability Crisis.” We hear from her this week. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260417Anderson.mp3 Fight for the Future (4/13/26) Also on the show: The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is a nonprofit digital library with the fundamental mission of preserving web pages. For example, a union organizer used it to look up old job listings and check how what the company says it offers has shifted over time. When police edited a press release after a journalist reported on it, and then said her report was false, she was able to prove that the department had changed their statement. It's kind of Information 101. But it's under threat. We hear about that from artist and activist Lia Holland, campaigns and communications director at the group Fight for the Future. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260417Holland.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260410.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). New York Times (4/8/26) When a president commits war crimes, including what the Nuremberg trials established as the “supreme international crime” of plotting and waging an aggressive war, as Trump has done, and then blithely threatens more war crimes, as Trump has done, you would hope major news outlets would do much more than type up reports, like one from the New York Times, on how Trump currently “faces new diplomatic tests.” It’s important to call out Trump and his enablers' particular hatefulness and weirdness, but we’re missing something if we don’t see how they've been pulling on pre-existing threads, making use of old narratives that have proven useful before and left unexamined. We'll hear about that from Sina Toossi, senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260410Toossi.mp3 Defending Rights & Dissent (4/6/26) Also on the show: What can you do about a president like Trump? No, really: What can you do? Impeachment is often talked about in the press as a mean thing that partisan officials threaten each other with, but it was intended as a genuine response to presidents who were deemed unfit for public office. More and more people are saying unto shouting that about Trump now; so what next? We'll hear from activist/author Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260410Gibbons.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260403.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). USA Today (4/1/26) This week on CounterSpin: In Chiles vs. Salazar, the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado's law prohibiting health practitioners from employing the widely discredited practice of trying to “convert” young people from their sexual orientation or gender identity violates healthcare workers' First Amendment rights.  We'll hear about what the ruling does and doesn't do, and how news media might better explain it, from Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for LGBTQ Rights. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260403Minter.mp3 Local News Day Also on the show: April 9 is Local News Day, a new project aimed at lifting up the value of truly local news outlets in an increasingly consolidated media landscape. Alex Frandsen helps lead a group, the Media Power Collaborative, that's looking to forge a way forward that draws on the particular value of local news, to communities and those representing them, and that doesn't involve revisiting an imagined past age of benevolent media giants. We'll hear from him as well on the show. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260403Frandsen.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260327.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Good Jobs First (3/23/26) This week on CounterSpin: Sunshine Week, based on a popular statement from Louis Brandeis that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” is an effort to spotlight open government and its importance to the public's right to know what's being done in our name. The Michigan Press Association usually honors a public official who advances open government, but this year they said they're giving no award because “this year's legislative and policy landscape does not reflect the progress or commitment to openness that the award is designed to celebrate.” Ooof. So Sunshine Week, introduced decades ago by the National Association of Newspaper Editors, is meant to be both a celebration and a call to arms. To information advocates—and to journalists who should be natural partners with anyone seeking to bring the actions of the powerful to light. We talk about it with a group that stays on top of government transparency; Arlene Martinez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260327Martinez.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at Washington Post prices, the actual cost of oil, the Cuba blockade and Breonna Taylor. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260327Banter.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260320.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Truth Social (3/14/26) This week on CounterSpin: Those not in vigorous denial understand that we in the US are in the midst of not just “foreign” wars—today on, most prominently, Iran—but also a war against our ability to talk about it all, to dissent from it, to hear from people who have different ideas about ways forward. It doesn't seem too much to say: If we cut off our ability to have a widespread public debate, whatever “solutions” we're told “we” came up with have nothing to do with democracy. We'll hear from FAIR editor Jim Naureckas about what news media could call, if only they would, “the Trump administration vs. the First Amendment.” https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260320Naureckas.mp3 Just Security (3/17/26) Also on the show: US news media told us that the images of Iraqis tortured at the infamous “hard site” in Abu Ghraib have been “seared into the American consciousness.” That would imply that those US news media were genuinely interested in the horrors meted out at the Iraqi prison where the CIA and the Army committed what Wikipedia comfortably calls a “a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees.” Those media would surely want all of us “consciousness-seared” people to know what was being done to answer for it all, to bring people to account, to make sure it never, ever happened again. (That shouldn't sound like a joke.) The Center for Constitutional Rights has been in back of the last remaining lawsuit on behalf of victims of Abu Ghraib; and, though you might not have heard about it, they won. We'll get the update from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260320Azmy.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260313.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). New York Times (3/10/26) This week on CounterSpin: House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Brian Mast declared of Iran: “This murderous regime has posed an imminent threat against every American both at home and abroad for the last 47 years”—leading many at home and abroad to reach for their dictionaries. The Trump White House's war on Iran is unpopular in the US: “Even the highest level of public support for this conflict falls far lower than that at the start of most other conflicts, including World War II, the Korean War and the Iraq War,” reports the New York Times. That may have something to do with the parade of rationales offered; Popular Information has a roundup of the 17 different reasons the Trump regime has given to date for why we went to war. All of it normalized by corporate media that allow recorded history to be put up for debate, that pretend we haven't seen what we've seen, leaving today's warmongers free to draw up a historical narrative, or several, that serve their present purpose. As we record on March 12, some 251 groups have sent a letter to Congress demanding they vote against any additional funding for the unconstitutional war, now costing an estimated $1 billion a day. Signers included Public Citizen, the ACLU, Greenpeace, J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace and National Nurses United. A supplemental worth $50 billion, the letter notes, would be enough to restore food assistance for 4 million Americans, establish universal pre-K education and pay for the annual construction of more than 100,000 units of housing. CounterSpin has been tracking US news media failings, omissions and propagandizing on Iran for decades. We revisit some of that conversation this week, hearing from Cyrus Safdari (2009), Vijay Prashad (2012), Murtaza Hussain (2017) and Trita Parsi (2018).

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260306.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Column (3/4/26) This week on CounterSpin: As a radio producer, you get pitches; to paraphrase one we got this week: Dear Janine, the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iranian military targets and leaders this weekend. Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei was killed, as were key Iranian leaders.  President Trump is urging Iranians to rise up and overthrow the regime…. What will the impact be on the economy? On Wall Street?  What does this mean for markets and investors going forward? We were then offered a guest who will tell listeners that “concerns about the attacks causing economic chaos are overblown…. The markets will panic initially and then stabilize.” And, most importantly, “this ends the uncertainty that was impacting the markets over Iran…. If American and Israeli objectives are met, it could lead to dramatically reduced gas prices long-term.” No mention of parents in Minab, who dropped their daughters off at school March 3 and now have to bury them. What's losing a child when we’re talking about you maybe—or maybe not—paying less at the pump, amirite? It would be one thing if it were a guy at the end of the bar, but we have official “smart people” news media instructing us on how we should think and feel about attacks—paid for with our sometimes important “tax dollars”—raining horror on Iranians whose crime is that they didn't overthrow their disapproved leadership. Ask yourself if you want that to be the criterion for violent aggression around the world. It's hard to parse US corporate news coverage of the attacks on Iran if you aren't willing to let go of the idea that might does not, in fact, make right—along with your ideas about what a better world could look like. That's why we grow our critical faculties, and support media outlets that, whatever else they do, don't tell us that the US and Israel killing Iranian children is just something to consume with your breakfast cereal. Gregory Shupak is an academic and activist, as well as author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media from OR Books. We talk with him about the US war on Iran this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260306Shupak.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260227.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). American Prospect (2/23/26) This week on CounterSpin: US news media don't show a serious interest in history generally, as you can see from many outlets' pretense to offer “all you need to know” about current events in a matter of minutes. In the case of the Trump administration, presenting US history through media is important and relevant—as long as Trumpists are fully in charge of who defines what happened and what it means. So when Trump-appointed FCC chair Brendan Carr—he who attacks basic anti-discrimination measures in media, and overtly threatens the licenses of outlets determined insufficiently deferential to right-wing powers on the daily—says, “I believe in the greatness of our country,” you're of course right to beware. And all the more when he adds that he's “looking forward to broadcasters showcasing the country's inspiring history” by taking a pledge that he's drawn up, committing to do the right thing with regard to America's 250th birthday, for which the White House has big plans. But the man actively orchestrating interference-unto-cancellation of talk shows deemed guilty of “improper ideology” wants us to know that participation in the pledge, by the media outlets under his regulatory control, is “voluntary.” If you didn't already understand how vital is an understanding of US history, rooted in who's allowed to tell it, you would suspect it from this White House's ham-handed efforts to twist and erase and shout over it. There's a screaming void that journalists could be working to fill. Some are, some aren't. But as we look to encourage a rising up of people in response to the anti-democratic juggernaut, we can remember the words of Ida B. Wells: “The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.” We talk about attacks on, and defenses of, our ability to learn and learn from this country's history with Naomi Bethune. She's the John Lewis Writing Fellow at the American Prospect. She’s featured this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260227Bethune.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of Trump’s “Board of Peace.” https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260227Banter.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260220.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Center for Independent Documentary This week on CounterSpin: CNBC, a news outlet, brought viewers the news that Cuba has suspended its annual cigar festival. The postponement, if you wondered, “comes as the island nation's Communist-run government endures its biggest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Assured you've heard both “Communist” and “Soviet Union,” the “biggest test” bit has a link to another CNBC article, same writer, headed “What'sNext for Cuba? Trump Turns the Screws as the Island Runs Out of Jet Fuel.” Now take a breath: Why does Donald Trump get to punish Cuban people? Why is it cute to talk about “turning the screws”? Can other countries “turn the screws” on the United States if they don't like the US and its “capitalist-run” government? And above all: When did illegal actions carried out with the express intent of causing misery for other human beings living in other countries become blah blah blah? The Trump White House is openly trying to harm the Cuban people, and US media are openly trying to sell that to us as something to root for. Reed Lindsay has been reporting and making documentary film in and about Cuba for more than a decade. We hear from him on what you likely won't be hearing from corporate media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260220Lindsay.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260220Banter.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260213.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Mother Jones (2/11/26) This week on CounterSpin: Trump and congressional Republicans are pushing for changes to the electoral process that would make it harder for millions of people to vote, and some media are still presenting it as a matter of “election integrity.” Voter advocates describe things like the Save America Act as aiming to make the US into a “show us your papers” dystopia. That bill likely won't make it out of the Senate, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be sounding the alarm, loudly, about the various multi-level efforts this White House is pursuing to take control of elections away from the people. We hear that worrisome and enraging story from Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, among other titles. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260213Berman.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press commentary on Iran. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260213Banter.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260206.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). The Nation (2/3/26) This week on CounterSpin: “What do you call a ceasefire agreement under which people keep dying? That is the question the people of Gaza have been asking themselves for the past few months.” And it's the question that kicks off a new issue of The Nation magazine, which they call “A Day for Gaza.” Since a “ceasefire” was declared four months ago, Israel has killed, very conservatively, 420 Palestinians. More than 70,000 overwhelmingly Palestinian people have been reported killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, including more than 300 journalists and media workers. This is without mentioning the destruction of more than half of all religious and cultural sites in the Gaza Strip. The UN has reported Israeli soldiers recording videos in which they mock Palestinians and Palestinian education, before destroying schools and universities. If it ended today, the loss of life, and home, and culture, and history in Palestine would take countless years to reckon, if it could be reckoned at all. But here in the US, we're being told by media that the conflict is winding down, because there's a ceasefire in effect; and we are to interpret all events going forward in those terms. That pretense is mainly expressed through a simple drop in coverage, which by itself says, “Not so much to see here anymore, time to move on.” As an interrogation of and a pushback against the suggestion that because powerful people's words have changed, there is no longer a desperate, attention-worthy crisis in Gaza or for Palestinians, The Nation lifts up the voices of Palestinians themselves, as a kind of intervention into a media conversation that presents Palestinians as subjects—sympathetic or not, depending on the story—more often than as actors, who have the basic right to determine their own future. The issue was edited by writer and translator Rayan El Amine. We hear from him this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260206El-Amine.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260206Banter.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260130.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Free Press (1/26/26) This week on CounterSpin: There are reports that people out in the street opposing ICE abductions of their neighbors are chanting, “We're not cold, we're not afraid. Minnesota made us brave.” Around the country, people who never called themselves “political” are moving out of their comfort zone to register their opposition to violent, state-sanctioned power being unleashed on their communities in the service of racist authoritarianism. The spark is the murders by ICE of Keith Porter, Renee Good and Alex Pretti—that's just this year—but the resistance in Minneapolis isn't sprouting from nowhere; it has roots. Corporate news media evince little understanding of the kind of local, neighbor-to-neighbor communication and connection that has existed for decades, and that today is pulling people together across race, gender, age, class, religion lines in Minneapolis. That's just one way elite media remove themselves further every day from the conversations people want to have. But elite reporters could at least use their proximity to power to talk about what the state and corporate forces are doing to try and squelch the growing resistance, including basic rights you'd hope journalists would care about, like that of people to witness actions carried out with their money and in their name. Our guest put together a report on how “DHS Is Expanding Domestic Surveillance While Targeting Efforts to Document and Dissent.” Jenna Ruddock is Advocacy Director at the group Free Press. We hear from her this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260130Ruddock.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the Minneapolis clampdown, and at the lack of recent coverage of Gaza. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260130Banter.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260123.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies (1/19/26) This week on CounterSpin: In 1967, when Martin Luther King came out against the Vietnam War, and called the US the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” corporate news had nothing but emphatic condemnation. Life magazine called that speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” And the New York Times sniffed in a way today's readers will recognize, writing that when King argued that the war on Vietnam is “a barrier to social progress in this country,” he fused “two public problems that are distinct and separate. By drawing them together, Dr. King has done a disservice to both.” The elite press corps that now pretend they honor King show that they never heard, much less understood, him or the totality of his vision—or that of those that share that vision today. That's the space that the coalition headed by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies is stepping into with their new report: State of the Dream 2026. We'll hear from Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260123Asante-Muhammad.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Kalaallit Nunaat. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260123Banter.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260116.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Fox 9 (1/15/26) This week on CounterSpin:  Headlines today on January 15: “North Minneapolis ICE shooting: Children Hospitalized After Flash Bang, Tear Gas Hits Van.” And from the official Homeland Security website: “ICE Announced the Arrest of More Worst of the Worst Criminal Illegal Aliens From Across the Country, Including Those Convicted of First-Degree Rape of a Child, Homicide and Arson.” So did the hospitalized children commit the rapes, homicides and arson? Is that why they were attacked? Or are we supposed to just muddle it all together, so that we now think “immigration equals crime”? What happens if we do that? What would happen if we didn't? We'll hear from Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260116Ghandehari.mp3 TNG-CWA (1/15/26) Also on the show: We see reporters being physically attacked by purported “law enforcement,” and criminalized and threatened by the federal government, as they just try to do their job of witnessing and reporting the actions of powerful state actors. At the same time, we see corporations telling us that journalists aren't really important; AI can do whatever it is that they do. And if a newspaper doesn’t make the quarterly profit that shareholders have said they want, well, what more evidence do you need? The closure of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will mean a lot to people. But who will be brought on to speak on the meaning of the shutdown, and where it fits with other predations on our right to know what is happening around us? We'll hear from Jon Schleuss, president of the Newspaper Guild-CWA. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260116Schleuss.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260109.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). AP (1/6/26) This week on CounterSpin: For millions of people around the globe, the US under the administration of convicted felon Donald Trump has acted—it's beyond “illegal”; it's sort of “a-legal,” as if laws meant nothing—they've kidnapped the leader of a sovereign nation, and declared that Trump will henceforth “run” that nation. If you think flagrant bullying, Mafioso, might-makes-right behavior is what international law is created to combat, and basic human decency is designed to reject—you would be supported by the majority of the world's people. But alas, you live in the US and rely for your world view on US media, and thus you are fed authoritarian apologies disguised as disinterested analysis, like that from AP's headline on January 6: “Trump's Vague Claims of the US Running Venezuela Raise Questions About Planning for What Comes Next.” Because, you see, the problem about Trump's claim that his weirdo government will now run the country of Venezuela isn't that that is crazy with a capital K, but that Trump “has offered almost no details about how it will do so.” Nation of Change (1/5/26) Our conversation and understanding of our political power is so warped that even a thoughtful piece from Nation of Change says: “The White House has not explained how it intends to legally justify the detention of a foreign head of state, the reported civilian deaths, or the long-term scope of a military “quarantine” designed to coerce a sovereign nation.” When we really need to accept that they will just not justify it, and will simply declare that anyone who asks for justification is a terrorist. And news media will report that as one side of a two-sided argument. As a CounterSpin guest said recently: “The cavalry is not coming. You're it.” We'll talk about the Venezuela invasion, as neither a beginning nor an end, with Michelle Ellner, Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260109Ellner.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of ICE’s murder of Renee Good. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260109Banter.mp3 Featured Image: January 4 rally in Caracas protesting the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (photo by Rome Arrieche via Venezuelanalysis—1/5/26).

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260102.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). The Best of CounterSpin for 2025 features Silky Shah on mass deportations, Gregory Shupak on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, Paul Offit on RFK Jr.’s pro-virus policies, Karen Thompson on policing pregnancy, Erin Reed on anti-trans pseudo-science, Farrah Hassen on criminalizing homelessness, Mumia Abu-Jamal on unheard stories and Tom Morello on music as protest. We call it the “best of,” but, as always, we are deeply thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. These are just a few of the void-filling conversations it's been our pleasure to host in the last year. 2025 was a rough one; we appreciate everyone who helps us stay informed, forward-looking and in communication. Featured Image: Top row: Silky Shah, Gregory Shupak, Paul Offit and Karen Thompson; second row: Erin Reed, Farrah Hassen, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Tom Morello

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251226.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). AAPF (10/25) This week on CounterSpin: After every police killing of a Black person, every announced policy singling out Black immigrants as the cause of crime and disorder, every declaration, like that from Arlington National Cemetery, that as of now materials on Black and female service people will be scrubbed from the website—we hear from corporate media about how, boy, this country is for sure “reckoning” with “racism.” But then: If we reckoned with racism every time elite media claimed this country was “reckoning” with racism, seems like we ought to be fully “reckoned” by now. US corporate media have a white supremacy problem (and you see how that term lands differently than “racism”): They decide who they think, and hence you should think, is worth talking to, based on an accepted conflation of power with worthiness. They decide whose ideas are taken for granted and whose deemed marginal, and they tell us how to define progress: Is it moving toward actual equity, or just things quietening down? Who needs to be reassured, and whose lives is it OK to disrupt, whose basic humanity is it OK to question, day after day after day? A new report titled Anti-Blackness Is the Point, from the African American Policy Forum, engages this age-old if ever-morphing narrative. Kimberle Crenshaw is a leading legal scholar and justice advocate, the force behind the transformative ideas of intersectionality and critical race theory. She's co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, as well as a professor of law at both Columbia and UCLA. We talk with Kimberle Crenshaw this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251226Crenshaw.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at nonprofits and diversity, equity and inclusion. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251226Banter.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251219.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Truthout (12/8/25) This week on CounterSpin: Forbes reports the Starbucks workers strike as you might expect: “The company claims it already offers the ‘best job in retail.’ … Yet the union is demanding….” “The company says, ‘We're ready to return to the bargaining table whenever the union is.’ But as of yet, the union is holding out for the company to present a contract that meets demands….” You get the idea: One party is generous, the other is ornery. But even Forbes has to acknowledge that even as the strike “drags” into a second month, “global support grows.” Derek Seidman has been following the strike. He's a writer, researcher and historian who contributes to Little Sis and to Truthout, where he recently reported on the Starbucks strike and…what Walmart has to do with it? https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251219Seidman.mp3 Politico (12/17/25) Also on the show: Sen. Bernie Sanders is the latest to join a broad group of more than 200 environmental and economic justice advocates that just sent a letter to Congress, calling for a moratorium on the construction of new data centers, the energy sources powering the boom (and, as some would say, predictable bust) of artificial intelligence, until, as Sanders says, democracy “has a chance to catch up.” Turns out as people learn more, opposition grows, and so, Politico notes, “The industry is taking out ads and funding campaigns to flip the narrative and put data centers in a positive light—spinning them as job creators and economic drivers rather than resource-hungry land hogs.” The letter to Congress was spearheaded by Food & Water Watch. We'll hear from the group's deputy director, Mitch Jones. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251219Jones.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Bondi Beach. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251219Banter.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251212.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Popular Information (12/8/25) This week on CounterSpin: If you see no problem in news outlets reporting on desperately horrific conditions in Gaza, and what various political entities are doing or could do to address them, while a ticker at the bottom of the screen offers you an opportunity to gamble—for money—on whether or not “famine” in the region will be officially declared, this episode is not for you. We're learning about the deal just struck by “news” outlets CNN and CNBC with the “prediction market operator” (evidently what we're calling them now) Kalshi Inc. We'll hear from Judd Legum—founder and author at the newsletter Popular Information—and from author and analyst Adam Johnson, of Substack‘s the Column and the podcast Citations Needed. Judd Legum’s interview: https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251212Legum.mp3 Adam Johnson’s interview: https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251212Johnson.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251205.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). CEPR (12/2/25) This week on CounterSpin: A militarized US Drug Enforcement Administration force declared they'd taken out drug traffickers in the Caribbean, killing some of them in what was sold as a successful operation. Locals on the ground reported differently, saying these people weren't drug traffickers, just human beings who happened to be on the river and got shot up by US forces who were not attacked, as they claimed, but just killed innocent people because they were given orders to kill them. It should sound familiar—but this isn't today in Venezuela; it's 2012 in Honduras. An inspector general review from the State Department and the Justice Department found that, no, this was not a Honduran operation, or a “joint operation” the DEA were helping with; it was a DEA operation, and it killed four innocent people and injured others in a remote, Afro-Indigenous part of Honduras. The story that the DEA pushed on Congress and the press corps was just a lie. But you’d hardly know that history reading current coverage of Honduras, where, as we record on December 4, the presidential election is still in question. Not in question: the US's long history of intervening—violently, dramatically, unaccountably—in Honduras. We'll talk about it with Alex Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251205Main.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of the murder of Amber Czech. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251205Banter.mp3

Focusing on what people, including those most harmed, are doing, along with what's being done to them, could help move debate off an outdated dime.

What if SNAP weren't a story about major political party back-and-forthing, and were instead a story about people who need food?

Housing and home ownership represent a critical vector in the project of a multi-racial democracy.

The argument is so specious a third grader could call it out. But if it comes from the Supreme Court majority, we are forced to consider it as serious.

News media need to locate the climate fight in the boardrooms of greedy people perversely trying to wring every last dime from our shared future.

Corporate reporters scratch their heads over how this bombing campaign might be legal, rather than discussing what tools can respond to wildly illegal actions.

We're in a fight for our right to speak up, and out—but it's not the first time.

Coverage of the conversion therapy case left out scientific and legal information necessary to understand what's at stake for LGBTQ youth.

Major media suggest we use something other than our own eyes and judgment and humanity to assess the Gaza situation, and how to act in the face of it.

Something so vaguely named as a “data center” is actually a physical thing in real neighborhoods affecting real people.

Witness testimony is how we can resist official testimony about people "resisting arrest." And you can tell how much it matters by the efforts to shut it down.

Can the Trump administration, or any administration, declare people guilty and summarily kill them based on that declaration?

It's only an opinion that it's wrong that our federal health agency is led by a guy who claims he can diagnose children he walks past at the airport.

You buy insurance in case something bad happens—like a fire, or a flood. But if that fire or flood is driven by climate disruption? Well, wait a minute.

The White House's assaults on the press corps are part of, and not ancillary to, their direct assaults on Black and brown people.

Voting: Everyone gets a voice; that's what makes us different, special and better. Is that ideal being subverted? Or have we misunderstood it all along?

Elite news media transmit the weird worldview that it's appropriate to force tipped workers to please and appease patrons in order to survive.

"I think it's a success of Israel's control of the narrative that sometimes it's really not well understood that the occupation is central to all this."

"The pitting against each other of people who lack housing and people who have housing is so insidious and counterproductive."

Corporate media are now gesturing toward engaging questions of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. But what does that amount to at this late date?

To tell this as a tale about two uniquely bad men is a terrible disservice to a story of the systemic criminal victimization of women.

The UN's Albanese has long opposed Israel's genocide of Palestinians—but what broke US warmongers was her naming corporations profiting from that genocide.

Along with many other hate-driven harms, the budget bill puts Stephen Miller's cruel and bizarre mass deportation plan on steroids.

Elite news media are Trojan-horsing their hatred for any ideas that threaten their ill-gotten gains, via very deep “concerns” about Zohran Mamdani as a person.

US corporate media in war mode are a force to reckon with. We do some reckoning with media analyst Adam Johnson.

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.