6:30 PM Pacific Time: Sundays
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. Combines lively discussion and thoughtful critique. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting).
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, military contractor CACI has pushed some 20 times to have it dismissed. We got a … Continued
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 deeper into chaos” or else “descending into gang-fueled anarchistic chaos.” It’s “become a dangerously … Continued
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 have outpaced increases in costs. Capitalism 101 says this shouldn’t happen, because competing companies … Continued
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 make sense of White House policy that seems to call for getting aid to … Continued
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 the climate crisis, they still … can’t … quite …connect images of floods or … Continued
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 have changed since then, though industry still gets up and goes to court to … Continued
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 just been enabled by the Supreme Court, which put off until April the legal … Continued
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 little to do with whether it’s on paper or online but on who owns … Continued
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 thousands more were killed, mean the US is directly responsible for those deaths: “Complicity is … Continued
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 matter, to be fought over in the courts, instead of something to be acknowledged and … Continued
