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: Steven Rosenfeld reports on election transparency, among other electoral issues, for Voting Booth. We hear from him about kinds of election interference we ignore at our peril. Some elite media-designated “smart people” have determined, “Citizens United, what? It’s folks who give ten bucks to a candidate that are really messing up … Continued
This week on CounterSpin: CNN’s Jake Tapper is mad about college students protesting their institutions’ and their government’s support for Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza — because they’re preventing him, by his account, from covering Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Tapper and CNN, we’re to understand, are powerless to decide what … Continued
We’re now seeing the impacts of the reality that corporate media, as well as corporate-funded universities, will always side with official power — as they present students sitting quietly in tents in protest of genocide as violent terrorists. But in fact, we’ve been seeing it for decades, as corporate media spin narratives about people of … Continued
This week on CounterSpin: Many college students appear to believe that learning about the world means not just gaining knowledge but acting on it. Campuses across the country — Rutgers, MIT, Ohio State, Boston University, Emerson, Tufts, and on and on — are erupting in protest over their institutions’ material support for Israel’s war on Palestinians … Continued
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
