CounterSpin

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
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CounterSpin is the weekly radio show of FAIR, the national media watch group.

  1. -1 J

    Jesse Rabinowitz on Harassing the Unhoused, Maritza Perez Medina on Rescheduling Marijuana

    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.

    28 min

  2. 17 AVR.

    Sarah Anderson on Poverty Wages, Lia Holland on the Wayback Machine

    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

    28 min

  3. 10 AVR.

    Sina Toossi on War on Iran, Chip Gibbons on Impeaching Trump

    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

    28 min

  4. 3 AVR.

    Shannon Minter on ‘Conversion Therapy’ Ruling, Alex Frandsen on Local News Day

    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

    28 min

  5. 27 MARS

    Arlene Martinez on Sunshine Week

    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

    28 min

  6. 20 MARS

    Jim Naureckas on MAGA vs. 1st Amendment, Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Justice

    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.” Transcript: ‘A Media System Built on Profit Is Incredibly Fragile’ 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. Transcript: ‘This Is the Only Post-9/11 Case Seeking Accountability for Torture to Reach a Jury’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260320Azmy.mp3

    28 min

  7. 13 MARS

    A History of Iran Propaganda

    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). Transcript: ‘The Matter Is Being Radicalized and Solutions Are Being Ignored’

    28 min

  8. 6 MARS

    Gregory Shupak on the US War on Iran

    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. Transcript: ‘Even with Congressional Authorization, the War Would Still Be an Act of Aggression’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260306Shupak.mp3

    28 min
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CounterSpin is the weekly radio show of FAIR, the national media watch group.

Informations

  • Création
    Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
  • Années d’activité
    2005 - 2026
  • Épisodes
    274
  • Classification
    Tous publics
  • Site web de l’émission
    CounterSpin

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