
Advertise on podcast: CounterSpin
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4.8from
This podcast has
274 episodes
Language
EnglishPublisher
Fairness & Accuracy In ReportingExplicit
No
Date created
2005/07/12
Latest episode
2026/04/17
Average duration
28 min.
Release period
7 days
Description
CounterSpin is the weekly radio show of FAIR, the national media watch group.
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Check latest episodes from CounterSpin podcast
Sarah Anderson on Poverty Wages, Lia Holland on the Wayback Machine
2026/04/17
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260417.mp3
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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
Sina Toossi on War on Iran, Chip Gibbons on Impeaching Trump
2026/04/10
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260410.mp3
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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
Shannon Minter on ‘Conversion Therapy’ Ruling, Alex Frandsen on Local News Day
2026/04/03
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260403.mp3
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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
Arlene Martinez on Sunshine Week
2026/03/27
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260327.mp3
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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
Jim Naureckas on MAGA vs. 1st Amendment, Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Justice
2026/03/20
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260320.mp3
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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
A History of Iran Propaganda
2026/03/13
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260313.mp3
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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’
Gregory Shupak on the US War on Iran
2026/03/06
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260306.mp3
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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
Naomi Bethune on Anti-Black History Month?
2026/02/27
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260227.mp3
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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.
Transcript: ‘Advocates Know How to Fight Attempts to Repress Black History’
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
Reed Lindsay on the War on Cuba
2026/02/20
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260220.mp3
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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.
Transcript: ‘It’s Taken for Granted That Cuban Sovereignty Doesn’t Matter’
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
Ari Berman on Attacks on Voting
2026/02/13
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260213.mp3
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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.
Transcript: ‘The Risk Is Reporting This Like It’s a Normal Political Story’
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
Rayan El Amine on Voices From Gaza
2026/02/06
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260206.mp3
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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.
Transcript: ‘What We’re Witnessing Is a Genocide Sustained’:
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
Jenna Ruddock on DHS Domestic Surveillance
2026/01/30
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260130.mp3
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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.
Transcript: ‘The State Is Exercising Surveillance Over Us, But We Can Push Back’:
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
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad on State of the Dream 2026
2026/01/23
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260123.mp3
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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.
Transcript: ‘There’s an Attack on Racial Equity Analysis Because They Feel It Changes the Conversation’:
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
Setareh Ghandehari on ICE Violence, Jon Schleuss on Pittsburgh Paper Shutdown
2026/01/16
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260116.mp3
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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.
Transcript: ‘We’re Seeing the Result of Decades of ICE Being Able to Act With Impunity’:
Transcript: ‘‘We’re Looking to Save News for the Folks in Pittsburgh’:
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260116Schleuss.mp3
Michelle Ellner on Venezuela Invasion
2026/01/09
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260109.mp3
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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.
Transcript: ‘People in Venezuela Can Oppose the Government But Still Reject US Intervention’:
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).
Podcast reviews
Read CounterSpin podcast reviews
Superstumbler 2025/10/25
Love the host!
Insightful and engaging look at the subtle look at the ways corporate media serves as a mouthpiece for the powerful while still claiming the mantle of...
RevSara 2025/04/22
Investigate Ben Gurion Canal -connect the dots
Proposes To connect Red Sea to Mediterranean thru Gaza
Drivingmakesyoufat 2024/10/23
Excellent
Jeanine is a gifted journalist who tells it like it is. I appreciate her candor and factual approach. She does excellent interviews with seldom heard ...
rpswindspirit 2024/07/24
Thank you for the insight, wisdom and morality check.
Phyllis Bennis's call for ceasefire is right on!
Hairy Sammy Sam 2024/07/13
Necessary Reporting About Traditional Media
CS gives me hope.
I subscribe to various news publications, including the NYT, WSJ, and Wash Post.
CS is necessary to balance their viewpoints and ...
S. Fuht 2024/06/08
So Necessary
Consistently insightful. A necessary counterweight mainstream media.
Keemish squeamish 2024/05/04
Excellent media reset
It’s cohesive and careful critique of media is like a salve for our corporate media propaganda mindset. Thank you!
CBQ1846 2023/08/05
One of the best!
Have listened to this show for years and really appreciate the interviews and topics covered.
Mystery Dave 2022/07/15
Podcast will not stream, this happens often!
I really love your show, but about 10% to 25% of the shows will not play, someone isn’t carefully testing the show file after it’s been encoded. I ha...
Debs009 2022/07/14
VERY INFORMATIVE SHOW
Love this show.
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