Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The Solyndra scandal is the kind of story tailor made for Fox News: A green jobs creating solar power company receiving millions of dollars of taxpayer funds celebrated by the Obama White House... goes belly up. Much of the coverage all but shouts 'Scandal!'. It's not that there's nothing here, but the story we're hearing about Solyndra might not be the one we should be hearing. Journalist and activist Harvey Wasserman will join us to talk about that. Also on CounterSpin today: Sponsored by the same foundations and corporate interests behind what's called education [...]
Search Results for: Harvey Wasserman
Jun
10
2011
Harvey Wasserman on Fukushima; Andrew Fieldhouse on Bush tax cuts
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: After a lull in reporting about the Japanese nuclear disaster comes news that officials there are admitting that radiation releases were much larger than previously claimed-- not a surprise to critics who saw those early claims as part of a government/corporate/media misinformation loop that kicks in whenever we talk about nuclear power. So what is the real story out of Fukushima, and where can you get independent information? We'll talk to journalist and activist Harvey Wasserman. Also on the show: Ten years ago mainstream media were running stories like the Dallas Morning News’ "FINDING [...]
May
01
2011
After Fukushima, Media Still Buying Nuclear Spin
Downplaying deadly dangers in Japan and at home
Ever since the start of nuclear technology, those behind it have made heavy use of deception, obfuscation and denial—with the complicity of most of the media. New York Times reporter William Laurence, working at the same time with the Manhattan Project, wrote a widely published press release covering up the first nuclear test in New Mexico in 1945, claiming it was nothing more than an ammunition dump explosion. The Times and Laurence went on to boost nuclear power for years to come (Beverly Deepe Keever, News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb). A central concern of nuclear promoters, [...]
Dec
25
2009
Best of CounterSpin 2009
Download MP3 On this special CounterSpin program we’ll take a look back at some of the stories of the past year, and hear again from a few of the many journalists, activists, researchers and critics that brought those stories to us, or helped us make sense of them. CounterSpin: Writer and investigative historian Gareth Porter joined us back in April to talk about the big picture questions still mostly missing from the media discussion of the Afghanistan war, especially the very rational for the war itself. Gareth Porter: There's not been a single story that I have seen that really [...]
Sep
25
2009
Joseph Romm on Climate Summit, Elinore Longobardi on 'Subprime' vs. 'Predatory'
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: the highest-level conference yet on climate change took place this week at the UN. The press made much of the obstacles faced on the way to any international agreement -- but if the front page of the country's paper of record is saying that temperatures haven't risen in 10 years, maybe one of those obstacles is media coverage? We'll talk to Joseph Romm of Climate Progress.org Also on the show: Words mean things and the way reporters use them can shade the way we see the world. A new study published in the Columbia [...]
Mar
27
2009
Riki Ott on Exxon Valdez, Harvey Wasserman on Three Mile Island
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Disaster anniversaries are readymade news hooks for media always in search of one. March sees 20 years since the Exxon Valdez spilled at least 11 million gallons (and likely much more) of oil in Prince William Sound, Alaska. It's also been 30 years this month since this country's worst nuclear accident, the partial core meltdown at Pennsylvania nuclear plant Three Mile Island. Both incidents were seen as watershed revelations of institutional failures and engendered activism and calls for reform. But corporate media's "looks back" and "lessons learned" don't always identify the right lessons--and rarely [...]
Feb
01
2008
Money Is the Real Green Power:
The hoax of eco-friendly nuclear energy
Nuclear advocates in government and the nuclear industry are engaged in a massive, heavily financed drive to revive atomic power in the United States—with most of the mainstream media either not questioning or actually assisting in the promotion. “With a very few notable exceptions, such as the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. media have turned the same sort of blind, uncritical eye on the nuclear industry’s claims that led an earlier generation of Americans to believe atomic energy would be too cheap to meter,” comments Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “The nuclear industry’s public [...]
May
01
2001
Deregulation Blackout
How media hype California's fake energy crisis
Power shortage! Unavoidable blackouts! Too much environmental regulation! All these media themes about the electric crisis in California have one thing in common: They are utterly false. Seldom have establishment media gone through greater contortions to misrepresent a crisis on behalf of the mega-corporations that made it happen. Of course, there’s usually not as much money at stake--upwards of $200 billion or more by the time we're through. The fake story, repeated in a thousand news headlines, and beat to death week after week by the bloviating punditocracy, goes something like this: Too many people and too much industry moved [...]
