May
01
2012

With a la Carte Cable, Pay for What You Watch

Maybe you don’t want to send Murdoch money every month

Photo Credit: Fox News

If you’re like most people, you probably don’t tune in to Disney-owned all-sports channel ESPN very often (the channel has roughly 2 million primetime viewers per night). But it’s likely the most expensive channel on your television; and since everyone pays for it, that means you’re subsidizing the people who do watch it. And guess who’s the ESPN of cable news? The right-wing Fox News Channel. There’s a comforting notion that customers have a level of control in the modern media landscape like never before—recording programs on a hard drive to skip the commercials, viewing video on the Internet, listening [...]

Apr
13
2012

Mark Cooper on e-book price fixing; Milton Allimadi on Gil Noble

By

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The Justice Department has sued Apple and five major book publishers for colluding to fix prices e-book prices, in an attempt to undermine competitor Amazon. What should you know about the suit and its broader implications for, say the music and film industries? We’ll talk to the Consumer Federation of America’ Mark Cooper. Also on the show: Any community icon's passing leaves a void, but when that person is responsible for arguably the single serious TV program engaging the lives and concerns of African Americans, the loss is magnified. Gil Noble, host and producer [...]

Jan
06
2012

Glenn Greenwald on NDAA, Corynne McSherry on SOPA

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Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: President Obama's signing of a defense bill including authorization for the indefinite detention of terror suspects--including U.S. citizens-- has been condemned by leading civil liberties voices. But the outrage has been somewhat obscured by a general confusion about what the bill means and the president’s intentions. Salon columnist and former constitutional litigator Glenn Greenwald will sort that out for us. Also on CounterSpin today, Big Media companies have lined up to support the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, a bill that its supporters say will finally do something about the problem of online [...]

Dec
23
2011

Joe Torres on News for All the People, Amy Alexander on Uncovering Race

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Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin, a special look at race and people of color in U.S. journalism. Told quickly it's a story about under representation and exclusion, of bias... and of breakthroughs. And all along, recognition that the stories news media tell us about the world and one another are a tremendous shaping force on the state of racial and ethnic understanding and the advance of social justice. We'll hear from Joseph Torres of the group Free Press, co-author with Juan Gonzalez of a new book called News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the [...]

Dec
16
2011

Jamilah King on the digital divide, John Knefel on OWS arrests

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Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Few deny anymore that internet access is becoming critical to taking part in political and economic life. So, what does it matter that research shows that higher proportions of African Americans and Latinos than white people are achieving that access through relatively more affordable smartphones rather than home computers? Our guest says unless things are changed, it's going to matter very much indeed. Jamilah King from Colorlines.com will join us to talk about the 'new' digital divide. Also on the show: The epidemic of strong-arm police tactics being applied to Occupy activists and the [...]

Dec
01
2011

Media Justice and the 99 Percent Movement

How net neutrality helped Occupy Wall Street

It all started with one message posted on a blog on July 13, 2011. The magazine Adbusters, a not-for-profit, reader-supported, 120,000-circulation magazine that combats corporate consumerism, issued a call: “On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.” On September 17, a thousand people marched to Wall Street, and then hundreds stayed to occupy Liberty Plaza in New York’s Financial District. Even after a solid two weeks of [...]

Oct
01
2011

Media Monopoly Revisited

The 20 corporations that dominate our information and ideas

The introduction of the original 1983 edition of The Media Monopoly, Ben Bagdikian’s classic investigation of media consolidation, concluded: “When 50 men and women, chiefs of their corporations, control more than half the information and ideas that reach 220 million Americans, it is time for Americans to examine the institutions from which they receive their daily picture of the world.” When the second edition was released in 1987, the number of people controlling half the media was down to 26. By 1993, as the last edition went to print, the number had fallen to 20. To arrive at these alarming [...]

Feb
18
2011

David Swanson on military budget, Aram Roston on Bloomberg

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Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The federal budget is big news this week, but while your hearing all the calls for cuts, cuts and more cuts, ask yourself, what isn’t considered an acceptable target for substantive reductions? Here’s a hint: it accounts for more than half of the country’s public spending. We’ll talk about the budget with activist and author David Swanson. Also on CounterSpin today, public interest groups and media activists of all stripes lined up to oppose the Comcast-NBC merger. And among the coalition of anti-merger activists was... Bloomberg, the media company owned by New York City [...]

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