Kirk Herbertson on Big Oil’s Lawsuit Against Environmentalism
Fossil fuel corporations’ lawsuits against those who challenge their destruction take aim at our ability to speak out about anything.
CounterSpin
Gregory Shupak on Palestine Ethnic Cleansing, Portia Allen-Kyle on Tax Unfairness
Corporate media can’t bring themselves to call Trump’s illegal, inhumane plan what it is: ethnic cleansing.
Luke Charles Harris on Critical Race Theory (2021)
Corporate news media presented a campaign openly defined as uninterested in truth or humanity as a totally valid, “grassroots” perspective.
Ezra Young on Trans Rights Law, Anne Sosin on RFK Jr. and Rural Health
The Trump campaign against transgender people lands in an elite media climate in which trans lives have long been deemed “subject to debate.”
David Kass on Billionaire Election-Buying
The increasing influence of the super rich on the politics and policy we all have to live with is an urgent story, if not a new one.
Silky Shah on the Attack on Immigrants
Immigration itself is now not a human rights story, or even an economic one, but yet another story about “their” crimes and “our” safety.
Derek Seidman on Insurance and Climate (2024); Ariel Adelman on Disability Civil Rights (2024)
Many are calling out insurance companies that take folks’ money, but then hinder their ability to come out from under when these predictable and predicted crises occur.
Dean Baker on China Trade Policy
How different is Thomas Friedman’s insistence that China “let in more Taylor Swifts” from US media coverage of China and trade policy generally?
Sonali Kolhatkar & Laura Flanders on Independent Media and the Year Ahead
Corporate news media, tasked primarily with enriching the rich and shoring up entrenched institutions, will not do the liberatory, illuminating work of independent journalism.
The Best of CounterSpin 2024
This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations from the past year that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us.
Yanni Chen on TikTok Ban, Richard Mendel on Youth and Crime
Does banning TokTok threaten First Amendment freedoms? A judge says the government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.”
Iman Abid on Israeli Genocide
While not the first to ask us to see the assault on Palestinians as genocide, Amnesty’s report offers an opening to ask why some are so invested in saying it isn’t.
Arlene Martinez on Amazon Misconduct, Neil deMause (2019) on Amazon HQ Fight
When a corporate behemoth like Amazon buys one of the country’s national newspapers, it’s a conflict writ large as can or should be.
Katherine Gallagher on Abu Ghraib Verdict
A federal jury has just found military contractor CACI responsible for its part in Abu Ghraib abuse, in a ruling being called “exceptional in every sense of the term.”
Amos Barshad on Legalized Sports Betting
Legal sports gambling is the apple of the eye of many corporate and private state actors—but how does it affect states, communities, people?
Adam Johnson on Charlottesville March (2017), Jacinta Gonzalez on Criminalizing Immigration (2018)
If we’re to believe the chest-thumping, high on Trump’s agenda will be the enforced criminalization of immigration.
Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas on Placing Blame for Trump
We talk about what just happened, and corporate media’s role in it, with Julie Hollar, senior analyst at the media watch group FAIR, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas.
Nicole Foy on Immigration and Labor
News media start with the premise of immigration itself as a “crisis,” with the only debate around how to “stem” or “control” it.
Shawn Musgrave, Orion Danjuma on Vote Fraud Hoax as Voter Suppression
Trump’s “Big Lie” attorneys are not so much returning to the field, but actually never left.
Chip Gibbons on Gaza First Amendment Alert
Defending Rights & Dissent has started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday.
