FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“The former 9/11 detainees also really see this as a case to ensure that this kind of suspicionless, baseless religious and racial profiling doesn’t happen again. That it doesn’t go unpunished.”
CNN host Erin Burnett wonders whether it’s time to come up with some new laws in the wake of the Boston bombing, since the old ones seem to give Dzhokhar Tsarnaev too many rights.
Argo won the Best Picture Academy Award. The film claims to be ‘based on’ the true story of the Iranian hostage crisis. But just how far removed is it from that true story, and why does it matter? We’ll hear from Nima Shirazi of the blog WideasleepinAmerica.
Also on the show: The Supreme Court has determined that the government doesn’t have to reveal who it’s targeting with its domestic spying programs, but civil liberties groups can’t challenge the spying because… they can’t prove they’ve been targeted. Mitra Ebadolahi of the ACLU’s National Security Project will explain.
What happened at the Bradley Manning hearings this week? Corporate media don’t seem interested; Michael Ratner tells us what they missed. And big media getting… bigger? Joe Torres on the latest at the FCC.
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin030212 Sonali Kolhatkar and Kevin Gosztola @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin030212.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The burning of copies of the Koran by US military in Afghanistan touched off a week of protests, including attacks on US soldiers. While US media have by and large denounced the Koran burning as unacceptably stupid, they still seem to […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin022412 Yousef Munayyer and Dana Frank @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin022412.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Palestinian hunger striker Khader Adnan provided a real-life example of something many corporate pundits say they’ve longed to see: A Palestinian activist pursuing non-violent resistance. And yet his 66 day hunger strike to protest Israel’s policies of detaining Palestinians for months […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin010612 Glenn Greenwald and Corynne McSherry @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin010612.mp3″] 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 […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin112511 Charles Kurzman and Amy Goodman @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin112511.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The coverage of the recent arrest of a would-be Muslim terrorist ready to carry out attacks here at home had a we’ve-been-here-before feel. Whatever questions might surround this particular case, most media consumers are by now accustomed to the general presumption […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin110411 Costas Panayotakis and Nusrat Choudhury @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin110411.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: This is how ABC anchor Diane Sawyer explained the Greek crisis: “The Dow down nearly 300 points, so, what changed? Well, blame it on the country of Greece, long criticized for being undisciplined and now threatening American retirements.” With the EU […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin093011 Allison Kilkenny and Moshe Adler @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin093011.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Yes, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations aren’t being covered much in the corporate media. But then when papers like the New York Times come down to take a look, one might wish they hadn’t. We’ll talk to Allison Kilkenny of Citizen […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin090911 Katie Galloway and Yousef Munayyer @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin090911.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Two men were arrested at the 2008 Republican National Convention and charged with a firebombing plot. For the FBI and headline writers, violent domestic terrorists had been thwarted before the act. The new film Better This World takes another look at […]
When the USA Patriot Act* was rushed into law after the September 11 attacks, the erosion of civil liberties the Act represented—the broad powers it gave law enforcement to spy on people, and the creation of the dangerously ill-defined crime of “domestic terrorism”—met with little detailed scrutiny or principled challenge from major media. Typical at […]
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush deliberately discarded domestic and international laws, creating an experimental facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There prisoners would be deprived of the protections of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, held without rights as “unlawful enemy combatants” in a world-wide program of extraordinary rendition, secret […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin082611 Faiza Patel and Rena Steinzor @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin082611.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: An Associated Press report about how the New York City Police Department is working with the CIA to carry out domestic spying operations on minorities in cities across the U.S., is making some waves, and raising questions about ethnic and racial […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin080511 Bill Hartung and Rania Khalek @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin080511.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin. The debt ceiling has been lifted; that fixed everything, right? Well, the Democratic base is unhappy with the White House capitulation, the ratings agencies still aren’t sure the United States has its fiscal house in order, and there’s nothing here to […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin061711 Shahid Buttar and Gareth Porter @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin061711.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: An activist in Texas gets his FBI files—and finds out that agents have been tailing him for years. Activists in the Midwest are the targets of a wide-ranging investigation, including a half-dozen house raids and an array of subpoenas. And—oh yeah—parts […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin040111 Stephen Zunes and Karen Greenberg @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin040111.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The U.S.-led NATO bombing of Libya was supposed to last just a few days. It was supposed to just protect Libyan civilians. And, according to the White House, we weren’t supposed to think of it as a war at all—it is […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin032511 Asli Bali and Alia Malek @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin032511.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The U.S.’s sudden military involvement in Libya raises many questions that have not been answered by officials who’ve plunged the country into a war they say is to protect civilians, or even asked by many journalists who have been too busy […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Barack Obama has announced his pick for Supreme Court justice—former Harvard Law School dean and Solicitor General Elena Kagan. And the media debates have begun: about her record, her credentials and her likely impact on the court. We’ll sort through some of what you’re hearing and perhaps what you […]
For many people, the Olympics rank high on the Happy Meter, right up there with cuddly kittens and free beer. But those who take a closer look at the Olympics’ political-economic underbelly often end up seeing less feline and more freight train, a corporate juggernaut whizzing through town at taxpayer expense and leaving public debt […]
