FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“There has to be exposure and accountability for every single officer, for every single command official, for everyone who was involved in allowing, facilitating, this white supremacist mob violence.”
The Best of CounterSpin is a reflection of the sorts of conversations we hope offer some voice or context or information that you might not have heard elsewhere, or that might help you assess the news you are hearing.
“The Nixon administration went about policing drugs…as if it were a real war. The same way that we would fight foreign adversaries, we were fighting our own citizens.”
Washington Post coverage has paternalistically painted police defunding as a radical utopian fantasy that would hurt Black communities.
“There are lawsuits being filed in support of the real power, and that is the power of the people.”
While national corporate media outlets have offered Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby a wide platform to brand herself as a progressive prosecutor, local and independent media have been publishing reports that challenge her office’s record in practice.
“When you combine the incredible concentration of power and lack of accountability, with the concentration of that power in the hands of one demographic group, that makes for a very combustible and dangerous situation.”
A conversation that excludes sheriffs from talk of police abolition and/or reform is missing a critical element.
As protests against police violence erupted around the nation, Twitter and Facebook were filled with videos of heavily armored police forces indiscriminately pepper-spraying marchers, firing flashbangs at crowds containing children and the elderly, and shooting projectiles at people standing outside their own homes. To most of those immersed in the social media environment, looted or […]
Trump’s bizarre delusions on Covid-19 aren’t just bats in his attic; they’ve driven a response that is nothing short of disastrous.
“I think this bill really does fail to imagine what public safety could look like. That’s our biggest problem with it. They’re not listening to people on the ground.”
“It does make sense that for the people who are trying to amplify the voices of people who are resisting police violence, that the police might not be too happy about that.”
The demand to expel police unions from mainstream labor organizations was once a fringe demand. Now, in the wake of the ongoing Black Lives Matter uprising, the demand is taking center stage in labor news, and the Writers Guild of America East—which has been proactive in organizing new media newsrooms—is leading the charge to […]
Overpolicing and violent policing have much to do with the so-called war on drugs, which serves as a pretext for the harassment of individuals and entire communities of black and brown people.
Today, even as ideas for police reform that barely surfaced in corporate media in the past are becoming part of the mainstream conversation, media continue to try to steer that conversation away from its radical edge.
Even when outlets described the rampant police violence against protesters, the language used still protected police from scrutiny.
according to leading media narratives, the curfews aren’t deliberate measures of cruelty that infringe upon fundamental rights; they’re the hard but necessary choice that dedicated city officials must make in the interest of public safety.
“After Curfew, Detroit Police Act Aggressively to Disperse Protesters Who Refused to Leave” (Detroit Free Press, 5/31/20) “Minneapolis Officers Use More Aggressive Tactics Against Protesters as Rallies Flare Around US” (NBC News, 5/31/20) “An Agitated Trump Encourages Governors to Use Aggressive Tactics on Protesters” (CNN, 6/1/20) “Police Turn More Aggressive Against Protesters and Bystanders […]
Will police attacks on journalists lead reporters to back off, covering racial injustice from a safe distance? Or will they encourage them to work more deeply and consistently to amplify precisely those voices that the “forces of order,” as CNN called them, so vehemently want to silence?
