CounterSpin, FAIR’s weekly radio show, provides a critical examination of the major stories every week, and exposes what the mainstream media might have missed in their own coverage.
This week on CounterSpin: Trump’s threats to media corporations are laying bare what many already knew: Media corporations are reliant on government for policies that benefit them as profit-driven corporations, because they are primarily profit-driven corporations, even though we may still see them as the journalistic institutions whose job is to inform us about the world and one another—without, as is sometimes quaintly referenced, “fear or favor.”
But while many are meaningfully and rightfully engaged in this White Houses’ harmful overreach and gross predations on the First Amendment, there is less attention to the role of the 14th Amendment—meant to secure basic rights of equal protection and due process for formerly enslaved people.
That’s in play here too; if, like our guest, you are able to contextualize this retrograde White House’s assaults on the press corps as part of, and not ancillary to, their direct assaults on Black and brown people, on the policies that aim to afford us equal rights, on the programs that allow us to enter the country as immigrants, on the laws that resist active discrimination against us on jobsites, in public accommodations, in housing, on the street, at the bank. They don’t actively, aggressively, despise Black and brown people over here, but then just have some sort of principled problem with news reporters, separately, over there; it’s all of a piece. And that piece has a history that we’d do well to learn—not only because of the ongoing, institutional harms it helps us see, but also the hope and resistance that’s there in that history, as well.
We get into it with Joseph Torres, senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press, co-creator of the project Media 2070, and co-author, with Juan Gonzalez, of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.
This week on CounterSpin: In July last year, CounterSpinrecalled a statement from Donald Trump on Fox & Friends in 2020, that if voting access were expanded—meaning easing of barriers to voting for disabled people, poor people, rural people, working people—if voting were made more widely accessible, Trump said, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Many of us wondered at the time why news media wouldn’t call that out as anti-democratic, and talk up the multivocal, multiregional, multiracial democracy we’ve always said we’re aspiring to.
But here we are, dealing with the fallout of, among many things, that news media failure—now including the possible erasure of the landmark Voting Rights Act. Ari Berman is national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and his new book is called Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. We talk about that with him this week.
This week on CounterSpin: When the Washington, DC, city council voted to gut plans to raise wages for tipped workers, they weren’t just stiff-arming restaurant and hospitality workers; they were overturning the express will of the public, who had voted overwhelmingly, for the second time, to raise those wages. They were telling the electorate: You just don’t matter to us as much as the restaurant lobby. They say no, so we say no. It’s obviously a story about a rigged game that goes well beyond restaurant workers, but it’s also a story about restaurant workers, and how elite news media serve as frictionless transmitters for this weird worldview that it’s appropriate for overwhelmingly women and people of color to have to please and appease patrons in order to survive.
We’ll hear from worker advocate Raeghn Draper from the CHAAD Project; their recent piece about the rise-up of efforts for a better wage system for restaurant workers appears in Jacobin magazine.
Also on the show: Media reported on how “Trump Threatens Washington Stadium Deal Unless NFL Team Readopts Redskins Name.” and some, like ABC News, dutifully noted that there is no “deal” that Trump himself is involved in, and so it’s not clear what restriction he could actually put in place.
Would that these outlets showed equal interest in interrogating the threats and disinformation from other sources that led to the DC city council’s approval of a plan that exempts a profitable enterprise from property taxes and leases the land underneath the stadium for just $1 a year over some 30 years. Sales taxes from the stadium don’t even go to DC, but to a “reinvestment fund” for the stadium’s maintenance and upgrades.
The Commanders and their owner don’t need millions of dollars from a district where some 14% of the population live in poverty, and the people of the district said they didn’t want to give it to them. They got it anyway. That’s the story. But it’s a story that predates and will post-date Trump, so apparently it doesn’t rate.
Pete Tucker reports on government and media from the Washington, DC, area, including for FAIR.org and his own Substack. He joins us this week to talk about that.
This week on CounterSpin: The mainstream US media debate on the starvation and violence and war crimes in Gaza still, in July 2025, makes room for Bret Stephens, who explains in the country’s paper of record that Israel can’t be committing genocide as rights groups claim, because if they were, they’d be much better at it. Says Stephens:
It may seem harsh to say, but there is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal—if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans—why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?
“It may seem harsh to say” is a time-honored line from those who want to note but justify human suffering, or excuse the crimes of the powerful. It looks bad to you, is the message, because you’re stupid. If you were smart, like me, you’d understand that your empathy is misplaced; these people suffering need to suffer in order to…. Well, they don’t seem to feel a need to fully explain that part. Something about democracy and freeing the world from, like, suffering.
It’s true that corporate media are now gesturing toward engaging questions of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. But what does that amount to at this late date? We’ll talk about corporate media’s Gaza coverage with independent reporter and frequent FAIR.org contributor Ari Paul.
Also on the show: The Americans with Disabilities Act is generally acknowledged in July, with a lot of anodyne “come a long way, still a long way to go” type of reporting. There’s an opening for a different sort of coverage this month, as the Trump administration is actively taking apart laws that protect disabled people in the workplace, and cutting off healthcare benefits, and disabled kids’ educational rights, and rescinding an order that would have moved disabled workers to at least the federal minimum wage; and, with a recent executive order, calling on localities to forcibly institutionalize any unhoused people someone decides is mentally ill or drug-addicted or just living on the street.
Does that serve the hedge funds pricing homes out of reach of even full-time workers? Yes. Does it undercut years of evidence-based work about moving people into homes and services? Absolutely. Does it aim to rocket us back to a dark era of criminalizing illness and disability and poverty? Of course. But Trump calls it “ending crime and disorder,” so you can bet elite media will honor that viewpoint in their reporting. We’ll get a different view from Scout Katovich, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality.
This week on CounterSpin: The Trump administration is funding a genocide in Gaza—never mind headlines like July 24’s Washington Post: “Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza as Deaths From Hunger Rise.” (No, it’s actual human beings stalking Gaza, who could right now choose to act differently.)
None of this, while we acknowledge individual regretters, has radically shaken the MAGA base. But now that group, we’re told, may be fracturing, around the Epstein files.
To tell this as a tale about two uniquely bad men, one of whom mysteriously died in prison while the other mysteriously became president, is a terrible disservice to a story of thinly veiled institutional, professional machinery employed in the systemic criminal victimization of women. But how can we expect elite news media to tell that story when they’re busy wasting ink on Trump denials as though they were something other than nonsense?
There’s a lot going on here; we’ll talk about just some of it with Thom Hartmann, radio host and author of, most recently, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink.
Also on the show: Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has just announced a posthumous pardon for Nigerian writer, teacher and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged in November 1995, along with eight of his comrades in the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Their crime was nonviolent protest against the exploitation of their land and their people by oil industry giant Royal Dutch Shell. CounterSpin covered it at the time—and then in 2009, we caught up on still-ongoing efforts to bring some measure of accountability for those killings, and Shell’s unceasing human rights and environmental violations, with Han Shan, working with what was then called the ShellGuilty campaign, a coalitional effort from Oil Change International, Friends of the Earth and Platform/Remember Saro-Wiwa.
In light of this pardon, which is being acknowledged as necessary but insufficient, we’re going to hear that conversation with Han Shan again this week.
This week on CounterSpin: The US official stance about the UN is, basically, they’re not the boss of us. But: If it looks like they can make hay with it, then sure. That’s why Secretary of State Marco Rubio is declaring “sanctions” against Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, following an unsuccessful pressure campaign to force the UN to remove her from her post. Albanese has long been clear in calling on the international community to halt Israel’s genocide of Palestinians—but the thing that broke US warmongers was her naming in a recent report of corporations that are profiting from that genocide. We’ll talk about why talking about profiteering is so key with Iman Abid, director of advocacy and organizing at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
Also on the show, and to the point: Victor Pickard will join us to talk about corporate actions that make sense as business deals—but, because this country has chosen to run the democratic lifeblood of journalism as just another business, affect everyone relying on news media to tell us about the world. Victor Pickard is professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he codirects the Media, Inequality & Change Center. He’s the author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism? from Oxford University press.
This week on CounterSpin: Along with many other hate-driven harms, the budget bill puts Stephen Miller’s cruel and bizarre mass deportation plan on steroids. $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers; that’s a 62% larger budget than the entire federal prison system.
The goons hiding their faces and IDs while they snatch people off the street? ICE’s “enforcement and deportation operations” get $30 billion. $46 billion for a “border wall,” because that’s evidently not a cartoon. And in a lesser-noticed piece: While courts are backlogged with immigrants complying with legal processes to access citizenship, the bill caps the number of immigration judges to 800, ensuring more people will be kept in vulnerable legal status.
The Economic Policy Institute tells us that increases in immigration enforcement will cause widespread job losses for both immigrant and US-born workers, particularly in construction and childcare: “While Trump and other conservatives claim that increased deportations will somehow magically create jobs for US-born workers, the existing evidence shows that the opposite is true: They will cause immense harm to workers and families, shrink the economy, and weaken the labor market for everyone.”
That’s without mentioning how ICE is telling people they’re being moved from Texas to Louisiana and then dumping them in South Sudan, as the Intercept’s Nick Turse reports. Or the puerile delight Republicans find in holding people in an alligator swamp, and forbidding journalists and public officials from seeing what goes on there.
It’s important to see that Donald Trump, while especially craven, is using tools he was given, in terms of the apparatus for mass deportations, including in the acceptance of prisons as economic boons for struggling localities. So the fight can’t be just anti-Trump, but must be rooted in policy and practice and law—and most of all, in community and shared humanity.
We’ll talk about standing up for human beings because they’re human beings with Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network.
This week on CounterSpin: White supremacy, Islamophobia and antisemitism are irreducible dangers in themselves. They are also tools that powerful, wealthy people take up to protect their power and wealth, and to deflect everyone’s attention from who is, actually, day to day, threatening all of our well-being. That brazenness (everything is in peril!)—and that skullduggery (you know who’s the problem? your different-looking neighbor!)—are both in evidence in corporate media’s hellbent, throw-it-all-at-the-wall campaign against democratic socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
We’ll talk about how elite news media are Trojan-horsing their hatred for any ideas that threaten their ill-gotten gains, via very deep, very serious “concerns” about Mamdani as a person, with Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, longtime political activists, writers and co-founders of the emphatically nonpartisan group RootsAction.
This week on CounterSpin: Prosecutors at the 1946 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared:
War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
After the Trump administration dropped bombs on Iran last weekend, without congressional approval, the media debate wasn’t about legality, much less humanity. The Wall Street Journal offered a video series on The Massive Ordnance Penetrator, “The 30,000-Pound US Bomb That Could Destroy Iran’s Nuclear Bunkers.” But it’s not just boys excited by toys; the very important Wall Street Journal is “examining military innovation and tactics emerging around the world, breaking down the tech behind the weaponry and its potential impact.”
Most big media are consumed right now with whether those bunker busters did their bunker busting or maybe the US needs to buy bigger, better bombs to…do what, exactly? Well, now you’re asking too many questions.
Things you should not question? Statements like that of Sen. John Fetterman that Iran is the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror.
US corporate media in war mode are a force to reckon with. We do some reckoning with media analyst Adam Johnson, co-host of the podcast Citations Needed, Substack author at the Column, and co-author, with In These Times contributing editor Sarah Lazare, of some relevant pieces at InTheseTimes.com.
This week on CounterSpin: We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities—brown immigrant communities—around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also. But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question—“Why is anyone trying to come to the US anyway?”—by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from. We’ll talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Also on the show: Anyone who pays attention and cares can see that the Trump budget bill is a brazen transfer of resources from those that are trying to meet basic needs to those that can’t remember how many houses they own. But corporate reporting rarely breaks out economic policy in terms of how it affects different people—especially how it affects communities for whom they show no consistent concern. Economic policy is itself racialized, gendered, regionalized, targeted. Humanistic journalism would help us see that.
LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.”
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
