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: Headlines today on January 15: “North Minneapolis ICE shooting: Children Hospitalized After Flash Bang, Tear Gas Hits Van.” And from the official Homeland Security website: “ICE Announced the Arrest of More Worst of the Worst Criminal Illegal Aliens From Across the Country, Including Those Convicted of First-Degree Rape of a Child, Homicide and Arson.”
So did the hospitalized children commit the rapes, homicides and arson? Is that why they were attacked? Or are we supposed to just muddle it all together, so that we now think “immigration equals crime”?
What happens if we do that? What would happen if we didn’t? We’ll hear from Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network.
Also on the show: We see reporters being physically attacked by purported “law enforcement,” and criminalized and threatened by the federal government, as they just try to do their job of witnessing and reporting the actions of powerful state actors. At the same time, we see corporations telling us that journalists aren’t really important; AI can do whatever it is that they do. And if a newspaper doesn’t make the quarterly profit that shareholders have said they want, well, what more evidence do you need?
The closure of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will mean a lot to people. But who will be brought on to speak on the meaning of the shutdown, and where it fits with other predations on our right to know what is happening around us? We’ll hear from Jon Schleuss, president of the Newspaper Guild-CWA.
This week on CounterSpin: For millions of people around the globe, the US under the administration of convicted felon Donald Trump has acted—it’s beyond “illegal”; it’s sort of “a-legal,” as if laws meant nothing—they’ve kidnapped the leader of a sovereign nation, and declared that Trump will henceforth “run” that nation.
If you think flagrant bullying, Mafioso, might-makes-right behavior is what international law is created to combat, and basic human decency is designed to reject—you would be supported by the majority of the world’s people.
But alas, you live in the US and rely for your world view on US media, and thus you are fed authoritarian apologies disguised as disinterested analysis, like that from AP’s headline on January 6: “Trump’s Vague Claims of the US Running Venezuela Raise Questions About Planning for What Comes Next.”
Because, you see, the problem about Trump’s claim that his weirdo government will now run the country of Venezuela isn’t that that is crazy with a capital K, but that Trump “has offered almost no details about how it will do so.”
Our conversation and understanding of our political power is so warped that even a thoughtful piece from Nation of Change says: “The White House has not explained how it intends to legally justify the detention of a foreign head of state, the reported civilian deaths, or the long-term scope of a military “quarantine” designed to coerce a sovereign nation.”
When we really need to accept that they will just not justify it, and will simply declare that anyone who asks for justification is a terrorist. And news media will report that as one side of a two-sided argument.
As a CounterSpin guest said recently: “The cavalry is not coming. You’re it.”
We’ll talk about the Venezuela invasion, as neither a beginning nor an end, with Michelle Ellner, Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK.
Featured Image: January 4 rally in Caracas protesting the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (photo by Rome Arrieche via Venezuelanalysis—1/5/26).
We call it the “best of,” but, as always, we are deeply thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. These are just a few of the void-filling conversations it’s been our pleasure to host in the last year. 2025 was a rough one; we appreciate everyone who helps us stay informed, forward-looking and in communication.
Featured Image: Top row: Silky Shah, Gregory Shupak, Paul Offit and Karen Thompson; second row: Erin Reed, Farrah Hassen, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Tom Morello
This week on CounterSpin: After every police killing of a Black person, every announced policy singling out Black immigrants as the cause of crime and disorder, every declaration, like that from Arlington National Cemetery, that as of now materials on Black and female service people will be scrubbed from the website—we hear from corporate media about how, boy, this country is for sure “reckoning” with “racism.” But then: If we reckoned with racism every time elite media claimed this country was “reckoning” with racism, seems like we ought to be fully “reckoned” by now.
US corporate media have a white supremacy problem (and you see how that term lands differently than “racism”): They decide who they think, and hence you should think, is worth talking to, based on an accepted conflation of power with worthiness. They decide whose ideas are taken for granted and whose deemed marginal, and they tell us how to define progress: Is it moving toward actual equity, or just things quietening down? Who needs to be reassured, and whose lives is it OK to disrupt, whose basic humanity is it OK to question, day after day after day?
A new report titled Anti-Blackness Is the Point, from the African American Policy Forum, engages this age-old if ever-morphing narrative.
Kimberle Crenshaw is a leading legal scholar and justice advocate, the force behind the transformative ideas of intersectionality and critical race theory. She’s co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, as well as a professor of law at both Columbia and UCLA. We talk with Kimberle Crenshaw this week on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: Forbes reports the Starbucks workers strike as you might expect: “The company claims it already offers the ‘best job in retail.’ … Yet the union is demanding….” “The company says, ‘We’re ready to return to the bargaining table whenever the union is.’ But as of yet, the union is holding out for the company to present a contract that meets demands….” You get the idea: One party is generous, the other is ornery. But even Forbes has to acknowledge that even as the strike “drags” into a second month, “global support grows.”
Derek Seidman has been following the strike. He’s a writer, researcher and historian who contributes to Little Sis and to Truthout, where he recently reported on the Starbucks strike and…what Walmart has to do with it?
Also on the show: Sen. Bernie Sanders is the latest to join a broad group of more than 200 environmental and economic justice advocates that just sent a letter to Congress, calling for a moratorium on the construction of new data centers, the energy sources powering the boom (and, as some would say, predictable bust) of artificial intelligence, until, as Sanders says, democracy “has a chance to catch up.”
Turns out as people learn more, opposition grows, and so, Politico notes, “The industry is taking out ads and funding campaigns to flip the narrative and put data centers in a positive light—spinning them as job creators and economic drivers rather than resource-hungry land hogs.”
The letter to Congress was spearheaded by Food & Water Watch. We’ll hear from the group’s deputy director, Mitch Jones.
This week on CounterSpin: If you see no problem in news outlets reporting on desperately horrific conditions in Gaza, and what various political entities are doing or could do to address them, while a ticker at the bottom of the screen offers you an opportunity to gamble—for money—on whether or not “famine” in the region will be officially declared, this episode is not for you.
We’re learning about the deal just struck by “news” outlets CNN and CNBC with the “prediction market operator” (evidently what we’re calling them now) Kalshi Inc. We’ll hear from Judd Legum—founder and author at the newsletter Popular Information—and from author and analyst Adam Johnson, of Substack‘s the Column and the podcast Citations Needed.
This week on CounterSpin: A militarized US Drug Enforcement Administration force declared they’d taken out drug traffickers in the Caribbean, killing some of them in what was sold as a successful operation. Locals on the ground reported differently, saying these people weren’t drug traffickers, just human beings who happened to be on the river and got shot up by US forces who were not attacked, as they claimed, but just killed innocent people because they were given orders to kill them.
It should sound familiar—but this isn’t today in Venezuela; it’s 2012 in Honduras. An inspector general review from the State Department and the Justice Department found that, no, this was not a Honduran operation, or a “joint operation” the DEA were helping with; it was a DEA operation, and it killed four innocent people and injured others in a remote, Afro-Indigenous part of Honduras. The story that the DEA pushed on Congress and the press corps was just a lie.
But you’d hardly know that history reading current coverage of Honduras, where, as we record on December 4, the presidential election is still in question. Not in question: the US’s long history of intervening—violently, dramatically, unaccountably—in Honduras.
Opening ceremony for COP30 in Belem, Brazil (photo: Palácio do Planalto)
This week on CounterSpin: US media didn’t exactly mince words: “Climate Summit Viewed as Flop by Many” was the headline the LA Times put on an AP report. The subhead explained: “The COP30 talks held in Belem, Brazil, end without a timeline for reducing fossil fuels.” The future of climate disruption, if not pulled off course, is devastating, but the present is bad enough, if you are placed, or inclined, to see it. So how could a global climate conference that doesn’t put demands on fossil fuel producers at the center be anything but a flop?
The answer is not to absolve COP30 or polluting countries, much less industries, of their responsibility. But focusing some conversation on what people, including those most harmed, are doing, along with what’s being done to them, could help move debate off an outdated dime—onto the kind of work that stands a chance of helping us all.
This week on CounterSpin: Corporate news media have vilified people who use public assistance, and lied about why they need it, almost like it’s their job. Today is nothing new. But here’s a fun fact, as noted by Michael Klinski from South Dakota News Watch: Ziebach County has the sixth-highest percentage of residents who receive SNAP benefits in the country, at 43.5%, and doesn’t have a single retailer that accepts food stamps.
What if SNAP weren’t a story about major political party back-and-forthing, and were instead a story about people who need food? So they can go to their job? And feed their children so they can go to school? Wouldn’t that be something? What if that were the story?
This week on CounterSpin: The palace intrigue around the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte, soft-launching the idea of a 50-year mortgage suggests the reveal was perhaps mistimed, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reflective of the sort of policy the Trump White House is intent on.
And though the idea of extending payments over time under the guise of making home ownership more accessible seems to have landed poorly with economists right, left and center, much of corporate news media were willing to give it a reflexively respectful whirl.
Housing and home ownership represent a critical vector in the project of a multi-racial democracy, and we’ve talked about that a lot on the show. This week we revisit relevant, informed conversations with veteran housing analysts and advocates: Gene Slater, Richard Rothstein and George Lipsitz.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of Donald Trump’s 50-year mortgage scheme.
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