This week on CounterSpin: Headlined “The Cash Monster Was Insatiable,” a 2022 New York Times piece reported insurance companies gaming Medicare Advantage, originally presented as a “low-cost” alternative to traditional Medicare. One company pressed doctors to add additional illnesses to the records of patients they hadn’t seen for weeks: Dig up eno…

This week on CounterSpin: In March, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.” But as Greg Shupak writes, even as evidence accumulates, denial is becoming socially and journalistically accept…

This week on CounterSpin: At some point, we will get tired of hearing news reports on “record heat” — because the “records” will continue to be broken, and “heat” will have stopped meaning what it once may have meant. Media play a role in moving us from questions about where to buy a good air conditioner to what stands in the way of addressing a pu…

This week on CounterSpin: The power of the algorithm is ever clearer in our lives, even if we don’t understand it. Algorithms don’t just guess at what you might like to buy: sometimes they’re determining whether you get a job, or keep it. Some 40 million people in the U.S. use online platforms to find work. The algorithms these platforms use create…

This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote dozens of pages justifying his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, stating the Constitution does not confer the right to determine whether or when to give birth. None of those pages mention his intention to make the United States “a place of godliness,” or his belief that there can be no …

This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump told a Las Vegas crowd earlier this month that, if elected, the “first thing” he would do would be to end the IRS practice of taxing tips as part of workers’ regular income. Unfortunately, Trump can count on a general haziness in the public mind on the impact of “tipped wages,” more helpfully labeled subminimu…

This week on CounterSpin: Surprising no one, Donald Trump and his sycophants responded to his 34-count conviction on charges of lying in business records by claiming that the trial was “rigged,” the judge and jury corrupt, and that it was somehow Joe Biden’s doing. We’ll talk with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, about press response to …

This week on CounterSpin: In 2023, the California legislature passed legislation that said that big corporations doing business in the state have to tell the public how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. But this past January, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups challenged those laws, claiming that mak…

This week on CounterSpin: As an historic catastrophe, the deep and myriad impacts of Israel’s assault on Palestinians will not be fully understood until years from now, if then. That only adds urgency to present-day resistance to the collateral assault — on the ability to witness, to record, and to remember. When we spoke with historian Ellen Schre…

This week on CounterSpin: Steven Rosenfeld reports on election transparency, among other electoral issues, for Voting Booth. We hear from him about kinds of election interference we ignore at our peril. Some elite media-designated “smart people” have determined, “Citizens United, what? It’s folks who give ten bucks to a candidate that are really me…

This week on CounterSpin: CNN’s Jake Tapper is mad about college students protesting their institutions’ and their government’s support for Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza — because they’re preventing him, by his account, from covering Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Tapper and CNN, we’re to understand, are powe…

We’re now seeing the impacts of the reality that corporate media, as well as corporate-funded universities, will always side with official power — as they present students sitting quietly in tents in protest of genocide as violent terrorists. But in fact, we’ve been seeing it for decades, as corporate media spin narratives about people of color as …

This week on CounterSpin: Many college students appear to believe that learning about the world means not just gaining knowledge but acting on it. Campuses across the country — Rutgers, MIT, Ohio State, Boston University, Emerson, Tufts, and on and on — are erupting in protest over their institutions’ material support for Israel’s war on Palestinia…

This week on CounterSpin: The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuses of Iraqi detainees during the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia, with Al-Shimari v. CACI. Since the case was first filed in 2008, military contractor CACI has pushed some 20 times to have it dismissed. We got a reading on the case last year f…

This week on CounterSpin: U.S. corporate media’s story about Haiti is familiar. Haiti, according to various recent reports, has “whipped from one calamity to another.” The country is a “cataclysm of hunger and terror,” “teetering on the brink of collapse,” “spiraling deeper into chaos” or else “descending into gang-fueled anarchistic chaos.” It’s “…

This week on CounterSpin: In the final quarter of 2023, after-tax corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion. As reported by Popular Information, corporate profit margins were at a level not seen since the 1950s, as increases in prices have outpaced increases in costs. Capitalism 101 says this shouldn’t happen, because competing co…

This week on CounterSpin: A senior UN human rights official told the BBC that there is a “plausible” case that Israel is using starvation in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is a war crime. Meanwhile, US citizens struggle to make sense of White House policy that seems to call for getting aid to Palestinians while pursuing a course of action that make…

This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption is the prime mover of a cascade of interrelated crises. We’re told that, when it comes to problems people need solved, rule number 1 is “follow the money.” Yet even as elite media talk about the climate crisis, they still … can’t … quite …connect images of floods or fires to the triumphant shareholder me…

This week on CounterSpin: About this time seven years ago, John Deere was arguing, with a straight face, that farmers shouldn’t really “own” their tractors, because if they had access to the software involved, they might pirate Taylor Swift music. Things have changed since then, though industry still gets up and goes to court to say that even thoug…

This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump, if he should become president again, could order the Department of Justice to drop any charges against him stemming from his fomenting of an insurrection aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 election. That’s just been enabled by the Supreme Court, which put off until April the legal case wherein Trump…

This week on CounterSpin: Years ago, when media critics called attention to ways corporate media’s profit-driven nature negatively impacts the news, many would respond, “But what about the internet?” Nowadays, more people understand that constraints on a news outlet’s content have little to do with whether it’s on paper or online but on who owns it…

Every day the US falls more out of step with the world in its support for Israel’s violent assault on Gaza. As International human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber said, US vetoes of ceasefires in the UN Security Council, after which thousands more were killed, mean the US is directly responsible for those deaths: “Complicity is a crime.” Many in the U…

People with disabilities are meant to be grateful, excited even, for whatever access or accommodation is made available for them to participate in daily life. Often, it’s implied that any violation of the rights of disabled people is an individual matter, to be fought over in the courts, instead of something to be acknowledged and addressed societa…

This week on CounterSpin: The rate of inflation is down. Prices, though, are still high, and Americans are struggling to afford food, cars and housing. Speaking of people having trouble affording basic necessities, “cut up the credit cards” is the sort of advice that politicians and pundits dole out and that corporate news media presents as a respe…

This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court ruled that federal agents can remove the razor wire that Texas state officials have set up along parts of the US/Mexico border. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that ruling “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Elite news media, for their part, suggest…

This week on CounterSpin: Elite media can give the impression that problems wax and wane along with their attention to them. So it is with police brutality. The news media has moved on, yet 2023 saw killings by law enforcement up from the previous year, which was up from the year before that. More than 1,200 people were killed, roughly three people…

This week on CounterSpin: US corporate news media’s initial response to Israel’s terror campaign against Palestinians, unleashed in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas, was characterized largely by legitimization, a rhetorical blank check for whatever Israel might do. Israel, the New York Times editorial board said, “is determined to break th…

This week on CounterSpin: The journalists at Yahoo Finance tell us that a Connecticut McDonald’s charging $18 for a combo meal has “sparked a nationwide debate” on escalating prices in the fast food industry. The outrage, readers are told, is “partly attributed” to a recent raise in the minimum wage — which has not yet gone into effect. From there,…

This week on CounterSpin: It was a big deal when Jewish Americans who oppose US support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza filled New York’s Grand Central Terminal. But not big enough to make the front page of the local paper, the New York Times. US journalists invoke the First Amendment a lot, but not so much when it extends to regular folks using…

Every week, CounterSpin presents a look “behind the headlines” of the mainstream news. Not because headlines are false, necessarily, but because the full story is rarely reflected there. Many — most — conversations we need to have, must happen around corporate news media, while deconstructing and re-imagining the discourse they’re pumping out, day …

People in the U.S., the story goes, value few things more than individual freedom and money. So you’d think the way an individual uses their money would be sacrosanct. A sign of where we’re at are currently congressional efforts to put people in prison, and fine them millions of dollars, for choosing not to buy products from countries that are not …

This week on CounterSpin: UN Climate talks have ended with an agreement that, as New York Times headlines would suggest, “Strikes a Deal to Transition Away From Fossil Fuels.” Headlines, which are all that many people read, are often misleading, and sometimes they aggressively deflect from the point of the story, which in this case is that everyone…

This week on CounterSpin: As we record on December 7, the news from Gaza continues to be horrific: The Washington Post reports, citing Gaza Health Ministry reports, that Israel’s continued assault throughout the region has killed at least 350 people in the past 24 hours, which brings the death toll of the Israeli military campaign, launched after t…

This week on CounterSpin: “Abortion Politics Reveal Concerns” was the headline one paper gave a recent Associated Press story, language so bland it almost discourages reading the piece, which reports how right-wing politicians and anti-abortion activists are seeking to undermine or undo democratic processes when those processes accurately reflect t…

This week on CounterSpin: The new president of Argentina opposes abortion rights, casts doubt on the death toll of the country’s military dictatorship, would like it to be easier to access handguns and calls climate change a “lie of socialism.” Many were worried about what Javier Milei would bring, but, the Washington Post explained: “Anger won ove…

This week on CounterSpin: Coverage of what is quite possibly not the most recent mass shooting, as we record the show, but the recent one in Lewiston, Maine, leaned heavily on a narrative of the assailant as a “textbook case” of a shooter, because he had some history of mental illness. FAIR’s Olivia Riggio wrote about how that storyline not only ge…

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate news media use at least a couple of largely unexplored lenses through which to present US human rights violations. One is this: The US does not commit human rights violations, except by accident, or as unavoidable collateral for an ultimately net-gain mission, be that international or domestic. The other is this:…

This week on CounterSpin: Elite media are fond of saying that the US is resetting its Middle East policy. During the 2020 campaign, the New York Times explained, Joe Biden pledged, if elected, to stop coddling Saudi Arabia, after the brutal murder of prominent dissident and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. “We are not going to, in fact,…

This week on CounterSpin: Advertising critics have long noted that a company’s PR tells you, inadvertently but reliably, exactly what their problems are. The ad features salmon splashing in crystalline waters? That company is for sure a massive polluter. That’s the lump of salt with which to take the recent announcement from the US Department of He…

This week on CounterSpin: Government-supplied food assistance has been around in various forms since at least the Great Depression, but never with the straightforward goal of easing hunger. 1930s posters about food stamps declare, “We are helping the farmers of America move surplus foods”; that link between agriculture industry support and nutritio…

This week on CounterSpin: In the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas and the ensuing bombing campaign from Israel on the Gaza Strip, many people were surprised that CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria aired an interview with a Palestinian activist who frankly described the daily human rights violations in Gaza, the right of Palestinians to resist occupation an…

This week on CounterSpin: The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik is one of vanishingly few national reporters to suggest that if media care about crime, if they care about people having things stolen from them—maybe they could care less about toasters and more about lives? As in, the billions of dollars that are snatched from working people’s pockets every …

This week on CounterSpin: You can’t say elite US news media aren’t on the story of the federal indictment of Robert Menendez, Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But articles like the New York Times’ “As Menendez’s Star Rose, Fears of Corruption Cast a Persistent Shadow” represent media embrace of the “great man of history” …

This week on CounterSpin: An unprecedented labor action is underway as thousands of Midwest autoworkers working for the Big 3—Ford, GM and Stellantis (which used to be Chrysler)—went on strike at the same time. Some things workers are calling for may sound familiar: a pay raise for workers that bears relation to raises that owners have generously g…

This week on CounterSpin: New Yorkers who were here 22 years ago remember the proliferation of signs and stickers reading “our grief is not a cry for war”—and then the way that voice was shouted over by corporate news media, calling for war crimes with US flags on their lapels. Hosting old general after old general, as peace and human rights activi…

This week on CounterSpin: The White House has announced it’s extending the ban on people using US passports to go to North Korea. Corporate media seem to find it of little interest; who wants to go to North Korea? Which fairly reflects media’s disinterest in the tens of thousands of Korean Americans who might want to visit family in North Korea, al…

This week on CounterSpin: It is back to school week in the US. Schools—pre-K to college—have been on the front burner for at least a year now, but education has always been a contested field in this country: Who has access? What does it teach? What is its purpose? Do my kids have to go to school with those kids? So while what’s happening right now …

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin – August 27, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.…

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin – August 20, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.…

CounterSpin provides a critical examination of the each week’s major news stories, and exposes what the mainstream media may have missed in their own coverage. Produced by the national media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). The post CounterSpin – August 13, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.…