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The New York Times‘ obituary (5/18/26) for former LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman quotes him saying that “policemen never get the benefit of the doubt.”
The racism of Mark Fuhrman, the Los Angeles police detective whose involvement in the O.J. Simpson murder investigation helped sink the prosecution’s case, was so well-known comedian Dana Carvey once mocked him with a Nazi salute, calling him “Mark the Fuhrer-man.”
Fuhrman’s death this month (New York Times, 5/18/26) took middle-aged and older Americans back to 1995, when the televised trial of Simpson, accused of murdering his ex-wife and her friend, dominated media for much of the year.
During the trial, audio recordings and witness testimony revealed Fuhrman’s use of the n-word and other racist views, sinking his credibility as the cop responsible for recovering the “bloody glove,” the key piece of evidence tying Simpson to the killings. Because he had previously testified that he never used the word, it opened an opportunity for the defense to suggest he wasn’t honest about other things—and had a motivation to frame a Black celebrity.
Unrelenting racismIn July 2017, CNN‘s Kyra Phillips played new excerpts from the Fuhrman tapes.
The tapes portrayed hours of unrelenting racism. “All these n*****s in L.A. city government…all of them should be lined up against a wall and fucking shot,” he said. And often sexism as well: “What if I’ve just been raped by two buck n*****s, and a female shows up?”
During the trial, witness Kathleen Bell testified that Fuhrman had said, “If I had my way, all the n*****s would be gathered together and burned.”
Bell told the court, “When he sees a Black man with a white woman driving in a car, he pulls them over,” with no traffic violation needed (Washington Post, 9/5/95).
Fuhrman became the national representation of the American racist cop. He invoked the Fifth Amendment when questioned about his handling of evidence (LA Times, 9/7/95), offering the shadow of a doubt the jury needed to acquit the former football and movie star. In his fiery closing argument, defense attorney Johnnie Cochran characterized Fuhrman as “this perjurer, this racist, this genocidal racist.” Fuhrman pleaded no contest to a perjury charge a year later (CNN, 10/2/96).
But there was something bigger about Fuhrman, and it’s something we can deeply feel in the media environment today.
‘Unwitting catalyst’Mark Fuhrman interviewed in ESPN‘s OJ: Made in America (2016).
The legal “dream team” Simpson assembled certainly focused on pushing the jury for an acquittal—that’s a defense lawyer’s job. But as outlined in both the dramatized The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story on FX and ESPN’s OJ: Made in America, defense lead Cochran also built a larger case for a larger audience. (Side note: FAIR’s Janine Jackson briefly appears in the ESPN documentary in a segment about media coverage of the trial.)
Nicole Brown Simpson was killed at her Los Angeles home, along with Ron Goldman, on June 12, 1994, just two years after the city was engulfed in racial rioting as a result of an acquittal of police officers who had been videotaped brutally beating a Black man, Rodney King.
For much of America, the rioting was a dividing moment. Civil rights activists saw it as the explosion of a powder keg under pressure of decades of tension between LA’s Black community and the cops. A great deal of white America saw the rioting as an inexplicable overreaction. Press voices had their doubts too. Newsweek (5/10/92) called the looting “a manic fiesta, a TV game show with every looter a winner.”
Cochran set out to change the narrative, to demonstrate to the white public that Black Los Angeles has systemically suffered from racist policing.
Ben Ehrenreich (Guardian, 4/22/20): “The thousands of African Americans who migrated to Los Angeles from the Jim Crow south had found similar cruel realities awaiting them.”
In Set the Night on Fire, Mike Davis and Jon Weiner outline the ongoing war against the Black community by LA cops in the 1960s, erupting in the 1965 Watts riots. From the Guardian‘s review (4/22/20):
LA’s police make dramatic appearances in almost every chapter, clubbing peaceful protesters, brutalizing activists and killing so many Black men, and with such absolute impunity, that Davis and Wiener’s claim that “the Manson gang were bit players compared to the forces of law and order” ends up feeling more than fair. In the authors’ telling, the wanton violence of the police acted as a consistent if unwitting catalyst to historical change: It was the chaos that followed a ferocious LAPD assault on anti-war protesters that added to Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election in 1968, and the LAPD’s murder of a Black Muslim named Ronald Stokes—seven other Muslims were shot in the same incident—that pushed Malcolm X towards a broader vision of Black liberation. The shared experience of LAPD violence, Davis and Wiener write, forged a “common culture of resistance” among Black and Chicano youth, white hipsters and anti-war activists, and the city’s gay community.
This situation hardly improved with the economic turmoil of the 1970s, or the reactionary retreat of the 1980s. For many Black Angelenos, the 1992 riots weren’t about one videotape, but about this entire history.
Cochran had an opportunity to reveal the situation in the early ’90s to America. And with Fuhrman, who was called by the prosecution to bring the bloody glove into evidence, Cochran was able to show a feverishly racist man at the center of this investigation.
‘Kill somebody and go have some chicken’Sean Hannity (Hannity, 1/10/23) interviewing Pam Bondi (then a former Florida attorney general) and Mark Fuhrman.
In the end, Simpson was acquitted, and Fuhrman became a symbol of a divided America. It’s quite telling that the disgraced cop later found a landing place on Fox News.
The Murdoch media empire created the news network the year after the Simpson trial as the antithesis to what it claimed was a liberal slant in corporate television news. Bringing on Fuhrman as a recurring guest—and, later, giving him his own show on Fox Nation—didn’t just promote his own public rehabilitation, it foretold a shift in “acceptable” discourse on right-wing TV.
Fox‘s Greta van Susteren (5/19/05) defended having him on as a frequent guest:
Mark happens to be a very, very, very smart detective—one of the best I have ever worked with and I have worked with many. He really thinks about the investigations we book him on the show to discuss.
But Fox was attracted to Fuhrman not by his smarts, but by his hate. The racism that spilled out in the Simpson trial—Fuhrman’s animosity toward the people who he was sworn to protect and serve—catered directly to the Fox audience.
Another Fox star that routinely showcased Fuhrman was Sean Hannity (Extra!, 9/13). On Hannity & Colmes (11/16/06; cited by Media Matters, 11/20/06), Fuhrman asserted that the the type of “people” he “dealt with … for 20 years” will
kill somebody and go have some chicken at KFC. You will catch them eating chicken and drinking a beer after they just murdered three people.
He added that “these people are out there. They’re all over the place.”
In another appearance, Hannity (Hannity, 7/16/13) brought the ex-cop on to speculate on whether Black people would riot if George Zimmerman were found not guilty of murdering an unarmed Trayvon Martin in Florida.
“Mark, it seems to me like it’s going to be a dangerous scenario for the cities where this is going to occur,” said Hannity.
Fuhrman replied, “I think you’re right, Sean,” and proceeded to fantasize about protesters “assaulting people, assaulting officers, so when you cross that line, it’s pretty obvious, and, you know, this is completely drawn on racial lines now.”
‘They just take more and more’“You can always find something that doesn’t look like justice was served one way or another,” Mark Fuhrman tells Megyn Kelly (and right-wing novelist Brad Thor) on Fox‘s Kelly File (7/8/16).
Fuhrman had nothing but contempt for the Black Lives Matter movement erupting in Ferguson, Missouri. He told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly (8/10/15):
Stopping traffic is not a lawful demonstration. Stopping pedestrians is not a lawful demonstration. Stopping regular traffic on sidewalks in front of buildings. That is not lawful demonstrations. And they should enforce it. And you know, when you allow some kind of, you know, leeway, they just take more and more.
And now we have people that are not on the city council and they’re not on the police department, no matter how represented the Black community is. They are not there. You’re dealing with gang members and street drug dealers that are just hanging out. They’re armed and they’re taking advantage of a hesitant police department.
How did Fuhrman respond to a video of “a white school police officer in a Columbia [South Carolina] classroom grabbing an African-American student by the neck, flipping her backward as she sat at her desk, then dragging and throwing her across the floor” (New York Times, 10/26/15)? He made the officer a saint on Fox. Media Matters (10/27/15) quoted Fuhrman:
He requested her. He verbally did that. The next level is he put a hand on her. She escalated it from there. He used soft control. He threw her on the ground, he handcuffed her. He didn’t use mace. He didn’t use a Taser. He didn’t use a stick. He didn’t kick her. He didn’t hit her. He didn’t choke her. He used a minimal amount of force necessary to effect an arrest.
In 2019, he attacked Democratic presidential hopefuls for their police reform rhetoric on the Ingraham Angle (8/2/19), saying those politicians were looking to win “that 18-to-25-year-old base that is involved in all these movements—these anti-government, anti-establishment, anti-republic, anti-Trump” movements.
He eventually was given his own show on Fox News spinoff Fox Nation, the Fuhrman Diaries, which ran from 2018 to 2022. (Fox promoted him as “America’s most controversial detective”—LA Times, 11/29/18.)
‘Total reputational annihilation’Just because someone lied under oath about using racial slurs dozens of times doesn’t mean they should be canceled (Wall Street Journal, 5/20/26)—and by “canceled,” we mean given their own TV show.
People can and do change over time. Fuhrman gave a somewhat nuanced view on Fox News (Ingraham Angle, 5/29/20) about the police killing of George Floyd, which resulted in widespread political unrest. He called Floyd’s killing “a slow-motion homicide,” and said the video footage was “a slow and really painful thing to watch of somebody grinding somebody’s face into the pavement until they’re dead.”
At the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, columnist Matthew Hennessey (5/20/26) christened Fuhrman a victim of cancel culture, admitting that he was a “bad cop,” but that he
was among the first to suffer the total reputational annihilation that has become a hallmark of life in the digital era, where everything you say—or have ever said—will one day be used against you in the court of public opinion.
It’s a strange sort of “reputational annihilation” that gets you regularly showcased on a national cable TV network, and then gives you your own show.
Fuhrman’s afterlife as a commentator foretold a media conservatism that flips the narrative about racist policing on its head, where prejudice becomes a sign of expertise. It’s a legacy we live with today in MAGA America, even with Fuhrman having departed this world.
Research assistance: Priyanka Bansal
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New Republic (3/10/26)
This week on CounterSpin: It’s a safe bet that a majority of US citizens know that “we” are currently at “war” with Iran. I am equally confident that very few people could explain why. Or what “war” means. Or what it has to do with their day-to-day life, much less how it could possibly make it better. That’s a problem of this boldly anti-intellectual administration, and the, let’s say, incurious posture of so much of US corporate news media—the ones tasked with telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may.
We have alternative sources of information, that we need to seek out and support, perhaps no time more importantly than when “we” are “at war”—when not only US lives, if that’s all you care about, are at risk, but also many other human lives, as well as the standing of the United States on the world stage (which evidently is super important to many supporters of this war.)
Why is the US at war with Iran? What is the hoped-for outcome? Who is hoping for it? And will we hear from any of the millions who got something they didn’t hope for?
Annelle Sheline is research fellow for the Middle East at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. We hear from her this week on CounterSpin.
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Texas Tribune (5/20/26)
This week on CounterSpin: You may have seen videos of college commencement speakers telling students who’ve spent time and money learning how to read, write and think critically that that was dumb, cuz AI is going to be doing that from now on, so just get on the train or else—wait, why are you booing? That’s far from the only disconnect between students and teachers who think higher education means engagement with a range of perspectives, and right-wing politicians and their administrative acolytes saying “not so fast.” We’ll hear from Karma Chávez, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, at the center of this assault on academic freedoms.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260522Chavez.mp3CEPR (3/10/26)
Also on the show: There is a US State Department memo that calls for “a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
Thing is: That memo is from 1960. So while Trump is making everything old, new—and ugly and violent—again, he isn’t inventing it all. We try not to do media criticism by counterfactual, but consider: What if another country were cutting off resources to the US, in an explicit effort to cause us misery, in hopes that would make us overthrow our government? We’ll talk about what sounds reasonable as long as it’s about Cuba with Alex Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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FIFA, the governing body of association football, concocted a “FIFA Peace Prize”—described as recognizing “individuals for exceptional contributions to peace and unity”—in order to award it to Donald Trump. Alongside revelations of deep-seated corruption—collusion, bribery—involving official bodies and executives, and now ticket prices for this year’s World Cup being called not just excessive but “extortionate,” you might say more folks are “following” football (or soccer) these days, but not necessarily as fans.
OR Books (2026)
Sports has always been a big part of news media, but typically segregated into its own section on stats and personalities, ignoring the economic, social and environmental impacts sports have always had. Think about cities enticed into building new arenas with promises of jobs and commerce that never arrive. Or whole communities uprooted for temporary “Olympic Villages.”
Jules Boykoff has been following the relationships of sport and society for years now; he’s a former professional soccer player himself, as well as a critic and writer, now teaching political science at Pacific University. He’s author of a number of books, including What Are the Olympics For? (Bristol University Press, 2024).
He joins us to discuss his latest: Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing and the FIFA Greed Machine, out now from OR Books.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260515Boykoff.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260515Banter.mp3Featured Image: Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok
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Media Matters (11/16/23)
This week on CounterSpin: In 2023, the group Media Matters reported that social media platform X was placing ads for major brands like Apple and IBM alongside content touting Hitler and the Nazi Party—despite the claim of X’s CEO that brands are “protected from the risk of being next to” toxic posts on the platform.
Musk threatened a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters for reporting the truth, and many in state and federal government were happy to take that work on. Three years and several court cases later, Media Matters announced victory in what wound up being Media Matters v. Federal Trade Commission. The case and the victory are not just hopeful but instructive, offering what the group calls a “roadmap” for other newsgathering and nonprofit organizations facing, or at risk of, government retaliation.
We hear about the case and the outcome from Media Matters president Angelo Carusone.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260508Carusone.mp3Washington Post (4/19/23)
Also on the show: Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the dominant method of abortion in the US has become mifepristone, particularly as it can be administered by telehealth, without the need for an in-office visit. But now Louisiana, which has a near-total abortion ban, sued the FDA over telehealth, and though it got support from a federal appeals court to block remote prescription, a visit by the drug’s makers to the Supreme Court led to a temporary stay on that. As the debate continues, we revisit a conversation we had a few years ago with Rachel K. Jones, principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, who knows more than most about mifepristone.
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Yahoo Finance (4/25/26)
This week on CounterSpin: A CNN headline a few months back told us that Instacart—which used to call itself a company that delivers groceries, but now, as its CEO told investors, is the “leading technology and enablement partner for the grocery industry”—was now using AI to “Gauge Customer Price Sensitivity.” “Price sensitivity” apparently means whether or not you care that you pay more for the same can of beans as another person—or, to be more clear, whether or not you notice. While some states look into banning it, so-called algorithmic or “dynamic” pricing is being presented by the corporate press as a fait accompli, the only question remaining being how to make sure consumers understand that they have no choice. We’ll hear more from investigative reporter Derek Kravitz, from Consumer Reports.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260501Kravitz.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of the White House Correspondents Dinner attack.
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NHLC (3/24/26)
This week on CounterSpin: From the federal level on down, many laws and policies that claim to be about “ending homelessness” seem to be clearly more about hurting homeless people than changing their circumstance. Even if you, or anyone you know, has never been unhoused: How hard is it to understand the difference between charging poor people monetary fines they obviously can’t pay, and then throwing them in jail when they don’t—and addressing homelessness with, oh I don’t know, housing?
That would be a commonsense conversation, about what resources we have and how we deploy them; but instead we see power actors, with the support of the White House and the Supreme Court, telling us that “ending homelessness” means tearing up people’s tents, throwing away their belongings; a new law in Kentucky says officials can use “stand your ground” laws to shoot homeless people that don’t “cooperate” with their eviction from private or public land.
So: Is this really about addressing homelessness? Because we know how to do that. And if it’s not: What is it about? And can we have an honest conversation about that?
Jesse Rabinowitz is the campaign and communications director at the National Homelessness Law Center. We hear from him this week.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260424Rabinowitz.mp3Marijuana Moment (12/18/25)
Also on the show: You may think weed is “legal” because you see so many people smoking it on the street. Including your grandma and your next-door neighbor who just a few years back would’ve called the cops. But just as the criminalization of marijuana affected different communities very differently, the current supposed de-criminalization continues to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. Though that is not at all the understanding you would get from a casual view, or for that matter from media coverage that makes it seem like the debate over weed is all over, and now we’re all just talking about which strain is the best.
Maritza Perez Medina is director of federal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. She joins us to talk about what the “rescheduling” of marijuana does and doesn’t do.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260424Medina.mp3With both homelessness and drug policy, it’s useful to see how many current legislative measures, with a cultural backwind from corporate media, are fooling people that things have changed, while actually things are still harming the people who have always been harmed. So these moves are not something to “tweak”; we need conversation and action based on a different understanding of why things are as they are, and of how things can be.
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Inequality.org (3/4/26)
This week on CounterSpin: Tesla reported $5.7 billion in US profits in 2025 and paid $0.0 in taxes. As Rebecca Crosby and Judd Legum at Popular Information report, there’s little mystery to this miracle: Tesla used corporate tax breaks, proffered by Trump and co. in what reporters with straight faces call the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—including 100% bonus depreciation; and they exploited a long-standing deduction for executive stock options.
At least 88 profitable corporations have reported paying $0 in federal income taxes last year, according to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. Citigroup, CVS, Walt Disney—they “made” billions but, weirdly it turns out, they somehow owe the federal government bupkis, whereas you and I are playing a chump’s game, evidently. Cheaters cheat, grifters grift, but why do news media label companies “successful” when that success stems from cheating and grifting and, crucially, shafting their workers?
Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits the site Inequality.org. She’s written a new report that gets to the heart of America’s “Low-Wage Employers and the Affordability Crisis.” We hear from her this week.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260417Anderson.mp3Fight for the Future (4/13/26)
Also on the show: The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is a nonprofit digital library with the fundamental mission of preserving web pages. For example, a union organizer used it to look up old job listings and check how what the company says it offers has shifted over time. When police edited a press release after a journalist reported on it, and then said her report was false, she was able to prove that the department had changed their statement.
It’s kind of Information 101. But it’s under threat. We hear about that from artist and activist Lia Holland, campaigns and communications director at the group Fight for the Future.
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New York Times (4/8/26)
When a president commits war crimes, including what the Nuremberg trials established as the “supreme international crime” of plotting and waging an aggressive war, as Trump has done, and then blithely threatens more war crimes, as Trump has done, you would hope major news outlets would do much more than type up reports, like one from the New York Times, on how Trump currently “faces new diplomatic tests.”
It’s important to call out Trump and his enablers’ particular hatefulness and weirdness, but we’re missing something if we don’t see how they’ve been pulling on pre-existing threads, making use of old narratives that have proven useful before and left unexamined. We’ll hear about that from Sina Toossi, senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260410Toossi.mp3Defending Rights & Dissent (4/6/26)
Also on the show: What can you do about a president like Trump? No, really: What can you do? Impeachment is often talked about in the press as a mean thing that partisan officials threaten each other with, but it was intended as a genuine response to presidents who were deemed unfit for public office. More and more people are saying unto shouting that about Trump now; so what next?
We’ll hear from activist/author Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent.
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USA Today (4/1/26)
This week on CounterSpin: In Chiles vs. Salazar, the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado’s law prohibiting health practitioners from employing the widely discredited practice of trying to “convert” young people from their sexual orientation or gender identity violates healthcare workers’ First Amendment rights. We’ll hear about what the ruling does and doesn’t do, and how news media might better explain it, from Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for LGBTQ Rights.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260403Minter.mp3Local News Day
Also on the show: April 9 is Local News Day, a new project aimed at lifting up the value of truly local news outlets in an increasingly consolidated media landscape. Alex Frandsen helps lead a group, the Media Power Collaborative, that’s looking to forge a way forward that draws on the particular value of local news, to communities and those representing them, and that doesn’t involve revisiting an imagined past age of benevolent media giants. We’ll hear from him as well on the show.
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Good Jobs First (3/23/26)
This week on CounterSpin: Sunshine Week, based on a popular statement from Louis Brandeis that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” is an effort to spotlight open government and its importance to the public’s right to know what’s being done in our name. The Michigan Press Association usually honors a public official who advances open government, but this year they said they’re giving no award because “this year’s legislative and policy landscape does not reflect the progress or commitment to openness that the award is designed to celebrate.” Ooof.
So Sunshine Week, introduced decades ago by the National Association of Newspaper Editors, is meant to be both a celebration and a call to arms. To information advocates—and to journalists who should be natural partners with anyone seeking to bring the actions of the powerful to light.
We talk about it with a group that stays on top of government transparency; Arlene Martinez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First.
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Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at Washington Post prices, the actual cost of oil, the Cuba blockade and Breonna Taylor. -
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Truth Social (3/14/26)
This week on CounterSpin: Those not in vigorous denial understand that we in the US are in the midst of not just “foreign” wars—today on, most prominently, Iran—but also a war against our ability to talk about it all, to dissent from it, to hear from people who have different ideas about ways forward. It doesn’t seem too much to say: If we cut off our ability to have a widespread public debate, whatever “solutions” we’re told “we” came up with have nothing to do with democracy. We’ll hear from FAIR editor Jim Naureckas about what news media could call, if only they would, “the Trump administration vs. the First Amendment.”
Transcript: ‘A Media System Built on Profit Is Incredibly Fragile’
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260320Naureckas.mp3Just Security (3/17/26)
Also on the show: US news media told us that the images of Iraqis tortured at the infamous “hard site” in Abu Ghraib have been “seared into the American consciousness.” That would imply that those US news media were genuinely interested in the horrors meted out at the Iraqi prison where the CIA and the Army committed what Wikipedia comfortably calls a “a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees.” Those media would surely want all of us “consciousness-seared” people to know what was being done to answer for it all, to bring people to account, to make sure it never, ever happened again. (That shouldn’t sound like a joke.)
The Center for Constitutional Rights has been in back of the last remaining lawsuit on behalf of victims of Abu Ghraib; and, though you might not have heard about it, they won. We’ll get the update from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Transcript: ‘This Is the Only Post-9/11 Case Seeking Accountability for Torture to Reach a Jury’
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New York Times (3/10/26)
This week on CounterSpin: House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Brian Mast declared of Iran: “This murderous regime has posed an imminent threat against every American both at home and abroad for the last 47 years”—leading many at home and abroad to reach for their dictionaries.
The Trump White House’s war on Iran is unpopular in the US: “Even the highest level of public support for this conflict falls far lower than that at the start of most other conflicts, including World War II, the Korean War and the Iraq War,” reports the New York Times.
That may have something to do with the parade of rationales offered; Popular Information has a roundup of the 17 different reasons the Trump regime has given to date for why we went to war. All of it normalized by corporate media that allow recorded history to be put up for debate, that pretend we haven’t seen what we’ve seen, leaving today’s warmongers free to draw up a historical narrative, or several, that serve their present purpose.
As we record on March 12, some 251 groups have sent a letter to Congress demanding they vote against any additional funding for the unconstitutional war, now costing an estimated $1 billion a day. Signers included Public Citizen, the ACLU, Greenpeace, J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace and National Nurses United. A supplemental worth $50 billion, the letter notes, would be enough to restore food assistance for 4 million Americans, establish universal pre-K education and pay for the annual construction of more than 100,000 units of housing.
CounterSpin has been tracking US news media failings, omissions and propagandizing on Iran for decades. We revisit some of that conversation this week, hearing from Cyrus Safdari (2009), Vijay Prashad (2012), Murtaza Hussain (2017) and Trita Parsi (2018).
Transcript: ‘The Matter Is Being Radicalized and Solutions Are Being Ignored’
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Column (3/4/26)
This week on CounterSpin: As a radio producer, you get pitches; to paraphrase one we got this week:
Dear Janine, the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iranian military targets and leaders this weekend. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei was killed, as were key Iranian leaders. President Trump is urging Iranians to rise up and overthrow the regime…. What will the impact be on the economy? On Wall Street? What does this mean for markets and investors going forward?
We were then offered a guest who will tell listeners that “concerns about the attacks causing economic chaos are overblown…. The markets will panic initially and then stabilize.” And, most importantly, “this ends the uncertainty that was impacting the markets over Iran…. If American and Israeli objectives are met, it could lead to dramatically reduced gas prices long-term.”
No mention of parents in Minab, who dropped their daughters off at school March 3 and now have to bury them. What’s losing a child when we’re talking about you maybe—or maybe not—paying less at the pump, amirite?
It would be one thing if it were a guy at the end of the bar, but we have official “smart people” news media instructing us on how we should think and feel about attacks—paid for with our sometimes important “tax dollars”—raining horror on Iranians whose crime is that they didn’t overthrow their disapproved leadership. Ask yourself if you want that to be the criterion for violent aggression around the world.
It’s hard to parse US corporate news coverage of the attacks on Iran if you aren’t willing to let go of the idea that might does not, in fact, make right—along with your ideas about what a better world could look like. That’s why we grow our critical faculties, and support media outlets that, whatever else they do, don’t tell us that the US and Israel killing Iranian children is just something to consume with your breakfast cereal.
Gregory Shupak is an academic and activist, as well as author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media from OR Books. We talk with him about the US war on Iran this week on CounterSpin.
Transcript: ‘Even with Congressional Authorization, the War Would Still Be an Act of Aggression’
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American Prospect (2/23/26)
This week on CounterSpin: US news media don’t show a serious interest in history generally, as you can see from many outlets’ pretense to offer “all you need to know” about current events in a matter of minutes.
In the case of the Trump administration, presenting US history through media is important and relevant—as long as Trumpists are fully in charge of who defines what happened and what it means.
So when Trump-appointed FCC chair Brendan Carr—he who attacks basic anti-discrimination measures in media, and overtly threatens the licenses of outlets determined insufficiently deferential to right-wing powers on the daily—says, “I believe in the greatness of our country,” you’re of course right to beware.
And all the more when he adds that he’s “looking forward to broadcasters showcasing the country’s inspiring history” by taking a pledge that he’s drawn up, committing to do the right thing with regard to America’s 250th birthday, for which the White House has big plans. But the man actively orchestrating interference-unto-cancellation of talk shows deemed guilty of “improper ideology” wants us to know that participation in the pledge, by the media outlets under his regulatory control, is “voluntary.”
If you didn’t already understand how vital is an understanding of US history, rooted in who’s allowed to tell it, you would suspect it from this White House’s ham-handed efforts to twist and erase and shout over it.
There’s a screaming void that journalists could be working to fill. Some are, some aren’t. But as we look to encourage a rising up of people in response to the anti-democratic juggernaut, we can remember the words of Ida B. Wells: “The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.”
We talk about attacks on, and defenses of, our ability to learn and learn from this country’s history with Naomi Bethune. She’s the John Lewis Writing Fellow at the American Prospect. She’s featured this week on CounterSpin.
Transcript: ‘Advocates Know How to Fight Attempts to Repress Black History’
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260227Bethune.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of Trump’s “Board of Peace.”
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Center for Independent Documentary
This week on CounterSpin: CNBC, a news outlet, brought viewers the news that Cuba has suspended its annual cigar festival. The postponement, if you wondered, “comes as the island nation’s Communist-run government endures its biggest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Assured you’ve heard both “Communist” and “Soviet Union,” the “biggest test” bit has a link to another CNBC article, same writer, headed “What’sNext for Cuba? Trump Turns the Screws as the Island Runs Out of Jet Fuel.”
Now take a breath: Why does Donald Trump get to punish Cuban people? Why is it cute to talk about “turning the screws”? Can other countries “turn the screws” on the United States if they don’t like the US and its “capitalist-run” government? And above all: When did illegal actions carried out with the express intent of causing misery for other human beings living in other countries become blah blah blah?
The Trump White House is openly trying to harm the Cuban people, and US media are openly trying to sell that to us as something to root for.
Reed Lindsay has been reporting and making documentary film in and about Cuba for more than a decade. We hear from him on what you likely won’t be hearing from corporate media.
Transcript: ‘It’s Taken for Granted That Cuban Sovereignty Doesn’t Matter’
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260220Lindsay.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
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Mother Jones (2/11/26)
This week on CounterSpin: Trump and congressional Republicans are pushing for changes to the electoral process that would make it harder for millions of people to vote, and some media are still presenting it as a matter of “election integrity.” Voter advocates describe things like the Save America Act as aiming to make the US into a “show us your papers” dystopia. That bill likely won’t make it out of the Senate, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be sounding the alarm, loudly, about the various multi-level efforts this White House is pursuing to take control of elections away from the people.
We hear that worrisome and enraging story from Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, among other titles.
Transcript: ‘The Risk Is Reporting This Like It’s a Normal Political Story’
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260213Berman.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press commentary on Iran.
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The Nation (2/3/26)
This week on CounterSpin: “What do you call a ceasefire agreement under which people keep dying? That is the question the people of Gaza have been asking themselves for the past few months.”
And it’s the question that kicks off a new issue of The Nation magazine, which they call “A Day for Gaza.”
Since a “ceasefire” was declared four months ago, Israel has killed, very conservatively, 420 Palestinians. More than 70,000 overwhelmingly Palestinian people have been reported killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, including more than 300 journalists and media workers.
This is without mentioning the destruction of more than half of all religious and cultural sites in the Gaza Strip. The UN has reported Israeli soldiers recording videos in which they mock Palestinians and Palestinian education, before destroying schools and universities.
If it ended today, the loss of life, and home, and culture, and history in Palestine would take countless years to reckon, if it could be reckoned at all.
But here in the US, we’re being told by media that the conflict is winding down, because there’s a ceasefire in effect; and we are to interpret all events going forward in those terms. That pretense is mainly expressed through a simple drop in coverage, which by itself says, “Not so much to see here anymore, time to move on.”
As an interrogation of and a pushback against the suggestion that because powerful people’s words have changed, there is no longer a desperate, attention-worthy crisis in Gaza or for Palestinians, The Nation lifts up the voices of Palestinians themselves, as a kind of intervention into a media conversation that presents Palestinians as subjects—sympathetic or not, depending on the story—more often than as actors, who have the basic right to determine their own future.
The issue was edited by writer and translator Rayan El Amine. We hear from him this week on CounterSpin.
Transcript: ‘What We’re Witnessing Is a Genocide Sustained’:
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260206El-Amine.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort.
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Free Press (1/26/26)
This week on CounterSpin: There are reports that people out in the street opposing ICE abductions of their neighbors are chanting, “We’re not cold, we’re not afraid. Minnesota made us brave.” Around the country, people who never called themselves “political” are moving out of their comfort zone to register their opposition to violent, state-sanctioned power being unleashed on their communities in the service of racist authoritarianism. The spark is the murders by ICE of Keith Porter, Renee Good and Alex Pretti—that’s just this year—but the resistance in Minneapolis isn’t sprouting from nowhere; it has roots.
Corporate news media evince little understanding of the kind of local, neighbor-to-neighbor communication and connection that has existed for decades, and that today is pulling people together across race, gender, age, class, religion lines in Minneapolis. That’s just one way elite media remove themselves further every day from the conversations people want to have. But elite reporters could at least use their proximity to power to talk about what the state and corporate forces are doing to try and squelch the growing resistance, including basic rights you’d hope journalists would care about, like that of people to witness actions carried out with their money and in their name.
Our guest put together a report on how “DHS Is Expanding Domestic Surveillance While Targeting Efforts to Document and Dissent.” Jenna Ruddock is Advocacy Director at the group Free Press. We hear from her this week on CounterSpin.
Transcript: ‘The State Is Exercising Surveillance Over Us, But We Can Push Back’:
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260130Ruddock.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the Minneapolis clampdown, and at the lack of recent coverage of Gaza.
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Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies (1/19/26)
This week on CounterSpin: In 1967, when Martin Luther King came out against the Vietnam War, and called the US the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” corporate news had nothing but emphatic condemnation. Life magazine called that speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” And the New York Times sniffed in a way today’s readers will recognize, writing that when King argued that the war on Vietnam is “a barrier to social progress in this country,” he fused “two public problems that are distinct and separate. By drawing them together, Dr. King has done a disservice to both.”
The elite press corps that now pretend they honor King show that they never heard, much less understood, him or the totality of his vision—or that of those that share that vision today.
That’s the space that the coalition headed by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies is stepping into with their new report: State of the Dream 2026. We’ll hear from Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad.
Transcript: ‘There’s an Attack on Racial Equity Analysis Because They Feel It Changes the Conversation’:
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260123Asante-Muhammad.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Kalaallit Nunaat.
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