(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: This week marks the two-year anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Media will be checking in on the Gulf to mark the anniversary—but what will their reporting on this ongoing environmental catastrophe look like? We’ll talk to journalist Antonia Juhasz about her new report in the Nation, “Two Years Later: BP’s Toxic Legacy.” Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: What can we make of a media that seems to thrive on war? Just this week a New York Times news report lamented that the Obama administration was not doing a better job of selling the war in Afghanistan. The Washington Post featured an editorial and a column last week voicing the same regrets. Never mind Afghanistan seems to have little to do with U.S. security or that polls show that majorities of Americans have been sour on the war for years. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: The right is charging that Barack Obama is responsible for high gas prices, but it’s a given among liberals that Barack Obama has no power over the matter. Media Matters and Think Progress have published pieces chiding Fox News blaming Obama for the high prices at the pump, but could Fox News be right? (Even if for the wrong reasons?) We’ll talk to Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen’s Energy Project about gas prices and politics. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: Journalistic access to the unfolding crisis in Syria is dangerous and sparse. But that hasn’t kept Western officials from insisting that the situation is black and white, with the Syrian regime of Bashir al Assad the bad actor, and rebel Syrian militias the good guys. How accurate is that? We’ll be joined by Conn Hallinan, former head of the journalism school at UC Santa Cruz and a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: The burning of copies of the Koran by US military in Afghanistan touched off a week of protests, including attacks on US soldiers. While US media have by and large denounced the Koran burning as unacceptably stupid, they still seem to be having trouble placing the current violence within the context of the larger decade-long violence that is the US/NATO occupation. We’ll talk to Sonali Kolhatkar of the Afghan’s Women Mission and KPFK’s Uprising radio show about what the Washington Post calls “saving the Afghan strategy.” Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: Much reporting on the White House’s new budget proposal focuses on tax increases, military cuts, and how it will affect the national debt. But what’s the whole story on the White House budget? We’ll hear from Ruth Flower from the Friends Committee on National Legislation about the ‘Five Things Your Newspaper Might Not Tell You About the Budget.’ Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: In the summer of 2010, Rolling Stone published an explosive story about the Afghan War. Within days U.S./NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal was out of a job. Much of the media coverage of the story focused on the blunt language McChrystal and his closest aides were using to talk about U.S. officials. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: Egypt just finished its first round of elections since the uprising earlier this year by democratic activists. So why aren’t the activists overjoyed? We’ll talk about the state of democracy in Egypt and the way US corporate media are covering it, with independent journalist and Democracy Now! Cairo correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: The coverage of the recent arrest of a would-be Muslim terrorist ready to carry out attacks here at home had a we’ve-been-here-before feel. Whatever questions might surround this particular case, most media consumers are by now accustomed to the general presumption that Muslim terrorism is a serious, prevalent danger. University of North Carolina Islam scholar Charles Kurzman argues exactly the opposite in his recent book, The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists. He’ll join us to talk about that. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: Sexual harassment has been in the news recently because of allegations that GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain sexually harassed women in the 1990s. But what does the way media discuss sexual harassment tell us about how we view women, especially working women? We’ll talk to Julie Berebitsky, professor of history and womens’ studies at Sewanee: The University of the South. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: The International Atomic Energy Agency published its latest report on Iran on November 8th, but for nearly two weeks beforehand news media were rife with leak-based stories promising the report would be “game changing.” What did it actually say, and what of that is to be believed? We’ll talk to Cyrus Safdari who is tracking the story at IranAffairs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: Did the corporate media turn on the Occupy Wall Street protests? When the protests started, the media story was a familiar one—the press ignored them, then derided activists for being leaderless, bongo pounding know-nothings. But then something happened, and suddenly anti-Wall Street activism is leading the nightly newscasts and splashed on the front page. Independent journalist and co-founder of the Occupied Wall Street Journal Arun Gupta will join us to talk about this shift–and what the media is still not getting quite right. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: The Solyndra scandal is the kind of story tailor made for Fox News: A green jobs creating solar power company receiving millions of dollars of taxpayer funds celebrated by the Obama White House… goes belly up. Much of the coverage all but shouts ‘Scandal!’. It’s not that there’s nothing here, but the story we’re hearing about Solyndra might not be the one we should be hearing. Journalist and activist Harvey Wasserman will join us to talk about that. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: For a lot of people, the Republican debate on September 9 had one memorable moment: when Texas governor Rick Perry was asked about his state’s death penalty record, the audience cheered wildly. Moderator Brian Williams wanted to know if Perry lost sleep worrying whether he’d ever executed an innocent man. Perry said no, and that’s where it was left. But what’s the record in Texas? We’ll ask Texas Tribune reporter Brandi Grissom. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: Two men were arrested at the 2008 Republican National Convention and charged with a firebombing plot. For the FBI and headline writers, violent domestic terrorists had been thwarted before the act. The new film Better This World takes another look at the story and finds much more to say about the definition of terrorism and the U.S. legal system. We’ll speak with filmmaker Katie Galloway. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: Why have more than 700 people been arrested at the White House in recent days? Don’t ask nightly news– they’ve so far yet to find anything newsworthy in the largest environmental action in years: a massive protest against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. We’ll get the story TV’s missing from Lorne Stockman, Research Director at the group Oil Change International. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – August 12th, 2011 – Source

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(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: The US media narrative equating terrorism with Islam was on embarrassing display last week following the Norwegian terror attacks, a story which raised issues about right-wing extremism, and the links between violent speech and violent actions. We’ll speak with Devin Burghart, the vice president of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, who has written about white nationalism in Norway and the US. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: You’ve probably never heard of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. So why do they have so much sway over the laws affecting your life? We may get some sunlight on the actions of this influential “public/private membership organization” with the release of a cache of previously secret documents on their work. We’ll hear from Mary Bottari of the Center for Media and Democracy about the ALEC Exposed project, and what it all means. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin we’re talking about two new films which, while journalism is not their central subject, directly engage news media’s influence and real world impact as a critical part of the stories they tell. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: An activist in Texas gets his FBI files—and finds out that agents have been tailing him for years. Activists in the Midwest are the targets of a wide-ranging investigation, including a half-dozen house raids and an array of subpoenas. And—oh yeah—parts of the Patriot Act were renewed, there’s an effort to extend the term of FBI chief Robert Mueller, and the FBI is giving agents new powers. Can media start connecting the dots? We’ll ask Shahid Buttar of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fair) – This week on CounterSpin: After a lull in reporting about the Japanese nuclear disaster comes news that officials there are admitting that radiation releases were much larger than previously claimed– not a surprise to critics who saw those early claims as part of a government/corporate/media misinformation loop that kicks in whenever we talk about nuclear power. So what is the real story out of Fukushima, and where can you get independent information? We’ll talk to journalist and activist Harvey Wasserman. Read the rest of this entry »