Seth Stern on Criminalizing Dissent

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260814.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). Al Jazeera (8/12/26) This week on CounterSpin: It was not a shock when Donald Trump’s Justice Department greenlit the merger of Paramount—owned by the scion of the Trump-adjacent Ellison family—with Warner Bros Discovery. Who cares if a single entity (that loves Donald Trump and all he stands for) controls a vast empire of the movies, cable TV and streaming services we have access to? It turns out a lot of people care, and that’s why the merger, presented as a done deal weeks ago, is actually on the ropes. We’ll get a state of play from Jessica Gonzalez, co-CEO of the public advocacy group Free Press. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260814Gonzalez.mp3 Extra! (12/08) Also on the show: A sitting congressperson stated publicly: “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic. We refuse to be silent.” The fig leaf, if there were one, is off. Folks are just out here saying all Muslims (well, except for Dr. Oz) are devils, criminals, evil—and woe betide anyone who doesn’t sign up for that perverse, hateful view. News media could declare such racist, ignorant, ahistorical, anti-democratic—did i say racist?—they could call all that out, and remove anyone spouting it from respectful public conversation. But: We have the media we have, so people who hate Muslims because they’re Muslim have a seat at the grown-up table, and a microphone. Islamophobia in media is not new. It wasn’t new when FAIR produced a report about it in 2008. We’ll hear today a conversation we had around that report, which we called Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Fear, Bigotry and Misinformation, with former FAIR staffers Isabel MacDonald and Steve Rendall. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260814MacDonald_Rendall.mp3

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260807.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). CT Mirror (7/30/26) This week on CounterSpin: If you look for media coverage about the Farm Bill that’s currently passing through Congress, you can find it–at sites like agriculture.com or agri-pulse.com, or those outlets that have “ag” sections. If you look for coverage of SNAP, the largest food assistance program in the country, you can find that lots of other places. And while some of those headlines are about “Deadbeat Parents” and “SNAP Fraud,” these days many more say things like “Nearly 19K State Kids Have Lost SNAP Benefits Over Past Year” (that’s Connecticut) or “Illinois Launches New Program to Provide Food Benefits to People Who Lost SNAP,” or “Small Grocery Stores Cutting Inventory, Considering Layoffs as SNAP Dollars Decline.” Overwhelmingly, local reporters are documenting how cuts to SNAP are hurting people and communities. But the lack of major media stories linking the program to the Farm Bill seem somehow emblematic of the opacity around this country’s lawmaking on critical questions around food. We get an update from Gina Plata-Nino, director of SNAP policy and advocacy at the Food Research & Action Center. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260807Plata-Nino.mp3   Also on the show: People who rely on food benefits programs have long been a punching bag for both right-wing ideologues and their corporate media enablers. Claiming people working full time jobs that don’t provide enough to feed their families are really just grifters living high on your dime is a time-honored tactic, no matter how far it falls afield of reality. We talked about that last year with the president of Food Research & Action Center, Crystal FitzSimons; we add a little of that conversation as well. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260807FitzSimons.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260731.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   NPR (7/16/26) This week on CounterSpin: “In Primetime Speech, Trump Doesn’t Provide Evidence for Illegal Voting” was the temperate headline NPR put on a story about Trump’s recent East Room speech that, they allowed, “included many baseless claims” about election integrity. They told us that “many of the documents the White House posted online during the speech did not appear to fully support sweeping claims the president made,” and even got to the point of calling his contention that he won the 2020 election “a lie.” What the story didn’t do was show, with urgency, how voting in the upcoming midterms and beyond will be materially affected by the use of state power to promote ideas that they’re saying are, yeah, for sure, not true. Obstacles to voting don’t have to be valid to have impact. Black people know that better than anyone. And it isn’t just Trump’s lies, that media keep repeating, even as they call them lies; the Supreme Court’s June decision in Louisiana v. Callais makes the terrain different, in ways people need to understand and confront. Vincent Southerland is associate professor at New York University School of Law, where he directs the Criminal Defense and Reentry Clinic. He’s faculty director of NYU Law’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law, and co-editor of Race, Rights and Redemption: The Derrick Bell Lectures on the Law and Critical Race Theory. We talk with him this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260731Southerland.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the Gaza genocide. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260731Banter.mp3 Featured image: San Francisco voting rights activists, 1956 (Frances Albrier Collection)

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260724.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Nine of the Prairieland protesters received sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years; one received a 30-year sentence for moving a box of zines. (Photo: DFW Support Committee) This week on CounterSpin: Are you upset about ICE agents using your tax dollars to detain and deport people because they have a quota to fill – and to kill anyone who doesn’t “comply”? Are you bothered by women losing not just the right but the ability to access abortion for whatever reason they might have? Do you care that fossil fuel-created climate disruption is rearranging the planet?  Well, my friend, you might be a terrorist. Last September, Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) that added a whole lot of folks to a list of “domestic terrorists”. All of us are now officially, by challenging or questioning the Trump White House and their acolytes, “the enemy within.” When Trump pushed through NSPM 7 last fall, folks like Hina Shamsi at the ACLU told us: it’s a scare tactic – “domestic terrorism organization” as applied to a wide range of groups that are, in the memo’s language “anti-americanism, anti-capitalism, anti christianity” does not create new federal crimes or powers. The president, even if it’s Trump, cannot rewrite the Constitution. Which, Shamsi explained, doesn’t mean it isn’t scary, despite being a “fever dream of conspiracies, outright falsehoods and the president’s distorted equation of criticism of his policies by real or perceived political opponents with ‘criminal and terroristic conspiracies’. We have to stand up where we can, how we can, right now. And right now could have started years ago but it can at the least start with getting prison time for moving zines.  We’ll talk about the Prairieland case and what it means for you, with Dorothee Benz, who wrote recently about it all for FAIR.org https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260724Benz.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260717.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Maine Monitor (7/15/26) This week on CounterSpin: Protests are ongoing in southern Maine, where Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was killed by an ICE agent on July 13. The Maine Monitor says folks are “expressing rage, fear and questions about what occurred.” Protestors also showed up at Houston City Hall, calling out ICE operations there that killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Houston Public Media said: Each speech inside the council chambers was echoed by the raucous chants of dozens of protestors outside who stood for hours during the public comment session, making demands for accountability and transparency. Here in Manhattan’s Foley Square, one protester told NY1: “I think it’s gone past the point of we need to abolish ICE. I think we need a thorough investigation and, if appropriate, trials, prosecutions.” Said another: “For me, this past week is a reminder that we should all be out here.” Corporate media are narrating this nightmare, but do their, will their questions ever go deep enough to drive actual change? Right now, the focus seems heavy on the notion that we need to “humanize” the victims of racist state violence, rather than challenge the humanity of those who enact it. (Oh, but you’ll be happy to know Snopes is on top of the question of whether Joan Sebastián Durán’s three-year-old daughter actually saw her father be shot to death by state agents. Don’t want to get it twisted.) We talk about ICE murders, and the bigger system that encourages and absolves them, with Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260717Bonds.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Lindsey Graham’s death and the war on Venezuela. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260717Banter.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260710.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Washington Post (7/8/26) This week on CounterSpin: One outlet says “it’s unclear if war is back on”; another says “Trump mulls restarting war”—as though you can start and stop the harm bombs bring, to people, to power plants, bridges, airports, hospitals. US corporate news report the US war on Iran as if it were a playground altercation. And the Washington Post calls the illegal violation of another sovereign state  a “political problem” Trump “can’t shake.” If war were a football match, we could have a different conversation, and who takes the L would be a different story. But war is not a sport, and dead people are not afterthoughts. As a corollary, people worry that the war on Iran has pushed the genocide in Gaza out of corporate media’s attention. But media outlets make their own choices about what to present to us. And: Media attention isn’t change. Being on the front page guarantees nothing. There will never be a substitute for our learning about what’s being done in our name and with our resources, and if your paper of record isn’t doing that, you should seek other sources. We hear about Iran, Gaza, Lebanon and the costs of war with Phyllis Bennis, fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, international advisor with Jewish Voice for Peace and author of numerous books, most recently one called Understanding Palestine and Israel, out last year from Olive Branch Press. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260710Bennis.mp3

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260703.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Disability Scoop (6/22/26) This week on CounterSpin: A former UK Prime Minister famously sniffed: I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand, “I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!” Or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the government must house me!” And so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women, and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people, and people look to themselves first. That idea, from Margaret Thatcher, seems important to keep in mind as we watch corporate news reporters whistle past a directive from the Trump administration’s Department of Justice that says: That whole thing about policies encouraging disabled people to be able to live in community, with family, with friends—yeahh, you don’t need to do that. You can just lock ’em up. Why are establishment news reporters uninterested in this memo from the Office of Legal Counsel that says that no laws “require states to treat mentally disabled patients in the most integrated setting appropriate to their needs”? The memo, as folks like those at Disability Scoop remind us, does not alter current law, but could impact how federal agencies enforce it.  But is that the reason that elite media don’t care? Or are disabled people, their lives, their possibilities, just off the screen? When states start forcing folks into institutions because they’ve been told they don’t need to provide services, will it be a story then? And what kind of story will that be? We talk about it with Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260703Ives-Rublee.mp3   Featured image from Getty/Barbara Alper via the Disibility Justice Initiative.

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260626.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Freedom of the Press Foundation (6/23/26) This week on CounterSpin: Do you disagree with anything that the Trump administration is doing? Are there other people that share that view? Do you think you should get together and use your voices to say something? Well, you might be a terrorist! Do you think we’re joking? Do you want to test that? We talk about the criminalizing of dissent with Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260626Stern.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260619.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   CEPR (6/15/26) This week on CounterSpin: The way we hear about the stock market is quite different from the vision many people still hold: that businesses strive to serve people’s real needs or desires, and investors are rewarded by that metric—not by convincing people that they might make a lot of money in the future, or by conspiring with powerful entities to ensure that shareholders profit, by whatever means. This longstanding confusion and conflict are being showcased right now in the unasked-for push of artificial intelligence into so many aspects of our lives, and the aggressive build-out of energy-gobbling data centers to serve it—whether communities want them or not. Now, questions are arising around whether the promises of endless growth of the AI industry actually make any sense. Is there an AI bubble? How would we know? And what happens, and to whom, when it bursts? A new project engages questions, not just about price-to-earnings ratios, and historical comparisons, but about the predictable impacts—on, for example, workers’ retirement accounts—when the AI exuberance falls to earth. Dean Baker is co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the force behind their new project, called the AI Bubble Monitor. He joins us this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: ‘We Have to Say What AI Can Do, Who’s Responsible When It Messes Up’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260619Baker.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look at some recent press coverage of the 2026 congressional primaries. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260619Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260612.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   AP/PBS (6/6/26) This week on CounterSpin: PBS News told its audience “What to Know About the Protests and Arrests Outside a New Jersey Detention Center.” What to know, evidently, is that protesters “say they are showing up in solidarity with detainees inside over accusations of poor living conditions.” Maybe they aren’t showing up in solidarity; that’s just what they say. And poor “living” conditions?—because it’s their home now?—that’s also just an “accusation.” Why can’t we see what’s true? Oh, because reporters who try to see what’s happening are being kept from doing so with rubber bullets and tear gas. But for PBS News, that means: We just can’t know! “Delaney Hall detainees say they are being given moldy and expired food,” the article (from AP) reads. But you know what? “President Donald Trump and his deputies have defended the center’s operations and denied there is any hunger strike, abuse or poor conditions inside.” We hear from Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin: “The fact is, we’re giving them the calories they want.” And we get a quote from Tom Homan, described as “Trump’s border czar,” saying he got to visit, and “the spaghetti was good.” PBS News tells readers that Attorney General Todd Blanche “shared images of bloody wounds and bruises” sustained by ICE officers. There is not a single quote from a protester, an immigrant rights advocate, or even a journalist who says that people should be able to see what is being carried out in their name. But PBS News assures: That’s “What to Know”! We’ll have a different conversation about what’s happening at Delaney Hall, and the bigger systems and structures in back of it, with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network. Transcript: ‘Detention Has Become a Testing Ground for Authoritarianism’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260612Shah.mp3   Jersey Vindicator (6/5/26) And: Yes, times like these make you wish for brave reporters who go to where the darkness is and shine a light. And we have them. They just aren’t at the traditional media you may have learned to look to. We’ll talk about the crucial role of frontline reporting with Vanessa Maria Graber, senior director of journalism and media education at the group Free Press. Transcript: ‘We’ve Been Seeing Immigrant Journalists on the Front Lines of This Story’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260612Graber.mp3