Counterspin
CounterSpin
Your weekly look behind the headlines.
About the Show
Every week, CounterSpin takes the stories the press decided were important and asks a harder question: who decided, and what got left out? Janine Jackson talks to the reporters, researchers and organizers who know the material firsthand — on food assistance, labor, housing, war, policing, the climate — and lines their account up against what the major outlets actually ran.
It's the oldest trick in the book, and it still works: name the frame. When coverage of hunger becomes a story about fraud, when a cut to a program gets reported as a saving, when a single quoted "expert" stands in for a whole debate — that's a choice somebody made, and CounterSpin makes it visible. Produced by FAIR, the national media watch group, and heard on more than 150 stations.
History & Legacy
FAIR — Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting — was founded in 1986 by Jeff Cohen and Martin A. Lee to do something almost nobody was doing systematically at the time: watch the watchdogs. CounterSpin is the group's weekly broadcast arm, and it has spent decades documenting the habits of corporate news — whose sources get quoted, whose experience counts as anecdote, which questions never get asked. It now reaches more than 150 stations across the country.
Janine Jackson came to FAIR as research director in 1992 and has hosted and produced the show since, writing on labor economics, racism in media, and media regulation for FAIR's magazine along the way. The show is engineered by Michael Cherry. Full episodes, transcripts and FAIR's written media criticism are at fair.org.
Host
Janine Jackson
Program director at FAIR, where she started as research director in 1992, and the host and producer of CounterSpin ever since. She writes on labor economics, racism in media and media regulation, and has testified before the Senate Communications Subcommittee on media consolidation. Her instinct on air is to hand the mic to the person who actually lives the story, then hold the coverage up next to it.
Episodes
Keep This Show On the Air
Media criticism doesn't get corporate underwriting for obvious reasons. CounterSpin reaches KPFK because listeners pay to keep independent programming on 90.7, and your contribution is what makes room on the dial for a show whose whole job is telling you what the big outlets left out.
What's On Now
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Program Schedule
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Global Village Wednesdays11:00am - 1:00pm
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Alternative Radio2:00pm - 3:00pm
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