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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.

Local 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.

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.”

Just 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.