Listen Live on KKFI
Every Tuesday at 6:30pmAbout the Show
CounterSpin
Counterspin is FAIR's weekly radio show, hosted by Janine Jackson, Steve Rendall and Peter Hart. It's heard on more than 125 noncommercial stations across the United States and Canada. Counterspin provides a critical examination of the major stories every week, and exposes what the mainstream media might have missed in their own coverage.
This week on CounterSpin: When Massey Energy, the biggest coal company in Appalachia, polluted the groundwater of the community Massey CEO Don Blankenship lived in, he had employees run a private water line direct to his mansion, while fighting off the lawsuit from his poisoned neighbors. That’s just the kind of guy he is, and it’s decades of that behavior, as much as the 2010 explosion that killed 29 people at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine, that led to Blankenship’s sentencing this week to a year in prison on a charge of conspiracy to violate mine safety standards.
Media celebrated the sentencing as the first time such a high-level executive received jail time for a workplace safety violation. But shouldn’t we question why that is? And why was such a serious charge, after all, just a misdemeanor? We’ll talk about the Blankenship case and corporate crime in general with attorney Bruce Stanley, who has been representing people fighting coal and chemical companies, and fighting Don Blankenship in particular, for many years.
