CounterPunch Vows to Battle AI-Adulterated "Facts"

The progressive media outlet CounterPunch, which has been in operation for nearly 40 years, has vowed to uphold the two mottos on its masthead: “Power and Evil in Washington” and “Tells the Facts, Names the Names.”

CounterPunch’s mission is to keep challenging the illusions created by propaganda — and the forces that sustain them.

“We’re still telling facts in an age when facts are being adulterated, perverted, and fabricated,” editor Jeffrey St. Clair wrote in an editorial.

“We’re still naming names in an age when thin-skinned billionaires finance site-killing libel suits capable of sinking you financially before you even get to depositions. We’re still trying to be journalists at a time when journalists are an endangered species, targeted for extinction not only by the nabobs of MAGA but by their own bosses — many of them private-equity pirates — who want to replace reporters with AI scribes (see Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Newsweek, or the article ‘summaries’ in the Associated Press, The New York Times, and CNN) or have them micromanaged and disciplined by the likes of Bari Weiss, the ultra-Zionist editorial dominatrix now running the once-venerable CBS News for Trump’s billionaire pals the Ellisons,” he added.

“How does CounterPunch fit into this strange new media ecosystem? Well, by continuing to expose ‘power and evil,’ even when the powerful and evil are publicly exposing themselves daily like schoolyard flashers and daring you to do something about it. Our job, as I see it, is to present American history clearly and to highlight the continuities of power that have sustained forever wars, racial oppression, environmental destruction, and gaping economic inequality across political affiliations,” he argued.

St. Clair continued: “You don’t have to swallow all of Michel Foucault’s philosophy to understand that a critique of power — who wields it, how it’s leveraged, who it harms, and who profits from the damage done — is vital to understanding how we got to where we are. Where are we? We’ve entered a time of shattered illusions: the illusion that there ever was such a thing as ‘political norms’; the illusion that the West ever operated under a ‘rules-based order’; the illusion that the power of our government is limited by checks and balances and the separation of powers; the illusion that the U.S. is a nation of laws enforced by an independent judiciary.”

He concluded that CounterPunch’s mission is to keep challenging those illusions — and the forces that sustain them.