Laura Flanders

Laura Flanders

Laura Flanders is the award-winning host and executive producer of The Laura Flanders Show, a nationally-syndicated TV and radio program that looks at real-life models of shifting power in the arts, economics and politics. Flanders founded the women’s desk at media watch group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) and produced and hosted the radio program CounterSpin for a decade. She is also the author of six books, including The New York Times best-seller BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a Cynical Species. Flanders was named Most Valuable Multi-Media Maker of 2018 in The Nation’s Progressive Honor Roll, and was awarded the Izzy Award in 2019 for outstanding achievement in independent media.

Articles by this author

Americans lack a national health care system, the country’s pockmarked with healthcare deserts, and millions of what Truman called “normally self-supporting” people are just one layoff or one virulent virus away from disaster—as we’re now seeing. (Photo: Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) Views
Saturday, March 28, 2020
Covid-19: Our Health Crisis Is Born of Bigotry
“A bridge is no stronger than its weakest part.” Former slave turned educator Anna Julia Cooper uttered those very contemporary-sounding words back in 1892. The US didn’t heed them then; we haven’t heeded them yet. The big question, brought home to us one more time by the Covid-19 crisis, is why...
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Billionaires Should Not Buy Elections" Views
Saturday, February 15, 2020
Democracy vs. Dictatorship: Don't Let Bloomberg Muddy That Choice
The 2020 presidential race didn’t get decided this week, but the choice before us did: more democracy or less of it. That’s the decision we are facing, and if the Democrats manage to foul this up, they may not get another chance. The very same day that New Hampshire held its primary, the president...
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Do we really want our reporting on Warren, Sanders or Klobuchar—all of whom support bills to defend local media and block media mergers—brought to you by the world’s biggest wealth-suckers? (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Views
Friday, January 31, 2020
Iowa Media Back to the Future
In the first week of February, every four years, coastal correspondents decamp to Iowa to cover the first-in-the nation nominating contest. Face-to-face, caucus by caucus, what the state lacks in demographics, it makes up for in down-home democracy, we’re told. And down-home democracy rests on down...
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JoAnn Conrad, a Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer, canvases a residential neighborhood on January 31, 2016 in West Burlington, Iowa. The 2020 Iowa caucuses will be on February 3. (Photo: Michael B. Thomas / AFP via Getty Images) Views
Saturday, January 18, 2020
Voters in Iowa Care More About Key Issues Than Warren-Sanders Unity
It was a balmy 70 degrees in New York City last Saturday, and the excited green croci began tipping through the earth. Now, that same ground is icy, and those tips are frozen stiff, and I’ve been fearing that the same fate might befall hopeful progressive voters in the wake of the Warren/Sanders...
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37-year-old Tanisha Anderson, who suffered from mental health isues, was killed by police in 2014 after her family members call 911 for assistance. (Photo: Anderson Family) Views
Saturday, November 16, 2019
Tanisha Anderson, Impeachment, and a Hawk
I was thinking about impeachment when a bird fell out of the sky. I was thinking about quid pro quos and the using of the presidency for personal gain when I rounded a corner and saw a hawk, gray and crumpled. It was a bright blue day, and she seemed to have slammed herself into a window, mistaking...
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Last Friday, as four million young people marched in the world’s capitals for action on climate, countless more were on the picket line supporting autoworkers who are out on strike. (Photo: Ron Jenkins/Getty Images) Views
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
Climate Strike/Auto Strike: Same Struggle, Same Fight
Twenty years after turtles and teamsters teamed up to battle the WTO in Seattle, labor strikes and climate strikes are coinciding everywhere but in the media, and that’s dangerous. If history is any guide, any minute now, some two-bit pundit or shameless president will pit workers against...
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John Lansing, now CEO of National Public Radio (NPR), talked about the operations of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the agency that oversees United States government-supported, civilian international news media such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Marti, and Alhurra. He explained how he planned to reshape U.S. media operations to better fit the current media environment, including how to address propaganda by countries such as Russia and China and stateless actors suc Views
Sunday, September 15, 2019
From Voice of America to NPR: New CEO Lansing's Glass House
I don’t know about you, but I take a teeny weeny bit of offense when a guy in a glass house lobs a great big stone and expects me not to notice the sound of shattering. Which brings me to National Public Radio. When the ubiquitous news and public affairs network announced the appointment of a new...
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Lesbians and self-described dykes have, for many years, marched on the day before the big parade. The Dyke March is always a raucous, disobedient alternative to the staid and commercial official Pride Parade. (Photo: Scott Barbour/Getty Images) Views
Tuesday, July 02, 2019
Love and Rights: Contingent or Unconditional?
Kali Akuno asks an important question: where would we be as a world today if people of the left had been as organized in 2008 when the financial crash hit as they’d been in 1980 before thirty years of neoliberalism? Akuno, a co-founder and co-coordinator of Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, asked...
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'Barcelona en Comu' (Barcelona in Common) leader Ada Colau waves to wellwishers after her party won the municipal elections on May 24, 2015 in Barcelona, Spain. (Photo: David Ramos/Getty Images) Views
Monday, June 17, 2019
In Barcelona, Being a Fearless City Mayor Means Letting the People Decide
Losing Barcelona. That was the headline on the story in Jacobin this week. A local vote in a far-off city; had I not just returned from Barcelona, I might have left it at that. possibilitiy The truth is, US media give us so little coverage of goings-on elsewhere, and so little context as to why...
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"I suppose you and I think the rich are going to sit quiet and—what’s the phrase—accept the verdict of the people? Like hell they are."(Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images) Views
Friday, May 31, 2019
Reporter in Spain
Eighty years ago this April, Spain fell under a thirty-year dictatorship after Right beat Left in a brutal civil war. That history feels acutely alive to me today, and not just because, for the first time in my life, I’m in Spain. General Franco’s rebels, backed by Mussolini and Hitler and the...
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