This week on CounterSpin: Barack Obama wasn't running for anything this election season, but you may have thought that he was, judging from the media coverage he generated. Obama's appeal extends across the political and pundit spectrum; indeed, finding anything approaching critical coverage of the freshman Senator is next to impossible. So what's going on here? Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report joins us to talk about it.

Also on CounterSpin: We know that media can turn any factoid into a phenomenon when they choose: after the last election we were subjected to months of discourse on how voters put "moral values" above all else based on a single exit poll question. So what will media make of the fact that, in the midterm elections, proponents of so-called "free trade" agreements were handed their hats, especially given that those trade agreements enjoy such unequivocally endorsement in the elite media? We'll hear from Chris Slevin of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, on that story.

Links:

—Black Agenda Report

—Global Trade Watch