A FAIR analysis of front-page election coverage in three major dailies revealed a strong emphasis on horserace politics at the expense of issue coverage. The study found a lopsided focus on Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, and an overwhelming focus on the presidential race at the expense of all other electoral contests.
Nov 4 2016
Rose Aguilar on Standing Rock Reporting, Michelle Chen on Samsung Labor and Environmental Abuses
By CounterSpin
Corporate Media’s main method of undermining the significance of what’s happening in North Dakota has been to simply ignore it. If that maneuver is failing, it’s due to independent media working to get the stories from Standing Rock out, despite on-the-ground intimidation and big media’s studied disinterest.
Nov 1 2016
‘Our Identity Is Often What’s Triggering Surveillance’
CounterSpin interview with Brandi Collins on Black Lives surveillance
“What we’ve seen throughout history is the role that the media has played, when convenient, in forwarding a police PR narrative that reinforces the need for surveillance in our community, and conflates safety with surveillance in ways that I think everybody should find alarming.”
Oct 31 2016
NYT’s Kristof Blames Poverty on Too Many TVs, Not Too Little Money
By Neil deMause
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for giving “voice to the voiceless” on international social justice issues, wrote an op-ed with a familiar message to longtime Kristof-watchers: that the poor aren’t actually poor because they lack enough money, but because of their own moral failings.
Oct 29 2016
At DAPL, Confiscating Cameras as Evidence of Journalism
While elite media wait for the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline to go away so they can return to presenting their own chin-stroking as what it means to take climate change seriously, independent media continue to fill the void with actual coverage.
Oct 28 2016
Do Wars Make Us Safer? The People Aren’t Feeling It
A new poll from an unlikely source suggests that the US public and the US media have very little in common when it comes to matters of war and peace.
Oct 28 2016
Brandi Collins on Black Lives Surveillance
By CounterSpin
Corporate journalists rely on the First Amendment, but it’s increasingly unclear if the First Amendment can rely on them. The relative lack of interest in the impact of spying on activists—a practice with a long and disturbing history given new power by technology—is the latest example.
Oct 27 2016
Media Roll Out Welcome Mat for ‘Humanitarian’ War in Syria
Hillary Clinton has stepped up her promotion of the idea that a no-fly zone in Syria could “save lives” and “hasten the end of the conflict” that has devastated that country since 2011. It has now been revealed, of course, that Clinton hasn’t always expressed the same optimism about the no-fly zone in private.
