Fair Study: TV’s Low-Cal Campaign Coverage
New study of TV news coverage of the primary elections shows that 385 stories can tell you next to nothing about whom to vote for.
Two Standards on Public Financing
7/3/08
Democratic candidate Barack Obama's June 19 announcement that he would not accept public financing in the presidential race prompted a media furor. Obama's "flip-flop" (Hardball, 6/20/08; USA Today, 6/25/08) was used by many corporate journalists as an opportunity to undermine Obama's reformist image.
7/3/08
Democratic candidate Barack Obama's June 19 announcement that he would not accept public financing in the presidential race prompted a media furor. Obama's "flip-flop" (Hardball, 6/20/08; USA Today, 6/25/08) was used by many corporate journalists as an opportunity to undermine Obama's reformist image.

CounterSpin: Glenn Greenwald and Arianna Huffington on right-wing myths (7/4/08) Media Advisory: Two Standards on Public Financing (7/3/08)
Extra!: Network News Blackout on Pentagon Pundits (Update June 2008) By
Extra!: NYT Iraq War ‘Debate’ Excludes Critics: Paper’s panel features nine hawkish ‘experts’ (Update June 2008) By
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Elections/2008
George W. Bush
Iraq Occupation
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Media Double Standard on Fundraising Promises
Challenging Obama, ignoring McCain's hypocrisy (4/16/08)
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Meet the Oil Executives
Industry-friendly panels on NBC’s Meet the Press (July/August 2006)
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NBC Distorts Its Polling on Warrantless Wiretaps
Russert, Reid paint public as backing Bush (2/10/06)
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Why Does Tim Russert Associate With Don Imus' Bigotry?
(3/1/00)
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Can Democrats End the Iraq War?
Media flunk constitutional question on war funding (6/1/07)
FAIR's annotated newswire
The weekly magazine supplement's political profiler tells us how Rush Limbaugh loves French things, has a life-size oil portrait of himself in the main staircase of his house and so on. Chafets is clearly impressed, writing that "That day, and every day, [Limbaugh] produced 10,000 words of fluent, often clever political talk."). When the Times scribe finally gets down to the specifics of Limbaugh's enormous new $400 million, eight-year contract, he reports that the radio star's show commands "five minutes of every hour of airtime, which it can then sell to advertisers" beyond the normal "18 to 20 minutes each hour for advertising"—then Chafets casually drops this bomb:
Lately he has created a new option. At a much higher rate, he will weave a product into his monologue. (To a caller who said he took two showers after voting for Clinton in Operation Chaos, Limbaugh responded: "If you had followed my advice and gotten a Rinnai tankless water heater, you wouldn’t have needed to take two showers. And I’ll tell you why....")
And that, folks, is why Rush Limbaugh is worth $400 million.
Correspondent Zeleny reports on recent back and forth between presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain:
The terse exchanges between the rivals, echoed even more vociferously by their campaign representatives and surrogates, underscored a central question both candidates are grappling with: How do they present themselves as practicing a new kind of politics, while they, and particularly their allies, are still pointing out flaws in each other?
It's like there was some unspoken agreement to campaign for president without criticizing your opponent. Corporate media always want to have it both ways—they love the backbiting and the trumped-up "controversies" like this story, but then they must also pretend to hate "negative" campaigning.
The Washington Monthly blogger posts on a new George Washington University study of the ideological identification of media audiences—the interesting thing is that audiences for all the major TV outlets skew strongly to the left, with the exception of Fox News. One way of looking at this is to say that the right is underserved—but if that were the case, wouldn't the audience for Fox be about as big as that of all other TV outlets (including broadcast) put together? Another way to look at this is that TV is a complete market failure—the left-leaning audience would presumably like left-leaning news, and you can flip through any random issue of FAIR's magazine Extra! to see that TV fails to provide it.
While going a bit overboard with his claim that it's a media "myth that the presidential race is somehow close," Hogarth does valuable work in getting at some of the problems with the Washington Post's "Flag City" story—in which a reporter went to a tiny, very Republican town and, lo and behold, found that many voters there don’t like Obama. Why it matters is hard to figure out—you could do a similar piece showing that people in, say, San Francisco don't much care for John McCain. But it feeds the idea that Obama has more to prove to certain voters, whose opinions matter more for some reason.
Think Progress: McCain In 2003: 'I Absolutely Don’t Believe' Military Service Alone Qualifies Somebody for President (7/1/08) by Igor Volsky
- During an interview with National Journal, John McCain was asked if "military service inherently makes somebody better equipped to be commander-in-chief." McCain said, "Absolutely not.... I absolutely don't believe that it's necessary." [National Journal, 2/15/03]
- I believe that military service is the most honorable endeavor an American may undertake. But I’ve never believed that lack of military service disqualifies one from occupying positions of political leadership or as Commander and Chief. In America, the people are sovereign, and they decide who is and is not qualified to lead us. [American Legion Speech, 9/7/99]
See the newest FAIR Media Advisory: Press Distorts Clark's Comments (7/2/08)
NewsHour: Candidates Fight to Disprove Smears, Set Record Straight to Voters (6/30/08) by Gwen Ifill
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