FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
You gotta hand it to America’s mass media: When war hangs in the balance, they sure know how to bury a story. After devoting thousands of network hours and oceans of ink to stories about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, major U.S. news outlets did little but yawn in the days after the latest […]
On February 24, Newsweek broke what may be the biggest story of the Iraq crisis. In a revelation that “raises questions about whether the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist,” the magazine’s issue dated March 3 reported that the Iraqi weapons chief who defected from the regime in 1995 told […]
One of the big media buzzwords to emerge in recent years is “globalization.” By now, we’re likely to know what it means. That’s unfortunate — because at this point the word is so ambiguous that it doesn’t really mean much of anything. News outlets have reported that key international pacts like NAFTA and the World […]
These days, it’s a crucial ace up Uncle Sam’s sleeve. “Terrorism” is George W. Bush’s magic card. For 17 months now, the word has worked like a political charm for the Bush administration. Ever since the terrible crime against humanity known as 9/11, the White House has exploited the specter of terrorism to move the […]
In an attempt to further increase the government’s surveillance and law enforcement powers, and decrease judicial review and protections of civil liberties, the Department of Justice has secretly drafted a sweeping sequel to the USA Patriot Act of 2001. Despite the draft legislation’s authoritarian provisions—including one that would empower the government to strip Americans of […]
The latest hire by the cable news network MSNBC— co-owned by General Electric/NBC and Microsoft— is Michael Savage, a radio talkshow host noted for his unabashed bigotry. Savage is scheduled to have his own weekly one-hour show on MSNBC beginning in March. Savage routinely refers to non-white countries as “turd world nations” and charges that […]
In reporting on Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5 presentation to the United Nations Security Council, many journalists treated allegations made by Powell as though they were facts. Reporters at several major outlets neglected to observe the journalistic rule of prefacing unverified assertions with words like “claimed” or “alleged.” This is of particular concern […]
There’s no doubt about it: Colin Powell is a great performer, as he showed yet again at the U.N. Security Council the other day. On television, he exudes confidence and authoritative judgment. But Powell owes much of his touted credibility to the fact that he’s functioning inside a media bubble that protects him from direct […]
While teams of U.N. experts scouring Iraq have yet to find any hidden caches of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, some U.S. journalists seem to have already turned up their own smoking guns. Whether out of excess zeal or simple carelessness, the media’s intensive coverage of the U.N. inspections has repeatedly glided from reporting the […]
A dozen years after the Gulf War, public perceptions of it are now very helpful to the White House. That’s part of a timeworn pattern: Illusions about previous wars make the next one seem acceptable. As George Orwell observed in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” […]
FAIR values the opportunity to comment on the rules currently under consideration in the FCC’s 2002 Biennial Review. Unfortunately, the complicated and technical nature of the FCC’s public comment procedure does not encourage–and some would argue actually discourages–significant participation from the public, the citizens whose interests the FCC is supposed to safeguard. In addition, the […]
As the poet Robert Burns noted, it’s hard to see ourselves as others see us—especially if we rely on the mainstream U.S. press. Here’s a paragraph from an editorial in the Los Angeles Times—headlined “Lifesaving Trade Policies” (1/2/03): Yes, the $1.66 billion the Bush administration has earmarked for international development aid in fiscal year 2004 […]
