Search Results for: Isabel Macdonald

Jan
01
2013

Lost in Translation

The Quebec student strike in Anglo-American corporate media

"It's a Student Strike, It's a People's Struggle," reads the banner. (Photo cred.: legrandecart.net)

When Quebec students went on strike last spring in protest over an announced 75 percent tuition hike—part of a package of austerity measures by Quebec’s provincial government—U.S. media paid scant attention. The six-month-long strike was the largest and longest student strike in North American history; hundreds of thousands of Québécois repeatedly took to the streets, with thousands arrested. Yet the strike elicited not a single story from any of the three major U.S. broadcast networks, PBS NewsHour or the Washington Post. In Morning Edition’s sole story on the Quebec student movement (5/15/12), NPR’s David Greene characterized the protests against the [...]

Jul
31
2009

Media Take Notice of FAIR's Healthcare Petition

On Tuesday, FAIR successfully delivered our petition demanding a broader debate on healthcare reform to ABC News, and already the media are taking notice of our efforts. The L.A. Times covered our petition delivery and acknowledged that there has been a "gaping hole in much of the media coverage -- caused by the failure to investigate practices around the rest of the world, particularly European-style, single-payer programs." And the buzz continues to grow.... Check out these links to see some of the coverage the petition has received so far: Common Dreams (7/30/09) L.A. Times (7/29/09) Democracy Now! (7/29/09) Paper Tiger [...]

Jul
28
2009

Doctors, media critics demand broader TV debate on healthcare

Between noon and 1 pm EST, the national media watch group FAIR and local healthcare advocacy groups will deliver a petition signed by over 12,000 people demanding that the TV networks include the single-payer proposal in their coverage of the national healthcare debate. The petition's signatories include Obama's longtime physician, Dr. David Scheiner; filmmaker Michael Moore; former MSNBC host Phil Donahue; actors Mike Farrell, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon; and doctors Quentin Young, Stephanie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein of Physicians for a National Health Program. The petition will be presented to a representative of ABC News, which disinvited Dr. Scheiner [...]

Jun
01
2009

Media Quarantine of Single-Payer Continues

Fifteen years later, public health insurance still taboo

As a big healthcare policy debate looms once again in Washington, one thing remains as certain as it was in 1993: A single-payer plan that would provide government health insurance to everyone is off the media agenda. CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen recently explained why healthcare “reform” is more possible now than it was under the Clinton administration (3/5/09): Fifteen years ago you sometimes heard—actually you heard quite a bit—people saying: “Let’s have a single-payer system like in Canada. The government is going to be the health insurer for everybody.” You don’t hear that as much as you used [...]

May
01
2009

Marketing the Media's 'Toughest Sheriff'

Joe Arpaio hyped by cable, exposed by locals

The East Valley Tribune’s Pulitzer-winning series (7/9-13/08) exposing the soaring crime rates that followed from Maricopa County (Ariz.) Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s redeployment of law enforcement resources into a campaign against undocumented immigrants (see Extra! 6/1/09) offers a fine example of journalism holding the powerful to account. It’s a model of journalism that has been all too rare in much of the news coverage of the official who—often with the help of cable news outlets—markets himself as “America’s toughest sheriff.” Under Arpaio’s leadership, Maricopa County, which includes the Phoenix metropolitan area, has faced record numbers of lawsuits and has had to [...]

Nov
01
2008

'Secret Muslims,' Open Bigotry

Islamophobia in the 2008 presidential campaign

This article is the overview of FAIR's study, "Smearcasting, How Islamophobes Spread Bigotry, Fear and Misinformation." Visit the report's special micro-site at www.smearcasting.com or click here to download the full report. In the 1990 Polish elections a whispering campaign suggesting that Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Roman Catholic, was a “secret Jew” attracted widespread attention in the U.S. press, as did a nearly identical rumor about the leading challenger in Poland’s 1995 election. In no uncertain terms, U.S. news reports called the rumors “ugly examples” (Washington Post, 12/31/90) of the “increasingly visible expressions of anti-Semitism” (New York Times, 1/21/91), [...]

Nov
01
2008

Making Islamophobia Mainstream

How Muslim-bashers broadcast their bigotry

This article is the overview of FAIR's study, "Smearcasting, How Islamophobes Spread Bigotry, Fear and Misinformation." Visit the report's special micro-site at www.smearcasting.com or click here to download the full report. A remarkable thing happened at the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) nominations in February 2007: The normally highbrow and tolerant group nominated for best book in the field of criticism a work widely viewed as denigrating an entire religion. The nomination of Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within didn’t pass without controversy. Past nominee Eliot Weinberger denounced the book at the [...]

Oct
10
2008

David Cay Johnston on meltdown/bailout, Isabel MacDonald & Steve Rendall on 'Smearcasting,' FAIR's Islamophobia report

By

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The bailout story turns again as Congress passes the White House's bailout bill. Will reporters give up questioning the plan entirely now that it has that holy grail of "bipartisan support"? We'll hear from one journalist who's been calling for skepticism from the beginning--author and reporter David Cay Johnston, recently retired from the New York Times. Also on the show: "Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Fear, Bigotry and Misinformation," is the name of a just-released report by FAIR that looks at how America's leading Islamophobes--who the report dubs "The Dirty Dozen"--are able to spread their [...]

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