FAIR: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
The national media watch group
Withholding important news over supposed national security concerns is nothing new. And in many cases, no official request is even needed—the decision-makers seem to have internalized the notion that keeping the government’s secrets is part of their job.
Issues like oil spills, land use rights, groundwater pollution etc. are all complaints made by critics of the Keystone XL pipeline. And looming over all of them is the way that tapping the tar sands will exacerbate climate change. But the media doesn't seem to care.
When Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen won gold medals in the 200- and 400-meter individual medleys in London, she knocked a second off the world record, and five seconds off her personal best. But rather than applaud and admire her accomplishments, the media threw doubt and suspicion on Shiwen’s wins, leveling evidence-free accusations of drug use (New York Times, 7/31/12). The media coverage rang with sexism and racism; how could a Chinese woman pull this off? CNN (8/1/12) was incredulous that Shiwen swam faster than a (white) man—American gold medalist Ryan Lochte. The UK’s Daily Mail explicitly questioned Shiwen’s gender (7/30/12): [...]
Economics has traditionally been the media's favorite academic discipline. In normal times, the "consensus" of the economics profession (or at least what passes for consensus) tends to weigh heavily in the way reporters and editors cover political subjects--assuming that less-regulated trade is always beneficial, for example. But since the onset of the economic crisis, journalists have increasingly abandoned their habit of deferring to the views of mainstream economics. As economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman often argues (e.g., 5/7/11), the answers to our economic problems that come from ordinary textbook economics have come to be seen as radical [...]
If you really believed, as many Americans claimed to after the September 11 attacks, that "they hate us for our freedom" (Extra! Update, 10/01), then it makes a certain kind of sense to protect against future attacks--by reducing our freedom. That would seem to be the only kind of logic that could justify the erosion of freedom of the press manifested by the Obama Justice Department's concerted efforts to prosecute whistleblowers. The first steps toward the criminalization of being a source for investigative journalism were taken by George W. Bush's administration, when those who revealed how the "War on Terror" [...]
U.S. media consumers are used to magazines where ads outnumber stories, to on-air hosts who contractually consume brand-name drinks, to “consideration provided by” this and “brought to you by” that. But when it comes to the news, many still maintain at least the kernel of expectation that reports in the paper or on TV have more to do with journalistic judgment than with anything else. The Fear & Favor report is about some of the things that come between that image and reality on a daily basis. From pushy advertisers to heavy-handed owners and local power players, there are a [...]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: WikiLeaks strikes again, this time with the release of 250,000 diplomatic cables that shed considerable light on how U.S. foreign policy is conducted. The headlines so far are about Iran's weapons and the perilous situation in Pakistan. But one story hasn't received enough media attention: how the U.S. embassy really saw the 2009 coup in Honduras. How did this cable conflict with official U.S. pronouncements and corporate media spin? We'll talk to Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy. Also on CounterSpin today: Two women are serving double life sentences in Mississippi for the alleged [...]
A November 29 New York Times article alleging that Iran possesses powerful missiles with "the capacity to strike at capitals in Western Europe" appears to rest on incredibly shaky evidence--amounting to a German newspaper article that did not fully corroborate the U.S. claims the Times was touting. The piece relied on one of the cables published by the website WikiLeaks. The Times did not publish the cable on its website "at the request of the Obama administration." But the paper was willing to selectively use information from that cable to bolster the U.S. claims against Iran. Doubts about the piece [...]
