Search Results for: Julie Hollar

May
01
2013

When Bigotry Is 'Balance'

Media still worried homophobes aren't being heard

Cover

As the Supreme Court finished hearing oral arguments on two same-sex marriage cases, the Wall Street Journal editorial page (3/27/13) proclaimed what has become a mantra of the right on this subject: The liberal media frame opponents of marriage equality as bigots. America’s cultural and media elites are attempting to browbeat the High Court into coercing the country into recognizing same-sex marriage by casting opponents as bigots for holding a position that President Obama held less than a year ago. Murdoch’s Journal is woefully misguided on two counts. It’s hard to make the case that the most prominent arguments against [...]

Jan
01
2013

Talking About--but Not With--Latino Voters

Electoral power not matched by media presence

Maria Teresa Kumar, a rare out-of-house Latina appearance on TV. Source: MSNBC's News Nation

The Latino vote has been widely credited in the mainstream news media with playing a major role in securing Barack Obama’s re-election. According to the polling organization Latino Decisions, the president won 75 percent of the Latino vote, compared with 23 percent for Romney, a 3-to-1 margin (Foreign Affairs, 11/15/12). But while the stereotypical sleeping giant woke up, that does not mean that the mainstream media, especially television news shows, wanted to talk with the Latino electorate. They just wanted to talk about them. Extra! looked at hundreds of transcripts of post-election coverage and found that the majority of both [...]

Oct
01
2012

Guide to Election Coverage 2012

Tropes, tricks and tics of campaign journalism

Every four years, U.S. media spend untold time and energy covering the presidential campaign. And every election cycle there are certain media themes that keep coming back. Extra! has compiled a guide to the most popular recurring tropes, as well as some new additions to keep an eye on in 2012. Candidate Caricatures In 2008, journalists gave us McCain the maverick vs. Obama the snob (Extra!, 5–6/08, 7–8/08): easily digestible caricatures that the candidates’ every action could be forced into. It didn’t matter that McCain toed the party line more than your average Republican, or that Obama’s middle-class, community activist [...]

Sep
01
2012

Missing Latino Voices

Excluded from the newsroom, absent from the conversation

Since 1990, the Latino population in the United States has more than doubled to 16 percent, but English-language U.S. news media outlets are simply not keeping up. While people of color and women have always been underrepresented in U.S. media, Latinos consistently stand out—in the coverage as well as inside the newsroom—for their exceptionally paltry numbers relative to their population size. In coverage In Extra!’s recent study of the opinion pages of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal (4/12), Latinos were granted less than half a percent of the op-ed bylines over the two-month study period—writing [...]

Aug
30
2012

Extra! - The Magazine of FAIR, the Media Watch Group

About | Latest Articles | Subscribe | Issues Archive Order Back Issues | Write for Extra! Extra! is FAIR's hard-hitting monthly magazine of well-documented media criticism. Extra! receives no money from advertisers or corporate underwriters, and depends on subscribers for its existence. If you find the information on this website valuable, please subscribe and help make it possible for us to keep investigating and publishing.   Extra!'s staff: Editor: Jim Naureckas Managing editor: Julie Hollar Publisher: Deborah Thomas Letters to the editor: letters (at) fair (d0t) org

Jun
01
2012

NATO Protesters Free to Shout Down Hole

Praising police, ignoring protesters’ message

Veterans tossed away their medals at the NATO protest--Photo Credit: Democracy Now!

If a protester shouts in a city and no one’s there to hear, does she make a sound? Police corral protesters into so-called “free speech” zones, far from their intended political targets and on streets emptied of passersby. Corporate mass media barely cover the protesters’ message. The voices of protest are heard almost exclusively by fellow protesters on the streets and readers of independent media, and corporate journalists declare it a triumph of free speech. This is the reality of American protest today, on display in Chicago during the NATO summit protests in May. The news story that emerged was [...]

Mar
01
2012

Letting Apple Off the Hook for Labor Abuses

Blaming consumers for not knowing what media have barely covered

“The iEconomy,” a New York Times series “examining challenges posed by increasingly globalized high-tech industries,” provides Exhibit A on how even the best attempts by corporate media to dig into international labor rights fall short. With three bylined reporters and nine months of work (Economix, 1/25/12), the first two pieces of the series provided perhaps the most in-depth look at the production of Apple products that a corporate outlet has ever published. Despite all the resources it had expended and the abuses it had documented, the Times refused to pin the responsibility on Apple. The first article (1/22/12), “How the [...]

Nov
01
2011

Letters to the Editor

Overfishing Factor in Somali Famine Julie Hollar’s article on Somalia (10/11) missed one contributing factor to the famine. Overfish-ing in the North Atlantic pushed the Atlantic commercial fishing into the Indian Ocean, where they steal fish from Somali waters with impunity—which links, of course, with Somali pirates. How does a fisherman make a living when the fish are gone? D.L. Berry Grants, N.M. Media Fail on Gitmo Andy Worthington’s “Worst of the Worst?” (9/11) points out that media was also focused much on “recidivism,” just because 4 percent (22 of 534) released were alleged to have taken up arms against [...]

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