FAIR: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
The national media watch group
Margaret Thatcher's death brought a wave of gushing coverage of the former prime minister-- but journalist Laura Flanders remembers a different Thatcher legacy; she'll join us to talk about it. And detainees at Guantanamo have engaged in a life-threatening hunger strike for months. We’ll talk about the effort to shed light on it with Pardiss Kebriaei, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
FAIR recently lost two of its mentors. On July 21 came the unexpected death of radical journalist Alexander Cockburn, who was one of two or three writers to whom FAIR most owes its existence. Cockburn inspired a revival of hard-hitting political media criticism in the Village Voice’s Press Clips column, which he launched in 1973; he moved his assault on the Fourth Estate to the Nation in 1983. Part of his appeal was simply how well he wrote: He had a voice that was effortlessly stylish, boundlessly informed, savagely funny and unapologetically left. He once recalled C.L. Sulzberger (New York [...]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: In the summer of 2010, Rolling Stone published an explosive story about the Afghan War. Within days U.S./NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal was out of a job. Much of the media coverage of the story focused on the blunt language McChrystal and his closest aides were using to talk about U.S. officials. The piece also caused some media figures to express alarm that a reporter would write such a story in the first place. Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings has turned his story into a book. He'll join us to talk about The Operators: The [...]
This September at New York City’s Rockefeller Center, NBC put on its second annual Education Nation conference—a series of events and broadcasts bankrolled by the corporate interests and foundations aligned with the so-called “education reform” movement. On September 27, the second day of the conference, FAIR convened our own discussion of education and corporate media coverage at New York’s School of the Future. The panel, moderated by journalist Laura Flanders, featured former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch, NYU education professor Pedro Noguera, parent/activist Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters and New York City public schoolteacher Brian Jones. Here are [...]
During the last week of September, NBC was staging its second annual "Education Nation" summit--a series of events and broadcasts bankrolled by the corporate interests and foundations aligned with the so-called "education reform" movement. Corporate media coverage of education policy tends to hew closely to the "reform" agenda: promoting charter schools and vouchers, embracing relentless testing and other "accountability" measures, and attacking teachers' unions for standing in the way of progress. On September 27, FAIR brought together four of the most dynamic and thoughtful education experts and activists in the country for a discussion about how the media mangle the [...]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: As politicians of both parties and pundits of various ideological stripes discuss what services and rights need to be cut and stripped from working people, the subject of raising taxes seem almost taboo in corporate media discussions. Not so here. We'll talk about raising taxes with Chuck Collins, a senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, and the co-founder of U.S. Uncut, a network working to stop corporate tax dodging. Also on the show: It's not the corporate press keeping the story of Wisconsin alive; people in this country and around the world [...]
A Little Learning I am struck by the fact that George Will referred derisively to those who believe in global warming (which includes, of course, the vast majority of scientists) as “climate Cassandras” in a February 12 Newsweek column (Extra!, 5-6/07). Can it be that Will doesn’t know that in Greek mythology, Cassandra was endowed with the gift of accurate prophecy—but cursed by the gods never to be believed? Joanne Gruber New York, N.Y. Something to ANSWER For Did a bit of the New York Times rub off on its former reporter Frances Cerra Whittelsey? I don’t know, but it [...]
It did not surprise me, during the 2004 election, when Kerry/Edwards supporters called in to my show on Air America Radio—though it did surprise me when they called in seeking yard signs. I don’t have a yard, much less a sign. All I could think to do was to direct these callers to the Kerry campaign website, which is what I did until one exasperated caller protested that she could find no darn way to obtain a yard sign through www.johnkerry.com. The caller was right. Not only was there no apparent way to obtain a yard sign through the Democratic [...]
