After years of mismanagement, the Tribune Company newspapers--including the Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times--are up for sale. And one of the potential buyers? The Koch brothers.
Yes, those Koch brothers. Let's send the Tribune Company a message.
Search Results for: Staff
Apr
12
2013
Laura Flanders on Margaret Thatcher, Pardiss Kebriaei on Guantanamo
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.
Apr
01
2013
Joe Biden, Aesthetic Populist
A track record of screwing the little guy
Joe Biden’s popularity stems from his perception of “folksiness.” In reality, though, Biden’s record is anything but working class–friendly.
Feb
01
2013
FAIR REPORT: 13th Annual Fear & Favor Review
Revealing the hidden influence behind the news
It’s a fair indication of the current state of play in U.S. media that, in 2012, TV newscasts were acknowledged to be “increasingly seeded with corporate advertising masquerading as news” (Washington Post, 1/3/12)—and the regulatory response was to call, not for an end to the practice of deceiving audiences, but for broadcasters to make note of such arrangements in an online file. While we work on creating the sort of unfettered news media that democracy requires, calling out compromised reporting as we do each year in Fear & Favor is just another way to note where and why the current [...]
Jan
01
2013
The Hall of Fame of Bad Ideas
Why acting like you lost the election is the ‘serious’ thing to do
As usual when Democrats win elections, plenty of corporate media pundits advised them to act as though they lost.
Dec
01
2012
The 'Raising the Retirement Age' Scam
What they're really talking about doing to Social Security
It’s inevitable that “raising the retirement age” for Social Security benefits will be talked about by corporate media as an option that would save the government large amounts of money. Such talk, however, will be entirely misleading—and designed to mislead.
Nov
01
2012
SoundBites
Extra! November 2012
By Staff
Don’t Look to NYT to ‘Litigate’ the Facts Margaret Sullivan, the new New York Times public editor (9/16/12), used the topic of “voter fraud” to illustrate the concept of “false balance”―when two sides are treated as equivalent even when one side has reality on its side. Despite Republican efforts to pass laws to prevent voting by the ineligible, research finds next to no examples of this problem―but coverage often treats the absence of fraudulent voting as a partisan assertion (Extra!, 10/12). While Sullivan rightly observed that “journalists need to make every effort to get beyond the spin and help readers [...]
Nov
01
2012
Not for Teacher
Journalists take sides in Chicago strike
By Peter Hart
Among corporate media pundits, hostility towards teachers’ unions spans the ideological spectrum (Extra!, 9/10). And in supposedly straight news reporting, the policy goals of corporate “reformers”―support for charter schools and teacher ratings based on standardized test statistical models―are treated as common sense instead of contested and controversial. So when the Chicago Teachers Union went out on strike this September, it was never in doubt which side the corporate media would take. The story of Chicago, as they framed it, was that well-paid teachers in an underperforming, cash-strapped school system wanted more money, and opposed any attempt to hold them accountable [...]
