A new FAIR Action Alert (5/16/12) calls on the New York Times public editor to address the conflict of interest posed by Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner's marriage to someone whose job it is to sway the coverage of international outlets like the Times in a pro-Israel direction. [...] Read more»

Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann are well-known in the Beltway. They work at big-time think tanks (Brookings and American Enterprise Institute), appear on television chat shows, and write books and op-eds that powerful people pay attention to. Lately, though, it … Continue reading → Read more»

 The New York Times editorially decried the New York City police department's stop-and-frisk practices ("Injustices of Stop and Frisk," 5/13/12), noting that the criterion of "furtive movements" most often used for stopping disproportionately black and brown people is "so vague as to be meaningless," that people of color are treated more violently than white people when stopped, and that the excuse that stop-and-frisk keeps guns off the street is not supported.

The paper's conclusion: "The mounting evidence reveals a pattern of abusive policing that warrants the attention of the Justice Department, which should be using its broad authority to investigate these practices."

That might sound all right, but as I recently wrote for Extra! (3/12), the Times has been clutching its pearls over stop-and-frisk for 10 years, and it's become clear that there is no evidence, no research, no investigation that will move the paper beyond calls for more of the same. [...] Read more»

You have to wonder: Do journalists covering energy issues imagine they and their loved ones are going to be living on another planet in the not-too-distant future?

That seems like the only reason you would write a piece about the world discovering ways to extract and burn vast new quantities of hydrocarbons without mentioning one word about climate change. That's what Bryan Walsh gave us in the May 21 issue of Time magazine–an article about fracking that doesn't mention the technology's powerful contribution to global warming.

The headline over this article: "The Golden Age."

Walsh does refer to fracking's ecological impact, referring to "environmental concerns over fracking–chiefly the possibility of groundwater pollution." The groundwater contamination associated with fracking is certainly bad, but most environmentalists will tell you that climate change is the biggest challenge facing humanity–and that finding new ways to burn carbon (and release methane as well) is utterly unhelpful. [...] Read more»