FAIR: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
The national media watch group
A "Right to Work" law passes in Michigan-- what is missing from the press coverage? Labor writer and activist Jane McAlevey has some thoughts. And is Washington's focus on the "debt crisis" misguided? Mijin Cha thinks we'd be better off focusing on the jobs crisis.
What happened at the Bradley Manning hearings this week? Corporate media don't seem interested; Michael Ratner tells us what they missed. And big media getting... bigger? Joe Torres on the latest at the FCC.
Over the past 30 years, the top 1 percent of the United States has experienced a 240 percent increase in its real annual income, while the median household income has barely budged (Economic Policy Institute, 6/18/12, 9/13/11). Imagine if this explosive, decades-long growth of inequality were somehow reversed—at an even faster rate than its original expansion. This has actually happened in Venezuela, and it goes a long way toward explaining why President Hugo Chávez was re-elected in October, despite many U.S. media pundits’ predictions of a victory by opposition leader Henrique Capriles (CounterSpin, 10/12/12). The likelihood of coming across an [...]
To those of a certain age, the image of eggs sizzling in a frying pan instantly evokes the Partnership For a Drug-Free America’s 1987 “this is your brain on drugs” ad. But any group that wanted to draw attention to drug use in the 1980s and ’90s didn’t really need to buy ad space; media coverage was already saturated with sensationalized reporting on crack cocaine and other drugs (Extra!, 9/92). This plentiful drug coverage served to support U.S. government policy, encouraging public embrace of a heavy-handed crack-down that began under President Richard Nixon and was expanded by Ronald Reagan. Government [...]
When there are austerity protests in Europe, New York Times headlines like “Markets Falter in Europe Amid Protests on Austerity” (9/27/12) and “Markets Tumble on Unrest in Greece and Spain” (9/27/12) accurately capture the reports’ primary concerns: how the protests might affect financial markets. Of lesser concern to the Times, it seems, is how austerity affects people. CounterSpin’s Steve Rendall spoke on September 28 with Costas Panayotakis, a professor of social science at the New York City College of Technology, who has been following U.S. media coverage of the economic crisis in Greece. CS: I wonder if you could briefly [...]
Scott Nova of the Workers Rights Consortium joins us to talk about the fire at a garment factory in Bangladesh that killed over 100 workers. “War torn, mineral rich” --that’s pretty much all Time magazine thinks you need to know about the region of eastern Congo. Maurice Carney of the group Friends of the Congo talks media.
CounterSpin talks to Yousef Munayyer, the director of Washington, D.C.'s Jerusalem Fund, about what happens when the smoke clears in Gaza. And we'll talk to Amy Goodman about her new book, The Silenced Majority, and what she thinks media needs to do to serve the public.
What should we know about Fix the Debt and their plans? We'll hear from Sarah Anderson, director of the Institute for Policy Studies' Global Economy Project. Also: We'll talk with former CounterSpin host and Extra! publisher Martin Lee, author of the new book Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana, about the role corporate propaganda has played in pot debates.
