CLICK HERE TO WATCH VIDEO The doctor who served as Obama's personal physician for 22 years speaks out about how ABC disinvited him from their healthcare forum two days before the prime-time event where he was planning to ask about single-payer healthcare. Watch FAIR's exclusive video interview with Dr. Scheiner and add your name to FAIR's petition demanding that the networks include single-payer in the healthcare debate here. Many experts see single-payer national health insurance as the most sensible solution to expand coverage to the uninsured and to reduce costs. This proposal polls well with the public, who preferred it [...]

Join FAIR at the 6th Annual NYC Grassroots Media Conference Hope to Action Saturday | May 30th 2009 Since 2004, the annual NYC Grassroots Media Conferences feature workshops, skills-sharing, dialogue, debate and strategizing sessions about media making, media policy and how to use media to forward social justice campaigns. Hunter College, 68th Street and Lexington Ave | Entrance via West Building Hours: 9am-6pm FAIR's Managing Editor, Julie Hollar, along with Arun Gupta of the Indypendent and Christy Thornton of the NACLA Report on the Americas, will lead the panel: "Life After the Death of Left Print Journalism?" 12:15 - 1:45 [...]

PBS ombud Michael Getler is siding with critics of a Frontline documentary that failed to examine single-payer national health insurance as a possible alternative to the U.S. healthcare system. Citing FAIR's study "Media Blackout on Single-Payer Healthcare," which documented that single-payer advocates were all but shut out of the media discussion about healthcare reform, Getler stated: I find myself in agreement with those who wrote initially and who felt it was a missed opportunity by Frontline to shed some light on where this specific idea - clearly telegraphed in the previous program about how other countries do it, enjoying some [...]

As the BBC continues to come under fire for refusing to carry an aid appeal for Gaza, the U.S. media watch group FAIR is challenging the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for making false and biased claims after a campaign by groups that advocate for uncritical coverage of Israel. The campaign was launched in response to CBC’s October 23, 2008 airing of the 2003 educational documentary Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land. The film cited a FAIR report on U.S. media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict, prompting the CBC's French-language radio ombud Julie Miville-Dechêne to question the independence of FAIR’s research, referring [...]

A new FAIR study finds that leading newspapers have been putting political considerations ahead of humanitarian concerns in their editorials on human rights in Latin America. The report, "Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington's Needs," finds that while Venezuela is by every measure a safer place than Colombia to live, vote, organize unions and political groups, speak out against the government or practice journalism, editorials at four influential newspapers have portrayed Venezuela's government as having a far worse human rights record than Colombia's. While the human rights concerns expressed in newspaper editorials do not track with the degree of human rights [...]

Think tank citations in the media are dropping, but right and center still predominate, according to a new study by FAIR. The annual study, which FAIR has conducted since 1995, counts citations of the 25 most prominent think tanks of right, center and left, using the Nexis database. Citations for the 2008 study were counted in what Nexis designates to be major U.S. newspapers, as well as in transcripts of the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC; the cable channels Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and CNBC; and publicly funded PBS and NPR. Among the findings for 2007: * The ideological [...]