FAIR: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
The national media watch group
Withholding important news over supposed national security concerns is nothing new. And in many cases, no official request is even needed—the decision-makers seem to have internalized the notion that keeping the government’s secrets is part of their job.
Issues like oil spills, land use rights, groundwater pollution etc. are all complaints made by critics of the Keystone XL pipeline. And looming over all of them is the way that tapping the tar sands will exacerbate climate change. But the media doesn't seem to care.
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 [...]
Anonymous government sources speaking to the New York Times, along with intelligence based on satellite imagery, tell a frightening story: The brutal leader of an unfriendly Arab country is preparing to unleash chemical weapons. Sound familiar? There are significant differences between the allegations about Syria’s WMDs today and Iraq’s nonexistent weapons in 2003. But the similarities are notable for what they reveal—not about U.S. foreign policy plans, but about the corporate media’s ability to churn out a stream of alarmist coverage based on the thinnest of evidence. Now, as then, the New York Times drove the initial storyline. On December [...]
Amnesty International (10/1/12) describes it as a nation where ruling party officials have “abused public institutions and administrative re-sources to restrict the freedom of assembly, expression and association of opposition supporters,” many of whom have been “fined, fired, harassed or detained.” Free speech advocates condemned its president for shuttering an opposition TV station for alleged complicity in a coup plot, right before its 2008 elections. The region’s leading election monitor found those elections plagued by violence, intimidation and ballot box-stuffing. Its president has been criticized for changing the law to sidestep term limits and remain in power. Venezuela? No—U.S. ally [...]
“Hyperbole is the currency of presidential campaigns, but this year the nation’s future truly hangs in the balance,” warned the New York Times editorial board in October 2008 (10/23/08). In endorsing presidential candidate Barack Obama over John McCain, the Times stressed that the differences between the two candidates were “profound.” On issues related to the Constitution and the rule of law, the Times editorial decried Bush-era transgressions, like “the power to imprison men without charges,” the executive branch’s “unfettered authority to spy on Americans” and the creation of “secret prisons” around the world where torture was outsourced. Although the newspaper [...]
If you’re covering Latin America for U.S. corporate media, Michael Shifter is the person to turn to when you need a quote. Currently the president of the Inter-American Dialogue research group, Shifter offers soothing centrism about political developments across the region—giving reporters soundbites on everything from a papal visit to Cuba to elections in Argentina to leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Readers might wonder how one expert could be so valuable to elite media. What these papers don’t reveal is that Shifter is also valuable to an array of international corporations who fund his think tank—along with several governments of [...]
The news that a U.S. Army sergeant killed 16 civilians, most of them children, in southern Afghanistan early Sunday morning was treated by many media outlets primarily as a PR challenge for continued war and occupation of that country. "Afghanistan, once the must-fight war for America, is becoming a public relations headache for the nation's leaders, especially for President Barack Obama," explained an Associated Press analysis piece (3/12/12). Reuters (3/12/12) called it "the latest American public relations disaster in Afghanistan." On the NBC Today show (3/11/12) the question was posed this way: "Could this reignite a new anti-American backlash in [...]
