FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
When Marlon Brando declared on Larry King Live (4/5/96) that “Hollywood is owned by Jews,” he only said what quite a few Americans believe. Since they don’t know who owns the media, millions think that it’s “the Jews.” It is an old canard. Having been codified in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (forged […]
Thanks in part to activists from all over the country who contacted ABC and Disney, FAIR’s campaign against the bigotry of talkshow host Bob Grant has been a success. The success was not in Grant’s firing from New York’s WABC, the flagship of Disney/ABC‘s radio empire. FAIR, in fact, never called for Grant to be […]
Here is a sampling of Buchanan’s views: On African-Americans After Sen. Carol Moseley Braun blocked a federal patent for a Confederate flag insignia, Buchanan wrote that she was “putting on an act” by associating the Confederacy with slavery: “The War Between the States was about independence, about self-determination, about the right of a people to […]
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s spectrum excludes “unvarnished progressives” while making sure that antisemites have someone to represent them.
“If the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms insists upon a firefight, give them a firefight. Just remember, they’re wearing flak jackets and you’re better off shooting for the head.”
In a bizarre column blaming TV talkshows, in part, for the “sexually irresponsible culture of poverty,” Newsweek‘s Joe Klein (2/6/95) provided telling insight into how some in mainstream media see their relationship to poor people: “Television is the only sustained communication our society has with the underclass,” Klein wrote. “It is the most powerful […]
This conservative media machine now rivals—and may well surpass—the power and the influence of the old-line press. It holds sway over much of the national agenda, deciding which ideas and individuals are accepted and which are marginalized.
Since winning control of Congress, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R.-Ga.) has constantly complained about “destructive” and “negative” coverage from the “liberal elite media.” For example, when asked on Nightline (11/29/94) about his reference to the Clintons as “counter-culture McGoverniks,” he first insisted that he had been misquoted—”I used the term McGovernite, not McGovernik—it was one of […]
The front page of the New York Times Week in Review section is a platform that both reflects and helps set the conventional wisdom. Michael Wines, one of the Times‘ top political reporters, used that space on September 11 to amplify the claims by “Mr. Clinton’s loyal critics in Congress and Democratic research circles…that only […]
From dioxin to Whitewater, from Rodney King to Reaganomics, Rush Limbaugh has a finely honed ability to twist and distort reality.
When the Russian crisis began, CBS anchor Dan Rather suggested (9/21/93) that Boris Yeltsin “didn’t go far enough” in getting rid of the “hard-liners.” But how does a president legally get rid of elected members of parliament? President Yeltsin did it by simply dissolving parliament on Sept. 21, a blatantly unconstitutional move that won immediate […]
As virtually all media outlets celebrated the “magnificent spectacle of peacemaking” in Washington (Newsweek, 9/27/93), leading media voices were often more jubilant than accurate in their reporting. Even as the Israelis and Palestinians were lauded for “emerging from the clutches of history” (Time, 9/13/93), too many journalists clung to past habits of bias in their […]
“PrimeTime goes undercover to investigate welfare fraud, and the mess of a system that entices people to break the rules and gouge the taxpayers,” Diane Sawyer announced last year, introducing a segment of ABC‘s PrimeTime Live (9/17/92). “With so much money up for grabs,” Sawyer declared, “investigators in the field say it’s even better than […]
A luxury car tools along a mountain road. A Citicorp bankcard gleams behind the slogan, “Anyhow. Anywhere. Anytime. Right Now.” Chase Manhattan advises viewers: “We believe that helping our customers realize their dreams is the best investment we can make.” Typical commercials? No — because they’re on “noncommercial” TV. According to PBS, these are not […]
In an October 1992 editorial, the New York Times proclaimed that “the debate over healthcare reform is over. Managed competition has won.” This outcome, the Times announced (10/10/92), was “delicious” and “wondrous.” In fact, the debate over healthcare reform still goes on, but you might not know it from establishment media. While the New York […]
FAIR’s four-month study of National Public Radio found that All Things Considered and Morning Edition devoted less than 2 percent of stories — 45out of 2,296 — to the environment. This parallels commercial broadcasting trends, where coverage of the environment has been declining since 1990 (Tyndall Report1/92). Here, as in other subject areas, NPR tended […]
Shortly after a favorable review of his book on Jewish settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Zealots for Zion, appeared in the New York Times Book Review (1/10/93), Village Voice reporter Robert I. Friedman was invited to discuss the book on Fresh Air, an interview-format show distributed by NPR. The interview was taped on January […]
Most of the major media reacted to George Bush’s last-minute pardon of leading Iran/Contra figures with less than outrage. The conventional wisdom in media circles for years has been that the scandal is old news and it should just go away. Robert MacNeil of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (12/24/92) spoke for many in the media when […]
Harvard professor Carol Gilligan, studying the psychological development of teenage girls in 1988, found that they experience a major drop in self-esteem as they reach adolescence. Only 29 percent of teenage girls said that they “felt happy the way I am,” as opposed to 60 percent of nine-year-old girls. Gilligan suggests that this adolescent crisis […]
Faced with attacks from right-wingers like Sen. Jesse Helms who accuse public television of having a left-wing agenda, PBS and its affiliates have tended to either cave in to the conservatives or else argue that public TV is balanced and doesn’t need changing. But some PBS viewers are refusing to accept that limited spectrum of […]
