FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Question: When does a drought that threatens millions of human lives become news that fits the front page of the New York Times? Answer: When animals die. That’s the rule New York Times editors apparently followed in the week of July 5-12, 1992, when they published five substantial stories in eight days on countries ravaged […]
Nowadays one can be portrayed as a wanton murderer on a nationally televised program, get killed by police less than 48 hours later, and have the nation invited by television to applaud the death within the week. That fate befell Cesar Mazariego-Molina, 26, an undocumented worker from El Salvador, who L.A. County sheriff’s deputies said […]
Today, the “drug issue” remains a blank screen of public concern upon which society’s most profound fears — about the urban poor, or dark-skinned foreigners — can be easily focused. Although polls indicate that public concern about drugs is again at an ebb, it remains a small matter for the media or the administration to bring the issue back to life.
As a background graphic for reports on abortion, TV has sometimes used a depiction of a late-term fetus hanging in space, with no connection to a pregnant woman. The “floating fetus” logo is in sync with the media’s tendency to push women out of the public’s mental picture of the abortion issue. In recent years, […]
I often felt that the media assumed that, to be black, one had to espouse leftist ideas and Democratic politics. Any black who deviated from the ideological litany of requisites was an oddity and was to be cut from the herd and attacked…. There was, indeed, in my view, a complicity and penchant on the […]
At every home team baseball game, there are the same players, same ballpark, same uniforms, same rules. But the media would never conclude that coverage should shut down because there’s nothing new. Somehow, though, the standard that would never be applied to sports is the rule of thumb for covering cities: Ho-hum, they’re still poor […]
The U.S. Senate has been taken for a ride on public broadcasting by the same right-wing critics who have long sought to destroy any alternative to commercial broadcasting. The current attacks on public TV — made by people who don’t seem to watch the programming — turn reality upside down. Many PBS stations air three […]
To see how papers were following through on their promise of more substantive reporting, FAIR surveyed all news articles on the presidential election in three national papers.
Patrick Buchanan and David Duke today find themselves in the same place—using nearly identical issues and rhetoric to challenge George Bush from the right. But they took different paths to get to this point: Duke rose to prominence through the use of KKK robes; Buchanan rode a more conventional vehicle: television. Although Duke recently received […]
News media consistently deferred to David Duke when framing his candidacy for governor of Louisiana, calling him a “former Ku Klux Klan leader” and an “ex-Nazi.” Such descriptions are deceptive, for there is little that is “former” or “ex-” about Duke’s white supremacist beliefs.
An investigative series on the Los Alamos National Laboratory by the Santa Fe New Mexican resulted in the sacking of the daily newspaper’s managing editor who edited the series, and a moratorium on nuclear technology stories by the newspaper. The editor, David N. Mitchell, told Extra! that due to the legal settlement reached after his […]
In a July 1991 column about the hate murder of a local gay man, Houston Post columnist Juan Palomo tried to come out of the closet to discuss his own fears about being gay-bashed. His editors demanded the mention of his sexual orientation be cut, finding it “inappropriate” and part of a “personal agenda.” After […]
New York City’s shelter system for homeless families has become so livable that hundreds, if not thousands, of families who could stay elsewhere are flocking to shelters so they can move to the top of the list for permanent subsidized housing, city officials say. Dorian and Renita Steeley and their three children, for example, were […]
When People’s Dirk Mathison infiltrated the exclusive Bohemian Grove retreat, he got a view into the US elite that very few reporters have glimpsed. Unfortunately, that elite includes the management of Time Warner, the owner of People, which prevented Mathison from telling his story.
The increasing tendency of television throughout the ’80s to exploit young viewers reached some kind of breakthrough with Whittle Communications’ Channel One. For the uninitiated, Channel One is a television news program targeted to teenagers, and beamed to school classrooms around the country via satellite. Whittle offers this program to school systems, along with the […]
Budget out of control, banks going bust, states and cities going broke, children going hungry — who’s to blame? For major media, no problem. It’s elderly Americans. In their drive to punish gray hair, big media give no quarter. There is no trial, no defense. “Elderly, Affluent — and Selfish”, snarls a typical op-ed in […]
Two thousand people gathered on the South Lawn of the White House on July 26, 1990, for the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was the largest gathering ever of journalists for a disability story, most of whose reporting ignored the fact pointed out by a lonely Associated Press dispatch a few days […]
The end of saturation coverage of the Gulf War has left some journalists feeling nostalgic. “Mark Thompson, defense correspondent for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, says his days feel shapeless without the comforting rhythm of the morning briefing from Riyadh and the afternoon session at the Pentagon,” according to the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz (3/25/91). “There’s nothing better […]
“Even though a story can be incredibly preposterous in the Western mind, it can resonate deeply in other parts of the world,” Todd Levanthal, a U.S. Information Agency specialist on disinformation, told the New York Times (9/16/90). “The key is predisposition to believe, not the crudity of the charge.” While the point of the article […]
The most important think tank for the media on the Persian Gulf Crisis was the Brookings Institution. In August 1990 alone, the group’s representatives spoke 14 times on network evening newscasts, not counting appearances on Nightline, the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour or network news specials. A database search of citations in six national newspapers found 440 citations […]
