FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
A number of pundits are doing that most noxious of political commentary pastimes—equating right and left responses to the failures of globalization and advocating that “elites” should fight back against the forces of inconvenient democracy.
One of the more urgent tasks for the Serious Person Club of late is lumping Sanders and Trump together in an effort to discredit the former and apologize for the latter. Thursday in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria attempted to do just that.
Hillary Clinton has a long, objectively verifiable track record of acting recklessly on matters of foreign policy that seems to have slipped into a memory hole as the prospect of a Trump presidency looms overhead. While one would expect this rewriting of history to come from Clinton surrogates, it’s increasingly bizarre coming from nominally independent media pundits.
While BuzzFeed has certainly done important work of late, on issues ranging from sexual harassment to AIDS in Africa, when it comes to the most powerful person on earth, however—the president of the United States—its coverage is almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic.
The more cynical writers and pundits—no matter how contrived the task would be — would take the opportunity to take a story about a nationalistic British response to a pro-austerity EU, and make it about Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin.
In “An Expensive Reminder That Sanders Still Hasn’t Dropped Out: His Secret Service Detail,” the Washington Post used an eight-year-old stat to provide urgency to thesis that Sanders’ quixotic campaign is draining us, the good American “taxpayer,” of resources.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday (6/14/16) that Russian intelligence had hacked the DNC servers to steal opposition research on Donald Trump. Dozens of media outlets who picked up on the story uncritically presented Russian guilt in their headlines without qualification.
For establishment outlets like the New York Times, more important than Bernie Sanders dropping out of the race is that his core policy goals be dismissed as fantasy. In its editorial look back at the Sanders campaign, the Times did some ideological policing.
News “explainer” Vox ran a seemingly innocuous write-up on Friday of President Barack Obama appearing on NBC’s Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon the night before, “slow jamming” the benefits of the highly controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership. It would be funny if it weren’t a borderline parody of everything wrong with corporate-owned “new media”:
In “Trump Is a Much Worse Threat Than Brexit” (Washington Post, 6/6/16), Bill Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warned that a Trump presidency could “lead to a recession in 18 months.” The only problem is Summers, by many accounts, was instrumental in creating the last recession—an essential piece of context that’s left out of his latest warning and its subsequent coverage.
Hillary Clinton has a long, objectively verifiable track record of acting recklessly on matters of foreign policy that seems to have slipped into a memory hole as the prospect of a Trump presidency looms overhead. While one would expect this rewriting of history to come from Clinton surrogates, it’s increasingly bizarre coming from nominally independent media pundits.
Journalists are unwittingly helping to make overturning Citizens United that much more difficult by humoring the pretense that Super PACs aren’t part of political campaigns.
Over 45 million Americans live in poverty—but you wouldn’t think potential leaders of the country are expected to know or care anything about this, listening to the questions asked by the elite journalists who moderated the Democratic debates this primary season. A FAIR analysis of all nine democratic debates over the past seven months shows that not one question was asked about poverty.
As Donald Trump caught up with Hillary Clinton in the polls over the past two weeks, the Bernie Sanders campaign has reiterated its last-ditch argument to win over superdelegates and secure the nomination: The Vermont senator is walloping Trump in the polls by over ten points, in contrast to Clinton’s dead heat. To counter this increasingly messy fact, several Clinton boosters in the media have dusted off an old talking point: that Sanders hasn’t been properly “vetted”—thoroughly examined for political faults—rendering the polls meaningless.
Vox, which constantly tells its readers that life is actually swell, with the momentum of history indisputably on the road to justice, decreased poverty and less war, consistently uses a method of ranking countries to prop up its argument that “democracy” is on the rise. But dig into the criteria being used and you find a troubling definition of “democracy” that serves the interests of US power—and wealthy elites.
Why would so much ink be spilled on a candidate who, by the Post’s estimation, can’t possibly win? The objective is, of course, to further stigmatize Sanders’ ideas and platform goals—all of which are deeply antithetical to the editorial and financial bottom line of the paper.
The fascinating part of all this concern with “stealing from future generations” is it almost never includes military spending or the trillions in offshore tax shelters. Even if one accepts the claim that Social Security and Medicare are urgent issues “bankrupting” our country, it’s curious why other things that also cost trillions don’t appear as part of that conversation.
Journalists are unwittingly helping to make overturning Citizens United that much more difficult by humoring the pretense that Super PACs aren’t part of political campaigns.
The New York media tried and convicted 120 suspects as gang members solely on the say-so of the NYPD and federal officials.
Those reading New York Times Real Estate sections on a quiet Saturday morning aren’t expecting in-depth investigations. But the uncritical adoption of industry language has the paper of record either repeating or allowing others to repeat rather tone-deaf colonial language and tropes.
