FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
In the face of one of the most conflicted, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant administrations in modern history, why is the most influential column space in the English-speaking world being used time and again to go after relatively powerless college kids and PC professors?
Faced with a unique and unprecedented threat in Trump, attempts to find “balance” between Trumpism and wholly unrelated phenomena to its left were tone deaf, and at times bordered on apologies for fascism.
Putatively liberal outlet Vox spends a great many column inches trying to stop the national labor movement known as “Fight for 15” from increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
The idea that Sanders had not been “properly examined” was pure dogma, asserted by pundits with hardly any critical thought. It was a major contributing factor to the Democrats not nominating someone who, by available measures, was a stronger candidate than Clinton.
That a group of Cold Warrior hacks would publish such a blacklist is not a surprise; that one of the most established names in American news would uncritically parrot it was.
The balance between covering hate and promoting it is a difficult one, and one that we shouldn’t dismiss out of hand. But after a week of wall-to-wall coverage, most of which one could imagine the Nazi Dork and his Nazi friends reading and posting to Facebook with a smirk, the balance has come down heavily on the side of fascist agitprop.
Over the past two weeks, pundits from all ends of the spectrum have been scrambling to explain Clinton’s unexpected loss, with reasons spanning from the plausible to the highly dubious; Lately, a new, entirely bogus culprit has emerged from center and center-left circles: “identity politics” and its close cousin, “political correctness.”
Thousands of protesters rejected the Trump administration’s agenda of forced deportations, Muslim bans and attacks on women’s reproductive rights. On cue, several center and center-left pundits jumped in to call into question and concern-troll this exercise of dissent.
The idea that Sanders had not been “properly examined” was pure dogma, asserted by pundits with hardly any critical thought. It was true because Important People in Important Media Outlets simply said it was.
Hillary Clinton has been the subject of many scandals–some legitimate, some with a mix of fact and fantasy. But last week a “scandal” emerged that was created by media entirely out of whole cloth.
But media don’t just cover terrorism, they engage in meta-terrorism—the terror that comes from the gratuitous or excessive coverage of stories that don’t actually involve terrorism, but rather potential or staged terrorism, or ISIS propaganda repackaged as news.
How do you blame Trump on the age group least likely to vote for Trump?
Russia, ISIS and taxes overwhelmed all other topics during the four presidential and vice-presidential debates, totaling 429 mentions from both candidates and questioners.
Despite the fact that the world has endured 16 consecutive months of record-breaking heat, not one of the debate moderators saw fit to ask about climate change in any of 2016’s general election debates.
The response to Clinton campaign leaks from some journalists has been to analyse, dissect and find the most newsworthy bits. For others, the reaction has been to dismiss and downplay, turning the often cynical meatgrinder of American politics into a snooze barely worthy of discussion.
The fact that the United States has been literally fueling Saudi warplanes for 18 months while selling weapons and providing intelligence support to the Gulf monarchy—acts which even the US State Department believes could expose the US to war crimes prosecution—was either downplayed or ignored.
A review of topics mentioned and questions asked in the first three presidential/vice-presidential debates shows a significant emphasis on Russia, terrorism and taxes—pushing aside most other issues, including climate change, abortion, education, campaign finance and LGBTQ rights.
There’s an attempt by some pundits to blame Millennials for the rise of Trump, bending logic and basic social science in the process. These attempts come in different forms, but one recent gambit is to point the finger for Trumpism on the falling standards of civic education, a thesis that either implicitly or explicitly indicts younger voters
The vice presidential debate provided a stark picture of just how distorted corporate media’s priorities are compared to issues of actual consequence in people’s lives. Issues such as abortion, poverty, LGBTQ rights and climate change were never asked about.
That CSIS would promote the expansion of the military and surveillance state is predictable, since that’s who pays its bills; what the Times revealed was a specific, rather direct example of this, using heretofore secret documents.
