FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Since the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Mohammed bin Salman has been on a media charm offensive, trying to present one of the most repressive states in the world as a progressive, emerging country.
With tremendously high stakes, media rely largely on the testimonies of US officials, many of them anonymous, who have a clear incentive to lie and defame three countries with whom the United States is currently ramping up tensions.
For the New York Times, crying election fraud then staging a coup is bad, and just like what dictators do—unless it is the US making dubious claims of electoral fraud against official enemies, in which case it is an honorable practice.
Corporate media—whose owners are overwhelmingly from the class that would be paying a wealth tax—are returning to throw cold water on the idea.
Virtually every story of national significance includes secret or leaked material; they could all be in jeopardy under this new prosecutorial theory.
Discussing the West Coast heatwave and fires, corporate media have been extremely hesitant to frame the discussion around climate change.
Words like “muscular” and “robust” are all too regularly used as euphemisms to sugarcoat inflicting violence around the world.
Israel is bombing Palestine again, although you likely wouldn’t guess that from watching TV news.
Much of the public discussion of the Harper’s letter misses the fact that it is the powerful, not the masses, who inordinately have the ability to “cancel” individuals for their actions, and that it is the left and those challenging power who consistently suffer the brunt of the consequences.
Resisting the reopening of schools on the basis that the White House press secretary misspoke represents a lost opportunity to actually oppose the administration’s scandalously poor handling of the coronavirus.
Despite the fact that the anonymous accusations were far from proven, and that both the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal included categorical denials from all those involved, including the White House, the Taliban and Moscow, much of corporate media treated the story as an established fact from the outset.
Some corporate media have recently been taken with the “inspirational” story of Emily Thompson, the first woman to pilot the super-costly F-35 jet in combat.
The problem with much of the reporting focusing on rich, developed countries where media have foreign correspondents is that it ignores often superior responses to the virus from much of the Global South, countries that have nothing like the resources of advanced Western states.
During an epochal catastrophe such as this one, where bodies are piling up outside morgues and tens of millions have lost their jobs, corporate media’s neoliberal understanding of what is uplifting stretches credulity to the breaking point.
Unfortunately, for journalists stuck in a corporate media system that promotes deference to authority and finds equivalency even when there is none, the president’s dangerous ramblings need to be treated as legitimate and worthy of discussion, even in apparently adversarial media.
corporate media have accepted Trump’s premise that China is uniquely to blame and must be “held accountable” for its sins,
Election Focus 2020: The Washington Post’s poorly sourced, evidence-free and quickly walked-back report became the basis for endless stories linking Russia and Bernie Sanders.
The message from the media is clear: Their protesters are good, regardless of what they do; ours are vandals, thugs or criminals. Their cops are bad; ours are unimpeachable heroes under fire for just doing their jobs.
Election Focus 2020: The “stop Bernie at all costs” mentality explains why some of the media simply ignored Sanders’ victory altogether, part of a longstanding Bernie blackout strategy.
Big news, everyone! Billionaires don’t like socialism. In response to a rising progressive tide in the United States, a new genre of stories has emerged in corporate media: rich guys warning against taxing them, or really changing anything about the system at all. Just as the press are keen for you to know that […]
