FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Noticing how “in the past week, Republican politicians and pundits have been striving mightily to invoke fear in the hearts of the American people,” News Corpse blogger Mark Howard has collected (5/25/09) some choice quotes from GOP members “blanketing the airwaves with assertions that President Obama’s policies on national security (Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, torture, etc.) […]
Reporting that “the Obama administration has recently paid a lot of lip service to freedom of the press, particularly around the case of Iranian-American journalist Roxanna Saberi, who was released May 11 from an Iranian prison,” Jeremy Scahill asks (Rebel Reports, 5/26/09) the simple question, “If Iran Freed Roxanna Saberi, Why Won’t the U.S. Release […]
Poking holes in the Brookings Institution’s “preening conceit”—”they bequeath their website with an ‘.edu’ suffix…. They are ‘scholars.’ Just ask them and they’ll tell you“—Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald (5/26/09, ad-viewing required) quotes one blogger fundamentally debunking Brookings mainstay William Glaberson‘s May 22 New York Times contention that, as U.S. president, Barack Obama “has sworn an oath […]
Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post, 5/25/09) is offering, as “a particularly egregious example” of corporate media as “enabler of the transformation of real reform into D.C. ‘reform,’” a May 23 L.A. Times editorial she thinks “might as well have been written by industry lobbyists (the way many ‘reform’ bills are).” After her initial reaction to the […]
Wondering “why NPR decided it was appropriate to present Cheney’s blatantly self-serving propaganda as anything remotely relevant to current policy,” NPR Check contributor Brian (5/23/09) blogs about current president Barack Obama and former vice president Dick Cheney recently “attacking the policies of the other administration and defending their own positions in speeches.” Even though each […]
Remembering all too well how the New York Times “helped sell the Iraq War with a bogus story about aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges and withheld evidence of illegal spying on Americans for more than a year,” Consortium News editor Robert Parry (5/21/09) tells how the paper “is again mishandling a sensitive story in a […]
Political science professors Sonia Cardenas and Andrew Flibbert survey the bloodthirsty media reaction to African pirates for CounterPunch (5/22/09): Across countless blogs and media outlets, here and abroad, thousands of people have called unequivocally–often in blunt, colorful language–for killing Somali pirates. “Kill the Pirates” was the headline of a Washington Post op-ed on April 13 […]
Amy Goodman recently interviewed independent journalist Jeremy Scahill on her Democracy Now! show (5/19/09) regarding the fact that, in Scahill’s words, “while much of the focus has been on the tactical use of torture at Guantanamo, almost no attention had been paid to a parallel force” known as the Immediate Reaction Force. Describing the methods […]
Jonathan Schwarz recently caught the Washington Post crediting the author of an anti-progressive tax op-ed as just “an economics professor,” when in fact he sat on tax-funded bailout beneficiary “AIG’s board of directors. He’s also a member of the board’s finance committee.” Now, continuing (A Tiny Revolution, 5/21/09) to mine the Post‘s editorial page for […]
New York Times media reporter Tim Arango has a story (5/20/09) on one very serious repercussion from shrinking corporate news outlets: Opponents of the death penalty looking to exonerate wrongly accused prisoners say their efforts have been hobbled by the dwindling size of America’s newsrooms, and particularly the disappearance of investigative reporting at many regional […]
Jonathan Hiskes of Grist—who recently exposed “The NYT‘s Favorite ‘Climate Change Denier’”—has now (5/13/09) caught Fox News giving airtime to Marc Morano’s charge of Al Gore “profiting off global warming campaign” : Say you’re a harried cable news producer with 24 gaping hours to fill with finished material every day of the week. Say you’re […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald (5/19/09, ad-viewing required) “gives the lie to the collective national claim that we learned our lesson and are now regretful about the Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism”: Republicans are right about the fact that while it was Bush officials who led the way in implementing these radical and lawless policies, most of the […]
Taking note of Bill O’Reilly’s “cheerleading the downfall” of newspapers–“he reacted with glee when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was forced to go Web-only. More recently in his column, O’Reilly similarly wisecracked about the New York Times‘ financial woes”–MediaWeek editor Mike Shields (Editor & Publisher, 5/18/09) challenges “O’Reilly’s theory for why these publications are in such deep […]
NACLA has Latin America writer Daniel Denvir’s review (5/11/09) of a new Bart Jones biography of Hugo Chavez. In it, Denvir’s reasons for having “never been a big reader of biographies”–“the product of our most unfortunate and idol-indulging tendencies”–give way to the fact that some leaders’ “images become proxies for larger ideological, social and cultural […]
Media critic blogger Mark Howard (News Corpse, 5/16/09) has a problem with the voluble media controversy over “the fact that Obama’s pro-choice position is in conflict with [Notre Dame] University’s Catholic principles”–namely, “neither the Catholic protesters nor the media ever threw similar tantrums when George W. Bush delivered the commencement speech in 2001, after receiving […]
In his introduction (TomDispatch, 5/12/09) to Pepe Escobar analyzing the current politics of the Aghanistan/Pakistan region, Tom Engelhardt describes how “there, the skies are filled with planes and unmanned aerial drones, and civilians as well as combatants die every day in increasing numbers as ever more frequent attacks and expanding conflicts make daily headlines.” But […]
Quoting Sen. Lindsey Graham’s statement at a May 13 Senate hearing that “one of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work,” Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/16/09) explains that this is “implicitly endorsing the Spanish Inquisition’s brutal treatment of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and other alleged heretics from the […]
Taking down “Michael Wolff’s fat masterpiece of sycophancy about Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News,” Murdoch Archipelago co-author Bruce Page (CounterPunch, 5/15/09) counters Wolff’s “astigmatic lens of gossip” with “a true outline” of Fox/Wall Street Journal mogul Murdoch’s roots: Rupert’s father, Sir Keith, founded the dynasty during World War I as a dirty-tricks […]
Pointing to a May 9 Boston Globe editorial saying that Barack “Obama conveyed the right message last week by hosting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari” to emphasize “the close link between Pakistan and the anti-Taliban struggle in Afghanistan,” before admitting that “U.S. military strikes against militants in both countries inevitably […]
Giving us a glimpse at “a large part of what was left on the editor’s floor” from his On the Media NPR interview, Harpers.org‘s Scott Horton (5/12/09) writes of “the New York Times and its history of dealing with the word ‘torture’”: I noted that in the pre-Bush era, the Times had absolutely no compunction […]
