FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Blogger and Philadelphia Inquirer writer Will Bunch has a review (Attytood, 5/11/09) of how, “by late last year, the world already knew a great deal about John Yoo, the Philadelphia native and conservative legal scholar whose tenure in the Bush administration as a top Justice Department lawyer lies at the root of the period of […]
The Associated Press‘ Shawn Pogatchnik (5/12/09) has the incredible and deeply alarming story of Dublin sociology student Shane Fitzgerald having “posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia” just as the world’s reporters were writing up the March 18 death of composer Maurice Jarre. Intended for “testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding […]
Current Anti-Advertising Agency CEO Steve Lambert and founder Jordan Selier have posted (AntiAdvertisingAgency.com, 5/12/09) their letter to the New York Times responding to a May 11 piece that cites one NYC advertising executive asking, “All you have to do is walk out the door for lunch and notice the number of vacant storefronts… so why […]
Hearing “the whining retreat of a whipped pup instead of the toothy growl of a watchdog,” the Colorado Independent‘s John Tomasic (5/11/09) quotes Washington Post reporter Paul Kane answering an online question with a new excuse for refusing to “call waterboarding people and slamming them into walls torture”–“because [the Post] fears a lawsuit for libel”: […]
Medical librarian blogger Laika Spoetnik (Laika’s MedLibLog, 5/8/09) has taken a long look at the international media “tsunami” generated by the Australian paper’s one sentence on “a fake Elsevier/Merck journal. It says: ‘The drug company also allegedly produced an entire journal–called the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine–and passed it off as an independent […]
Free Press‘ new report suggesting “how the government should respond to the current crisis in journalism”–“Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy” (5/12/09)–addresses both “short- and long-term strategies.” Among their transformative ideas: New Ownership Structures. Encouraging the establishment of nonprofit and low-profit news organizations through tax-exempt and low-profit limited liability company (L3C) models. New […]
Eugene Hernandez of indieWIRE.com reports (5/11/09) that NPR censored its own review of the Outrage documentary for “nam[ing] politicians believed to be closeted homosexuals in the film, specifically those whose public voting record counters the civil rights of gay and lesbian Americans.” NPR cited its privacy policy as reason, but to Hernandez “it seems to […]
Noticing how PBS‘s Gwen Ifill has a penchant for “filling her Washington Week program with journalists who almost invariably agree with each other instead of actually debating the issues of the week,” critic Charles Kaiser decided to contact her (CJR.org, 5/8/09) about a recent “discussion of torture in which the only issue the panelists identified […]
Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald gets the site’s lead story today (5/8/09, ad-viewing required) with an excerpt from the New York Times obituary for U.S. fighter pilot Harold E. Fischer Jr., who, as the Times headline puts it, was “Tortured in a Chinese Prison.” Greenwald deems such naming of Fischer’s ordeal–“kept in a dark, damp cell […]
The current Democracy Now! (5/8/09) features New York Times Pentagon Pundits reporter David Barstow giving Amy Goodman the background on the U.S. military’s retraction of a report clearing itself of domestic propaganda wrongdoing: So the report comes out in January, and it effectively exonerated the program. Now, one thing your viewers should know is that […]
Asking “Can We Get Reporters to Stop Saying That EFCA Takes Away the Secret Ballot?” Dean Baker bluntly states (Beat the Press, 5/7/09) that “it’s not true.” Even though this is one of the “most often repeated lines of the opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act”–“that it will deny workers the right to vote […]
It is quite telling that, even considering how in Ed Schultz’s May 7 MSNBC interview of Physician for a National Health Program Margaret Flowers and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, he “slaps a gratuitous insult on the heroines of Code Pink” and “says he’s against protesting and “getting arrested” as a rule but thinks it’s OK if […]
Quoting John Dewey’s warning about “the proper role of the press in a democracy”–“a class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge”–Eric Alterman finds it (Nation, 5/6/09) “difficult to imagine a more telling–and disturbing–manifestation of Dewey’s prediction than the current torture debate […]
During his regular review of scientific reporting for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Boyce Rensberger describes (5/7/09) how the “11-year (give or take) sunspot cycle, associated with a periodic reversal in the sunâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s magnetic poles” means that “the number of sunspots increases in the years just before a reversal.” But Rensberger notes that “Where are […]
Reading Mark Landler’s and Elizabeth Bumiller’s New York Times “tidbit out of an overheated Washington last week: ‘President Obama and his top advisers have been meeting almost daily to discuss options for helping the Pakistani government and military repel the [Taliban] offensive,’” Tom Engelhardt (TomDispatch, 5/7/09) decides to toss some cold water on “this kind […]
Bringing us the news that “the North Carolina legislature just sent a bill to study committee (a.k.a shelved it at least until next year) that would have crippled municipal broadband projects in the state,” AlterNet‘s Tana Ganeva (5/6/09) tells “why that’s a really, really good (albeit temporary) thing”: According to a recent study, America ranks […]
Eyeing a new poll that “revealed that one in four Americans now believe that the ‘faux’ news delivered by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is replacing ‘real’ news sources as viable outlets,” Greg Mitchell (Editor & Publisher, 5/5/09) has to wonder “if the remaining (if relatively low) public respect for the press is gone for […]
Blogging on how May 4 and 5 broadcasts “feature NPR continuing its function of justifying and sanitizing the U.S. torture regime,” dedicated public radio critic Mytwords (NPR Check, 5/5/09) plumbs the depths of NPR‘s aversion to “human rights or international law advocates or experts”–instead preferring “members or former members of various U.S. government agencies,” even […]
The North American Congress on Latin America has published (NACLA Magazine, 5-6/09) Dan Beeton’s account of how, following Evo Morales’ huge win in the Bolivian presidential referendum of last August, his opponents instigated “riots, economic sabotage and the massacre of more than 20 indigenous”–during which Bolivia threw out the U.S. ambassador for attempted spying and […]
Just one highlight in Brad Jacobson’s wide-ranging interview of Editor & Publisher‘s Greg Mitchell (Media Bloodhound, 5/5/09) is Mitchell’s scorn for “media coverage of the anti-tax tea parties”: Greg Mitchell: Most amazing was that they tended to treat it like protests in the past. There have been national abortion rights protests and immigration rights protests […]
