FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Reporting on New York’s Javed Iqbal receiving a 69-month prison sentence for “assisting Hezbollah… by providing satellite television services that included broadcasts by the party’s television station, Al Manar,” Peter Daniels (World Socialist Web Site, 4/27/09) mentions that the broadcast packages included “Christian evangelists as well as Hezbollah” before explaining how the law under which […]
David Swanson has noted (Consortium News, 4/23/09) that, as “much of elite U.S. punditry is backing away from torture,” the Boston Globe‘s Jeff Jacoby is bucking that trend with an April 22 column in which “he both opposes torture under all circumstances and excuses it given the current circumstances.” Jacoby’s main justification for U.S. torture […]
Demonstrating his trademark ability to move effortlessly from belligerent grandstanding to completely fictive political commentary, Fox star Bill O’Reilly claimed on April 22 that current and former attorney generals “Eric Holder and Janet Reno put the wall up between the FBI and the CIA, which led to the 9/11 attacks.” But Media Matters points out […]
Writing at Salon (4/23/09, ad-viewing required) of how the “sheer criminality” of George W. Bush-era torture, “really for the first time, has exploded into mainstream political debates,” Glenn Greenwald is thoroughly unsurprised by their behavior as “media stars are forced to address it”: Exactly as one would expect, they are closing ranks, demanding (as always) […]
Describing his previous “ill-starred tenure at New York magazine” as having been “a crash course in the staggering unselfawareness of Manhattan class privilege,” Chris Lehmann (The Awl, 4/21/09) now applies his insight to the magazine’s recent “Rage of the Rich” issue, in which Gabriel Sherman “spells out with admirable, if analytically bankrupt, clarity” what Lehmann […]
Brad Jacobson has a new Media Bloodhound post (4/21/09) lauding CNN anchor Anderson Cooper for his “refreshing” refusal of “a generic phony Devil’s advocate stance” when scholar Mark Danner “torpedoed” CNN analyst David Gergen’s claim that the number of people who were interrogated [by U.S. personnel] with these harsh and, I think, torturous techniques was […]
Asking a simple question about a large issue–“How Do Trillion Dollar Bank Bailouts Fit With ‘Free-Market Fundamentalism?’”–Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 4/19/09) tells his readers that “the obvious answer is, they don’t”–since, “if you are a free-market fundamentalist, then you are absolutely opposed to bank bailouts” that “involve taking taxpayer dollars and handing them to […]
On the occasion of the first annual Izzy Awards from Jeff Cohen’s Park Center for Independent Media, the son of progressive journalism icon I.F. Stone, Jeremy Stone (Consortium News, 4/1/09), describes Stone’s most journalistically valuable quality–“his capacity for thinking independently”–along with its rewards and consequences: In the McCarthy era, because he spoke in defense of […]
Blogging from his regular Salon perch (4/20/09, ad-viewing required), Glenn Greenwald notes that the public wants to investigate U.S. torture (that’s what the polls tell us), but: These facts about public opinion are virtually always excluded from establishment media discussions, and those who advocate investigations and prosecutions–the view held by large percentages, if not majorities, […]
Taking the brave position (ScholarsAndRogues.com, 4/20/09) that the National Review Online is so bad that it makes William F. Buckley‘s print version look “semi-respectable” by comparison, former U.S. Navy Commander Jeff Huber writes that in his April 11 NRO post, “military historian and former classics professor Victor Davis Hanson comes across like a rabid war […]
A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (4/18/09) samples the response to Mike Allen of Politico‘s quote of “a former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush” calling the publishing of U.S. torture memos “damaging because these are techniques that work“: This, from Andrew Sullivan, is a representative example of the reaction: Allen […]
Political Animal blogger Steve Benen (4/8/09) asks if maybe it’s “Already Too Late for the Truth” in cable news coverage of U.S. military spending, considering that directly “after Defense Secretary Robert Gates unveiled his recommendations for restructuring military spending–and boosting the Pentagon budget by $21 billion (4 percent)–the response was immediate: The Obama administration is […]
Norman Solomon is unable to resist the irony (Huffington Post, 4/11/09) of a lead New York Times article titled “Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory,” inverting the futuristic character of news that scientists possibly “could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain” to look back on how “American media […]
Free Press Campaign Director Tim Karr (SaveTheInternet.com, 4/16/09) is celebrating Time Warner Cable having “shelved its plan to impose excessive Internet fees against those who use the Web for more than email and basic surfing.” Karr details how Time Warner Cable had been testing new Internet use penalties on people in Beaumont, Texas, and planned […]
Reading Wall Street Journal reporter Gary Fields’ “point that a family making slightly over $250,000 doesn’t necessarily feel all that ‘rich’ when it comes to facing a tax hike from Barack Obama,” Matthew Yglesias (Think Progress, 4/17/09) dubs his story “The Not-So-Compelling Plight of the Somewhat Rich” and notes that “what the story doesn’t do […]
“Co-director of Press Pass TV, a youth organization in Boston,” Cara Lisa Powers (Women In Media & News, 3/31/09) is telling how, having “shot a story at the home of a community member who had a scare Friday night when shots were fired outside his childrenâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s bedroom,” her group “sent the story to local media […]
Long a critic of the Washington Post‘s habit of pushing of “its editorial position in the news section” when operating as “a strong proponent of reducing Social Security benefits,” Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 3/31/09) has a new example of what he dubs the Post‘s “Jihad Against Social Security”: In keeping with this practice, it […]
Blogging on “Greta Van Susteren’s defensive response” to reports “saying that one of the reasons that Sarah Palin has been caught up in a ‘series of public relations gaffes’ is because she is ‘taking advice from Greta and her husband,’” major GOP booster John Coale, the Huffington Post‘s Geoffrey Dunn (3/29/09) thinks the Fox News […]
Despite the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s new “State of the Media” report likening the current U.S. media condition to “someone about to begin physical therapy following a stroke suddenly contracting a debilitating secondary illness,” Eric Alterman and Danielle Ivory spot (Center for American Progress, 3/26/09) “one sunny area in the news business, according […]
Quoting Washington Post/CNN media “critic” Howard Kurtz slamming Headline News for “talking about this constantly on cable for more than a week” and “feasting on this terrible situation,” Brad Jacobson (Media Bloodhound, 3/30/09) also cites Kurtz railing against media obsession with octuplet mother Nadya Suleman on CNN: “The media were demonizing her….all the while capitalizing […]
