FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok has the latest (HateWatch, 3/19/09) on CNN‘s “Lou Dobbs, the insult-spewing Latino-basher”: Dobbs, of course, is known for regularly pushing defamatory falsehoods about undocumented immigrants–they fill one third of American prison and jail cells, they’re part of a secret Mexican plan to “reconquer” the American Southwest, they are […]
Wondering at the “remarkable class solidarity” displayed by U.S. elitists, Robert Parry (Consortium News, 3/22/09) hypothesizes that “this may help explain why the Washington Post‘s editorial writers penned three editorials last week decrying the populist outrage over the AIG bonuses“: The first editorial on March 17, entitled “Bonus Blowback,” purported to share the public’s outrage […]
The media activist group Free Press has a new release (3/19/09) warning of the latest threat to free speech online: “a technology known as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) that offers Internet service providers unprecedented control over Internet content.” DPI, says Free Press, “could spell disaster for the free market online,” AKA Net Neutrality. According to […]
Journal-isms writer Richard Prince is highlighting (3/19/09) an article in the current issue of GQ headlined “You Think Your Job Sucks? Try Working for Lenny Dykstra”–the title of which might be an understatement, considering some of its reporting therein: A photo editor’s unflattering portrait of baseball-player-turned-financial adviser Lenny Dykstra as a racist, sexist and homophobe […]
Upon seeing that, “on her show Tuesday night, Fox News‘ Greta Van Susteren devoted an entire segment to criticizing David Letterman” for having “made jokes about Sarah Palin and her family,” Political Animal blogger Steve Benen (3/19/09) notices that there seems to be a pattern here. In fact, it’s hard not to notice that Van […]
Think Progress editor Ali Frick (3/18/09) has posted video of CNN‘s celebrity xenophobe descending into the Rosie O’Donnell realm of racist ridicule of Asian language: Yesterday on his radio show, anti-immigrant crusader Lou Dobbs attacked St. Patrick’s Day as a needless “ethnic holiday.” “How about an American day,” he proposed. He also wondered whether other […]
Resisting the tide of “liberal blogger men” who “are thrilled with the New York Times‘ appointment of 29-year-old Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat to replace William Kristol on the op-ed page,” Katha Pollitt (Nation, 3/18/09) contrasts the fact that “Douthat is best known for his conservative Catholicism (abortion is murder, frozen embryos are children, contraception kills […]
Editorializing in the Wall Street Journal (3/18/09) on how “Financial Journalists Fail Upward,” Wrecking Crew author Thomas Frank sees the “world of financial infotainment” as its own “market where accountability does not seem to exist” and in which “the old order discredits itself, but the old order persists nevertheless”: This needs to be repeated every […]
Writing that “an astonishing number of North American dailies are gasping their last,” veteran Mexico journalist John Ross (CounterPunch, 3/18/09) cites “a recent survey by the New York Times, itself on its last legs,” that “lists 75 daily newspapers of being at risk from sea to stinking sea,” and singles out how San Francisco Chronicle […]
Personally inclined to think that “CNBC may be beyond repair,” John Nichols (Nation, 3/17/09) still thinks a new Fix CNBC! campaign’s “messaging is smart and instructive with regard to the broader media crisis in America,” quoting their open letter to the financial network: Americans need CNBC to do strong, watchdog journalism–asking tough questions to Wall […]
Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 3/17/09) weighs in on Richard Cohen’s defense of Jim Cramer, accusing the Washington Post columnist of “continuing the stream of excuses for the financial media’s failure to warn of the economic crisis.” Baker sees “an effort to imply that the issues involved were very complex” lying “at the center of […]
As “the American foreign policy community worked itself into something resembling a frenzy over the appointment of Charles W. ‘Chas’ Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council”–because “at stake was, if not a direct policy battle of huge consequence, a real struggle over the range of viewpoints that will be permitted in an official government […]
Noting how “media have been pelting us with heart-wrenching stories about the neo-suffering of the Nouveau Poor”–“Sales of Gulfstream jets declining!”–Barbara Ehrenreich pretends (Barbara’s Blog, 3/12/09) to be “tempted to delete ‘class inequality’ from my worry list” before doing some actual reporting: But hard times are no more likely to abolish class inequality than Obama’s […]
Paying homage to “perhaps the first journalist to speak out on the racist and sexist implications of lynching,” Black Agenda Report‘s Sikivu Hutchinson (3/11/09) says that the “relative obscurity” of Ida B. Wells doesn’t reflect well on the present day: Despite her challenges to the American criminal justice system, her long record of publication at […]
Hoping for “a trickle-down of a different sort, of compassion,” media writer Edward Wasserman gives his personal take (Miami Herald, 3/16/09) on resurgent media interest in (some) impoverished Americans: My own sense is that, in general, coverage of the poor has been so bad for so long that if indeed there is growing interest in […]
Veteran journalist Robert Parry (Consortium News, 3/15/09) has a message for anyone left who, when they “hear the name Washington Post,” might “still think of… brave journalists facing down a corrupt president”–“today’s version of the newspaper would be a sad disappointment, a betrayal of a noble past”: Over the last three decades, the Post has […]
Writing on CounterPunch, former Wall Street insider Pam Martens notes (3/16/09) that the academics and economists (none of whom ever worked a day on Wall Street) have been telling us in op-eds and speeches and testimony before Congress that the crumbling Wall Street structure results from bundled subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps […]
When NPR ombud Alicia Shepard commented on an NPR blog that “we can all take a lesson from” Jon Stewart because “he holds people in power accountable for what they say”–this being her “definition of a good journalist”–Matthew Murrey, AKA NPR Check blogger Mytwords, couldn’t resist asking “So when will Shepard hold the NPR journalists […]
Women In Media & News guest blogger Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser’s examination (3/12/09) of the “media firestorm” that “erupted… when Nadya Suleman gave birth to octuplets” shows that in initial “stories playing on the well-worn ‘wow factor’”–like “the AP‘s piece, posted on Fox News‘ website, [that] bore a cutesy headline: ‘8 Is Definitely Enough‘”–“basic information was […]
Reporting that “marketers are running advertisements on the covers of some publications,” Stuart Elliott (New York Times, 3/11/09) reviews past precedents–“the February issue of Esquire broke ground with a window, or flap, in the middle of the cover under which [was] an ad for…a series on the Discovery Channel” and “a hole in the [1990] […]
