FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Media reporter DeWayne Wickham sees (USA Today, 3/3/09) the new Pentagon rules allowing photography of U.S. casualty coffins as “just the silver lining” around the dark cloud of a fact that “our free press is still being stage-managed by those who run the wars.” That the new regulations permit photos only “if the family of […]
Keeping tabs on the “Fair and Balanced” network, Mark Howard (News Corpse, 3/2/09) details how last year, prior to the election, Fox News was already fortifying its right flank. New multimillion dollar contracts were handed out to Roger Ailes, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Hannity’s show shed the dead weight of alleged liberal Alan Colmes. […]
In examining how the “national news media remains largely enthralled by the pro-Republican rules of the past three decades,” Robert Parry (Consortium News, 2/28/09) notes that “in both right-wing and mainstream news organizations, stories continue to be structured as faulting Obama and largely absolving Bush.” Parry looks at recent major New York Times and Washington […]
Reporting on last week’s closure of the 150-year-old Denver Rocky Mountain News, Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!, 2/27/09) give us the financial backstory behind the fact that “the newspaper industry is going through a major, major upheaval in these last few days”: “A lot of the papers ended up being bought in recent […]
Characterizing an “Incredibly Bad Economic Piece on NPR” as having “helped a blackmail effort,” blogging economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 2/27/09) says “the piece concluded by telling listeners that ‘the problem is us,’ that we had borrowed too much and therefore we have to pay the cost in the form of big taxpayer bailouts”: […]
Having already caught “the infamous GOP talking point that the stimulus package contains gobs of cash for saving marsh mice” having “found its way into a New York Times story, without the paper mentioning that the claim is untrue,” blogger Greg Sargent (Plum Line, 2/24/09) now finds that “earlier drafts of the story did describe […]
Jeff Cohen journalism student Christopher Lisee has a blog post (myxomatosis, 2/27/09) with video of an independent reporter’s question to University of Connecticut basketball coach Jim Calhoun. Asked to justify his being the “highest-paid state employee” during “a $2 billion budget deficit,” the coach’s belligerent response–“my best advice to you… shut up”–has the questioner responding […]
Calling a PBS NewsHour budget plan segment by Judy Woodruff “a primer on how to conduct an interview relying almost solely on Republican talking points,” Brad Jacobson (Media Bloodhound, 2/27/09) says her “first question isn’t necessarily a Republican talking point, but it might as well be”: “$3.66 trillion, is that a number you can actually […]
Immigrant rights advocate and independent journalist Roberto Lovato is worried (Huffington Post, 2/26/09) that Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Department Detective Aaron Douglas “deals with the world’s media more than most” when flacking for Joe Arpaio–“America’s Toughest Sheriff”–“Though he is a local official, his is often the first voice heard by many of the foreign correspondents […]
In his online column (2/26/09) for the Maynard Institute, Journal-isms, Richard Prince reports on those who see the New York Post‘s recent cartoon of a chimpanzee shot-dead–so that now “they’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill”–as “an opportunity to examine the factors that led to the cartoon’s appearance in the […]
Lamenting the fact that “commercial radio stations everywhere have been swallowed up by a handful of giant corporations, playlists have shrunk and local and independent acts have been drowned out,” Free Press activist Timothy Karr (MediaCitizen, 2/26/09) also lets us know that the good news is that your rescue is at hand. On Tuesday, Reps. […]
Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias (2/25/09) hits the Washington Post for “standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is”–and then spreads some of the blame around: Meanwhile, one of the Post‘s main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is the New York […]
Media writer Nat Ives (AdvertisingAge.com, 2/23/09) throws some cold water on overheated reportage of “all the apocalyptic news about newspapers”: Even as they take blow after blow from recession and digital media, newspapers themselves still earn decent profits…. “Not a lot of papers are operating at a loss,” said John Morton, the veteran industry analyst. […]
While “TV news executives would like us to forget this whole bizarre episode,” FAIR founder and former Fox News talking head Jeff Cohen looks back (Huffington Post, 2/22/09) at the shameful media circus that was Chandra Levy’s disappearance. “As I witnessed the farce from inside cable news,” Cohen writes, “I could see it was all […]
Industry news outlet TV Predictions has a commentary from Phillip Swann (2/22/09) telling us that when “roughly 36 percent” of local television stations recently stopped broadcasting ahead of the digital conversion deadline (“stations save money by switching early because they would no longer have to transmit both analog and digital signals”), “the FCC received more […]
Ryan Chittum of CJR.org holds up (2/19/09) Rick Santelli’s recent CNBC tantrum as “an example of what’s wrong with a certain kind of financial journalism, the kind where people of like backgrounds spend all day staring at tickers and interviewing each other. As such, Chittum says, “the segment couldn’t more clearly illustrate the disconnect between […]
Economics blogger Dean Baker asserts that “about the only thing that readers can learn from an article on Japan in the business section today” is that “The New York Times Doesn’t Like Japan” (Beat the Press, 2/22/09). Among the piece’s “variety of complaints about Japan’s economy, many of which are contradictory,” is “the standard line […]
Huffington Post journalist Sam Stein thinks (2/19/09) that “coming off of a tone-deaf cartoon that compared the author of the stimulus bill with a crazed, shot-dead chimpanzee, it seemed likely that, for the time being, provocative political metaphors would be put on hold”–but that would be discounting the offensive superpowers of hate radio staple Rush […]
The February 18 Democracy Now! segment on Fox reality TV star Sheriff Joe Arpaio features Arizona’s East Valley Tribune reporter Ryan Gabrielson telling Amy Goodman exactly how Arpaio’s officers went to the homes of the two publishers for Phoenix New Times, which—there was an investigation being conducted into a case where New Times published Joe […]
The Sacramento Unit of the California Media Workers Guild has published (BeeGuildNow.org, 2/16/09) an open letter to McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt describing how, in quick succession, our salaries and our pensions have been frozen. The company match has been eliminated from our 401K plans. Weâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢ve gone through two rounds of buyouts. Our ranks are thinner. […]
