FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
ZNet has Noam Chomsky‘s in-depth analysis (11/25/08) of the recent U.S. presidential election–its likely ramifications, and its overall democratic qualities as compared to other countries. Chomsky here addresses the corporate media aspect: In the liberal Boston Globe, the headline of the lead story observed that Obama’s “grassroots strategy leaves few debts to interest groups”: labor […]
The folks at Free Press recount (11/25/08) how, “when St. Paul police launched a violent crackdown on journalists covering the Republican National Convention,” the media reform group “needed an on-the-ground organizer to pressure city officials to drop the charges against the journalists”–luckily they “knew just the person to call: Nancy Doyle Brown of the Twin […]
TV reporter Michael Schneider updates us (Variety, 11/25/08) on Fox‘s race to the ethical bottom of media programming. The real losers? Kids, as usual: In an unprecedented move, Fox will program two hours of longform commercials on Saturday mornings starting in January. That’s believed to be the first time a major network has slated full-blown, […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald contrasts (11/26/08, ad-viewing required) Joe Klein in the current Time magazine declaiming George W. Bush’s “ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign” as a “defining moment… of the Bush failure” with Klein’s May 4, 2003 Face the Nation response to […]
Eric Hananoki and Lauren Auerbach have a new Media Matters exposé (11/24/08) of how, since the beginning of October, Dick Morris has repeatedly used his columns and Fox News appearances to promote and raise money for the National Republican Trust PAC without disclosing that the organization has paid $24,000 to a company apparently connected to […]
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has unsettling new results (Kaiser Family Foundation, 11/24/08) from a “study of how the U.S. news media covered health issues over an 18-month period from January 2007 through June 2008.” The report “finds that news about health and health care made up less than four percent […]
Under the ironic headline “God Damn The God Damn Liberal Media” (A Tiny Revolution, 11/20/08), Jonathan Schwarz points out an astonishing quote from Scott Horton‘s new article in Harper‘s on creating some kind of accountability for the torture conducted by the Bush administration (subscription required): [I]n a 2006 radio interview, Dick Cheney said simply that […]
Hullabaloo blogger digby deflates (11/21/08) what she says “has actually been an article of faith among the gasbags for a very long time”: Until recently, what they proclaimed (without qualification) was that this was a “conservative country.” The election of a Democrat with a popular mandate required them to change their rhetoric. But it hasn’t […]
The ever-vigilant Electronic Frontier Foundation announces (11/18/08) its representation of “a New York City community organizer [who] is fighting back in court after her parody website challenging redevelopment efforts in New York City’s historic Union Square was shut down with bogus claims of copyright infringement and cybersquatting”: As one part of her education campaign, [Savitri] […]
As George W. Bush prepares to leave office, Ian Williams (Guardian.co.uk, 11/18/08) thinks that what is really in order is some sort of pardon and apology to Dan Rather, who CBS‘s cowardly management squeezed from 60 Minutes for telling the truth about Bush’s war record. Rather’s suit against them, with its accompanying subpoenas, has now […]
In looking at “How Our Gutless Media Helped Trigger the Credit Crisis,” Trudy Lieberman examines (Columbia Journalism Review, 11/20/08) “just one piece of evidence of the decline of the consumer movement, the rise of consumerism to replace it and the media’s role in both trends.” Lieberman recalls then-New York State Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s veto of […]
Glenn Greenwald delineates for Salon readers (11/21/08, ad-viewing required) the implications of the Committee to Protect Journalists including a prisoner of U.S. forces on their list of “six journalists who have faced down persecution and grave danger in their line of work”: So, to recap the award winners: We have a reporter persecuted by the […]
Don’t miss this week’s offering on the FAIR radio program CounterSpin (11/21/08): The victory of Proposition 8 in California has, at least for the moment, put the brakes on gay marriage in that state. The post-election recriminations are flying, but the main story we’re hearing is that black voters turned out in droves–to support Barack […]
CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn confesses (Nation, 11/19/08) to being moved to violent thoughts “while listening to the McLaughlin Group, all of whom presumably haul home at least $200,000 a year, as they deplored the unconscionable wages of line workers in Detroit”: The same urge flares up when reading the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page. As […]
Blogging communications attorney Harold Feld (WetMachine, 11/14/08) thinks he missed a class in law school. Not once in my Administrative Law class did my professor ever tell me that you could respond to a federal investigation by telling the agency, “We know you have authority, but we’d rather not answer these questions because you are […]
Via Beat the Press: Saying he “might expect it from right-leaning commentators like Will Wilkinson” but not “from someone like Mark Perry, who lives in Flint, Michigan,” Felix Salmon of Portfolio notes (11/18/04) that “all of them are perpetuating the meme that the average GM worker costs more than $70 an hour, once you include […]
Responding (11/13/08) to those “who would argue that the election of the first African-American president signaled the country has moved past the need to be concerned about racial equity,” PBS.org‘s Dori J. Maynard writes that it is true that some television networks put on air more African-American commentators during the campaign. Those additional voices, however, […]
Via A Tiny Revolution, a reminder from Vanity Fair website contributor Peter Newcomb (11/14/08) of the unspoken motivations of a bazillionaire pundit writing an enormously influential column on economics: It would be easy to dismiss today’s rant… by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as yet another ideological tirade against the U.S. automobile industry. But […]
Posting on Editor & Publisher‘s E&P Pub blog (11/17/08), Greg Mitchell has more on “Misleading Parents After Their Kids Are Killed in War”: Battle fatalities are way down in Iraq, thank goodness (though not Afghanistan), but many U.S. troops are still passing away in “noncombat” ways, via accidents, friendly fire, suicides and so on. And […]
From his perch over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald (11/18/08, ad-viewing required) sees “nothing new” in the current media craze for “bipartisanship“: “To the contrary, the last eight years have been defined, more than anything else, by overarching bipartisan cooperation and consensus.” Where is the evidence of the supposed partisan wrangling that we hear so much […]
