FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Writing on his Consortium News website (11/11/08), Robert Parry warns Barack Obama–who “is being told to forego investigations of George W. Bush’s war crimes“–to “Beware the Lessons of ’93” when “the last Democratic president got burned with similar advice.” Parry lays odds that “had the full stories [of George H. W. Bush’s Iran/Contra involvement] been […]
Hearing Joe Scarborough utter “the phrase ‘fuck you’ when discussing Obama’s appointment of Rahm Emanuel” on MSNBC, Salon‘s Green Greenwald states (11/10/08, ad-viewing required) that he “couldn’t care any less”–except that he just can’t stomach the immense hypocrisy of “one of the most zealous crusaders against such awful filth on television”: Scarborough led the lynch […]
Fresh off successes in mobilizing people to pressure the FCC to condemn Comcast censorship and wrest “white spaces” from corporate control, Free Press has a new Internet for Everyone project announcing (11/11/08) their Los Angeles Town Hall event to “Kick-Start the Movement to Make an Internet Connection a Right of Every American”: The meeting–to be […]
The Media Matters staff has more (11/7/08) on the prominent press fallacy of “a ‘center-right’ country”: In a November 7 Washington Times column, [Heritage Foundation president Ed] Feulner claimed that Obama “campaigned on conservative themes throughout the fall,” and that Obama “took some conservative positions on issues like taxes (promising to cut them).” Yet prior […]
Economist Dean Baker catches (Beat the Press, 11/8/08) a Washington Post piece that “tells us how the people who designed the bank bailout were committed to the free market.” But Baker is intrigued to note that, “interestingly, the key decisions that they made gave the banks much better terms than they could have received from […]
Blogger Mytwords’ monitoring (NPR Check, 11/10/08) of National Public Radio finds Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon putting a shine on those two pillars of nationalism–God and country. He was having a little chat with two of Billy Graham‘s shysters grandchildren who have written a book glorifying their humble grandpa who lived in a “log […]
Currently a well-respected and widely published educator, Bill Ayers discusses the periodic “media episodes of fleeting notoriety” around his former membership in the Weather Underground–“it was always a bit surreal. Then came this political season”–and charts (In These Times, 11/7/08) how the ’08 campaign mania around him was amplified while bouncing from political operatives to […]
Recent Nobel laureate Paul Krugman uses his New York Times column (11/7/08) to answer the “many commentators” who are urging Mr. Obama to think small. Some make the case on political grounds: America, they say, is still a conservative country, and voters will punish Democrats if they move to the left. Others say that the […]
Corporate media may have belatedly embraced the historic black power gestures of 1968 Olympic medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos, but sports media critic Dave Zirin tells (Nation, 11/7/08) of how a modern-day version by one NFL player drew immediate condemnation: [Denver Broncos receiver Brandon] Marshall’s plan was to score a touchdown on Thursday night […]
Writing on the military paper’s blog (11/5/08), Stars and Stripes ombud Dave Mazzarella tears down the Pentagon reasoning from trying to block reporters from having contact with military personnel on Election Day: What servicemembers say while in uniform can be construed as a position of the Department of Defense, the officials said. No matter that […]
Moving “beyond the use of the term Muslim as a pejorative” to ask “what did real Muslim-Americans think of the Chicago senator? And how did they vote?”, Newseek‘s Lorraine Ali (11/7/08) cites a 10-state survey that found “95 percent of Muslims polled cast a ballot” and “89 percent of respondents voted for Obama.” Ali sees […]
Dean Baker finds (Beat the Press, 11/5/08) a Wall Street Journal economy article fails to support its editors’ headline–which itself just happens to support their own ideology: [The November 6 Jon Hilsenrath] article… told readers in the first sentence that “the U.S. government is on course for an unprecedented borrowing binge in coming months that […]
An NBC affiliate’s report that “if the results differ by 1 percent or less” in a Virginia congressional race, “the losing candidate can formally request a recount in court” gets David Swanson wondering (AfterDowningStreet.org, 11/7/08) how this unquestioning language could possibly apply to the current voting process: The interesting question is, if they do a […]
Tom Engelhardt muses (TomDispatch, 11/5/08) on 2008 U.S. presidential election coverage as “a tsunami of entertainment, or was it distraction?”: An eternal election campaign. Two years of the most everything–the most money… the most ads… the most places (Internet, email, YouTube, Facebook, bloggers, text messaging, cell phones), the most jokes, the most appearances by candidates […]
Environmental reporter and activist Harvey Wasserman notices (Columbus Free Press, 11/6/08) that, “as the world media filled with the victory of Barack Obama, a defeat for atomic power in his own back yard sent a Solartopian message to the new administration”: Chicago-area… voters approved by well over two-to-one a referendum asking that “our elected officials […]
FAIR founder Jeff Cohen spots (Huffington Post, 11/5/08) a major factor in this election season that he thinks “is now so second-nature to us that we may overlook its transformative impact since just four years ago: the Internet and the progressive online boom”: The media terrain has changed dramatically since 2004, when Matt Drudge dominated […]
Salon has a grimly humorous collection (11/6/08, ad-viewing required) of idiocy intoned with supreme confidence by media pundits throughout the U.S. presidential campaign. Unsurprisingly, Fox News personalities are prominently represented. From Bill Kristol looking forward at the very beginning of the campaign and getting it entirely wrong (Fox News Sunday, 12/17/06): If [Hillary Clinton] gets […]
San Francisco Bay Guardian founder Bruce B. Brugmann posts (11/3/08) on his paper’s blog about how “the day before the historic vote on the Clean Energy Initiative (Prop H), under vicious multi-million attack by the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle continued its campaign of decades to censor and marginalize the […]
Professor and author Michael Eric Dyson provides a useful corrective (Los Angeles Times, 11/5/08) to a particularly damaging campaign media theme: Contrary to many critics, his election does not, nor should it, herald a post-racial future. But it may help usher in a post-racist future. A post-racial outlook seeks to delete crucial strands of our […]
Free Press activists so instrumental in bringing public attention to the issue announce (11/4/08) that “the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve the unlicensed use of ‘white spaces‘–empty airwaves between television channels–to provide high-speed Internet access nationwide”: Nearly every market in the United States has available white spaces; in some communities, more than three-quarters of […]
