FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Upon hearing NPR‘s “rewriting of the history of the Vietnam War” by reporting that the U.S. commander in Vietnam, Gen. Creighton Abrams, used tactics in which “the important thing isn’t enemy body count; it’s protecting the population, training local Vietnamese forces, providing money and programs for a better life,” blogging critic Mytwords (NPR Check, 10/31/08) […]
Blogging at A Tiny Revolution (11/2/08), Princeton professor Bernard Chazelle incisively conveys how corporate media not only uncritically disseminate bad economic forecasting, but contribute directly to such poor analysis: Economists are notoriously unable to predict anything but the past. Why? Yale Professor Robert Shiller, an exception to this rule, explains: Why do professional economists always […]
News Corpse‘s Mark Howard provides (11/3/08) an Election Day reminder of how the announcement of a winner “is not as straightforward as one might think”: At the nationâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s biggest and most dishonest cable TV news network, Fox News, the man in charge of making the final call… is John Moody, and he is also the […]
On the occasion of Studs Terkel‘s death, veteran journalist Dave Lindorff recalls (OpEd News, 11/1/08) his own 1992 book tour in which “most of the program hosts had obviously not read more than the liner notes on the dust jacket” of his book on “for-profit hospital corporations that were buying up community hospitals all over […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald is incensed (11/02/08, ad-viewing required) over a column that had Washington Post Ombud Deborah Howell claiming that one reason that the Post and other papers are losing money is because they are “too liberal,” have had “more favorable stories about Barack Obama than John McCain,” and “conservatives are right that they often […]
Dean Baker notices (Beat the Press, 11/02/08) “an obvious concern” completely missing from a long Washington Post piece in which “no one cited” thought that maybe “politicians at the [major upcoming economic] summit are too closely tied to the financial industry to promote regulations that will rein in abuses.” In fact, “while the paper had […]
Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! broadcast (11/03/08) in honor of the recently passed Studs Terkel gives a brief description of his professional life as an exemplary “radio broadcaster, writer, oral historian, raconteur, chronicler of our times”: Since the ’60s, he was particularly well-known as a world-class interviewer, a writer and radio personality who drew celebrities and, […]
Publishing (Nation, 10/30/08) an open letter from independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader to campaign media, John Nichols laments how “for the most part, Nader’s campaign–with its… worthy messages about the role of government, regulation of corporations, foreign policy and, above all, democracy–has been ignored by the print, broadcast, cable and even digital media”: To a […]
Elaborating on his Raw Story investigation of Colorado U.S. Attorney Troy Eid’s “Decision Not to Prosecute Obama ‘Assassination Plot’“, MediaBloodhound blogger Brad Jacobson writes (10/31/08) that Mark Hosenball, an investigative correspondent for Newsweek, is the only mainstream journalist that I could find on record who questioned Eid’s handling of this case. Yet not in the […]
Elaborating on his Raw Story investigation of Colorado U.S. Attorney Troy Eid’s “Decision Not to Prosecute Obama ‘Assassination Plot’“, MediaBloodhound blogger Brad Jacobson writes (10/31/08) that Mark Hosenball, an investigative correspondent for Newsweek, is the only mainstream journalist that I could find on record who questioned Eid’s handling of this case. Yet not in the […]
Corporate media economics reporters’ knee-jerk repetition of the “free trade” moniker has pushed things to the absurd point that Dean Baker is forced to ask (10/30/08) on his Beat the Press blog, “What Does It Mean to Support ‘Free Market’ Economics?”: New York Times readers no doubt asked this question when they saw that Charlie […]
In his Altercation blog at Media Matters, Eric Alterman (10/28/08) points out the difficulty in critiquing the New York Post: It’s hard to tell whether the paper is being offensive or idiotic. Steve Serby in the New York Post: “Good for Tom Coughlin. Good for Coughlin for tightening the noose around Plaxico Burress.” Burress, a […]
Hosting FAIR communications director Isabel Macdonald on his religion radio show State of Belief (10/25/08), Rev. Welton Gaddy raised the issue of corporate televangelist Pat Robertson‘s “really significant role in aiding and abetting Islamophobia.” Macdonald pointed out how Robertson made some of the most outrageous comments about Muslims and Islam, and in addition to his […]
Over at Conde Nasté Portfolio (10/29/08), Jeff Bercovici does a good job busting National Review writer Byron York for trying to “defend the focus of the political press on questions such as whether Obama was in church when Rev. Jeremiah Wright said ‘God damn America.’” York had argued that “this kind of lament that we […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald (10/29/08, ad-viewing required) takes apart a “sentimental, cringe-inducing retrospective from the Los Angeles Times‘ campaign reporter Maeve Reston, wistfully lamenting the loss of affection and friendship between John McCain and the reporters who cover his campaign–what she twice calls ‘intimacy.’” Deeming the piece “an instant classic in illustrating how campaign reporters think […]
Economist Dean Baker is the highlight of a Politico feature (10/29/08) asking several political commentators the question, “Is the press really biased against McCain or does poor coverage reflect the reality of his campaign?”: No one would expect Saddam Hussein to get good press. The reality is that he was a pretty bad guy and […]
Interviewed for the online magazine Guernica (10/08), religion journalist Jeff Sharlet remembers what John McCain “spiritual adviser” John “Hagee got in trouble for”– “saying that Hitler was just doing what God wanted”–but says what Doug Coe,” as “the Family’s unofficial leader,” has said is much more monstrous.” While writing The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at […]
Posting on the Nation‘s blog (Notion, 10/25/08), Jon Wiener quotes from a Los Angeles Times story on the hardships being endured by spouses of workers on Wall Street, where “the average income is $365,000, according to the Times, ‘although top-flight managers typically make many millions more’”: “Wall Street wives are finding that they must defer […]
Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman (Truthdig, 10/22/08) writes on the extent, and consequences, of a political season in which “commercial broadcasters are cleaning up… like never before, and you’ll never hear them questioning the system that allows so much money to come back to them”: The Obama campaign has “flooded the zone” with advertising. It has […]
In a TomDispatch essay (10/23/08), professor and author Michael Schwartz lets us know “What the Good News from Iraq Really Means”: Even before the spectacular presidential election campaign became a national obsession… coverage of the Iraq War had dwindled to next to nothing. National newspapers had long since discontinued their daily feasts of multiple–usually front-page–reports […]
