FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
This week we look at what the big TV networks covered instead of the new reports about US drone attacks. Plus CBS host Bob Schieffer calls for more discussions of issues that matter, and CNN is set to air some pro-nuclear power propaganda.
60 Minutes goes after disability benefits, government leaks on that Somalia raid, and Time magazine’s Iran timeline is missing some important history.
Corporate media’s engagement of Martin Luther King has long had an air of unreality about it, as the antiwar and anti-capitalist ideas that for him and others in the civil rights movement were integrally connected with racial equity are ignored or worse.
This week on FAIR TV, NBC got a scoop: Iran’s new president says his country isn’t interested in a nuclear bomb. NBC–and other outlets–treated this as big news. But it’s not. Plus: Time magazine finds a link between mass shooters and government whistleblowers, and NBC tries to do some Obamacare fact-checking. It doesn’t go very […]
This week: War on Syria has been called off, at least for now, and that seemed to bother a lot of pundits. ABC looked at how the war would have affected your 401(k), assuming you have one. And a radio station rejects an ad criticizing the “Washington Redskins” for using an ethnic slur as a […]
Rachel Maddow asks why corporations would want to be associated with the promotion of Stand Your Ground gun laws–but fails to mention that her employer is one company that doesn’t seem embarrassed by the connection.
A true re-examination would ask: What is it about media institutions that makes them so willing to write off millions of mainly black children?
Anyone could have predicted the Boston Marathon bombing would receive the high-color, saturation-style coverage it’s gotten. The April 15 attack lends itself to all sorts of narratives U.S. corporate media love to explore: the ever-present “terrorist” threat, scary Muslims and their “networks,” the potential of new security technology. Still, it was hard not to be […]
The Associated Press announced a change in their style guide: The wire service will no longer refer to “illegal immigrants,” except in direct quotes. The change is a victory for activists who have called for years for journalists to stop using the term.
“Outspent and lately out-hustled by highly organized gay rights organizations,” USA Today reports, “opponents have struggled to get their story out.” That’s a curious premise, given that “their story” is the law of the land, and that’s why we’re talking about it in the first place.
Who stands between the hard-working people of Upstate New York and money and jobs coming out of the ground? Why, it’s actor Mark Ruffalo.
What should be done to prevent incidents like the January 26 fire at the Smart Fashion Export factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in which at least seven garment workers (three of them teenage girls) were killed, their escape impeded by a blocked exit and the absence of the most rudimentary fire safety equipment? The answer for […]
It’s a fair indication of the current state of play in U.S. media that, in 2012, TV newscasts were acknowledged to be “increasingly seeded with corporate advertising masquerading as news” (Washington Post, 1/3/12)—and the regulatory response was to call, not for an end to the practice of deceiving audiences, but for broadcasters to make note […]
When pundits wax rhapsodic about the “colorblind” era we live in–or fulminate against affirmative action policies as interfering with that “post-racial” state–some of us think of cases like Wet Seal.
U.S. media had a soft spot for the 2012 Paralympic Games, featuring some 4,000 athletes with disabilities from around the world. Not that they thought people wanted to see much of them―NBC only aired a few hours’ worth, and no live coverage (AP, 8/23/12)―but the events “proved once again that whatever your obstacles, you really […]
U.S. media have shown great, and warranted, interest in Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head October 9 by members of a Taliban faction for her outspoken promotion of education for women. The attack “has horrified people across the South Asian country and abroad,” reports the Washington Post, and “has also sparked […]
Maria Hinojosa, the founding host of public radio’s Latino USA, was the first Latina reporter at NPR, the first Latina correspondent on CNN, the first Latina to anchor PBS’s Frontline, and, in the 1980s, the first Latina to host a primetime TV talkshow, New York Hotline. With the September debut of America by the Numbers […]
Corporate news media paid what looked like sympathetic attention to consumer activism that, within weeks, saw the ingredient known as “pink slime” removed from ground beef sold in major supermarkets and fast food chains and provided to public schoolchildren in their lunch. Reporters seemed as compelled and repelled as many consumers by the realization that […]
Recent years have seen much rallying around “traditional” journalism in the face of its supposedly imminent demise, including the mythologizing of pre-Internet news media as a force of social cohesion. Lamenting the “culture of observing events from ‘inside’ a community,” Washington Post columnist and associate editor David Ignatius (5/2/10) contended: When the information landscape was […]
The New York Times editorially decried the New York City police department’s stop-and-frisk practices (“Injustices of Stop and Frisk,” 5/13/12), noting that the criterion of “furtive movements” most often used for stopping disproportionately black and brown people is “so vague as to be meaningless,” that people of color are treated more violently than white people […]
