FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The New York Times ran a front-page story (1/11/10) on the race for the Senate seat held by New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand that omits mention of the sole Democratic candidate running a serious campaign against her. Jonathan Tasini (who garnered 125,000 votes in a bid for the seat against Hillary Clinton in 2006) declared […]
“Asked to choose between a larger influx of troops to fight Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and train the Afghan military, and a smaller number of new U.S. forces more narrowly focused on training, Americans divide 46 percent for the bigger number, 45 percent for the lower one.” —Washington Post (11/18/09), “Poll Finds Guarded Optimism on […]
After a tour of the country last year, a United Nations special rapporteur (4/28/09) urged Washington to do more to address “the depth of racism [that] still permeates all dimensions of life of American society.” Not “questions of race,” not “past racism,” not “personal biases”—but present-day, institutional racism, as expressed in, for example, “racial bias […]
There was something particularly Timesian about the New York Times’ response to an important new study on charter schools—public schools that operate under special rules, seen by some as the main engine of reform for a fundamentally dysfunctional educational system and by others as a thinly veiled effort to drain resources from existing public schools […]
When critics talk about “saving journalism,” the image one gets is of ink-stained toilers bringing important truths into the light of public scrutiny. But this bears little relation to most people’s experience of news media. For one thing, most people get their news from TV, not generally the poster child for journalism worth saving. Certainly, […]
Back in the mid-1980s, when Jeff Cohen founded FAIR, large-scale progressive media activism was still more than a decade away, and the media justice movement lay in the even more distant future. But FAIR set out to focus attention on race/ethnicity, class and gender bias in the media from the beginning, and to draw connections […]
Andrew Revkin’s April 24 piece, about how an energy industry group publicly denied links between emissions and global warming even as their own scientists confirmed such links, is pretty damning, if utterly unsurprising. This part leaps out: George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of […]
If corporate media really cared about workers rights, there probably would have been more than zero stories on those rights on the nightly broadcast news in the last year. And labor representatives would likely have provided more than the not quite 0.2 percent of nightly news sources found in a recent survey (Extra!, 5-6/02). Yet […]
There were early indications that corporate media coverage of Barack Obama’s candidacy would be squirm-inducing, putting on display the elite (mainly white) press corps’ murky ideas about race much more than any straightforward reckoning of black Americans’ situation or what an Obama presidency might mean for their concerns. Journalists were sometimes embarrassingly frank about how […]
A January 27 New York Times story, “The Epidemic That Wasn’t,” brought the news that researchers following children prenatally exposed to cocaine have found “the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small” and are “less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco.” Though […]
I was intrigued to see this in a New York Times editorial yesterday (12/18/08): The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror”–the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted […]
The New York Times may have revealed more than intended with a September 22 piece headlined “Amid Market Turmoil, Some Journalists Try to Tone Down Emotion.” The article, by Richard Pérez-Peña, said that reporters are being very careful in choosing words to describe the ongoing meltdown in financial markets—not because reporters should always choose their […]
The General Accounting Office released a report June 23 that condemned the Bush administration’s “surge” strategy in Iraq. The same day the Pentagon released its own overwhelmingly positive report, “dated June 13 but not released until yesterday” (Washington Post, 6/24/08), which might reasonably be seen as a blatant White House effort to take the air […]
In an April 10 editorial headlined “Drop Dead, Colombia,” the Washington Post excoriated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for holding up passage of a proposed trade promotion deal with Colombia. With the hyperbole the paper seems to reserve for this issue, the Post declared, “The year 2008 may enter history as the time when the Democratic […]
U.S. journalists seeking to fulfill the profession’s traditional goal of telling the truth and “letting the chips fall where they may” have powerful forces to contend with, starting with the corporate owners who employ them, and the corporate advertisers who fuel the enterprise, both of whom have an investment in maintaining a political conversation and […]
Most “fear and favor” shown by media outlets takes the form of slanted or incomplete news coverage. But media companies’ zeal to please the advertisers, who are, after all, their main client, goes beyond covering news to making it. In 2007, congressional debate on a big Food and Drug Administration bill touched on pharmaceutical ads, […]
At the end of an unusually long editorial headlined “The High Cost of Healthcare,” the November 25 New York Times dismissed the idea of publicly funded universal healthcare, which all other industrialized countries use to provide medical treatment to all of their citizens while spending much less per capita than the U.S. Framing a public […]
Reading the coverage of Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason, the line elite media have developed was impossible to miss: Gore’s a smartypants! His ideas may be good or bad, but the point is, he’s a laughingstock. Even those inclined to dislike Gore might be put off by the kind of condescension expressed […]
“Fear and favor” describes the various pushes and pulls on journalists to use something other than journalistic values in producing the news. The intense corporatization of media makes the precise contours of such compromise difficult to trace. Pressure to cut costs and please financially powerful players is, as it were, “in the air” in corporate […]
The “Plan D” Medicare drug benefit came with so much confusion about deadlines, costs and gaps in coverage that one critical article (Nation, 1/30/06) was headlined “Plan D From Outer Space.” Perhaps critics’ biggest question: Why is the government forbidden to negotiate with the drug industry for lower prices? That idea makes so much sense […]
