FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“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 […]
A number of activists at the 16th International AIDS Conference complained that the Toronto gathering foregrounded the rich and famous—most prominently Microsoft chair Bill Gates and former President Bill Clinton—at the expense of front-line workers and people living with AIDS (e.g., “Activists Blast Focus on Celebrity,” Calgary Herald, 8/17/06). “They can’t have it both ways,” […]
[Note: this piece is a sidebar to Star Power Trumps History in AIDS Coverage] A study published in August in the Journal of the American Medical Association (8/9/06) found that sub-Saharan Africans are better at following drug regimens than North Americans. The authors hoped the findings would lay to rest the myth that Africans are […]
If there were a John Stossel School of Journalism, reporters-intraining would be taught a simple template for any story: Free markets are good. Unions are bad. When consumers get to “choose,” everyone wins; if governments try to regulate, everyone loses. No matter what the assignment, a Stossel-trained reporter would be instructed to merely plug in […]
In 1896, New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs laid out standards by which journalism is still judged today, declaring that his paper would “give the news, all the news . . . impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interest involved.” Unfortunately, mainstream media often fail to live up to that goal; […]
The Bush administration made a concerted effort to trumpet a “booming” U.S. economy in early December, widely understood as an attempt to reverse what polls indicate to be the public’s largely negative views on the matter. There are, of course, obvious reasons the majority of Americans dissent from the White House’s rosy presentation of the […]
There was a story the night of the State of the Union address (1/31/06) that may have said more about the actual state of the union than anything in George W. Bush’s speech. Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan was in the public gallery, a guest of Rep. Lynn Woolsey. When Sheehan sat down and unzipped her […]
[Note: this piece is a sidebar to “Fear & Favor 2005—FAIR’s Sixth Annual Report.”] At the beginning of the year, the Armstrong Williams scandal highlighted the disturbing practice of the Bush administration’s using taxpayer dollars to fund media that uncritically promote government policies and programs, without disclosing the source of the funding to readers or […]
[Note: this piece is a sidebar to “Fear & Favor 2005—FAIR’s Sixth Annual Report.”] Sometimes the conflict of interest isn’t with advertisers or owners, but with reporters themselves. It isn’t that journalists aren’t allowed to have private lives. But readers and viewers do have to wonder, in some cases, whether someone with fewer entanglements couldn’t […]
Most people have heard the famous quote by press critic A.J. Liebling, “Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.” Recently I keep recalling another, less popular quote in which Liebling referred to the press as the “weak slat under the bed of democracy.” He continued: It is an anomaly that information, […]
In January 2005, readers across the country all saw the same thing in their morning paper: an ad for Wal-Mart. That in itself is no surprise—Wal-Mart is, after all, the largest corporation in the world—but this particular ad, which ran in more than a hundred papers, was different: it consisted of a rebuttal of arguments […]
The July 3 L.A. Times finally put to some sort of definitive rest the notion that it was ebullient Iraqis who pulled down the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square in April of last year. The statue pulldown is described in an internal Army study, the Times reported, as one of many psychological operations […]
Introduction It would be hard to overstate the impact of news media in shaping public opinion, on issues from healthcare to plans for war. With media such an influence on us, it’s crucial that we understand who’s influencing media. FAIR’s annual Fear & Favor report is an attempt to chart some of the pressures that […]
Television networks are abandoning their responsibility to provide educational children’s programming—one of a dwindling few public interest obligations that remain for commercial broadcasters. One after another, major networks have said they are unhappy with the profit they’re making on kids TV, so they’re quitting. As outlined in the 1990 Children’s Television Act, and detailed in […]
Introduction Fear & Favor is FAIR’s annual review of incidents that reflect the range of pressures on reporters to use something other than journalistic judgment in deciding what goes in the news and what gets left out. The year 2001 presented special challenges in this regard. The horrific September 11 attacks on the World Trade […]
Just two days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the FCC moved to eliminate some of the last remaining restraints on media concentration. With all eyes elsewhere, the FCC voted unanimously to “review” regulations that limit the percentage of the national audience that a single cable company can […]
A number of pundits and politicians offered Americans a simple solution to the helplessness and anxiety they were feeling in the wake of the September 11 attacks: Go shopping! Vice President Dick Cheney (L.A. Times, 9/17/01) described it as a way for ordinary citizens to “stick their thumbs in the eye of the terrorists and […]
When a regulator’s appointment is hosannaed by the corporations he is supposed to be regulating, the public should be concerned. When the person charged with defending the public interest in telecommunications acknowledges that he has “no idea” (Columbia Journalism Review, 7-8/01) what the public interest is, telegraphs his willingness to eliminate virtually every remaining check […]
Introduction Surveys of working journalists have found that they experience pressure from powerful interests, outside and inside the news business, to push some stories and ignore others, and to shape or slant news content. The sources of pressure include the government, which enlists media to support its actions and policies; corporate advertisers who may demand […]
