FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
This is an excerpt from the book Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV (Da Capo Press). Former VH1 programmer and Flavor of Love creator Michael Hirschorn has said of reality TV, “If women didn’t want these shows, they wouldn’t get made.” This gender-specific variant on Fox programmer (and Joe Millionaire mastermind) […]
In the weeks leading up to the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan, news watchers grew accustomed to poll stories with headlines like the Washington Post’s “Public Unyielding in War Against Terror; 9 in 10 Back Robust Military Response” (9/29/01). The numbers seemed overwhelming: Two out of three respondents to the Post poll “would favor military […]
Thousands of scientific studies are conducted every year, but only a fraction of these ever see newsprint. Even fewer dominate the news cycle for weeks, transform researchers into culture war commentators and move the public debate. At the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting on May 9, two unpublished, non-peer-reviewed studies offered opposing reports about the […]
The New York Times (8/22/99) declared the glass ceiling “shattered” when Hewlett Packard’s Carly Fiorina became the third female CEO of a Fortune 500 company. But if they were looking for conflicting evidence, they could start in their own backyard. As a variety of recent studies show, women continue to face a substantial glass ceiling […]
George W. Bush celebrated his first working day in office–and the 28th anniversary of Roe v. Wade (1/22/01)–by reinstating the Mexico City Policy, a Reagan-era rule that bans U.S. family planning aid to overseas groups that provide abortions or referrals–even if they do so with private, non-U.S. funds. Under the rule (lifted in 1993 by […]
Journalists are obsessed with cutting political women down to size, whether elected to office or propelled by marriage into the peculiar role of first lady.
Mothers work because they’re selfish. That’s the conclusion viewers might have drawn after watching ABC and NBC news broadcasts about a recently released Census Bureau report (“Fertility of American Women,” 9/00) that showed that more mothers, especially mothers of infants, were in the work force in 1998 than ever before (73 percent and 59 percent, […]
During the past three decades, the religious right has slowly chipped away at women’s access to safe, legal reproductive services with a multi-tiered approach to anti-abortion activism. Legislative efforts have resulted in funding restrictions, waiting periods, parental consent and notification bills, as well as so-called “fetal protection” bills and “partial birth” abortion bans attempting to […]
National Desk continues to feature undisclosed relationships between funders and sources, one-sided advocacy packaged as balanced journalism, and serious factual errors.
Feminists have been talking about the electoral gender gap since the early 1980s, but DC’s power-brokers have finally caught on: in contemporary American politics, a candidate who does not appeal to women voters has about as much chance of winning elective office as Dr. Laura has of receiving “Radio Host of the Year” honors from […]
When Taliban leaders claim women incite sexual assault by wearing clothing more revealing than a burkah or leaving their homes unchaperoned by male relatives, it’s not hard for U.S. reporters to recognize these statements as products of misogyny. But when two evolutionary psychologists recently put forth the same basic notion under the guise of objective […]
TV Guide‘s cover story on “How Women Took Over the News” (10/9/99) painted a pretty then-vs.-now picture of gender equity in the newsroom, in which “women are on every beat, in every aspect of news, as fixtures in jobs traditionally held by men.” Way back when, TV Guide reminisces, women were “second-class citizens in TV […]
Recent media responses to a Department of Justice (DOJ) study on domestic violence raise an interesting question: What makes some DOJ studies less “scientific” than others? How can the same agency at times be a bastion of impartial science, and at others be a purveyor of questionable, ideology-driven data? The answer can be found not […]
Throughout April, the PBS public affairs program National Desk presented a three-part series on “the gender wars” that sought to address “whether the advancement of women in virtually all areas of society can be achieved without a retreat, in some way, on the part of men.” Asking the question that way is akin to answering […]
Journalists Trivialize Howard Stern’s Advocacy of Rape as ‘Insensitivity’
