FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The cartoon by Cameron Cardow of the Ottawa Citizen that USA Today selected as its daily editorial cartoon for February 2 is not terribly hard to parse: Islam is the modern equivalent of Nazism, and threatens a new Holocaust.
Accurate headlines would not leave casual readers with the impression that Venezuela was interested in getting a nuclear bomb, or in trying to nuke New York.
Edsall finds it alarming that people are objecting to the platforms of political parties, and using identification with a party’s agenda as a gauge of character.
In a major loss for press freedom and the right of citizens to be informed about what their government is doing, CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling was convicted this week on nine felony counts related to his supposed exposure of a bungled CIA operation.
The New York Times describes the death of two Israeli soldiers as “the most serious flare-up in the area in years.” But it’s not even the most serious flare-up in the area this month, as you learn later in the article.
USA Today wants you to know that a nuclear agreement between the United States and India is good news. But what is the news?
Warning Greece against a radical break with austerity has been a longstanding theme at the Washington Post. It’s worth emphasizing, though, that the creditors who “bailed out Greece” in reality didn’t bail out anyone but themselves.
A New York Times piece seems to treat the poor and middle class as almost interchangeable. Thus Mitt Romney vowing to “end the scourge of poverty” is equated with Mitch McConnell calling for a focus on “the stagnant middle class.”
So what’s wrong with comparing Barack Obama to Robin Hood? Well, aside from implying that taxation is a form of “stealing”–and aside from the fact that it’s a popular theme in racist caricatures of Obama–it gives the president too much credit.
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank complains that Obama’s State of the Union address didn’t have enough terrorism in it. Why, it only mentioned “terrorism,” “terror” or “terrorists” nine times!
You really don’t learn too much else about Joni Ernst, picked to rebut the State of the Union address, from media profiles, Nor do you get the impression that corporate media think you need to know much.
“On matters of race,” writes Maureen Dowd, “there is an even higher responsibility to be accurate.” Yes–especially for white columnists lecturing African-American directors about black history.
If the purpose of climate coverage is to convey how open-minded the New York Times is, then this piece is a success, managing to give one-third of its quotes to a proponent of a fringe theory without giving any indication that his eccentric views are virtually absent from peer-reviewed science.
Poor Dana Milbank. Here it is just the beginning of 2015, and the Washington Post columnist is already tired of covering the 2016 presidential campaign.
There’s not a lot of daylight between USA Today’s conservative and so-called liberal on the issue of a war on Islam.
Why is that Islamist violence is drop-everything fascinating to US corporate media, while a massacre by a right-wing anti-Muslim zealot doesn’t seem to be worth talking about?
Op-eds are supposed to stick to the actual facts. But the ones attacking Selma do far more to distort the reality of Martin Luther King’s relationship with Lyndon Johnson than the fictional film does.
CBS’s “senior security consultant” doesn’t appear to remember a massacre less than four years ago that killed 77 people, mostly teenagers.
USA Today boasts that most of its “editorials are coupled with an opposing view–a unique USA Today feature.” So you’re getting both sides, is the implication–when in fact what you’re more likely to get is perception management.
Whose story, USA Today’s Michael Wolff wonders, will replace “the dominant culture tale” provided by white men? “The women’s narrative? The anti-one-percent narrative?” As far as I can tell, he’s completely serious.
