FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The New York Times has a news piece today (11/6/12) reporting that MSNBC is just like Fox News, and isn’t that awful. Now, MSNBC, for all its flaws, is not really anything like Fox News. And most of Times reporter Jeremy Peters‘ evidence for their similarity comes from a Pew study of “positive” and “negative” […]
After establishing that Karl Rove is a terrible political prognosticator, Dana Milbank did the false-balance thing and attacked polling blogger Nate Silver,
CBS‘s Bob Schieffer revealed his greatest fear on yesterday’s Face the Nation (11/4/12): Let me just say, David Gergen, I think the worst of all worlds would be if one of the candidates won the popular vote and other won the Electoral College. As the two made clear, they were talking about the possibility that […]
Columbia Journalism Review‘s Curtis Brainard and I had a somewhat lengthy back-and-forth on Twitter about his view (10/30/12, 11/1/12) that some journalists and environmental activists are misleading the public by pointing to superstorm Sandy as an outcome of human-caused global warming. I argued on FAIR Blog (11/1/12) that saying that global warming caused Sandy is […]
Writing about journalistic treatment of the superstorm and climate change, CJR‘s Curtis Brainard (10/30/12) criticizes the New Yorker‘s Elizabeth Kolbert for the wrong reason. He takes issue with her statement (10/29/12): As with any particular “weather-related loss event,” it’s impossible to attribute Sandy to climate change. However, it is possible to say that the storm […]
NPR‘s Tom Gjelten had a story on Morning Edition today (10/25/12) that made an important point about a prominent fallacy in the energy debate–and then spent the second half of the story falling into the exact same fallacy. The story questioned the constant use of the phrase “energy independence” in political discussions of U.S. energy […]
CBS Evening News (10/17/12) provides another example of corporate media’s through-the-looking-glass media “factchecking” of the Libya exchange at the second Obama/Romney debate (FAIR Media Advisory, 10/18/12). CBS‘s Jan Crawford set up the issue this way: For weeks, Republicans have said the president’s reluctance to call the attacks terrorism is a sign his administration doesn’t have […]
The day after the second Obama/Romney debate, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (10/17/12) offered a sort of scorecard for the debate–for the benefit of those watching on DVR, presumably. “I thought the most useful thing I could do is to offer the scoring system I’ll be using to determine who did best,” Friedman wrote, […]
It’s clear by now, after several repeats of the same cycle, that the right doesn’t really want to defund PBS. And the left, unfortunately, isn’t truly interested in saving PBS, either. Why would the right defund? For a tiny investment—about a hundredth of a penny from each federal dollar—the GOP gets a leash on public […]
Corporate media’s depiction of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is often cartoonish, but the lead from David Frum’s piece from CNN.com (10/9/12) takes the cake: Venezuela’s authoritarian president Hugo Chavez is a villain out of a Batman movie: buffoonish and sinister in equal measure. You want to be careful about throwing around words like “buffoonish,” though, […]
Media activist Alison Weir (10/8/12) calls attention to a remarkable New York Times report (10/9/12) on Gaza violence. While we’ve come to expect a pro-Israeli bias from the Times, it’s still surprising to find the paper using time travel to make sure that events happen in their proper sequence. The headline of the Times piece […]
Time’s Michael Scherer (10/9/12) responded to a FAIR Blog post by FAIR’s Peter Hart (10/3/12), who apparently spoke for many: Peter Hart, writing for the liberal Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, summed up many of the tweets I received. “The article kicks off with a hefty helping of false balance—the tendency to see all problems […]
Politicians should not be able to pull the plug on the public’s media—PBS needs a dedicated trust fund that can’t be used as a political prop by candidates.
Back in May, Facebook introduced its Promoted Posts program, giving groups and companies with pages on the social media site the option of paying to get their posts seen by more of their fans. The way Facebook works is that you don’t see every post by every friend or every page that you like—Facebook has […]
Washington Post ombud Patrick Pexton (9/30/12) presents conservative opinion as a prima facie case for a left-wing slant in corporate news media: “Republicans think the news media are being too easy on Barack Obama…. Everyone sees more bias, and Republicans see it more than other groups.” Offering this as evidence of a left media bias […]
Crooks & Liars (9/26/12) notes Bill O’Reilly is proposing a naval blockade of Iraq: Says O’Reilly: We’re going to block it, nothing in, nothing out. OK? That’s what we’re going to do. And if you challenge the blockade, we’ll do what we have to do like the Cuban missile crisis, same thing—not gonna do […]
From last night’s ABC World News (9/18/12): DIANE SAWYER: But we do remember four years ago the president, then candidate, was at a fundraiser, it was during the primary, but he too was caught on tape. JAKE TAPPER: That’s right, he was talking about the difficulty of reaching small-town Pennsylvanians and how, because of tough […]
Time magazine’s James Poniewozik (9/24/12–subscription required) says it’s been “a banner year for the factcheckers,” and yet the facts keep on getting mangled: Yet the traffic violations keep coming. Scads of fibs, exaggerations and misleading statements have been swept up in the dragnet: a super-PAC ad implying that Mitt Romney was responsible for the cancer […]
At Huffington Post (9/13/12), Ryan Grim and Michael Calderone are raising questions about the somewhat mysterious disappearance of a New York Times news article: On Wednesday, the New York Times published a provocative story bylined by David E. Sanger and Ashley Parker, leading with the news that Mitt Romney had personally approved the blistering Tuesday […]
If you’re a profit-seeking outfit, which do you prefer, the appearance of fairness or the inner peace that comes with knowing you’ve done the right thing?
