FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
You often see pundits making suggestions to political candidates like David Brooks makes in his New York Times column today (1/10/12): If Romney is to thrive, he really needs to go on an integrity tour. He needs to show how his outer pronouncements flow directly from his inner core. He needs to trust that voters […]
New York Times columnist David Brooks, who’s been called the “bard of the 1 percent” for his writings in defense of the economic elite, is at it again–telling people not to worry about the concentration of wealth at the very top of the income scale. Brooks writes in his January 31 column that the claim […]
From Amanda Terkel in the Huffington Post (2/1/12): Newt Gingrich Florida Primary Results 2012: The Candidate Who Refuses to Operate Within Reality …From the beginning to the end of Gingrich’s election night party, the campaign and its supporters seemed to be operating outside of realities, denying the importance of this large state’s primary contest and […]
Niall Ferguson is undoubtedly an expert. As the bio on his Newsweek column points out, he’s “a professor of history at Harvard University. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.” His latest column (1/23/12) is about the need to sell the public […]
There’s a news article in the Washington Post today (1/26/12) that really captures that paper’s view of the way the world works, and how it ought to work. Headlined “After Earthquake, Japan Can’t Agree on the Future of Nuclear Power,” Chico Harlan’s piece begins: The hulking system that once guided Japan’s pro-nuclear-power stance worked just […]
Arianna Huffington had an announcement (1/19/12) about a new section in her Huffington Post: I’m delighted to announce the launch of Global Motherhood, a new section within HuffPost Impact dedicated to the health and well being of mothers and babies around the world, and sponsored by Johnson & Johnson. It goes without saying that it’s […]
There are two ways to approach being evenhanded: You can try to actually be evenhanded, which could mean that you find that one side is right and the other is wrong. Or you can strive for the appearance of being evenhanded, which means that you decide in advance that you’re going to find that there’s […]
We’ve been seeing a lot of this sort of thing lately–this time from Elizabeth Wurtzel on TheAtlantic.com (1/9/12): All the reasons Romney is disliked are all the reasons he would be an excellent president. Let’s start by recognizing that principled politicians are highly overrated–consider Jimmy Carter as Exhibit A. Despite our pretensions to pretension, we […]
Real estate developer and media mogul Mort Zuckerman has picked Colin Myler to be the new top editor for his New York tabloid, the Daily News. That’s a surprising choice on at least a couple of accounts. One is that Myler’s last job was at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, which was shut down […]
FAIR’s latest Action Alert (1/6/12) urges activists to contact the New York Times about its repeated assertions, contrary to the available evidence, that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. Feel free to leave copies of your messages to the Times in the comments thread here, along with any thoughts on the alert.
“Ron Paul Ignored by the Media? Not So Much” was the headline on a National Journal post yesterday (12/21/11). “The Texan’s campaign has raised millions of dollars to combat the alleged media conspiracy that, they claim, is out to destroy the candidate the media fears most,” the Journal‘s Sarah Mimms reported. “There is just one […]
The Winter Garden is one of New York City’s largest and most beautiful indoor public spaces. Graced by giant palm trees that would look impressive on Sunset Boulevard and a vast skylight that provides year-round balmy sunlight, this crossroads of Manhattan’s Battery Park City became a symbol of Downtown’s rebirth when it was reconstructed after […]
The national hardware chain Lowe’s pulled its advertising from the TLC reality show All-American Muslim—explaining that the question of whether Muslims can be presented as regular human beings is a “hotly contested debate.” All-American Muslim is a reality show described by TLC, the cable channel that airs it, as “a look at life in Dearborn, […]
PBS has a website called MediaShift, billed as “Your Guide to the Digital Media Revolution.” Based on an alarming post this week headlined “Tear Down the Wall Between Business and Editorial!” (12/7/11), the revolution looks rather revolting. The piece is written by Dorian Benkoil, who “handles marketing and sales strategies for MediaShift, and is the […]
Sam Husseini’s encounter with Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud makes me wonder once again–why do we call a person like Al Saud a “prince”? Al Saud was the longtime chief of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, and later served as ambassador to the United States and Britain. His grandfather, Abdul Aziz Al Saud, declared himself […]
When the authorities are going out of their way to keep your journalistic colleagues from witnessing what they’re up to, yet they reach out to give a ringside seat–what does that say about your reporting? That’s the question raised by a blog post by Yves Smith (Naked Captialism, 11/16/11) that makes the case that the […]
Joby Warrick’s Washington Post article (11/14/11) on the new International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran goes wrong from the first sentence: When the Cold War abruptly ended in 1991, Vyacheslav Danilenko was a Soviet weapons scientist in need of a new line of work. Well, no. Danilenko is allegedly a nuclear weapons scientist–but neither […]
Just because he wears cowboy boots and drops his G’s doesn’t mean he’s a dummy. Perry may be a small-town boy who went to an ag school (Texas A&M University), but he’s an extremely cagey and strategic politician who has been among the state’s most successful governors at getting what he wants. Put another way: […]
Leave it to the New York Times (10/7/11) to find a guy collecting unemployment who opposes the extension of unemployment benefits. He’s “Dan Tolleson, a researcher and writer with a Ph.D. in politics…whose last good job was working for a group that aims to replace the income tax with a national sales tax.” But don’t […]
CNN‘s newest show–OutFront, featuring Erin Burnett–did a “factcheck” of the protest in Lower Manhattan that was long on attitude and short on accuracy. If you’d like the network to take another look, see FAIR’s latest Action Alert. Please leave copies of your messages to CNN, or responses to the alert, in the comment thread below.
