FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
I agree with Keith Olbermann (11/15/10) about the dubious value of “objectivity” as a journalistic value; he makes a telling point about how journalistic icons like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow are most honored for the moments when they reached conclusions and asserted values. And I think he’s right that the U.S. media establishment’s […]
The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat (11/15/10) warns us about the nightmare world that “Nancy Pelosi and her compatriots” live in: It’s a world where the Social Security retirement age never budges, no matter how high average life expectancy climbs. Shudder! Luckily, Pelosi and co.’s world seems to have diverged from ours around 2003, when […]
New York Times headline (11/15/10): U.S. Plan Offers Path to Ending Afghan Combat More accurate headline: U.S. Plan Extends Afghan Combat by Three Years
The Washington Post‘s Steven Pearlstein (11/11/10), one of the few Americans (by his own account) who DOESN’T need to have his wages cut, writes: Reducing the federal deficit won’t by itself do much to balance the U.S. trade account by increasing exports, but to the degree it involves increases in taxes or decreases in employment […]
The lead story in today’s New York Times (1/12/10), written by Sewell Chan, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and David E. Sanger, focused on allies’ complaints about Barack Obama’s economic policies: There was no way to avoid discussion of the fundamental differences of economic strategy…. Major disputes broke out between Washington and China, Britain, Germany and Brazil. […]
New York City school chancellor Joel Klein is stepping down to take a job with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, and will be replaced with Cathleen Black, chair of Hearst Magazines. Though Black has no experience with education and Klein had none going in, I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense that the current […]
Matt Bai (New York Times, 11/9/10), as a standard-issue corporate media political analyst, sees the Democrats being moved to the right as an upside to their disastrous showing in the ’10 midterms. But he’s worried that the party isn’t learning the obvious lesson. If there was any sliver of hope for moderate Democrats on a […]
People love Fox News…. We said to the cable operators when we put the price up, we said do you want a monument to yourself…. Cancel us, you might get your house burnt down. –Rupert Murdoch (Australian Financial Review, 11/5/10)
MSNBC has suspended host Keith Olbermann for making political contributions–even though GE/NBC executives and fellow MSNBC host Joe Scarborough has made similar donations. If you’d like to urge MSNBC to follow a consistent standard, see FAIR’s Action Alert (11/5/10). And please post copies of your messages, and/or comments on the alert, to the comments thread […]
New York Times political analyst Matt Bai writes in a post-election piece (11/4/10): A powerful force in the party, Ms. [Sarah] Palin represents an aggrieved, anti-elitist strain of conservatism that goes back to Richard M. Nixon’s Silent Majority. It is a rural conservative impulse, rooted most firmly in the South and West, that equates liberal […]
Here’s the sentence that sums up what was wrong with election coverage ’10, courtesy of the New York Times‘ Peter Baker (11/3/10): Was this the natural and unavoidable backlash in a time of historic economic distress, or was it a repudiation of a big-spending activist government? Clearly, the economy was the main thing on the […]
Scientific American editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina (10/28/10) responded to criticism from Climate Progress‘ Joe Romm (10/26/10) and FAIR Blog (10/27/10) of the magazine’s recent coverage of climate change: In actuality, Scientific American reports on climate-related science in depth in nearly every issue and frequently online. You can see a sample list of past print and online-only […]
Has Scientific American jumped the shark on climate change? That’s the contention of Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm (10/26/10), who accuses the magazine of treating human-caused global climate change as an open question. Romm points to an article by Michael Lemonick (11/10) about Judith Curry, a climate scientist whose critiques of the Intergovernmental Panel on […]
Fox News must be a funny place to work. The biggest star there is constantly talking about how the Obama administration is leading us toward tyranny, slavery and dictatorship. Meanwhile, on the FoxNews.com website (10/25/10), you’ve got “frequent contributor” and Bush State Department alum Christian Whiton (you couldn’t make these names up) complaining bitterly that […]
USA Today typically pairs an editorial today with an opposing view–as it did with its recent editorials on redistricting and NFL rules. When it editorializedyesterday (10/25/10) on the need for the United States to adopt austerity measures similar to those of France and Britain, however, only one view was allowed: “The French are addressing their […]
It seems to me that debating Juan Williams’ firing from NPR in terms of the role of “opinion” and “objectivity” in journalism is missing the point. Williams has expressed his opinions on Fox News countless times. Other NPR employees frequently express opinions, too, as when Scott Simon wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal […]
Rush Limbaugh (10/18/10), holding a photo montage from Drudge up to the “Dittocam,” went off on a bizarre rant that suggested that Obama was possessed by supernatural evil (Mediaite, 10/19/10): Folks, these pictures, they look demonic. And I don’t say this lightly. There are a couple pictures, and the eyes, I’m not saying anything here, […]
USA Today (10/15/10) has a valuable article by Kevin Johnson on citizen’s use of video to document police brutality–citing numerous examples where such recording was instrumental in exposing violent behavior on the part of cops. The piece also includes the perspective of cops who don’t want to be videotaped, who produce zero evidence for their […]
David Broder–or an automated David Broderesque column-generator–bemoaned once again (Washington Post, 10/14/10) that “As the Gulf Between GOP and Democrats Widens, the Center Is Lost.” To illustrate this dire situation, Broder (or the Broderbot) cited congressional voting patterns: Bill Galston, the Brookings Institution’s resident political philosopher, was the first of the day to point out […]
In the era of social media, the audience itself has a big say in how big the audience is. If you’d like FAIR’s messages to reach more people, there’s a number of simple things you can do to help. 1. Comment on the blog. A lively comment section draws readers to a blog. If you […]
