FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Matthew Yglesias (8/3/10) has a good takedown of senators John McCain (R.-Ariz.) and Tom Coburn’s (R.-Ok.) list of supposedly wasteful stimulus projects that generated an “exclusive” on ABC‘s Good Morning America (8/3/10): Jon Chait observes that McCain and Coburn also seem to have decided that anything relating to animals is necessarily waste. Hence a small […]
Former special ops squad leader/current think tank fellow Andrew Exum noisily yawns at the WikiLeaks Afghan document release on the New York Times op-ed page today (7/27/10): The news media have done a good job of showing the public that the Afghan war is a highly complex environment stretching beyond the borders of the […]
Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger sent a memo to staffers on July 8 with the subject line “How Social Media Impacts Your Professional Life,” suggesting new rules for journalists’ private expressions of opinion. So far, the memo seems to have only been discussed on a German language media blog (Ruhr Barone, 7/22/10). Jumping off from the […]
FAIR founder Jeff Cohen writes a tribute to Mary Reed Shepard, one of FAIR’s longest-serving and most effective local activists. I met Mary Shepard, an incredibly energeticactivist and media critic from Minneapolis/St. Paul, when she was young–about 70-years-young. “If we had a Mary Shepard in everycity,” I thought, “we’d be on the verge of (nonviolent) […]
Unlike a lot of critiques of Amazon from the publishers’ point of view, Colin Robertson’s article in the latest issue of the Nation (8/2-9/10) does describe actual bad behavior on the part of the online bookseller: Dennis Loy Johnson, co-publisher of the Brooklyn-based independent Melville House, is one of the few publishers who have dared […]
Web-based outlets like Salon (7/21/10) and Talking Points Memo (7/21/10) have picked up on the connection—apparently first pointed out by dagblog (7/21/10)—between shooting suspect Byron Williams and Fox News host Glenn Beck. But to judge from a Nexis search, traditional media have ignored the story almost completely. (One exception, found via Facebook: local CBS station […]
Sometimes it almost seems like one of the requirements for a high-placed job in corporate media is an inability to learn from experience. Take the front page of USA Today (7/22/10)–the “cover story” is about Shirley Sherrod (FAIR Blog, 7/21/10), whose ordeal is blamed in part on “conservative blogger” Andrew Breitbart taking advantage of “a […]
The list of First Amendment–trampling rules for Guantánamo reporters makes for dispiriting reading in today’s New York Times (7/21/10)—e.g., “If information the government deems protected is inadvertently disclosed, the Pentagon can order reporters not to reveal it.” But perhaps the most discouraging part of Jeremy Peters’ article is the list of reporters who fell afoul […]
New York Times blogger Brian Stelter (7/20/10) reports on the controversy over the PBS documentary on George Shultz that was funded by Shultz’s friends and associates. Stelter quotes the producer of the show’s response to the criticism, along with FAIR’s rejoinder: The series’ producer, David deVries, said in a statement to Mr. Getler that “throughout […]
In his New York Times column today (7/19/10), Paul Krugman offers a prediction about the likely pundit response to the drubbing Democrats are expected to take in the November elections: What I expect…if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects will say that it was because Mr. Obama was too liberal—when […]
The fact that the Federal Reserve could be doing much more to stimulate the economy—but so far has chosen not to do so—is finally getting some prominent corporate media attention. The New York Times wrote today (7/15/10), referring to Fed chair Ben Bernanke: As Mr. Bernanke pointed out in a speech in 2002, when he […]
When he got a gig doing political commentary for CNN, hate-blogger Erick Erickson assured Howard Kurtz that he had realized that “I had to grow up in how I write.” And Erickson convinced the New York Times that he had become a kinder, gentler pundit. But hating is what Erickson does. That’s why it’s unsurprising […]
Reuters (7/14/10) has a report today on the efforts by senators Blanche Lincoln (D.-Arkansas) and Jon Kyl (R.-Arizona) to greatly reduce the amount wealthy estates owe in federal taxes. Under current law, after a one-year suspension, the federal estate tax rate will return to its pre-2001 level of 55 percent, with the first $1 million […]
FAIR has a new Action Alert (7/12/10) out about PBS airing a completely uncritical three-hour documentary about Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz–paid for by corporations with close ties to Shultz. You can leave copies of your messages to PBS, or comments on the alert, in the comment thread of this post.
Newsweek’s right-wing Latin American correspondent Mac Margolis (7/2/10) is once again playing games with statistics. After the obligatory attack on Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez as a “chest-thumping autocrat,” Margolis gets down to the business of praising his favorite Latin American country, Colombia, as a country that deserves “lead billing” among the “new stars of the emerging […]
L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan (7/2/10), reviewing Oliver Stone’s documentary South of the Border, remarks in passing that “a recent piece in the New York Times pointed out numerous errors” in the film’s discussion of Latin American politics. Turan might have noticed that the Times‘ supposed debunking, by former Latin American correspondent Larry Rohter, […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald has an illuminating post (6/27/10) that argues that the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg, with his “self-praising, desperately insecure need to tout his own wisdom, knowledge and expertise, while demeaning those who are not admitted to his Special Club…is a perfectly illustrative face of the American establishment media.” Responding to Goldberg’s assertion (Atlantic, 6/25/10) […]
National Review senior editor Jay Nordlinger (Corner, 3/24/10), responding to CNN pairing disgraced Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer with a not-conservative-enough-for-National-Review Kathleen Parker, muses: I’m reminded why conservatives had to build their own media outlets. It’s sort of like Jews and country clubs. Jews built their own, not because they wanted to, necessarily, but because the […]
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has endorsed the draconian Arizona immigration law on the grounds that immigration has caused the state’s crime to skyrocket—a claim that founders on the fact that crime in the state has actually gone down (FAIR Action Alert, 5/17/10). Of late, he hasn’t talked much about the immigration/crime angle, leading us […]
FAIR has a new Action Alert (6/21/10) on misleading historical context about Gaza’s rockets in the coverage of flotilla attack in the New York Times and Washington Post. You can post copies of your letters to the papers, or responses on the alert, in the comments thread below.
