FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
If James Risen’s blogger critics were in kindergarten, as the New York Times reporter suggests, when he broke the story about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping in 2005, then presumably they would have been in pre-K in 2004 when he first learned about the surveillance program. They would have moved up a grade as his paper […]
The thing that jumped out at me from the disturbing footage of Rep. Bob Etheridge (D.–N.C.) manhandling a young man, who had dared to approach him with a camera and a question, was the lawmaker’s ominous assertion: “I have a right to know who you are.” He doesn’t, of course—the Supreme Court has repeatedly […]
NPR‘s Brooke Gladstone (On the Media, 6/11/10) interviewed CNN‘s Ed Henry about the squirt-gun party at the vice president’s mansion that Henry giddily tweeted about: BROOKE GLADSTONE: If these events don’t influence coverage, why do you think the White House throws them? Do they just want to shoot you with a super-soaker? ED HENRY: Maybe […]
Media Detector, a New York Times blog, has a post today (6/14/10) about a comic book adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses that Apple is insisting be bowdlerized before it can be turned into an app for the iPad–replacing an image of a bare-breasted “milk lady” with a close-up of her face. While calling Apple‘s decision […]
You know, the fact of the matter is we have to change how we do things. We are on an imprudent and unsustainable path in a number of ways. You talk about debtors’ prisons, we used to have debtors’ prisons, now bankruptcy is no taint! Bankruptcy is an exit strategy! Our society and our culture […]
One thing to add about coverage of Gaza’s’ rockets is the popularity of the phrase “thousands of rockets.” To cite one of many examples, Joe Klein writes for Time (6/9/10): There is reason to treat Hamas as an enemy of Israel; thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilians attest to that. If you described the […]
Under the headline “President Bush Is No Nazi Torturer,” Washington Post editorial writer Eva Rodriguez uses a blog post (6/9/10) to “take exception” to another Post blog item (6/9/10) written by Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. The point of contention: vanden Heuvel, responding to a report that the U.S. government has been conducting research on […]
Three weeks ago, under the headline “Activists Seize Control of Politics,” Politico (5/19/10) was reporting that U.S. politics may have changed forever: The 2010 electorate has swallowed an emetic–disgorging in a series of retching convulsions officeholders in both parties who seem to embody conventional Washington politics. The anti-establishment, anti-incumbent fevers on display Tuesday are not […]
I have a question for the surprising number of people who are defending Helen Thomas’ comments: Don’t you think, given Thomas’ record, that if she thought she had said something she could stand behind, she would be standing behind it?
Think Progress (6/7/10) claims Sarah Palin’s criticism of the press regarding Helen Thomas is wrong, but I can’t even figure out what she’s trying to say. Here’s Palin’s Twitter statement: Helen Thomas press pals condone racism? Heaven forbid “esteemed” press corps represent society’s enlightened elite; Rest of us choose truth. “Enlightened elite” would seem to […]
Glenn Greenwald (Salon, 6/3/10), in a compelling blog post on “Victimhood, Aggression and Tribalism,” quotes Noam Chomsky from Imperial Ambitions: In one of his many speeches, to U.S. troops in Vietnam, [Lyndon] Johnson said plaintively, “There are three billion people in the world and we have only two hundred million of them. We are outnumbered […]
Newsweek‘s “environmental issue” has an article (5/28/10) by correspondent Stefan Theil declaring climate change to be “Uncertain Science.” Giving the Reader’s Digest condensed version of the denialist case, Theil refers to “e-mails and documents suggesting that researchers cherry-picked data and suppressed rival studies to play up global warming”–without mentioning that after sensationalistic media stories suggested […]
David Brooks (New York Times, 5/28/10) informs us that the idea that “government should have more control over industry” is one of the “predictably partisan and often puerile” reactions to the oil spill. The lesson that smart people derive from the spill, Brooks says, is “that humans are not great at measuring and responding to […]
A troubling article from Newsweek (5/26/10) reports on efforts by both BP and government officials to limit media access to the aftermath of the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion […]
In a piece about European countries adopting austerity measures in response to the Greek financial crisis, the New York Times (5/26/10) acknowledges that some people think this is a terrible idea: In most European capitals, the case for fiscal rectitude is now trumping fears that pulling away those props will hobble the fragile recovery. The […]
Thomas Friedman is upset in his New York Times column today (5/26/10) because Brazilian President Lula da Silva negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran. Asks Friedman, “Is there anything uglier than watching democrats sell out other democrats to a Holocaust-denying, vote-stealing Iranian thug just to tweak the U.S. and show that they, too, can play […]
Another development in the Obama administration’s unprecedented efforts to criminalize the leaking of information to the press: Politico‘s Josh Gerstein (5/24/10) reports that a former FBI contractor was given a 20-month sentence for giving five classified documents to a blog. The former contractor, Shamai Leibowitz, said he wanted to expose activity he believed was illegal. […]
It is commendable to hold misleading politicians to account. Our question is how universal this concern is at the New York Times.
I’ve commented before on the corporate media’s tendency to cherry-pick election results to illustrate their favorite political moral: that Democrats need to move to the right. Still, I was surprised, after a day of voting in which there was one major race pitting a Democrat against a Republican–the special election in Rep. Jack Murtha’s old […]
There’s a certain the-monster-isn’t-so-bad genre of journalism–profiling some character known for vicious misanthropy, usually a right-wing media personality, only to assure readers that once you get to know them, you realize that they don’t actually mean all the nasty things they say. (The Time cover story on Ann Coulter discussed here is perhaps the classic […]
