FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The New York Times reported (10/6/09) that the Federal Trade Commission was planning to establish new rules for bloggers: The FTC said that beginning on December 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any […]
In a story about the Senate Finance Committee voting down two amendments that would have added a public option to the committee’s healthcare bill, New York Times reporters Robert Pear and Jackie Calmes (9/29/09) write, “The votes vindicated the middle-of-the-road approach taken by the committee chairman, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana.” The Times just […]
William Bennett at the Values Voter Summit (AlterNet, 9/22/09): I don’t know why more of the African American leadership doesn’t talk about Frederick Douglass…. Probably because of his deep devotion to Lincoln, and his deep devotion to this country. Frederick Douglass at the dedication of the Freedman’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (4/14/1876): It […]
CIA employees in recent years have been more likely to be engaged in waterboarding and other forms of torture than to have performed death-defying, world-saving undercover work.
Former President Jimmy Carter’s statement (NBC, 9/15/09) that “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African-American,” has generated widespread discussion in the corporate media. But few of the many analyses of Carter’s remarks give you […]
PBS‘s NewsHour‘s Gwen Ifill (9/15/09), quizzing Richard Goldstone on his U.N. fact-finding mission that found that both Israel and Palestinian fighters had committed war crimes in the Gaza conflict: The term “even-handed” is the problem that Israel has with the conclusions in the report. Your criticism of Israel seems so much harsher than that of […]
Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (9/14/09) writes of the Van Jones controversy, in which Fox News‘ Glenn Beck took credit for the resignation of a White House staffer: In the Jones case, there is little question that the traditional media botched the story of an Obama administration official who, wittingly or otherwise, lent his […]
“It is difficult to overstate President Obama’s unpopularity in most of Louisiana,” writes Campbell Robertson in a front-page New York Times article (9/11/09). Yet Robertson managed to pull it off. Robertson continues: “He lost handily to Senator John McCain here, picking up only 14 percent of the white vote. (The state is roughly two-thirds white.)” […]
Under the charming headline “Eliminate the Parasites,” Newsweek‘s Daniel Lyons (9/12/09) advances another brilliant scheme to save corporate media from the menace of Google. Lyons likes the idea put forward by billionaire Ayn Rand fan Mark Cuban: Cuban’s advice: declare war on the “aggregator” Web sites that get a free ride on content. These aggregators–sites […]
The problem with Rupert Murdoch’s proposal to create an online news consortium, in which major publishers would all band together to put their news content behind pay walls (L.A. Times, 8/21/09), is that it’s not illegal to discuss news events online. And you don’t want to make it illegal to discuss news events online. And […]
Asked by a Canadian viewer, “Has anyone noticed that life expectancy in Canada under our health system is higher than the USA?” Bill O’Reilly (7/27/09) responded: “Well, that’s to be expected, Peter, because we have 10 times as many people as you do. That translates to 10 times as many accidents, crimes, down the line.” […]
Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom—best known for his bestseller Tuesdays With Morrie—had a July 25 column that criticized the Obama healthcare reform with an argument that suggested an unfamiliarity with how the U.S. tax system works: In explaining why it was OK to sock a new 5.4 percent tax on the highest earners in […]
Tossing out old papers in preparation for an upcoming office move, I came across what was probably the best hate letter I’ve ever received. It came in response to FAIR’s work on talkshow host Bob Grant–who, after FAIR had documented his bigoted, violent rants and promotion of white supremacy, had been fired by Disney’s ABC, […]
In another example of how the racist record of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s top Republican questioner has gone down the memory hole, Associated Press had a whole story (7/19/09) about Sen. Jeff Sessions’ assertions that Sotomayor was too prejudiced to get his vote without mentioning that the Senate Judiciary Committee had rejected Sessions when […]
In his front-page profile of movie industry blogger Nikki Finke, New York Times media reporter David Carr (7/17/09) can’t resist a self-congratulatory dig: “Her liabilities in the world of print–a penchant for innuendo and unnamed sources–became assets online.” Those familiar with the print media world may recall that unnamed sources are not exactly unknown there. […]
I give Peter Osnos credit for not being as nutty as Richard Posner or as self-pitying as Dana Milbank; his piece from CJR on “Whatâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s a Fair Share In the Age of Google?” (7-8/09) is the most reasonable version I’ve seen of the news industry’s case against the search engine company. Still, I can’t help […]
Former PR agent Wendell Potter’s stories of how he helped the health insurance’s industry’s campaign “to discredit Michael Moore and his film Sicko” calls to mind just how successful that campaign was. Corporate media coverage of the debate raised by the film’s expose of the for-profit insurance system went out of its way to demonize […]
Number of stories in the Nexis news database dated today that mentioned Sen. Jeff Sessions’ (R.-Ala.) questioning of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, in which Sessions accused Sotomayor of harboring ethnic prejudices: 69 Number of such stories that recalled that Sessions was rejected as a judicial nominee in 1986 in part because of his approving […]
The Washington Post‘s editorial (7/7/09) on the death of Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara managed to outdo even the New York Times‘ victim-erasing obituary. The Times cited the number of invading troops killed by McNamara’s war of aggression while ignoring the vastly larger number of Indochinese deaths—but for the Post, neither the aggressors nor their […]
Reading Caitlin Flanagan’s Time magazine cover story (7/2/09) on the “increasingly fragile construct” of marriage—which claims that “the divorce culture became a fact of life” over “the past 2½ decades”—one would never guess that U.S. divorce rates have actually dropped by almost a third since 1992, from 4.8 per thousand people to 3.5.
