FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
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.
In the sixth paragraph of his front-page obituary of Vietnam War–era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (7/7/09), the New York Times‘ Tim Weiner tries—and fails—to give some idea of the human cost of McNamara’s war: Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the […]
The business department at the Washington Post has gotten into trouble in what may be a case of too much truth in advertising. As reported by Politico (7/2/09), the Post circulated a flyer offering–for the low, low cost of $25,000–an “intimate and exclusive Washington Post salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of […]
Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research had one of the most informative pieces I’ve seen on the Iranian election, published on WashingtonPost.com (6/26/09). Weisbrot examines the actual Iranian vote-counting procedures, and concludes that in Iran, “large-scale fraud is extremely difficult, if not impossible, without creating an extensive trail of evidence.” Since […]
Richard Posner is the sort of judge who gets mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee because of his supposed brilliance. But, then, he’s also the person who wrote this: Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without […]
In his evaluation of the Dan Froomkin firing, Washington Post ombud Andy Alexander (6/26/09) confidently asserts that “first, it’s not about ideology,” then later asserts that Froomkin “was urged not to do media criticism.” Clearly, though, the notion that the Post should not be subjected to criticism is a central tenet of the paper’s ideology. […]
I wrote a short item on Dan Froomkin’s firing for FAIR’s radio show CounterSpin today: One of the bright spots at the Washington Post media enterprise was Dan Froomkin’s column, “White House Watch,” for WashingtonPost.com. It often struck us that Froomkin had a whole different attitude—skeptical of those in power, and critical of their journalistic […]
Do they still teach the First Amendment in law school? That’s what you have to wonder when you see a lawyer for the Obama administration’s Justice Department arguing that statements made by former Vice President Dick Cheney in the Scooter Libby probe ought to be kept secret because a future vice president might refuse to […]
In an affidavit supporting a lawsuit against a new novel related to J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (New York Times, 6/17/09), Salinger’s literary agent makes a statement that encapsulates a common misunderstanding of what copyright is for. Referring to Salinger, the agent said, “He feels strongly that he wants his fiction and his characters […]
The website Gawker (6/9/09) caught Newsweek making some sneaky changes in an online article—changes that were ordered by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, and which just happened to favor the host of a show that Meacham appears on regularly. On the afternoon of Friday, June 5, Newsweek‘s website put up an interview with Joe Scarborough, the […]
An AP story (6/7/09) previewing today’s European Parliament election is headlined on MSNBC, “Europe Leans Right Ahead of Parliament Voting: Amid Economic Gloom, Conservatives Look Set to Win Big in Europe-Wide Poll.” The article, by Michael Weissenstein and Robert Wielaard, begins: Europe was leaning to the right ahead of European Parliament elections Sunday, with voters […]
I give the Washington Post‘s Anthony Shadid credit for good intentions in his article today (6/3/09)–he realizes that there’s some aspects of Mideast history that his readers ought to know about but probably don’t. But it seems like any attempt to tell the truth about the Middle East has to be accompanied by a bodyguard […]
Imagine that the executive director of Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network punched a woman in the head while uttering a racial epithet. Imagine further that two years after this hate crime took place, the executive director still had his job, and when Sharpton was asked about this, he speculated about why this story was […]
The New York Times‘ front-page piece today (5/29/09) on Sonia Sotomayor’s work with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund is a good example of what is meant by “framing”–and a bad example of how it can distort a story. The bulk of the story describes various cases that the group took on while […]
Politico‘s Mike Allen writes (5/27/09): The media’s left-of-center bias is rarely more apparent than during court fights. The coverage running up to the pick was slanted heavily toward the notion of how “pragmatic” Obama’s legal views are and how unlikely he was to pick a liberal. So coverage of Supreme Court fights is one […]
FAIR’s latest Action Alert asks media activists to ask New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt about a recent Elisabeth Bumiller article that reported on former Guantanamo prisoners “returning” to terrorism–even though it was not clear there was evidence that any of the released prisoners had ever been involved in “terrorism” of any sort. Please […]
The New York Times had a story yesterday (5/21/09) about the test of an Iranian missile “that was capable of striking Israel and parts of Western Europe.” This was an important point in the article—reporters David E. Sanger and Nazila Fathi included it in their lead paragraph, and later listed it among “three technologies necessary […]
The independent website Raw Story (5/6/09) recently summarized the human toll of the U.S. government’s torture program. Approximately 100 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to human rights investigators, with 34 of those deaths officially classified as homicides; at least eight individuals were tortured to death. Yet somehow, when corporate […]
When influential institutions treat those responsible for torture as worthy experts, society risks losing things even more valuable than “thoughtful conversation.”
Corporate media’s arguments against Google are getting stranger and stranger. While previously the Washington Post had accused the search engine of “vacuum[ing] up their content without paying a dime,” now the Post has media lawyers Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown (5/16/09) charging that search engines “crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path.” Can […]
