FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
David Gregory, host of NBC‘s Meet the Press (3/1/09): The Obama stimulus package, $787 billion. The housing plan, $75 billion. That’s $2.3 trillion. Seven hundred and fifty billion dollars additional in this document for additional bailout money for the banks. Meantime, what metric do we have to see how people–what people think of that government […]
“First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.” –The official position of the U.S. government from October 23, 2001 until October 6, 2008 Why do I get the impression that this was seen as a feature, not a bug?
On the death of radio’s Paul Harvey, it’s hard for me not to think of his June 23, 2005 broadcast as his most revealing moment. That’s the episode where he delivered this memorable rant (Extra! Update, 8/05): After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill said that the American people–he said, the American people, he […]
You’d think that reporting on federal budget bills costing billions of dollars would be difficult. But it’s easy, really: All you have to do is remember that budget items involving animals or unusual foods are funny. ABC‘s Jonathan Karl has mastered the genre. Reporting on the ominous spending bill (World News, 2/24/09), he declared: “The […]
This AP “fact check” (2/24/09) of President Barack Obama’s speech is, as usual, a sad effort. You really need to have some threshold for calling “gotcha,” and some of these—maybe all of these—really don’t measure up. Obama says, “Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market,” […]
Media Matters (2/24/09) catches AP reporter Liz Sidoti garbling Barack Obama’s position on entitlements: He called the long-term solvency of Social Security “the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far” and said reforming healthcare, including burgeoning entitlement programs, was a huge priority. What Obama actually said was: In the coming years, we’ll be […]
Howard Kurtz had Bernard Goldberg on his Reliable Sources show (CNN, 2/22/09), weeks after the erratic right-wing media critic blew off his show. You could have had a better conversation about pro-Obama media bias with the drunk on the next barstool. For example, when Kurtz says: I think sometimes you’re selective in your evidence. For […]
Jackie Calmes reports in the New York Times (2/23/09): The president signaled in his campaign that he would support addressing the retirement system’s looming financing shortfall, in part by applying payroll taxes to incomes above $250,000. But that would ignite intense opposition from Republicans, especially with the economy deep in recession. Liberal Democrats are already […]
David Gregory sticking up for bank stockholders on Meet the Press (2/22/09): There’s a larger point here, which is, first of all, the more…the shares of…these banks gets talked down…the closer you get to wiping out the shareholder completely. And it’s, it’s not clear to me that everybody understands that the investor in this country, […]
Raw Story (2/22/09) has a report that illustrates, in passing, the ridiculousness of how copyright law is applied on the Internet. The story concerns a McDonald’s employee in Arkansas who threw an abusive customer out of the restaurant and got shot, and the hamburger company’s refusal to pay the injured employer workers compensation because the […]
With left-of-center columnists critiquing the Beltway obsession with bipartisanship even in outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, it’s no wonder that David Broder is upset (Washington Post, 2/19/09). He calls the idea that Obama should stop worrying so much about attracting Republican support “the worst advice he has received,” warning that without […]
In the wake of a George Will column (Washington Post, 2/15/08) attempting to refute the reality of climate change with a string of inaccurate claims, FAIR has an action alert calling on media activists to write to the Washington Post asking them to retract the falsehoods and explain their fact-checking procedures for columnists. You can […]
Politico reported (2/16/09) that a new poll shows that support for the Fairness Doctrine has dropped. Unfortunately, the policy described in the poll question bears no relationship to the Fairness Doctrine as it actually existed. The Rasmussen polling firm asked respondents whether “the government should require all radio stations to offer equal amounts of conservative […]
In the same column (2/16/09) that he cites Sam Donaldson’s reputation as a “blowhard liberal,” the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz has an item in which he complains that “the Vogue cover story on Michelle Obama, by editor at large André Leon Talley, is nothing if not laudatory.” Kurtz writes: The Talley article mentions briefly that […]
Discussing the retirement of ABC‘s Sam Donaldson, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz writes (2/16/09): Donaldson’s detractors viewed him as a liberal blowhard, and there were certainly times when his mouth outran his brain. I would certainly count FAIR as being among Donaldson’s detractors, and we viewed him as someone who was frequently mistaken for […]
You see it all the time: You need 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate. Not exactly. Under Senate rules—which can be changed by a majority vote—you need the consent of 3/5ths of the Senate to close debate on an issue; that’s 60 votes. To pass a bill, you need a majority of […]
There’s been a corporate media trope lately that the stimulus bill, despite Barack Obama’s assurances, contains “pork.” It’s not always clear what “pork” means, but the Washington Post today (2/13/09) had an example of the genre–headlined “Despite Pledges, Stimulus Has Some Pork”–that opens with a definition of what it means by the term. Unfortunately, it’s […]
Gail Collins covered Albany in a way that was both informative and funny—no mean feat. Then she went to work for the New York Times and has never been the same since.
Sometimes it’s really baffling that Thomas Friedman is considered one of our nation’s most important thinkers on political and economic matters. Here he is today (2/11/09) channeling what “non-Americans” have to say: Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing […]
Today’s lead New York Times story (2/1/09)–subheaded in the print edition “Scant Details, and Wall Street Reacts With a 4.6 Percent Plunge”–is a classic example of the fallacy of treating stock market prices as a kind of opinion poll. Reporters Stephen Labaton and Edmund L. Andrews wrote: “The initial assessment of the plan from the […]
