FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Tim Rutten writes today in the L.A. Times (11/5/08): What is perhaps most remarkable about the changed America to which we woke this morning is how the president-elect’s race seems, in most ways, the least remarkable thing about him. In large part, that’s a tribute to the fact that Barack Obama declined every opportunity […]
Matthew Yglesias sums up the likely electoral reactions of “liberal media”: In the real world, all responsible people know that when conservatives win elections, the only responsible thing is for the media to give more platforms to conservatives in order to reflect the country’s conservative sentiments. Meanwhile, when conservative lose elections, the only responsible thing […]
The New York Times‘ Carol Giacomo promises (11/3/08) to “certainly be a lot more skeptical” in covering the arguments for war with Iran than she was when she covered the march to war with Iraq as a diplomatic correspondent for Reuters. That’s good to hear, but this passage in her column made me skeptical about […]
For those who have had enough election coverage, here’s the alternate story of the day: “Sex on TV Increases Teen Pregnancy, Says Report” (Time, 11/3/08). “Teen Pregnancies Tied to Viewing Sexy TV Shows” (AP, 11/3/08). “Study First to Link TV Sex To Real Teen Pregnancies” (Washington Post, 11/3/08). Stories like these are catnip for the […]
New York Times TV reporter Jim Rutenberg (11/2/08) tries to make a case that Fox News and MSNBC are (in Tom Rosenstiel’s words) “reverse images of each other.” Here are the actual quotes used by Rutenberg to demonstrate this supposed parallelism—first, Ann Coulter on Fox (10/30/08): I feel like we are talking to the Germans […]
A personal footnote to the Troy Eid story: Eid lived next door to me in my senior year of college. He seemed like a nice guy, and was editor of the school paper, which is why I was surprised that the first thing I heard about him in more than 20 years was that he […]
The Associated Press (10/29/08) does its usual sad job trying to fact-check candidate statements—this time working a hefty dose of neo-Hooverism into the mix. AP‘s Calvin Woodward charges that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial Wednesday night about the costs of his programs and the crushing budget pressures […]
The story of the McCain worker who faked an assault and blamed it on an imaginary Obama supporter sheds a queasy light on the thinking at the top of the right’s most important media outlet. John Moody, the executive vice president responsible for the editorial direction of Fox News Channel, had this to say (on […]
As the editor of a magazine of media criticism, I make it a rule never to edit the words of someone we’re criticizing in such a way that our readers would understand the quote differently if they saw the original context. We don’t want people looking up what we’re criticizing and saying, “Oh—so that’s what […]
Perhaps CNN and Headline News will take the lesson that at the very bottom of the barrel, there isn’t much worth eating.
Bill Scher of the Campaign for America’s Future has some strong media criticism on AlterNet (10/23/08), focusing on an L.A. Times piece by Stephen Braun (10/23/08) that claims, as the headline says, “Obama and McCain in Denial About Deficits, Economists Say.” “The article repeatedly assumes budget deficits as unequivocally bad,” Scher notes, even though “many […]
Editor & Publisher (10/22/08) notes that Barack Obama is getting a wide lead in newspaper endorsements, winning 125 so far, by the newspaper trade journal’s count, to McCain’s 46. E&P further notes that this is, from a historical perspective, unusual. John Kerry edged out Republican George W. Bush in 2004, 213-205, Bill Clinton got 149 […]
In Michael Powell’s piece in the New York Times (10/22/08) on Barack Obama “changing his tempo,” I found this passage to be a little creepy: Mr. [Jim] Webb, a red-haired, proudly Scots-Irish pol with a John Wayne cadence, introduced Mr. Obama in Roanoke and began: He’s one of you. Mr. Webb offered a complicated formula […]
You don’t compare the size of political rallies to rock concerts, but to other political rallies, and compared to other political rallies, Obama’s are quite large. But *does* Fall Out Boy really get crowds as big as Obama’s?
Actual Fox News lower third, spotted today by Janine Jackson: “Obama Plan Treats Anyone Making Over $250,000 as Wealthy”
Speaking of Mark Halperin, the Politico‘s Michael Calderone notes that while Time‘s Joe Klein seems to have been banned from the McCain press plane for being too critical (“We don’t allow Daily Kos diarists on board either,” a McCain spokesperson says), “other Time magazine staffers, including Washington bureau chief Jay Carney, ” reporter Michael Scherer […]
Howard Kurtz once had a well-deserved reputation for going the extra distance to check what he printed. What happened to that reporter?
“America remains a center-right nation—a fact that a President Obama would forget at his peril,” Newsweek declares above a piece by Jon Meacham for the October 27 issue of the magazine. As Rick Perlstein observes in a dissenting passage in the article, it’s a difficult case to make from opinion polling; on contentious issues like […]
ABC‘s John Stossel is known for his far-fetched logic, but in his special last night he may have outdone himself. In John Stossel’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics (10/17/08), he shouted instructions to ice skaters through a bullhorn to demonstrate—well, it’s not clear what. Here’s how he previewed his experiment in an email to his […]
Via TPM, we read about a reporter (Capital Beat, 10/16/08) who got knocked down at a Sarah Palin rally in North Carolina because he tried to interview an Obama supporter. This seems like the natural progression from the earlier report of Palin inciting her followers to hurl obscenities and racist insults at journalists. And, you […]
