FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
You don’t generally expect to see a member of a terrorist movement portrayed sympathetically in the pages of a major U.S. newspaper, but that’s what the Washington Post gave us this week (10/15/08) in a report from the West Bank by Linda Gradstein: Avi Ben Yakov is a soft-spoken Jewish settler who loves playing with […]
Via TPM, CBS‘s Dean Reynolds complains at length that the Obama campaign doesn’t have its priorities straight: The Obama aides who deal with the national reporters on the campaign plane are often overwhelmed, overworked and uninformed about where, when, why or how the candidate is moving about. Baggage calls are preposterously early with the explanation […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen was one of John McCain’s strongest media defenders—and that’s saying a lot—up until about the time of the Sarah Palin pick, which seemed to convince Cohen that it wasn’t true that there was only so far McCain would go before “his pride or his sense of honor takes over.” Since […]
His cynicism about politics aside–“I don’t blame candidates for doing what they think will win the election”–blogger Matthew Yglesias (10/7/08) makes a good point about corporate media’s facilitation of politician’s efforts to trivialize the contents of election campaigns: David Gregory…asked McCain campaign spokeswoman Nicole Wallace a question about whether or not John McCain would bring […]
Here’s George Packer in the New Yorker (10/13/08) seeming to debunk Tom Frank: Until the mid-’70s, the white working class—the heart of the New Deal coalition—voted largely Democratic. Since the Carter years, the percentages have declined from 60 to 40, and this shift has roughly coincided with the long hold of the Republican Party on […]
Here’s Sarah Palin misquoting her coffee cup: I’m reading on my Starbucks mocha cup, okay? The quote of the day…. It was Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State [crowd boos] and UN ambassador…. Now she said it, I didn’t. She said, “There’s a place in Hell reserved for women who don’t support other women.” It’s […]
New York Times reporter Michael Gordon, analyzing the major-party candidates’ positions on Iraq (10/6/08), writes the sort of article you would expect from someone who has already taken a public position in favor of the policy embraced by one of the candidates and against the policy adopted by the other.
Almost as useless as not fact-checking politicians’ statements at all is to insist on presenting fact-checks as though both sides are equally guilty—a classic form of false balance that gives a big advantage to whomever happens to be the biggest liar. In this genre we find “Facts Go Adrift on Taxes, Energy in VP Debate: […]
The funny thing about the New York Times editorial yesterday about getting rid of term limits (10/1/08) is that the Times editorial board members no doubt tell themselves that they make up their own minds on issues based on the merits, not on whom their boss has had dinner with. Editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal […]
In yesterday’s New York Times (10/1/08), Steven Erlanger had a piece looking at the French reaction to the U.S. presidential election. He quoted French writer Bernard-Henri Levy: Obama is, certainly, black…. But not black like Jesse Jackson; not black like Al Sharpton; not black like the blacks born in Alabama or in Tennessee and who, […]
When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg began to pave the way for tossing out term limits and running for a third term, the first place he went was to his fellow media moguls (New York Times, 8/23/08): Even as he publicly remains coy about his political future, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has quietly approached some […]
The New York Times‘ Jim Rutenberg had a follow-up piece on Friday’s debate headlined “The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won.” The story described the McCain and Obama camps’ attempts at “influencing the public perception of who won an encounter that produced no clear winner or loser.” Except–is it really true that the […]
The Washington Post (9/28/08) gathered reactions from “foreign policy analysts and others” to last Friday’s debate on international policy, and what’s striking is how hawkish the Post‘s circle of foreign policy experts is. The lineup included Henry A. Kissinger–inevitably–and a bunch of hawks from right-wing think tanks and/or the Bush administration: Danielle Pletka of AEI, […]
In a breakdown of major U.S. newspapers’ positions on the Iraq issue before the invasion began, the trade magazine Editor and Publisher (3/14/03) labeled the New York Times “strongly dovish,” based on its stance in a March 9 editorial: “If it comes down to a question of yes or no to invasion without broad international […]
The special was called “In Search of America,” but when ABC News and Peter Jennings addressed the issue of the reintroduction of wolves to Idaho, they seemed to have already decided beforehand what they would find.
The September 11 attacks were supposed to have changed everything—but you can’t tell it from reading the newspapers.
Displaying a remarkable faith in the power of violence, many media pundits blamed the destruction of the World Trade Center on the failure of the US government to behave aggressively enough after previous acts of terrorism.
In the wake of a catastrophe on the scale of the destruction of the World Trade towers, one question is obvious: Why are fanatics so consumed by rage and hatred that they would give up their lives to kill thousands of civilians in the United States? Even before investigators identified Arab militants as the apparent […]
The New York Times editorial the day after George W. Bush’s inauguration didn’t find space to mention the most striking feature of the 2001 inauguration: that it occurred amidst widespread and angry protests rejecting the legitimacy of Bush’s claim to office.
About once an issue, Brill’s Content—Steven Brill’s for-profit, advertiser-supported magazine of media criticism—has an article about a corporation that Content says was mistreated by the media. In its July/August 1999 issue, the magazine came to the rescue of the Flo-Sun sugar company, which Time magazine’s Don Bartlett and Jim Steele (11/23/98) had cited as a […]
