Legitimate Targets?
In their zeal to present the war against Yugoslavia as a moral crusade, members of the media sometimes slipped into the logic of ethnic cleansing.
Jim Naureckas
MSNBC: More Slant–Not By Chance
The narrow political spectrum of TV punditry, familiar to Extra! readers, continues to shift to the right. The latest subsidence comes at MSNBC, whose recent changes to its lineup all serve to showcase already well-represented conservative views. One change is on the misnamed Equal Time, in which Iran/Contra conspirator Oliver North has been made co-anchor […]
SoundBites: April 1999
“Stumbling” Over Timor A New York Times article (2/18/99) about East Timor, an island nation occupied by Indonesia since 1975, claimed that “for almost a quarter-century, relations between Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, and the United States—as well as the rest of the outside world—have often stumbled over the fate of half of […]
The Art of the Con
A good prank attempts to shed light on an issue and to create social change. It is the manipulation of ideas and emotions in order to shift focus onto otherwise hidden agendas or social justices.
Does Media Coverage of President Clinton Reveal a Liberal Bias?
Before we can talk about the media’s attitude toward Bill Clinton, we need to understand what the media are. Nearly every major news outlet in the United States is owned by a large for-profit corporation—whether a media conglomerate like Time Warner or Disney or a diversified industrial giant like General Electric (which owns NBC) or […]
Info Bandits:
Media conglomerates hijacked telecommunications policy with millions in PAC contributions
There’s a Latin phrase that people use—cui bono—that translates as “for whose good?” It means that you can figure out who is responsible for a situation by looking at who benefits from it. Sometimes, though, it’s easier to figure out who benefits by looking at who is responsible. This rule greatly simplifies the task of […]
Witness for the Prosecution:
NPR slants the case against Mumia Abu-Jamal
After attacks from police groups, National Public Radio quickly backed away from its plan to air commentaries by Pennsylvania death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal, an African-American journalist, received a death sentence after being convicted in the December 1981 shooting death of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner—in a trial marred by gross procedural errors. NPR […]
ACTION ALERT: The Philadelphia Inquirer’s New Spectrum: From Centrism to Antisemitism
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s spectrum excludes “unvarnished progressives” while making sure that antisemites have someone to represent them.
The Oklahoma City Bombing: The Jihad That Wasn’t
Seldom have so many been so wrong—so quickly. In the wake of the explosion that destroyed the Murrah Federal Office Building, the media rushed—almost en masse—to the assumption that the bombing was the work of Muslim extremists. “The betting here is on Middle East terrorists,” declared CBS News‘ Jim Stewart just hours after the blast […]
Racism Resurgent:
How media let The Bell Curve's pseudo-science define the agenda on race
When the New Republic devoted almost an entire issue (10/31/94) to a debate with the authors of The Bell Curve, editor Andrew Sullivan justified the decision by writing, “The notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief.” In fact, the idea that some races are […]
Enemy Ally: The Demonization of John-Bertrand Aristide
Aristide has long been the target of a disinformation campaign, with CIA distortions disseminated through the media.
Letters to the Editor May/June 1995
An exchange between Christina Hoff Sommers and FAIR on the subject of her book Who Stole Feminism?.
Crime Contradictions
How did mass media give people the false impression that crime was climbing drastically? How did they justify portraying steady crime rates as a “scary orgy” that demands immediate action? An examination of U.S. News’ special report on crime is revealing, illustrating the major themes, distortions and self-contradictions of much of mainstream crime coverage in 1993 and 1994.
In Belfast Bombing, a Tragedy Without Context
What the US media frame failed entirely to convey was that the October 23, 1993, Shankhill Road explosion came after a month of relentless attacks on Catholics by loyalist death squads.
SoundBites March 1993
‘Anti-Liberal’ Media Dorrance Smith, a top media strategist for the Bush White House, will join fellow administration alumni C. Boyden Gray and Evan Kemp in launching an “anti-liberal public affairs network” on cable TV, the LA Times reports (1/11/93). Smith has the right experience for the task: As a former news executive at ABC, he […]
Counterspin No. 17: October 28, 1992
POLLS, PERSONALITIES, AND PRIORITIES: The Sunday, Oct. 25, issue of the Washington Post is a good example of what’s been wrong with mainstream election coverage this year. The lead story is a typical horserace article: “Presidential Race Looks Narrower.” Next to that was an examination of Clinton’s personality: “What Kind of President? On Clinton’s Inner […]
Counterspin No. 16: October 21, 1992
UNLEVEL PLAYING FIELD: That creaking you hear is the sound of the press corps bending over backwards for the Bush/Quayle ticket. One example of what seems to be a deliberately unlevel playing field was NBC’s tally of likely electoral votes for Bush and Clinton (10/19): NBC estimated that Clinton was likely to get at least […]
Counterspin No. 15: October 15, 1992
INTIMIDATION FACTOR: Nothing more clearly shows the impact of the Bush campaign’s efforts to intimidate journalists than the timid response of much of the media to Dan Quayle’s daring them to check his facts. When Quayle treated “telling the truth” as the central issue in the campaign, and responded to factual disagreements by saying that […]
Counterspin No. 14: October 1, 1992
GOOD MORNING, MR. PRESIDENT: How did ABC get President Bush to agree to do three live interviews on Good Morning America? By allowing him to pick what subjects he wanted to talk about and declare certain issues off limits, according to a report by Cox News Service (9/28). The setup was that Bush would be […]
Counterspin No 13: September 22, 1992
DEBATE EVASION: Bush’s debate-avoiding strategy extends to public television–and PBS is letting him get away with it. Last night, PBS ran the second part of an innovative two-part special called Voices of the Electorate, based on town meetings in black and Latino communities, where voters indicated the issues they wished candidates would address. The producers […]
