FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
One thing editors of the New York Times and I keep trying to do is knock down the notion that the Times is a liberal paper. But we go at it differently. They do it by stuff like calling the Nazi groper Schwarzenegger a moderate Republican (10/11/03), by apologizing for implying that George W. Bush […]
EXTRA! Update NEW YORK CITY—If the first casualty of war is the truth, any dispatch from Afghanistan was likely to slay it in its very first word. The dateline says: We are there, we saw it happen. But they weren’t. They didn’t. Poor Geraldo Rivera got slugged for pretending otherwise. A crossover from MSNBC to […]
The last weekend of April marked a high point in American journalism, when the New York Times Magazine and 60 Minutes II exposed a dreadful war crime. It also marked a low point in American journalism, when the media denied the crime, minimized it, defended it and reburied it. The story had first been exhumed […]
When New Yorkers went into shock over the 41 bullets fired at Amadou Diallo, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert found “comfort”–her word–by recalling the sodomizing of Abner Louima. The business with the broomstick, she explained in the New Yorker (3/29/99), was not what we hire the police to do, whereas we do pay them to accost characters […]
The Trust: The Powerful and Private Family Behind the New York Times By Susan E. Tifft and Alex Jones (Little Brown) On one memorable evening at the New York Times in mid-20th Century, a newly hired Hungarian charmer cried across the city room, “Darling, zay are changing my story!” When the echo reached the publisher […]
Felicity Barringer, the New York Times media reporter (“Week in Review,” 4/25/99), scolded editors for publishing an Agence France Press photo of a corpse in Kosovo, an Albanian refugee killed by a NATO bomb, without adequately warning that the Serbs could have arranged the body for dramatic effect. She quoted a CBS news executive who […]
June 1999 The Times ran a disclaimer (3/19/95) for a remark it would not repeat. It said the computer did it. The remark had turned up in a March 15 dispatch about Texas Governor George W. Bush studying to become president. One of the Times ‘ many editors, the correction revealed, had added in a […]
The pundits prayed for the long national nightmare to end, and free them to enlighten us on serious business like shoring up Social Security. They said the public had it up to here with tawdry scandal, that we craved nothing more than closure. But the vote of closure came at the start of Sweeps Month; […]
For the Times of London and the Times of New York, it is still quite proper to say the natives stink—provided they are French. When French soap merchants followed the lead of ours to persuade their public that it had B.O., the Timeses were happy to confirm it. The one in London (11/21/98) whinnied: “It’s […]
The rescue of Social Security has been a staple of American journalism for 20 years now—a story all the more remarkable in that Social Security has never been in peril except from its rescuers. The rescues have all been based on faulty arithmetic. First, in 1977, the rescuers humbly confessed that they had made a […]
A daily misdemeanor of our media is their election of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) as the voice of the nation’s elderly. A quick visit to any good newspaper morgue would reveal that this is a fiction. AARP was exposed by Consumer Reports in 1976 (1/76) and by 60 Minutes in 1978 (5/14/78) […]
Where does the man find the time to earn all that money? You can’t turn on the tube but there’s Peter G. Peterson, telling some awestruck talking head that Social Security and Medicare are gobbling up our kiddies’ porridge. Or he’s writing it on your favorite op-ed page, or in magazines, or relaying the message […]
Talk about being hoist on your own petard! That indispensable tool of modern journalism, the opinion poll, has dealt us journalists a cruel blow. And our own journalistic establishment–the Tunes Mirror Center for the People and the Press, and how much more poohbah can you get?– paid for the poll. The poll determined, scientifically as […]
For those fearing inflation, analysts said, one of the most reassuring elements of today’s report [of rising employment] was that average hourly earnings declined by 2 cents, after an October surge of 7 cents. —New York Times, Dec. 3, 1994 A common complaint is that the media favor bad news, but that isn’t fair. Given […]
Back last summer, when the editors of the Atlantic put Bill Clinton through an oral exam, they awarded him an over-all pass, but flunked him on one subject: entitlements. “Every ‘A’ student who has thought about the federal budget knows that if you don’t find some way to limit Social Security and Medicare, you will […]
The New York Times was up to a bit of demagoguery recently (11/3/91), under the headline “Why Older People Are Richer Than Other People.” Reporter Iver Peterson began by presenting a well-established fact—”the notion that some Americans will be the first generation to live at a lower level than their parents”—as a campaign slogan being […]
So you want to be a big-time city editor like Lou Grant? Well, fine, but remember what happened to Lou Grant. He got cancelled. In real life these days, city news is bad news: taxes up, jobs and wages down; no money for schools, parks and bridges; banks in trouble, business threatening to leave; homelessness […]
Budget out of control, banks going bust, states and cities going broke, children going hungry — who’s to blame? For major media, no problem. It’s elderly Americans. In their drive to punish gray hair, big media give no quarter. There is no trial, no defense. “Elderly, Affluent — and Selfish”, snarls a typical op-ed in […]
A curious phenomenon of the presidential campaign has been that the least popular Democratic candidate, Bruce Babbitt, has drawn the most favorable media treatment, while the most popular political demand has received the least favorable media treatment. The New York Times (1/20/88) noted raves for Babbitt in Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles […]
