FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Election Focus 2020: Support for progressive candidates in battleground states should give any journalist pause before drawing the conclusion that those voters are “counseling” pursuit of the so-called middle ground.
Election Focus 2020: Thomas Edsall looks at evidence that Trump won because of his “aversion to political correctness,” and concludes that jumping on that train is how Democrats will win back the “swing electorate.”
Election Focus 2020: What establishment Democrats are really worried about is their own power in the party, which is threatened by a surging left wing. Don’t look to their establishment media counterparts to report on that transparently.
Election Focus 2020: After four rounds of debates and more than 500 debate questions, moderators have asked only one question about LGBTQ issues to a Democratic presidential candidate.
Election Focus 2020: This week’s Democratic presidential debate confirmed that media are stuck in a fairly rigid debate script that elevates questions about healthcare and the economy above all else, and leaves many pressing topics deeply underexplored.
Election Focus 2020: Establishment Democrats and their big donors are suddenly looking at Elizabeth Warren’s rising polls numbers as a sign that her candidacy has very real potential—and is a very real threat to their power.
Election Focus 2020: Just as coverage wondering whether female candidates and candidates of color are “electable” serves to heighten the very stereotypes and prejudices it purports to be passively observing, “how old is too old” stories draw on tired prejudices that need to be challenged by reporters, not reinforced by them.
Election Focus 2020: Centrist think tank Third Way commissioned an August poll on how to turn people off of Medicare for All, and one of the strongest tactics turned out to be emphasizing what the plan would cost taxpayers. Lo and behold, the tax line has become a central focus of media coverage of Medicare for All.
Election Focus 2020: FAIR has been following the issue of the Washington Post’s bias against Bernie Sanders for quite some time, so we’re happy to offer the evidence CNN and the Post protest is lacking.
Election Focus 2020: By reassuring the kind of party insiders the media rely heavily on for framing their stories, Elizabeth Warren has largely avoided the kinds of aspersions—often anonymous—lobbed at Bernie Sanders.
Election Focus 2020: After CNN’s remarkably substantive and thoughtful town hall on the climate crisis, we wrote that the following debates now had a solid foundation from which to go deeper on climate for a larger audience. Unfortunately, ABC took it as an opportunity to do even less on the crisis.
Election Focus 2020: CNN’s climate crisis town hall showed that, when it’s not setting up mock combat among candidates, the network can actually provide thoughtful and substantive discussion about critical policy issues.
Election Focus 2020: FAIR has been following the issue of the Washington Post’s bias against Bernie Sanders for quite some time, so we’re happy to offer the evidence CNN and the Post protest is lacking.
Election Focus 2020: Coming out of the second round of Democratic debates, a curious storyline crystallized in the media: The candidates are attacking Obama, and that’s a sure-fire way to hand the election to Trump.
Election Focus 2020: The second round of debates may not have enlightened the public much about the candidates, but they made one thing clear: We desperately need serious, independently run debates, not over-the-top industry-friendly spectacles of the like put on by CNN.
Election Focus 2020: The fiscally conservative, risk-averse, largely-happy-with-the-status-quo voter—which, by the way, probably fits the profile of most of the corporate media questioners—would haunt much of NBC’s debates.
Election Focus 2020: It’s a common theme of Trump coverage that now is extending to election coverage: When people protest something Trump does or says, corporate media feel the need to cover as well the people who aren’t reacting as a sort of faux-balance, giving us tautological Trump-supporters-support-Trump stories.
Election Focus 2020: Please call on CNN to include a progressive journalist from an avowedly left media outlet as a moderator in its Democratic debates.
Election Focus 2020: Yes, Robert Johnson is black. Robert Johnson is also extremely wealthy; his wealth puts him in a demographic that has entirely different economic views and interests than the vast majority of the African-American population.
Election Focus 2020: After the first round of Democratic primary debates, the line from corporate media and their overwhelmingly centrist sources was clear: The Democrats are moving dangerously to the left, at their own peril.
