FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The United States is seeking to make space a new arena of war—but you wouldn’t know that from mainstream media that limit coverage to U.S. plans for “missile defense.” The wider space military program is laid out in publicly available documents—easily accessible to media—such as the recent report of the “Space Commission” chaired by new […]
The US military’s plans to “control space” and the Earth below by placing weapons in orbit are explicit and extreme—and go unreported by mainstream media. What reporting is done on space military policy is restricted to the spin that only “missile defense” is involved. “US Space Command—dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect […]
“Electricity from nuclear fission continues to be the most comprehensive source of energy available to meet growing U.S. demand,” declared Richard Rhodes, beginning his 1993 book Nuclear Renewal. He ended it 126 pages later declaring “whether it will be or not depends on leadership and public education.” Rhodes and John Palfreman made their contribution to […]
Although you’d never know it from most U.S. media, that Russian Mars space probe carrying nearly a half-pound of deadly plutonium did not fall “harmlessly” into the sea in November 1996. It crashed into South America, breaking up into a fireball as it came down, according to eyewitnesses. When President Bill Clinton called Australian Prime […]
I knew I was in trouble when, walking into a “leadership summit” of the Society for Environmental Journalists, I tested out what I was planning to say with a young reporter. SEJ should accept investigative reporting as being a part of environmental journalism—after all, I noted, Rachel Carson, the mother of environmental journalism, practiced investigative […]
Make your own media! I’m what they call a “media critic”—I teach a course called Politics of Media as a journalism professor at the State University of New York’s College at Old Westbury, and criticize media plenty, especially in the pages of Extra!. My focus is on concentration of media ownership, especially its impact on […]
New York Newsday had become the most enterprising and in many respects the best daily newspaper in New York City. In investigative reporting, liveliness, experimentation, in serving the New York City urban core, just as New York Newsday‘s advertisements said, it was “ahead of the Times.” But on July 14, 1995, the parent company of […]
The prospect of CBS being taken over by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation–the biggest nuclear power plant manufacturer in the world; the No. 3 U.S. government contractor for nuclear weapons; the manager of a string of government nuclear weapons facilities, including several heavily polluted sites–is being met with sharp criticism by safe energy activists. “We now […]
Victor Neufeld, 20/20‘s executive producer, whose wife is a PR agent whohas represented the nuclear, chemical and plastics industries, has continued to steer the show away from environmental stories. In an Extra! expose (1-2/94), 20/20 staffers and ex-staffers told of Neufeld squelching stories critical of the nuclear industry and putting a spin on environmental stories […]
A California appeals court has ruled that public utilities cannot discriminate against reporters—in a case that revealed how much power corporations have in determining who will cover them. The Dec. 27, 1993 decision by the Court of Appeal reinstated a lawsuit brought by journalist J.A. Savage, who charged that Pacific Gas & Electric Co. got […]
Victor Neufeld, 20/20‘s executive producer, whose wife is a PR agent who has represented the nuclear, chemical and plastics industries, has continued to steer the show away from environmental stories. In an Extra! expose (1-2/94), 20/20 staffers and ex-staffers told of Neufeld squelching stories critical of the nuclear industry and putting a spin on environmental […]
Victor Neufeld runs 20/20, the second-most popular TV news magazine in U.S. media. Neufeld has been a top executive of 20/20 for 14 years—for the last seven, its executive producer with the final say on what the average 14 million viewers of the ABC news magazine get to see every Friday night. After 60 Minutes, […]
According to the TV program What Happened?, broadcast on NBC earlier this year (3/16/93), “the system worked” during the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island (TMI). Although there were problems with “communication,” the show reported, with the undamaged unit of TMI back in operation, most people in the area now live happily with the […]
A space probe with 50 pounds of plutonium aboard–theoretically enough if dispersed to give everyone in the world lung cancer–made an extremely risky low-level “flyby” of the Earth in December 1992. But you wouldn’t have known any danger was involved by reading most of the mainstream U.S. media. Indeed, the New York Times‘ Dec. 8 […]
Newsday‘s reputation as a promoter of development on Long Island, N.Y., is being reinforced by publisher Robert M. Johnson—to the discomfort of many of the daily’s reporters and other Long Island media. Johnson was the principal speaker at an April 7 meeting of top Long Island developers, leaders of business groups and construction unions, who […]
One of the claims of the nuclear industry is that it is subject to constant criticism from the media. But a five-month sample of clippings gathered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission indicates that the majority of editorials, columns and news stories on nuclear power in U.S. newspapers are supportive of nuclear power. Extra! conducted a […]
One reason so many news articles and opinion pieces support nuclear technology is the massive public relations effort backed by both the nuclear industry, and state and local governments. One example of how the nuclear industry engineers media support was disclosed in November l991, when the Safe Energy Communication Council obtained a plan for a […]
An investigative series on the Los Alamos National Laboratory by the Santa Fe New Mexican resulted in the sacking of the daily newspaper’s managing editor who edited the series, and a moratorium on nuclear technology stories by the newspaper. The editor, David N. Mitchell, told Extra! that due to the legal settlement reached after his […]
Time magazine’s April 29 cover story asked the question: “Nuclear Power: Do We Have a Choice?”–and answered it in the negative. Time mirrored the arguments of the nuclear industry and nuclear enthusiasts in the Bush administration–without investigating their validity. For instance, Time cited an April report by the National Academy of Sciences on the greenhouse […]
The story was hot in more ways than one: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposed to deregulate much of so-called “low-level” radioactive waste from the nation’s nuclear plants, to deem it “Below Regulatory Concern” and allow it to be treated, without monitoring, like plain old garbage. This proposal was on the NRC’s agenda from 1985 […]
