FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Election Focus 2020: In the New York Times’ world, it’s apparently OK to bemoan a society and an economy that privileges the rich over the poor, but it’s unacceptable to run for the presidency on a promise to reverse those priorities.
Would Ida B. Wells’ exposes of lynching ever have made it into my news feed on Facebook? I doubt it, because Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced May 1 in a meeting with media executives that his company had started ranking news organizations by “trust.”
It did not surprise me, during the 2004 election, when Kerry/Edwards supporters called in to my show on Air America Radio—though it did surprise me when they called in seeking yard signs. I don’t have a yard, much less a sign. All I could think to do was to direct these callers to the Kerry […]
While conservative pundits frequently charged that the L.A. Times‘ expose was motivated by partisanship, the LA Weekly‘s Hollywood reporter, Nikki Finke (9/12/03), was one of the few to draw attention to the fact that right-wing radio was explicitly campaigning to recall incumbent Democrat Gray Davis. The websites of Disney’s KABC-AM in L.A. and its KSFO-AM […]
In 1992, many suspected that Clarence Thomas would not have become a Supreme Court justice if U.S. media had taken women more seriously. A decade later, it’s hard not to feel the same way about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Given different media coverage, Californians might still have elected him governor on October 7, but Schwarzenegger would surely […]
Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist with a long history of writing about sexuality and gender. When her most recent book came out this year, she hoped, as all authors hope, that her work might provoke some useful debate. Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex (Minnesota University Press) is a scholarly […]
There was a moment in the war against Afghanistan when the Bush administration appeared to care about nothing so much as women’s liberation. Out came first lady Laura Bush to talk to the nation about the matter. On November 16, she became what her publicists cheered was “the first first lady to deliver an entire […]
British libel law is called that, you’d think, because it applies in Britain. When it comes to libel, the U.K. is about the most plaintiff-friendly country in the world. British citizens enjoy no guaranteed freedom to write, to speak, let alone to publish. It’s a free speech-free zone. But U.S. citizens escaped all that when […]
Amnesty International has declared the entire female population of Afghanistan to be prisoners of conscience. When the Taliban, a fanatical militia based in North West Pakistan, seized control of the capitol Kabul in 1996, they expelled girls from schools, fired women from their jobs and forced women to wear a head-to-toe burqa, which leaves only […]
Establishment media claim to believe in democracy or “majority rule.” Not in Northern Ireland, it seems. There, a minority of conservatives has been able to stymie progress and practically scuttle an international agreement and a popular vote, because politicians and the press permit an intransigent few to misrepresent the facts and call the shots. A […]
The topic of sexuality received unprecedented news media attention in the 1990s–in part due to the AIDS crisis, in part because of a national fight to bring down centuries of legal, social and cultural bias against people who are bisexual, transgendered and/or lesbian and gay. In many year-end round-ups, the media remembered 1997 as a […]
One man’s prison rape story doesn’t come close to filling this kind of vacuum and mis-reporting in the newspaper of record. “Newspapers in New York could have a full time corrections reporter, there’s so much out there,” says Gary Craig. Not a bad idea.
Reporters who covered the funeral of Britain’s Princess Diana were mystified by the mourners (e.g., New York Times, 9/7/97). “Why are you here?” one journalist after another asked the people adding bouquets to the mountainous flower pile outside the palace gates. Sikhs and Rastafarians, Londoners and tourists, women and men, gay and straight, responded in […]
In July, the anti-feminist Independent Women’s Forum scored a double win worthy of the Women’s National Basketball Association: IWF representatives published op-ed articles in the New York Times (7/10/97) and the Wall Street Journal (7/11/97) on consecutive days with the very same message. And the message was repeated a third time on CBS Evening News […]
On May 16, days after his editor backed away from the contra-crack series and amid rumors that he would soon be fired, Gary Webb was interviewed by Laura Flanders and Janine Jackson on CounterSpin, FAIR’s radio show.
By the time you read this, the sober cynicism of summer will probably have settled in, but now, it’s spring. I’m as excited about “Ellen” coming out as I am about the budding leaves. By summer, I’ll remember that the obstacles to lesbian equality remain intact long after Ellen DeGeneres and her TV character said […]
Fat has been a matter of huge media interest lately, if you’ll pardon the pun. As a nation, we’re wrestling with the fact that we’re getting fatter and fatter all the time—on average, we’ve gained eight pounds apiece in the past decade—and we don’t know what,if anything, can be done about it. The news about […]
When Extra! reviewed welfare coverage in 1995 (5-6/95), it was easy to pick out the popular media themes. What passed for debate sounded more like a chorus–exaggerating the burden of welfare programs on the federal budget and scapegoating the poor, the black, the foreign, the female and the young. Relatively powerless groups became the targets […]
It’s easy to tell what makes folks in the establishment media nervous. When black men came together in Washington, D.C. for 1995’s Million Man March, most journalists scrutinized with healthy skepticism the political agenda fueling the Nation of Islam–led event. Many came down hard and heavy on the organizers’ exclusion of women and whites. Similarly, […]
For the past four years, the debate about “welfare” has targeted women. Politicians fingered poor women as the main source of the nation’s problems, and reporters followed, creating vivid, misleading images of lazy mothers-of-dozens draining to the dregs the nation’s coffers. The pictures skewed the facts, inflating the proportion of AFDC receivers who are African-American, […]
