FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
After the anticlimax of the COP-15 climate-policy negotiations in Copenhagen last year (Extra!, 2/10)—in which the more than 190 UN-member nations walked away with a non-binding statement of intent cobbled together in secret by the U.S. and a few other wealthy nations—public and press expectations for this year’s COP-16 meeting (11/29-12/10/10) in Cancún, Mexico, were […]
The need for informed and nuanced environmental reporting has never been greater: The scientific evidence of global warming demands urgent action, climate change already underway affects every corner of society, and climate issues unavoidably arise in economic and energy debates. That a recent poll showed declining concern about the planet’s state (Pew, 10/22/09) only accentuates […]
“We’d like to thank the mainstream media for showing up,” quipped Cheri Honkala, adjusting her baby son on her jeans-clad lap. The executive director of the Philadelphia-based Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a multiracial organization of, by and for poor and homeless people, Honkala was opening a Saturday press conference last October in a claustrophobic classroom […]
When people think of the most environmentally devastating industries, the print media may not come immediately to mind. But unfortunately for everyone who gets their news this way, the cost of the morning paper that lands on our stoop—and even the magazine you are now reading—may include “denuded landscapes, toxic rivers, foul air, bulging landfills […]
Coverage of restrictive abortion legislation demonstrates that “balanced” reporting is not necessarily synonymous with accurate reporting. Even while seeming to present impartial facts, media often simultaneously participate in the subtle rhetorical shift toward elevating the fetus to a legal standing separate and equal to a woman’s. The “rights of the unborn” is the most recent […]
Michael Moore likes to ask the question: “What if the rest of us had a TV show?” We might want an amiably unkempt, roly-poly everyman in a baseball cap for an anchor. We’d want to fly a kite with suicide-assisting doctor Jack Kevorkian, and run a convicted felon for president under the slogan, “From the […]
With the February 1 ABC News special, Boys and Girls Are Different: Men, Women and the Sex Difference, reported by correspondent John Stossel, hormonally induced haircut prices joined gay brains and race-based IQ as the politically charged science of the media moment. The show asked the eternal question, “Are men and women supposed to be […]
There’s good news and bad news, America. The good news is that toxics in the environment are much less dangerous than once thought; the bad news is the government’s exorbitant over-regulation of chemicals. The solution? Wait patiently for more definitive data and then apply strict cost/benefit analysis. That’s the growing consensus among a new “third […]
The environment and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe were two of last year’s hottest stories. And the two issues came together in the aggressive, graphic reporting on the severe pollution behind the “Iron Curtain.” There was no dearth of coverage: In the ten major publications studied by Extra!, there were 37 stories on […]
In September 1987, when Amnesty International issued its annual (1986) report on human rights abuses in 129 nations, it received scant and oversimplified coverage reflecting the anti-Sovietism of the day. Amnesty’s world-spanning report was typically cast in a superpower framework, as US journalists focused on human rights violations in the USSR or in countries out […]
