FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The last few days of every year bring a heightened sense of time passing, never to return. "Not always so," the end of a calendar reminds us. When Time recently invited readers to pick up their mobile phones and participate in a "wireless poll," the question was: "Who’s your pick for Person of the Year?" […]
The P.U.-litzer Prizes were established a dozen years ago to provide special recognition for truly smelly media performances. As usual, I’ve conferred with Jeff Cohen, founder of the media watch group FAIR, to sift through the large volume of entries. And now, the thirteenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes, for the foulest media performances of 2004: MANDATE […]
The usual notion of big news is the unusual. Journalists are taught to look for “man bites dog” stories — the events that raise eyebrows and make us think, “Wow!” News of the ordinary also makes the cut in media outlets, of course, but it’s not what sizzles, and it’s not apt to get onto […]
Early in the coldest season, optimists think of the day after solstice. It’s predictable: the hemisphere will start tilting toward more light and warmth. But in the politics of human societies, there’s no reliable way to tell how long a bone-rattling chill will last — or how far it might go. A government’s harsher policies […]
Top officials in Washington are now promoting jitters about Iran’s nuclear activities, while media outlets amplify the message. A confrontation with Tehran is on the second-term Bush agenda. So, we’re encouraged to obliquely think about the unthinkable. But no one can get very far trying to comprehend the enormity of nuclear weapons. They’ve shadowed human […]
When misleading buzzwords become part of the media landscape, they slant news coverage and skew public perceptions. That’s the story with the phrase "Iraqi forces" — now in routine use by U.S. media outlets, including the country’s most influential newspapers. The New York Times and the Washington Post have been leading the way in news […]
The conflict in Iraq has become a holy war. In both directions. On the surface, the most prominent headline on the New York Times front page Nov. 10 was simply matter-of-fact: "In Taking Fallujah Mosque, Victory by the Inch." Yet it’s not mere happenstance that American forces have bombed many of Fallujah’s mosques. For public […]
The day before the election, I visited Albuquerque and Las Vegas. Up close, I saw hundreds of people involved in vigorous get-out-the-vote efforts. Most were young; they seemed very idealistic. These Americans had an opportunity to make a difference, and — brought together by labor unions and such groups as the MoveOn PAC — they […]
Less than two weeks before Election Day 2004, the ABC television network cancelled Miss America. Fifty years after it premiered on national TV, the famous “beauty pageant” has fallen on hard times. Last month, the annual show drew just 9.8 million viewers, the smallest audience ever. “The pageant has changed, but not for the better,” […]
With the presidential debates now behind us, the struggle for the White House will tilt even more toward decentralized media battles for electoral votes. Between now and Election Day, vast resources will go toward spinning local news coverage in swing states while launching carefully targeted commercials on radio and television. For the Bush campaign and […]
More than any other events on the campaign trail this year, the debates have drawn intense public interest. Viewers are eager for something more than the carefully packaged junk that usually passes for political coverage — the nonstop media mix of countless photo-ops, canned speeches, evasive interviews, calculated sound-bites, programmed national conventions and manipulative TV […]
PORTLAND, Ore. — More than any other month of the last four years, October will be filled with reporting about polls. And many stories about them will be as puzzling as a recent Associated Press dispatch that focused on the latest surveys about the presidential race in this hotly contested state. “One poll conducted by […]
The big media themes about the 2004 presidential campaign have reveled in vague rhetoric and flimsy controversies. But little attention has focused on a matter of profound importance: Whoever wins the race for the White House will be in a position to slant the direction of the U.S. Supreme Court for decades to come. Justices […]
Soon after the American death toll in Iraq passed the 1,000 mark, I thought of Saadoun Hammadi and some oratory he provided two years ago. At the time, Hammadi was the speaker of Iraq’s National Assembly. “The U.S. administration is now speaking war,” Hammadi said. “We are not going to turn the other cheek. We […]
I just saw a horror movie — Bush’s Brain — the new documentary based on a book with the same name by journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater. The book’s subtitle is How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. I’ll spare you the grim details. What matters most now is that Rove’s long record […]
“Happy is the country which requires no heroes,” Bertolt Brecht commented. Today, by that standard, the United States is a very unhappy country. These days, the public’s genuine eagerness for heroes is difficult to gauge. If media output is any measure, the hero industry is engaged in massive overproduction. Whether the “products” are entertainers, star […]
The nation’s top dog of war is frisky again. Donald Rumsfeld has returned to high visibility — after a couple of months in the media doghouse following revelations about torture at the Abu Ghraib prison — now openly romancing the journalistic pack with his inimitable style of tough love as he growls and romps across […]
We saw butterflies turning into bombers. And we weren’t dreaming. At the time when the Woodstock festival became an instant media legend in mid-August 1969, melodic yearning for peace was up against the cold steel of American war machinery. The music and other creative energies that drew 400,000 people to an upstate New York farm […]
A recent obituary in the New York Times told about Frank Smith, “who as an inmate leader at Attica prison was tortured by officers in the aftermath of the prisoner uprising of 1971 and then spent a quarter century successfully fighting for legal damages.” Working as a paralegal after his release, Smith was a pivotal […]
The same broadcast networks that eagerly devote endless prime-time hours to vacuous sitcoms and unreal "reality shows" couldn’t spare a total of more than a few hours last week for live coverage of the Democratic National Convention. It’s true that complaining about scant news coverage from NBC, ABC and CBS is a bit like griping […]
