FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
George W. Bush’s June 14 commencement address at Ohio State University was a sign of a “revived” presidency, according to Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank (6/15/02). “Bush basked in the adulation of 55,000 people who treated him to waves of standing ovations in Ohio Stadium as he received an honorary doctorate,” he wrote. “If there […]
If it’s “spin” to back up your arguments with bogus facts and statistics, and to dismiss numbers that don’t fit in with your preconceptions, then Bill O’Reilly‘s Fox News Channel show isn’t, as he repeatedly claims, a “no-spin zone”—it’s Spin City. During an interview with National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy (O’Reilly Factor, 2/5/02), […]
The rapid demise of energy giant Enron is being called the largest corporate bankruptcy in modern American history. Stories of workers losing their life savings while executives struck it rich have certainly been big news–often overshadowing the war in Afghanistan–but conservative pundits and mainstream journalists alike have tried to minimize the story’s political impact. One […]
Proving that irony is alive and well post-September 11, a book deriding the national press corps for its suppression of conservative views has received enormous attention in that same “liberal” media. Bernard Goldberg’s Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News is long on name-calling and vitriol, but short on substance. “Delusional,” […]
Proving that irony is alive and well post-Sept. 11, a book deriding the national press corps for its flagrant liberal bias has been the subject of enormous attention in the same mainstream media that, the book argues, suppress conservative views. Bias, by former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg, is long on name-calling and vitriol, but short […]
Both Fox and CNN try to marginalize or minimize civilian deaths in Afghanistan, and self-censorship is taking place at smaller outlets.
While visiting Paris in May, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger received a summons to appear at the French Palace of Justice to answer questions about murders and disappearances in Chile in the 1970s. While the story was carried by major European news outlets, it has received relatively little coverage in U.S. media. The French […]
In January, the already bleak human rights situation in Colombia was reported to be in a state of “alarming degradation,” according to United Nations human rights observers (Associated Press, 1/20/01). A joint report from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Washington Office on Latin America (“Colombia Human Rights Certification II,” 1/01) found that “political […]
Throughout the presidential elections, mainstream media outlets were quick to charge Democratic candidate Al Gore with exaggerations: Whether he was talking about inventing the Internet, inspiring Love Story or discovering Love Canal, you just couldn’t trust what Gore was saying. If you looked into these incidents, you found that in each case the media’s exaggerations […]
The pain establishment media felt over Ralph Nader’s challenge to the two-party system was evident in CBS‘s election night coverage. When reporter Ed Bradley commented that Ralph Nader might approach the 5 percent threshold for receiving federal matching funds, Dan Rather interrupted: “About $12 million, $13 million of your money and mine.” As Bradley pointed […]
August 2, 2000 Ms. Ann Cooper Executive Director Committee to Protect Journalists 330 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10001 Dear Ms. Cooper, As longtime supporters of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ mission of defending press freedom worldwide, we are writing to express our disappointment that CPJ chose to exclude the 16 employees of […]
The dominance of right-wing think tanks and policy analysts in the media is a quantifiable fact. (See Extra!, 5-6/00.) But how does this happen, and what are the consequences? Those questions are explored by Trudy Lieberman in Slanting the Story: The Forces that Shape the News (New Press). Lieberman, the director of the Center for […]
After the crash of a U.S. Army reconnaissance plane in July 1999 that killed seven people (including five U.S. military personnel), the question of U.S. involvement in Colombia re-emerged on the media radar screen. Journalists wondered whether “the U.S. could wind up in a fight it doesn’t want” (NBC Nightly News, 1/16/00), with many reporters […]
Proving that irony is alive and well post-Sept. 11, a book deriding the national press corps for its flagrant liberal bias has been the subject of enormous attention in the same mainstream media that, the book argues, suppress conservative views. Bias, by former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg, is long on name-calling and vitriol, but short […]
While the main proponents of the liberal media myth are conservative commentators and talkshow hosts (who themselves are the dominant opinion voices in the media), the ammunition for such arguments usually comes from one of three well-funded groups. Two of the groups—Accuracy In Media (AIM) and the Media Research Center (MRC)—are openly conservative, while the […]
