FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
FAIR’s new alert takes aim at the Sunday morning chat shows (Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday) for ignoring climate change this weekend– right after “superstorm” Sandy devastated the East Coast. As we noted, NBC host David Gregory said early on his program: “Should more attention be paid to […]
CNN reporter Erin Burnett‘s comment (10/29/12) that it was “kind of neat” to see New York City break its flooding record as the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy flooded Battery Park was bizarre, to say the very least: I just want to give everyone an update of where we are right now in terms of […]
The gossipy, horse race-obsessed outlet Politico ran a story on October 29 about the credibility of polling expert Nate Silver, whose 538 blog at the New York Times is a must-read for people interested in election forecasting. What Silver does isn’t, on one level, all that tricky–his model combines national and state polls and generates probabilities […]
You can learn a lot from reading the Corrections box in the New York Times–often because going back to read the story that is being corrected reveals more than the correction itself. On October 20, the Israeli navy intercepted another boat attempting to reach the Gaza Strip to deliver supplies in defiance of the Israeli […]
A FAIR Action Alert (10/24/12) criticized the PBS NewsHour for reporting that “Iran’s nuclear weapons program has been a particular flash point” in the presidential race. As we noted, there is no hard evidence that Iran has such a weapons program; in fact, international inspections have consistently found no evidence that Iran has diverted uranium […]
Among corporate media pundits, hostility towards teachers’ unions spans the ideological spectrum (Extra!, 9/10). And in supposedly straight news reporting, the policy goals of corporate “reformers”―support for charter schools and teacher ratings based on standardized test statistical models―are treated as common sense instead of contested and controversial. So when the Chicago Teachers Union went out […]
On the new episode of FAIR TV: Is a new Obama ad…racist? We’ll take a look at how PBS is misreporting Iran, and also take a look at Joe Klein’s remarkable defense of killing four-year-old girls in other countries. Take a look–and please spread the word.
A new FAIR action alert takes the PBS NewsHour to task for reporting claims about Iran having a nuclear weapons program as if they were facts. If you write a letter to to the NewsHour, please consider posting it in the comments section below.
Remember how corporate media’s campaign coverage used to offer wide-ranging, diverse perspectives? Me neither. But Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank apparently thinks that’s the way the world used to work, until Twitter came along and the press corps turned into one giant exercise in groupthink. He writes today (10/24/12) that campaign reporters have one eye […]
The Obama campaign has released a new ad criticizing Mitt Romney for having a Swiss bank account and wanting to keep tax breaks for corporations that offshore jobs. The commercial’s most devastating line: Romney once railed against the deadly pollution from a coal plant. I know what you’re thinking: Totally racist, right? That’s sort of […]
MSNBC‘s Morning Joe had a remarkable discussion of U.S. drone attacks today (10/23/12). Here’s a clip of the most intense moments of the exchange between the conservative-leaning Joe Scarborough and Time columnist Joe Klein, who is occasionally mistaken for a liberal: Scarborough offered up a more passionate critique of drone attacks than you’re likely to […]
The London Independent published a harrowing story on October 14, “Iraq Records Huge Rise in Birth Defects.” The piece focuses on the legacy of the U.S war in Iraq, in particular the two massive U.S. military invasions of the city of Fallujah in 2004. The Independent reports: High rates of miscarriage, toxic levels of lead […]
This week on FAIR TV: Who factchecks the debate moderators? What Does Chris Matthews Think is in the Constitution? And why not just let advertisers write the “news”? Please take a look– and spread the word.
USA Today (10/17/12) ran a story about a battery manufacturer filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. But the story might as well have been a press release from the Mitt Romney campaign. “Another Blow for Green Energy” read the headline. Wendy Koch’s piece led off with this: An electric vehicle battery maker that was awarded […]
Over the past few weeks of the presidential campaign we’ve been hearing a lot—maybe too much—about the September 11, 2012, attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. It’s been turned into a campaign issue by the Romney team, which has used the incident to charges […]
Mitt Romney has a multi-trillion dollar tax cut plan that he says won’t add to the deficit. How does that work? He won’t say, other than to pledge that he’d close some loopholes and deductions, but that none of those would harm “middle-class” Americans. Analysts have argued that this is not mathematically possible. So how […]
CNN reporter Candy Crowley was apparently causing the Obama and Romney campaigns to panic over the weekend. Why? She was telling people she might ask a question at tonight’s presidential debate. Time‘s Mark Halperin reported (10/14/12) that has done a series of interviews on her network in which she has suggested that she will assume […]
This passage from Meet the Press (10/14/12) says a lot about how middle-of-the-road elite journalists think about fiscal issues. Here’s NBC veteran Tom Brokaw and host David Gregory: BROKAW: I was just going to say, I talked to a lot of major business leaders who want Romney to get elected, but almost to a man […]
FAIR TV takes a look at how the U.S. media handled the Venezuelan election, how the Washington Post “greened” fracking and how the New York Times used a time machine to “fix” a headline about Israel/Palestine. Watch it, share it with your friends and please leave a comment below.
With all the newfound interest in campaign factchecking in the corporate media (that enthusiasm shouldn’t be confused with being good at it), it’s worth remembering that it’s not just the political candidates whose claims should be factchecked. The moderators should face some scrutiny too. Last night ABC‘s Martha Raddatz framed a question this way: Let’s […]
