FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek cover story “Hit the Road, Barack” has attracted lots of the wrong kind of attention. As Dean Baker put it: It’s hard to believe that progressive bloggers didn’t get together to pay Newsweek to run Niall Ferguson’s piece on Obama. The thing is so shot full of easily identifiable errors no serious […]
Part of ABC‘s This Week show (8/19/12) was devoted to the idea that, as host Jake Tapper put it, the U.S. economy is at a potentially defining moment: The great debate: Can we restore the nation’s finances, or is the U.S. headed toward bankruptcy—an issue at the forefront of the presidential debate, especially since Mitt […]
The Washington Post (8/17/12) has a story on Iran and the threat of war that begins with this: Preparations in Israel for a possible war are focusing new attention on whether Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and forcing an unwelcome debate in the thick of a presidential campaign about the U.S. role in stopping […]
If you know anything of substance about Paul Ryan, it’s that the Republican vice presidential pick knows his numbers. A Washington Post profile today by Michael Leahy (8/20/12) tells us: He got his start on Capitol Hill as a 19-year-old intern working in the mailroom of Sen. Bob Kasten (R-Wis.). That led in time to […]
The Washington Post has done it again. Reporter Felicia Sonmez (8/17/12) somehow got a Republican campaign adviser to spill the beans on the Ryan/Romney relationship : A senior Republican adviser close to the campaign who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Ryan views Romney’s career as “a case study of some of the ideas […]
In this new episode of FAIR TV: The media’s Paul Ryan crush, fact checking failure at PBS and a look at the curious ethics at NPR.
Sometimes the facts that need checking are pretty easy to check. That seemed to be the case with some misleading statements Paul Ryan made at a campaign stop yesterday. The New York Times set the record straight. Unfortunately their fact check was pretty much buried. The piece (8/17/12) by Trip Gabriel—headlined “Ryan Pushes Working-Class Message […]
Even if you’re not an expert in media ethics, you’d probably agree that a show about finance and business exclusively sponsored by one giant bank has an obvious conflict. The fact that the show is on public radio might make such an arrangement all the more curious. And the fact that the host of the […]
Campaign rhetoric, we’re led to believe, can be hard to sort out. If Paul Ryan says his budget plan protects Medicare and the Democrats say it “ends” it, what should we believe? Those are the kinds of questions journalism is supposed to answer. Which is why ABC World News‘ August 14 “Reality Check” on Medicare […]
One more pilot episode of FAIR TV to share. Please let us know what you think.
Heading over to the ABC News website, I found this on the homepage: Tough call: Do you read the story about Paul Ryan‘s impressive physique first, or his awesome bowhunting skills?
Washington Post columnist Dan Balz has a big scoop from an anonymous source in today’s paper (8/14/12): The choice, like most vice presidential selections, also was a way for Romney to say something bigger about the kind of campaign he hopes to run. In that sense, advisers say, Ryan was “Mitt’s pick, completely.” “Stories talk […]
Some campaign disputes can be tricky to sort out. Others are not. That’s why media coverage that takes the both-sides-have-a-point approach can be so disappointing, if not dangerous. Take Mitt Romney’s recent claim that the White House was “gutting” the work requirements in the 1996 welfare “reform” law. As a Romney TV ad put it: […]
FAIR has produced two pilot versions of what we hope will soon be a regular weekly feature: FAIR TV. Please take a look at the segments below and let us know what you think. And, as always, please spread the word.
Senator Harry Reid started a whole lot of trouble on the campaign trail when he told some Huffington Post reporters that he’d heard that Mitt Romney paid no taxes. As in zero. For an entire decade. Now there are reasons to be skeptical of Reid’s account. As Dana Milbank pointed out, Reid’s record does not […]
NBC‘s Olympics broadcast last night included a profile of Grenadian runner Kirani James. The small island is peaceful now, viewers learned, thanks in no small part to Ronald Reagan’s decision to invade. Here’s the clip: (UPDATE: As you can see, someone at NBC is keeping tabs on YouTube, and they’ve taken this down twice. You […]
Coverage of national political campaigns is generally pretty bad–a parade of polls, horesrace analysis and fundraising tallies, with pundits doing their best at pretending they’re campaign strategists. Can it actually get worse than that? Maybe. NBC reporter Chuck Todd made that case with a full page article in the Washington Post on August 5 that compared […]
Umm, Newsweek? Really? As you can see the cover story is about great restaurants around the world. Naturally you would illustrate that… well, this way. I’m not naive about the apparent desire among the surviving newsweeklies to drum up interest by putting something on the cover that will make people stop and take a […]
In the first few years of FAIR’s existence, Gore Vidal referred to us a “noble, doomed enterprise.” He meant that as a compliment, both to our work and to the immense task of challenging the myths and propaganda served up by corporate media. In 1990, Vidal appeared at a FAIR function in Los Angeles with […]
–A 1977 New York Times review (4/20/77) by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of a collection of Vidal’s essays: So we are left to speculate over the psychological implications here, and to conclude that Mr. Vidal’s animus toward everything from West Point to the American Establishment–not to speak of academicians, who are, after all, instructors–boils down to an […]
