FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The New York Times‘ lengthy report (5/29/12) on Barack Obama’s drone “kill list” should provoke serious questions: Is such a program legal? How does it square with Obama’s criticism of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” policies? What does it tell us about how the administration identifies “militants” who are targeted for assassination? But those […]
It is a very good thing that the Nation‘s Chris Hayes has a weekend show on MSNBC. The panelists are smart and the lively conversations dig deeper than virtually anything else on cable news. (The same can be said for MSNBC‘s Melissa Harris-Perry.) In other words, sounds like a recipe for trouble. And trouble arrived […]
If you tuned in to ABC‘s This Week (5/27/12) to hear the panel of pundits discussing the economy, you may have George Will say this about Barack Obama: He’s made clear what the choice is this fall, and it really became clear, I think, this week. The president wants capitalism without casualties. He wants dynamism […]
On Sunday, there were reports of a NATO airstrike in the eastern Paktia province of Afghanistan. The early reports said that a family of eight was killed, as the New York Times reported: The casualties took place in eastern Paktia province on Saturday night when the family’s home was hit by a bomb, said Rohullah […]
Here’s the video of MSNBC host Chris Matthews speaking at a cable industry conference this week. We noted here the odd notion that, as Matthews argues, 24-hour cable news would have stopped the Iraq War lies—despite the fact that 24-hour cable news had been around for more than 20 years at the time of the […]
(UPDATE: See the video of Matthews’ comments here, along with some discussion of what it all means.) Reporting from the big cable TV industry event this week, Broadcasting & Cable‘s Andrea Morabito writes (5/22/12): Hardball host Chris Matthews argued that because of the rise of opinion-based news networks, the non-critical aspect of the media is […]
New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters (5/22/12) covers the new attack ad being released by Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS group. Under the (somewhat funny) headline “Subtler Entry From Masters of Attack Ads,” Peters makes it sound like this is something of a scoop, and certainly a pretty big deal: When it makes its debut Wednesday […]
I finally managed to get all the way through Richard Stengel’s fawning cover story about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At a moment when incumbents around the world are being shunted aside, he is triumphant. With his bullet-proof majority, he has a chance to turn himself into the historic figure he has always yearned to […]
Two things in the New York Times today that readers should have already known more about: –Reporter William Broad has an article (5/21/12) on the state of nuclear inspections in Iran, particularly the military facility at Parchin. Broad tells readers about the “proposed inspection of a building that the agency suspects Iran used in testing […]
On Friday (5/18/12) we noted that the New York Times and Washington Post had long pieces about a drug war shooting in Honduras that reportedly killed four innocent bystanders, including two pregnant women. The story got increased attention here in the U.S. because of the apparent involvement of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Honduran officials and […]
The details are somewhat murky, but we know the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency is heavily involved in counternarcotics in Honduras. A shooting incident last Friday reportedly left four innocent people dead–including two pregnant women. Questions are being raised about whether they were shot by DEA agents who were apparently going after a boat carrying drug […]
Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann are well-known in the Beltway. They work at big-time think tanks (Brookings and American Enterprise Institute), appear on television chat shows, and write books and op-eds that powerful people pay attention to. Lately, though, it seems they’ve become dangerous men. Mann and Ornstein recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington […]
Of all the Arab Spring uprisings, Bahrain probably gets the least attention in the U.S. press. There are perhaps some good arguments why; it could be the fact that the United States is on the side of the monarchy violently suppressing the democratic aspirations of its people. So it was news that the United States […]
Right before the United States invaded Iraq, Newsweek magazine published a remarkable story. Reporter John Barry revealed that former Iraqi weapons chief Hussein Kamel had told UN inspectors in 1995 that the country had destroyed its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. As FAIR pointed out at the time, this was a remarkable discovery, especially […]
If you watch TV news you’re bound to see a lot of commercials for oil companies. As Miranda Spencer reported in Extra! (2/12), there are far more commercials about energy companies and natural gas than there are actual news reports about controversial industry practices like hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” But then there are the news […]
The election results in Greece and France sent a clearer message about austerity: Voters don’t like it. That sentiment isn’t hard to fathom; massive spending cuts and pay cuts aren’t fixing the problems in their economies–they’re making things worse. Media coverage seems to be clearer these days about what the public thinks of austerity. But […]
Covering Hillary Clinton’s trip to India, USA Today‘s Richard Wolf writes (5/8/12): Fielding rapid-fire questions at a town-hall-style event in Kolkata, she denounced Iran’s nuclear arms program and urged India to reduce its Iranian oil imports further. “We appreciate what has been done, and of course we want to keep the pressure on Iran,” she […]
FAIR’s recent study of the Sunday morning network shows documented a distinct right-wing bias in the guestlists. Republicans and conservatives were everywhere; progressives and people of color, not so much. Since the study was released, there left-leaning commentator/TV host Tavis Smiley has been on two shows, CBS‘s Face the Nation (4/22/12) and ABC‘s This Week […]
On Wednesday (5/2/12), MSNBC host Chris Matthews played a long clip from the Daily Show, where Jon Stewart mocked Republicans who are complaining about Barack Obama’s celebration of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Stewart naturally recalls George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” photo op stunt from 2003. Stewart points out that if Republicans are angry […]
The New York Times shouldn’t be trusted to report on future wars if it can’t get the facts about previous wars right. Once again, the Times misleads readers about the lead up to Israel’s invasion of Gaza in late 2008. Isabel Kershner writes (5/3/12): Up to 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed during Israel’s […]
