FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
In corporate media, some political arguments are treated as indisputable fact. One of the most important: Democrats win by moving to the right. In the New York Times (5/3/12), Peter Baker offers the latest example: Mr. Obama, who campaigned on Sunday with Mr. Clinton, seems to be following his Democratic predecessor’s playbook. After a generation […]
With Occupy Wall Street making its May Day comeback, what did the corporate media have to say? Take a look at the New York Times story (5/2/12), which was stuffed in the Metro section and focused on… well, take a look at the headline: About half of the article is focused on arrests, “occasionally bloody […]
Stories about new state voter ID laws should, at a minimum, explain that the problem the laws supposedly address–voter fraud–doesn’t really exist. On that count, a New York Times report (4/30/12) by Michael Shear failed, since it presented the issue as a partisan dispute. On the one hand, Democrats complain: Many of the laws in […]
As we’ve written before, some political flipflops are better than others. The ones that Mitt Romney commits, or might commit in the future, are often seen as being the good kind. That argument was advanced once more this Sunday (4/29/12) on the Chris Matthews Show, by Time editor Rick Stengel and the host himself, who […]
Why can’t I just pay for the channels I actually want? That idea—usually called a la carte pricing—has been mentioned for years as an easy answer to runaway costs. And given how people tend to consume media, it holds a certain appeal.
New York Times columnist Gail Collins had a good critique of standardized testing and the No Child Left Behind law (4/28/12), weighing in on the “Pineapplegate” controversy about a bizarre question that appeared on a New York English exam. She writes: We have turned school testing into a huge corporate profit center, led by Pearson, […]
Sometimes it’s the little moments that tell you something–like this from a Meet the Press panel discussion (4/22/12) about potential running mates for Mitt Romney: DAVID GREGORY: E.J., the point though also about Paul Ryan is that if you want to send a message you’re serious about the budget you could do that with Paul […]
The Beltway press is remarkably fixated on two stories: A “scandal” over an $800,000 General Services Administration (GSA) conference in Las Vegas, and the unfolding saga involving prostitutes and some Secret Service and military officers in Colombia. The White House thinks both are bad, of course, but not worth the amount of coverage they’re getting. […]
Last week Barack Obama declared some sort of class war on Mitt Romney–at least that’s what Fox, the New York Post and a few other outlets would have you believe. On April 18, Obama gave a speech at a community college touting, among other things, a rather common only-in-America underdog spirit: Somebody gave me an […]
Seen FAIR’s recent alert about Dow’s sponsorship of a PBS series? Want to do something about it? Write to the ombudsman to encourage an investigation. And paste your letter in the comments section below.
There seems to be a lot of attention to a new study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) study that finds Barack Obama to be much more harshly covered than the Republicans competing to run against him this fall. “Obama Has Received Least Favorable News Coverage So Far During 2012 Election Cycle” reads […]
More Democrats are starting to shift towards supporting the controversial Keystone pipeline, reports Jennifer Steinhauer in the New York Times (4/20/12). The media discussion has leaned heavily in favor of the project, so perhaps this is no surprise. And this report is no exception. The political fight over Keystone has a lot to do with […]
Brian Stelter reports in the New York Times that Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity are renewing their contracts…meaning that we’ll be enjoying–and paying for–their talents through the 2016 election season. Not many people around Fox wanted to speak on the record about the new deals, but Stelter granted anonymity to one Fox insider who was […]
Portraying Assange a ‘nut job’ says little about Julian Assange–and plenty about the corporate media.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has delivered a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that calls for a resumption of peace negotiations. Look at the image the Washington Post (4/18/12) used to accompany its story about this : I will admit that a letter might not lend itself to an interesting graphic, but it […]
There are different ways media talk about how you can’t trust Iran. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, for one, went straight for bigotry: “These Persians lie like a rug,” he wrote in 2009. The New York Times took a slightly different route on Saturday (4/14/12): Maybe Iran can’t be trusted because their religion permits—or perhaps […]
Nobody loves centrism, writes Bill Keller in the New York Times (4/16/12), but they should. “Centrism is easily mocked and not much fun to defend,” writes, noting that critiques of centrism from the left and right have a certain appeal: The politics of the center–including the professional centrists and trans-partisans of groups like Third Way […]
Fareed Zakaria wrote in Time magazine (4/16/12) that “the Arab Spring is looking less appealing by the week.” The problem is a “messier reality,” and he zeroes in on Egypt: And now, as Egypt’s presidential election approaches, we see the rise of two candidates from Islamic parties, Khairat al-Shater and Hazem Salah Abu Ismail. The […]
Yesterday (4/12/12) Pakistan’s parliament unanimously voted in favor of a resolution that, among other things, calls for an immediate end to CIA drone strikes in their country. The Washington Post‘s account of this news included this curious observation: From Washington’s perspective, the debate in Parliament was a healthy exercise in democracy but one that is […]
The “Buffett rule”—as in Warren Buffett—suggests that super-rich should pay a tax rate comparable to middle-income earners. In Buffett’s case, this grew out of his observation that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Seems straightforward enough—and the public thinks so. But the Washington Post seemed to feel otherwise on April 12. A […]
