FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
One of the more annoying corporate media storylines since the midterms dwells on whether or not Barack Obama will move to the “center” in order to have better luck in the 2012 elections. The conventional wisdom is that Bill Clinton did this after terrible losses in the 1994 midterms, and his “triangulation” proved once […]
The Dean is happy. Washington Post columnist and “dean” of the Beltwaypress corps David Broder was one of the few people (not counting Republicans) who stood up to applaud Barack Obama’s tax deal. Under the I-am-not-making-this-up headline “Centrist on the Rise,” Broder (12/9/10) congratulated Obama, who has”separated himself from the left of his own party […]
The big news in the U.S.-guided Israel/Palestine talks is that a renewal of a so-called “settlement freeze” in the West Bank is basically dead. Ethan Bronner has a post-mortem of sorts in the New York Times (12/9/10), where he describes the backdrop for the previous round of negotiations: The Israelis had insisted that the only […]
Internal problems at CNN have jumped from the gossip pages to the New York Times. Brian Stelter reports today (12/8/10) on behind-the-scenes clashesat the new program Parker Spitzer, which is co-hosted by liberal-leaning former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and conservative columnist Kathleen Parker. Stelter writes: The ratings for CNN‘s latest experiment are stagnant. The […]
Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas visited Germany recently, and came away thinking the United States is headed for some serious trouble. The country is falling apart—polarized, susceptible to populist demagoguery and so on. Forces on both sides are to blame; they’re not all bad (“I think the Tea Partiers, despite their contradictions, are not all wrong about […]
As you may have heard, the White House-backed deficit commission failed to gain a supermajority vote to support a proposal from co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Their suggestions came under sharp criticism from liberal and progressive critics. Butthe December 3 broadcast of the PBS NewsHour, a short report on that failure was tilted heavily […]
Fox host Bill O’Reilly warned viewers on December 3 about “a disturbing development at the FCC”: Commissioner Michael Copps has been criticizing the failure of the media to provide citizens with substantive political information and discussion. O’Reilly zeroed in on these comments Copps made in a BBC interview (12/1/10): I think American media has a […]
New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane wrote a response (of a sort) to the criticisms that the paper’s reporting on Iranian missiles was fundamentally flawed. It’s hard to believe thathis column was meant be taken seriously. To review: The Times published a story, based ona WikiLeaks cable,onNovember 29 alleging that Iran possesses powerful missiles […]
NewYork Times (12/3/10): Mr. Karzai first burst onto the international stage in the style of Che Guevara, slipping over the Afghan border from Pakistan in 2001 as United States forces pounded the Taliban, before being installed by the West. President George W. Bush invited him to his first State of the Union speech after September […]
The lead of the New York Times story today (12/2/10) on the FCC’s new internet plan: The plan from the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission to ensure an open and neutral Internet drew mixed reviews on Wednesday from consumer advocates and Internet service providers, presenting the agency with an uncertain way forward as it […]
Today (12/2/10) the New York Times has another report based on the latest WikiLeaks cables. The focus is on U.S. policy toward the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and the upshot is that diplomats based there exercised little to no scrutiny of the claims made by Georgian government regarding South Ossetia and Russia. The conflict […]
FAIR has a new Action Alert hereabout the New York Times and its Iran missiles story this week. If you’re writing to the paper, please leave a copy of your letter in the comments section.
New York Times reporter Matt Bai uses the debt commission (12/1/10) to ask whether Barack Obama will finally stand up to the liberal base of the Democratic Party. As the headline puts it, “Debt-Busting Issue May Force Obama Off Fence.” You see, in Bai’s world, Obama was never much of a Clinton-style “triangulator,” which is […]
Corporate media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict does not suffer from a lack of creative use of language: the “generous” offer the Palestinians rebuffed at Camp David in 2000, for example (Extra!, 7-8/02), or references to illegal West Bank colonies as “neighborhoods” (Extra! Update, 8/02). The current round of U.S.-backed negotiations brought a new kind […]
Last night’s broadcast of the PBS NewsHour (11/29/10) offered a discussion of the WikiLeaks documents. Who were the guests? As Judy Woodruff announced: “We turn to two former national security advisers with extensive experience in making and carrying out U.S. foreign policy. “ That would be Carter’s Zbigniew Brzezinski and George W. Bush’s Stephen Hadley. […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses WikiLeaks as a jumping off point to talk about George W. Bush’s new book and the run-up to the Iraq War (11/30/10): As my colleague, the indefatigably indefatigable Walter Pincus, has pointed out, Bush manages to bollix up both the chronology and the importance of the various inspections of […]
WikiLeaks document dumps are largely what media want to make of them. There’s one conventional response, which goes something like this: “There’s nothing new here, but WikiLeaks is dangerous!” But there’s another option: “There’s nothing here, except for the part that confirms a storyline we’ve been pushing.” In those cases, WikiLeaks is deemed very, […]
Right here on November 12, we asked what the New York Times means when it talks about “centrism”– specifically when it comes to Beltway deficit reduction plans. The Times framed the proposal from deficit commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson as offering the Obama White House an opening to move to the center. That […]
From Sunday’s Washington Post (11/28/10): FBI Foils Elaborate Bomb Plot in Oregon Given the circumstances of this particular case (covered in great detail by Glenn Greenwald), I think the Post meant either “FBI Concocts Elaborate Bomb Plot in Oregon” or”FBI Foils Its Own Elaborate Bomb Plot in Oregon.”Even the Post‘s own account explained in the […]
From one of the Washington Post‘s stories about WikiLeaks: A senior U.S. intelligence officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified, said: “No one should think of American diplomats as spies. But our diplomats do, in fact, help add to our country’s body of knowledge on a wide […]
