FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Two PBS-related items of interest. -Last year when PBS announced the retirement of Bill Moyers and theinexplicable cancellation of the excellent Now program, word came that some public TV stations would be airing a program produced by(yes, this is a real thing) the George W. Bush Institute. The show, Ideas in Action, is host by […]
Boston TV newscaster Barry Nolan was outraged to learn back in 2008 that Fox host Bill O’Reilly was getting an award from the local chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. So Nolan made flyers documenting various O’Reilly outrages and distributed them at the local Emmys ceremony—and did not do so in […]
The “Ground Zero Mosque” story is unlikely to go away anytime soon.Republican politicians apparently believe it to be an issue that works in their favor, and the media are doing little to challenge the bogus storyline in the first place. Over at Salon.com, Justin Elliot hasa useful timeline that shows how little controversy the Park51 […]
As FAIR documented in an August 11 action alert, CNN‘s The Situation Room was featuring alarmist views on Social Security, particularly from the network’s political analyst David Gergen. We know CNN has heard from activists;Wolf Blitzer’s email response was, “I am certain this subject isn’t going away.” Sure enough, the show was back at it […]
In his New York Times column on Monday (8/9/10), headlined “The Flimflam Man,” Paul Krugman took aim at Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, who has emerged as the GOP’s big thinker on budgets: One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past […]
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs generated a huge controversy by slamming the “professional left” for being too critical of the Obama administration. People who compare Obama to Bush”ought to be drug tested,” according to Gibbs. Responses to the Gibbs remarks can be found almost anywhere you look–Glenn Greenwald’s post provides perhaps the most thorough […]
Please read– if you haven’t already– FAIR’s new action alert about CNN’s The Situation Room and Social Security. If you decide to take action and write a letter to CNN, please share itin the comments section below.
Today we learn that the New York Times does indeed print corrections if an op-ed writer makes an error: An op-ed article on Sunday about Arizona and immigration mistakenly suggested that javelinas are pigs. They are peccaries. Now, if someone were to, say, flagrantly misrepresenta “poll” that is the entire premise of an op-ed–as FAIR […]
We often heard during the WikiLeaks controversy that civilian deaths in Afghanistan are well-covered in the corporate media, so the revelations in the documents about such incidents were “old news.” A report in today’s Times from Rod Nordland (“Afghans Say NATO Strikes Killed Civilians,” 8/6/10) teaches a useful lesson in how such reporting appears. There […]
FAIR just released an action alert about the New York Times anda factchecking failure onits op-ed page. Read the alert if you haven’t already, and if you decide to write to the Times, please share your letter in the comments section below.
Every Sunday on ABC‘s This Week there is a feature that names the U.S. servicemembers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan the previous week. Christiane Amanpour is the new host of the show, and the segment continues. But her critics see something sinister at work. This is how previous host Jake Tapper generally introduced the list: […]
As Steve Rendall explained here last week,the recent Washington Post editorial (“Colombia Proves Again That Venezuela Is Harboring FARC Terrorists”) doesn’t really back up its argument that there is some sort of Venezuelan conspiracy to aid the Colombia rebel group FARC. “That Venezuela is backing a terrorist movement against a neighboring democratic government has been […]
The Afghanistan documents posted by WikiLeaks were obviously the big story of the week. So how did the network Sunday shows react to these disclosures, which have the potential to open up a real debate about the Afghan War? NBC‘s Meet the Press interviewed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen. ABC‘s […]
In case you thought the WikiLeaks story might change everything: The forthcoming Time magazine (out tomorrow) has a cover photo of a disfigured Afghan woman with the headline “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” The implication would seem to be that the Taliban will commit similar atrocities without the presence of U.S. forces. You can see […]
When ABC announced that CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour would take over as host of their Sunday chat show This Week, there were rumblings about how different things would be. Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote a nasty hit piece on Amanpour in which he worried thattheshow focuses on “inside-the-Beltway palaver, an area where Amanpour […]
For those of you not following right-wing non-stories, there is a mini-scandal brewing over something called JournoList, a now defunct private email list started by a liberal blogger named Ezra Klein. It came to include something like 400 members, many of whom were other liberal bloggers, academics and pundits. Someone leaked many of the emails […]
Fresh from her comments slamming Rolling Stone‘s Michael Hastings for reporting things the military wouldn’t like, CBS reporter Lara Logan weighed in on the WikiLeaks story on last night’s CBS Evening News, where she argued that reporters should do more to stress the Taliban’s record of killing civilians: KATIE COURIC: Also mentioned in these documents […]
The stories in today’s Washington Post tell you everything you need to know about the media establishment’s reaction to the Wikileaks Afghanistan documents: WikiLeaks Disclosures Unlikely to Change Course of Afghanistan War By Greg Jaffe and Peter Finn …The documents’ release could compel President Obama to explain more forcefully the war’s importance, military analysts […]
The lesson of the Shirley Sherrod story would seem to be a simple one:A conservative blogger with a history of promoting inaccurate, racially chargedstories published another one, and people in the media (not to mention the White House) fell for it–again. But New York Times reporter Matt Bai wrote a piece in the paper’s Week […]
The story of the day is obviously the large pieces in the London Guardian and the New York Times that are based on tens of thousands of documents related to the Afghanistan War published by WikiLeaks. The leak is already being compared to the Pentagon Papers. How newspapers determine what is most newsworthy about the […]
