FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
USA Today‘s Susan Page has a front-page piece (7/20/10) headlined “Faith in Social Security Tanking: Most Expect Cuts or Lose Hope for Funds.” The piece notes: A USA Today/Gallup Poll finds that a majority of retirees say they expect their current benefits to be cut, a dramatic increase in the number who hold that view. […]
Noting that policies like the stimulus plan tend to poll pretty badly, New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes (7/16/10) that Obama says he has pursued such policies because they’re “the right thing to do for America.” To Stolberg, that sounds familiar: It is an argument that sounds eerily similar to the one Mr. […]
The right-wing Newsmax site has a notably positive profile of CNN anchor John King. Why would they take such a liking to a member of the dreaded Liberal Media Establishment? Newsmax‘s Ron Kessler gives his reason: When contributor Erick Erickson of RedState.com leaves out a point that might buttress his conservative arguments, King gladly supplies […]
To hear some of the Beltway media tell it,on Sunday White House press secretary Robert Gibbs predicted that the Democrats could lose their congressional majority in the November midterms. The L.A. Times captured some of the sense of crisis (7/14/10), noting that party leaders also tried to improve the gloomy prognosis. White House Press Secretary […]
Octavia Nasr has been a Mideast correspondent for CNN for 20 years, and was their senior editor of Mideast affairs. Until yesterday. On hearing of the death of a Hezbollah leader, she posted the following on her Twitter feed: Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. One of Hezbollah’s giants I […]
At the top of his show last night (7/7/10), BillO’Reillynotified viewers that the Factor had “investigated”how much crime in Arizona is committed by undocumented immigrants,explaining: “What we found may surprise you.” “Telling the truth in the illegal immigration controversy, that is the subject of this evening’s Talking Points Memo,” O’Reilly began hiscommentary. Now that would […]
Back in May FAIR wrote about the problems with a new factchecking project, where the PolitiFact website evaluates ABC‘s This Week. As we said then, this is theoretically a fine idea; the problem is that, in practice, what PolitiFact decides to analyze is almost as important as what is said on the show. A completely […]
Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker (umm, PULITZER Prize–winning columnist) got a lot of feedback about her recent column (“Obama: Our First Female President,” 6/30/10) suggesting that Barack Obama is kind of girly. She carefully pointed out that she was “not calling Obama a girlie president. But . . . he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit […]
There’s been an awful lot written about the Washington Post and David Weigel. The short version of the story: Weigel was hired by the Post to do blogging/Internet reporting on the conservative movement. This bothered some on the right, since Weigel’s left-libertarian politics made them think he was out to get them. Weigel evidently had […]
Blogger Ben Somberg (7/3/10) notes that the New York Times is still telling readers that there isserious public concern about the budget deficit. This time the story is the debate within the Obama administration: Political advisers are channeling the widespread public anger at deficits while the economic team argues that the government should further spur […]
The new Oliver Stone documentary South of the Border israisingawareness of the often shabby U.S. media treatment of Latin America. A recent example is a June 24L.A. Times piece by Alex Renderos headlined “El Salvador President Under Fire.” The president is former FMLN leader Mauricio Funes, who waselected last year. According to the Times, things […]
Taghreed El-Khodary, formerly the New York Times correspondent in Gaza, spoke recently at an event organized by the Palestine Center (6/23/10). She shared some interesting observations–the first being that her revelation that she left Gaza after the controversy erupted over Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner’s son joining the Israeli Defense Forces: I’m sorry that I […]
Philadelphia Inquirer TV critic Jonathan Storm (7/1/10) noted that tonight, July 2, the city’s public TV station WHYY is airing a documentary called The Surge: The Untold Story. As he puts it, what’s most interesting about the documentary is who’s behind it: The film was produced by communications companies that work predominantly for the GOP […]
A study (4/10) by Harvard students discovered that waterboarding was commonly called torture by major newspapers–right until the United States was found to be practicing it. The study looked at coverage in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal. As Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald put it, “We don’t need a […]
Whenthe news is thatU.S./coalition casualties in June in Afghanistan were the highest monthly total of the war, you’d think it might be an opportunity to quote a critic of the war. Not for USA Today. In the paper’s report today (7/1/10), reporter Jim Michaelsgets a comment from the British defense minister (“We must hold our […]
You’d think after the paper’s recent whopper on the magnitude of the BP oil spill, folks at the New York Times would be extra careful. Apparently not. Back in May the paper suggested the BP spill wasn’t nearly as bad as Iraq’s 36 billion gallon spill at the end of the Gulf War. That number […]
News coverage in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill downplayed the harm, reasserted the need for offshore drilling and minimized the White House’s—and the corporate media’s—recent endorsement of additional offshore oil exploration.
On May 31, the Israeli military attacked a flotilla of boats full of civilians attempting to deliver humanitarian supplies to the Gaza Strip. Nine of the activists on board were killed, though some details remain sketchy due to Israel’s confiscation of all photo and video records of the assault. Much of the U.S. media coverage […]
Billionaire Pete Peterson has spent a lot of money trying to convince people that Social Security is a serious threat to the country’s finances. And it’s a message that the corporate media love to echo. So when Peterson’s group decided to hold “town hall” meetings to promote fiscal austerity by cutting Social Security and Medicare, […]
New York Times reporter Larry Rohter turned in a factually challenged fact-check of Oliver Stone’s new film South of the Border. So Stone and the film’s co-writers Mark Weisbrot and Tariq Ali wrote a devastating rebuttal. A reader passed along a link to that piece to Rohter, suggesting that he “should be embarrassed” by his review. […]
