FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The front page of USA Today tells us (6/8/10):: Oil Spills Escalated in This Decade Experts: Red flag wasn’t heeded By Alan Levin USATODAY The number of spills from offshore oil rigs and pipelines in U.S. waters more than quadrupled this decade, according to government data. The trend could have served as a warning for […]
In his editor’s note in the current edition of Newsweek, Jon Meacham surveys the failures of the past decade or so and comes to a completely unsurprising conclusion: the right and leftbothfailed. From the financial sector to the Roman Catholic Church, it has been a bad couple of years for–to borrow a phrase from a […]
On Tuesday (6/1/10), FAIR said this about the New York Times coverage of Gaza: Other news accounts presented misleading context about the circumstances leading to Israel’s blockade. [Isabel] Kershner (New York Times, 6/1/10) stressed that “Israel had vowed not to let the flotilla reach the shores of Gaza, where Hamas, an organization sworn to Israel’s […]
ABC‘s Good Morning America got an “exclusive” with ACORN video hoaxters James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart on June 1. Here’s how host George Stephanopoulos set up the segment: James O’Keefe became a media sensation after he and a friend posed as a pimp and prostitute and secretly recoded ACORN workers giving them advice on how […]
The media template for writing about Afghan civilian casualties requires that articles include some reference to the extreme care taken by U.S/NATO forces to avoid killing non-combatants. The practice reached a new low in this New York Times story (5/29/10) about a U.S. drone attack that killed 23 civilians: The attack, in which three vehicles […]
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organized protests in Maryland at the homes of several bank executives, along with follow-up rallies in Washington, D.C., at bank branches and offices. The events went largelyuncovered by the Washington Post, whichled Post ombud Andrew Alexander(5/29/10) to wonder why the paper missed a major labor story that was covered […]
Last week the Washington Post informed us that voters are “up in arms over the mounting federal debt”—and thus politicians were being forced to scale back a new bill that would, among other things, extend unemployment benefits and send money to state governments facing serious budget shortfalls. This made little sense, since polls do not […]
President Barack Obama does not like leaks coming out of his White House. Luckily, most of what is passed to reporters is not so damaging. Take this passage from the Washington Post (5/26/10): Although senior administration officials have voiced growing disapproval of BP, the company operating the rig and responsible for the cleanup, the mission […]
One of the most prevalent (and wrong-headed) interpretations of the recent elections is that both parties are dumping their respectable members in exchange for wild-eyed radicals. As Cokie Roberts explained it on ABC‘s This Week (5/23/10): COKIE ROBERTS: I’m not sure, Donna, that the voters this year care about somebody being out of the mainstream. […]
Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt wrote a piece today (5/24/10) headlined, “In the Absence of Debate, Iraq and Afghanistan Go Unnoticed.” Hiatt laments the silence surrounding U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ponders whether “the absence of debate reflects not full-bodied consensus but a wishful averting of eyes.” Fair enough. But what […]
The New York Times ran a story on May 4 that advanced a rather unusual argument: BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill was probably bad, but not that bad. Helping the paperflesh out that line was a group called the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, which the Times dubbed”a conservation group in Corpus Christi, Texas. ” […]
The Washington Post has a story today (5/19/10) that leads with this: With voters up in arms over the mounting federal debt, congressional Democrats are growing increasingly queasy about adding to the nation’s tab,with some arguing that additional spending to prop up the economy and help the unemployed should be paid for or abandoned. The […]
Fox host Bill O’Reilly continued his efforts to link Arizona’s harsh immigration law to the non-existent immigrant crime wave. Last night (5/18/10), with Cathy Areu of Catalina magazine: O’REILLY: OK, so you would just sit there and just status quo it? Status quo? AREU: Immigration is down, actually, in Arizona. Status quo’s working beautifully. O’REILLY: […]
The U.S. has drawnup a new round of proposed sanctions against Iran that they intend to present before the U.N. Security Council. Thisis obviouslya rebuke of Brazil and Turkey for negotiating their own deal with Iran. The Washington Post refers to the countriesas “two junior Security Council members” that ” swooped in with their own […]
A deal between Iran, Brazil and Turkey to ship some of Iran’s uranium out of the country to be enriched in Turkey and returned for use in a Iranian medical reactor has elicited some elite media panic. An early New York Times Web headline read, “Iran Offers to Ship Uranium, Complicating Sanctions Talks.” The Wall […]
A long New York Times Magazine piece (5/16/10) about start-up online journalism outlets brings us some troubling news about the wall between editorial content and advertising: One thing many of these new strategies have in common is a willingness to transgress time-honored barriers–for instance, by blurring the division between reporting and advertising. True/Slant offers to […]
Do you want to know what environmentalists think of the “compromise” climate bill unveiled by senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman yesterday? Ifso,don’t read the New York Times today. Times reporter John M. Broder (5/13/10) quotes Kerry, Barack Obama (a supporter of the bill) and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (formerly a somewhat iffy supporter). He […]
Under the not-too-promising headline “Afghans’ Distrust Threatens U.S. War Strategy” (5/13/10), the New York Times reports that U.S. success in the Afghan war “may well depend on whether Afghans can overcome their corrosive distrust of President Hamid Karzai’s government.” Why that lack of trust would be deemed “corrosive,” or why they should trust someone many […]
Washington Post critic Tom Shales (5/11/10) didn’t think much of the debut of the PBS show Need to Know. Given the reactions from viewers at the Need to Know website, and those published by PBS ombud Michael Getler, he’s not the only one who found the show a disappointment–or, as Shales put it,a “monstrosity”and “a […]
On May 4, 2010: What killed President Bush’s credibility? His utter claim that the reason we went to war in Iraq was to search for nuclear weapons. Because he and his people were dishonest enough to make that claim, he ended up looking like an incompetent when we fought our way into that country and […]
