FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Newsweek‘s Jacob Weisberg is tired of people picking on Robert Rubin. Sure, his critics to point to his involvement in the financial deregulation of the 1990s and his disastrous tenure at Citibank, but they’re wrong. At least that’s what Weisberg tries to argue in his column “In Defense of Robert Rubin” (5/10/10). Weisberg admits early […]
Fox host Bill O’Reilly searched around for a reason to support Arizona’s harsh new immigration law, and seemed to settle on the fact that there is a crime wave in Phoenix (5/3/10): Arizona had to do something. In the capital city Phoenix, crime is totally out of control. For example, last year New York City– […]
It was a surprise to see Afghan feminist activist Malalai Joya on Time magazine’s “Top 100 Most Influential People in the World” list. Not as surprising, though, to see her views criticized. Joya is a fierce opponent of the US presence in her country, which does not sit well with some in the corporate media. […]
We noted last week that the PBS NewsHour‘s coverageof the Gulf oil disaster one night includeda one-on-one interview with a spokesperson from BP. Going through the show’s coverage since then, a remarkable fact emerged: The show hadnot interviewed an environmental advocate opposed to the White House plan to increase offshore oil drilling. The reticence to […]
The New York Times’ May 2 Week in Review section leads with a piece from Jad Mouawad headlined “The Spill vs. a Need to Drill.” You get a sense of the tone of the piece early on: Readers learn that “emotions are running high” as the disaster gets worse. And this has led to predictable […]
By now, the structural deficiencies in a corporate media system heavily dependent on commercial advertising and controlled by sprawling conglomerates should be obvious. Dramatic reductions in advertising and subscription revenue in recent years mean news outlets are even less likely to push back against commercial intrusions in the functioning of the newsroom. Journalists trying to […]
In the first year of the Obama administration, the corporate media suddenly overcame their general aversion to citizen movements that criticize government policies, granting the staunchly conservative Tea Party activists enormous coverage—a decision that seems likely to impact politics for the foreseeable future. Citizen movements are hardly ever front-page news, even when they have clearly […]
When FAIR released a study of the PBS‘s NewsHour (then known as the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour) in 1989, one finding stood out: The Exxon Valdez oil spill was the major environmental story of the period. MacNeil/Lehrer had seven segments on the spill; not one included an environmental representative. Several discussions were limited to Exxon officials and […]
Fox host Glenn Beck has had it (4/27/10) with opponents of Arizona’s new immigration law making analogies to Nazi Germany: I hate to rain on the hate parade here, but can we please slow down for just a minute and, I don’t know, think? You are comparing the systematic, cold-blooded extermination of millions of Jews […]
A Washington Post article (4/23/10) about the International Monetary Fund focused on the advice it is offering for the United States. The piece notes that this is somewhat unusual. Even stranger, though, is the Post‘s description of IMF officials as folks who “have a long history of stabilizing economies and solving global financial problems.” This […]
And that someone is Fareed Zakaria, in columns published in the Washington Post (“Cool the Goldman Rage”) and in the Post-owned Newsweek. Zakaria is unimpressed by the SEC’s fraud case against Goldman Sachs; he likens the firm’s mortgage securities bonds to someone placing a bet against the New York Yankees. Then he writes: But the […]
A real headline today (4/26/10) in the Washington Post: Amid Outrage Over Civilian Deaths in Pakistan, CIA Turns to Smaller Missiles The piece–by Joby Warrick and Peter Finn–has government officials (anonymously, of course) providing new assurances: The technological improvements have resulted in more accurate operations that have provoked relatively little public outrage, the officials said…. […]
The headline of this Washington Post piece today (4/26/10) is certainly not promising: Sharing a West Bank Highway Proves a Tall Order for Israel, Palestinians The highway in question was built by the Israeli government on occupied Palestinian territory. Since 2000, Israeli authorities have barred Palestinians from using the road. They are now offering to […]
Perhaps the most revealing anecdote (noted by Glenn Greenwald, and likely others) in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine profile (4/25/10) of the Politico‘s gossip-journalist Mike Allen: On a recent Friday night, a couple hundred influentials gathered for a Mardi Gras-themed birthday party for Betsy Fischer, the executive producer of Meet the Press. Held at the […]
Usually propaganda is a little more clever than this (Reuters, 4/20/10): Israel, like the United States, European Union and others, suspects Iran is developing atomic weapons, a charge Tehran denies. Iran, whose president has said Israel should be wiped off the map, says its nuclear program is peaceful.
The cover of Newsweek (4/26/10) proclaims: “Don’t Mess With Texas: What Governor Rick Perry’s Hard-Right Creed Tells Us About America.” I can’t say I learned much about America, but I guess I learned something about Newsweek: They really like Rick Perry. The story, by Evan Thomas and Arian Campo-Flores, beginswith the observation, “The myth of […]
The PBS program Frontline on April 13 offered a look at the White House drive for healthcare reform titled Obama’s Deal. Like a previous Frontline special about the U.S. healthcare system, the program failed to adequately include single-payer. But the way the show did it this time was remarkable. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a […]
E.J. Dionne has a good column in the Washington Post today (4/19/10) looking at the Tea Party movement, and pinning a fair amount of blame on the press: “The news media’s incessant focus on the Tea Party is creating a badly distorted picture of what most Americans think and is warping our policy debates.” Looking […]
Andrew Tyndall makes a good point about how the network newcasts covered the Upper Big Branch mining disaster (flagged by Liz Cox Barrettat CJR): Not once, in all five days of coverage, did a single reporter mention the organization that has worked hardest over the decades to make sure that mining management does not cut […]
Continuing in the fine media tradition of treating dead civilians mostly as a problem for the people who kill them, USA Today offers readers this (4/16/10): Deaths of Afghan Civilians Double Accidental killings hurt NATO effort By Paul Wiseman USATODAY KABUL â┚¬” Deaths of Afghan civilians by NATO troops have more than doubled this year, […]
