FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
From his Web column today (4/16/10): After initially dismissing the tea types as an unimportant sideshow, the media are drinking deeply from that particular cup, especially with today being Tax Day and all. If by “dismissing” Kurtz means “featuring on the network evening newscasts,” he might have a point–since that’s how last year’s Tea Party […]
The New York Times’ Jackie Calmes has a report today (4/15/10) about the brewing fight over the Bush tax cuts, which were passed for limited time period and will phase out if Congress does not pass legislation to extend them. The Obama White House will ask lawmakers to renew most of the tax cuts, but […]
Andrew Breitbart is the right-wing Internet provocateur behind the ACORN video hoaxes, which purported to show a pretend pimp-and-prostitute duo getting criminal advice from the community organizing group ACORN. That’s not what happened, but Breitbart’s inaccurate presentation was taken at face value. Yet some in the media are still treating Breitbart seriously. Washington Post ombud […]
Last week the Drudge Report flagged an Associated Press report (4/5/10) by Stephen Ohlemacher with the headline: “Rob Thy Neighbor: Half of American Households Pay No Fed Income Tax.” The piece in questionsaid more or less the same, making it a popular item for right-wing pundits eager to pounce on tax freeloaders. But the AP […]
Veteran corporate journalists tend to dismiss the Internet age for delivering news with a point of view. In the good old days, you received a broad array of information from a broad array of guests. But nowadays you only read or watch things that conform to your political point of view. It’s not clear that […]
In his stint as interim host of ABC‘s This Week, Jake Tapper has arranged for the fact-checkers at Politifact to review what the guests say on the ABC Sunday morning show.An idea worth applauding, it came to Tapper via NYU’s Jay Rosen. The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz asked NBC Meet the Press anchor David Gregory […]
New York Times reporter Ethan Bronner has a piece today (4/7/10) headlined “Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance,” which attempts to show that there is a new move away from armed resistance to Israeli occupation. You get that message pretty clearly from Bronner’s language: He calls it a “new approach” and argues, “Nonviolence […]
Right-wing columnist Jonah Goldberg leads his column today (USA Today, 4/6/10): Congratulations! This is your last week working for the man–at least for this year. The Tax Foundation calculates that Tax Freedom Day for 2010 is April 9, which means that by Friday, Americans will have spent nearly 100 days working just to pay their […]
A short New York Times piece by Ian Urbina (4/2/10) serves as an update of sorts on the future of community organizing group ACORN, which says it will continue to have a national presence. Urbina includes this description of the now-infamous right-wing video hoax that did much of the damage to the group: ACORN has […]
NPR ombud Alicia Shepard has posted an article (4/2/10)headlined “Where Are the Women?,”a summary of a study of the gender diversityofhigh-profile NPR programs. The most important findings: With the aid of NPR librarian Hannah Sommers, we compiled a list of regular commentators, who are not NPR employees but are paid to appear on air. There […]
The New York Times has a web headline today (4/5/10): “U.S. Admits Role in February Killing of Afghan Women.” The story explains that the “role” the U.S. played in the killing of the three women was that it killed them. When this story first broke, NATO officials denied the killings, and tried to blame the […]
Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck had a surprising 2009 (Extra!, 6/09), becoming a high-profile advocate for the right-wing Tea Party movement and attracting millions of viewers to his late afternoon cable talk show. How does one top that? By spinning out elaborate theories about the “progressive” assault on the Constitution and the country, hinting […]
One of the main assumptions of the final weeks of coverage of the congressional debate over healthcare reform was that the public was opposed to the White House plan. But some polling analysis shows that this wasn’t the case. Barry Sussman noted this at the Nieman Watchdog on March 5. A McClatchy/Ipsos poll from late […]
The New York Times, thanks in large part to FAIR activists, printed an ACORN correction today (3/23/10): Several articles since September about the troubles of the community organizing group ACORN referred incorrectly or imprecisely to one aspect of videotaped encounters between ACORN workers and two conservative activists that contributed to the group’s problems. In the […]
Via an interview with Raw Story (3/22/10): The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor added that it’s a damning referendum on American democracy that one of the most highly supported components of the effort nationally, the public insurance option, was jettisoned. He partly blamed the media for refusing to stress how favorably it’s viewed by the […]
This week on CounterSpin: The network camera crews have mostly packed up and gone home, but the political fights over reconstruction and rebuilding in Haiti are only just getting started. University of Texas professor Jemima Pierre was part of a delegation that recently visited Haiti, and she wrote about what she saw for the Nation. […]
Last night on the O’Reilly Factor (3/16/10): What I’m about to tell you is simply stunning. A new survey published by the New England Journal of Medicine, a prestigious magazine, says that nearly half of primary care doctors in America could leave the medical profession if Obamacare is passed. According to the Journal, 63 percent […]
On his weekend NBC show, Chris Matthews regularly posts a question to 12 regular pundit/journalists–what he calls “The Matthews Meter.” This Sunday (3/14/10), the question was: “Should Obama Move to the Center Instead of the Left as a Reelection Strategy?” Matthews explained it on the show: Let’s go to the bottom line. We took it […]
The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz turns in a profile of Glenn Beck today (3/15/10)that includes a few interesting anecdotes.He reports that “Fox staffers note that veteran producer Gresham Striegel left the network after clashing with Beck and say the host has surrounded himself with loyalists” from his own radio company, and that “a vice president […]
Former Bush adviser Karl Rove is making the rounds to promote his new book Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. He landed on NBC‘s Meet the Press yesterday (3/14/10), interviewed by Tom Brokaw. Brokaw asked him about his book’s discussion of the Iraq War: BROKAW: And in it, you acknowledge […]
