FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
In most policy debates, the media preference is for a solution in the “center,” whatever they define that to be. A Los Angeles Times headline today on the Beltway debate on Afghanistan reads: “Obama mulls middle ground in Afghanistan war strategy.” Like the healthcare debate, the media’s version of “the middle” usually means something well […]
Rupert Murdoch’s latest hire John Stossel, speaking at a Michigan college: I quit ABC a couple weeks ago partly because they didn’t like what I was doing. They viewed it as too biased. Yes, ABC promoted Stossel to 20/20 anchor, gave him regular “Give Me a Break” commentary segments and one-hour, factually challenged primetime specials…all […]
In the new issue of Time magazine,a debate on Afghanistan is listed in the table of contents this way: What Should We Do Now? Two Views Is it time for the U.S. military to turn Afghanistan over, or is time for our troops to stay the course? The “stay the course” view is presented by […]
It was probably a given that the corporate press would mangle the debate over this year’s healthcare reform legislation, considering their poor showing in the healthcare debate of the early ’90s (Extra!, 7–8/93). The only questions were when and how. One answer came immediately, as the media shut off discussion of a popular single-payer plan […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes today of Iran’s nuclear program: They then turned themselves in to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and, as usual, said the site was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. These Persians lie like a rug. Classy. The fact that this appears in a column chastising […]
The Times has a report about their new poll on today’s front page. As Adam Nagourney and Dalia Sussman put it in their lead, Obama “is confronting declining support for his handling of the war in Afghanistan and an electorate confused and anxious about a healthcare overhaul.” While that’s true, the most interesting part of […]
Ousted President Manuel Zelaya has returned to Honduras, though not to office.Unfortunately, press accounts still manage to mangle the story behind his ouster, relying on those who supported the coup to explain what happened. In today’s New York Times (9/22/09): At the time of his removal, Mr. Zelaya was planning a nonbinding referendum that his […]
We’ve talked about these “Topic A” debates in the Washington Post before, and today’s installment is a doozy. The topic on the table is Obama’s media strategy. And, as before, the important people are on the political right, Here are the right-wingers: Karl Rove, Dan Schnur(communications director of John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign), Ed Rogers […]
Remember back in 2007/2008 when Democratic candidate Barack Obama was being called an elitist? Well, if you miss that kind of media coverage, the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank has got you covered (9/18/09) here, writing up Michelle Obama’s visitto aD.C. farmers market: The promotion of organic and locally grown food, though an admirable cause, is […]
USA Today ‘s left/right op-ed feature today is a doozy– a “debate” on escalating the Afghan War between regulars Cal Thomas and Bob Beckel. The headline gives it away: Time to Dig In, Not Bail Out Forget left or right. Forget politics. Think “war on terror.” Bob and Cal agree that now is not the […]
Conservative Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana unveiled his long-awaited health reform proposal yesterday, the results of weeks of negotiations among the Senate Finance Committee’s so-called “Gang of Six”–three Democrats from the right-wing of their party and three moderate-to-conservative Republicans. The bill (unsurprisingly) does not include a public option andcouldend up leavingmiddle-income Americans paying too […]
The Drudge Report (9/16/09) is featuring this headline (in scary red type): Obama Admin: Cap And Trade Could Cost Families $1,761 A Year… The link goes to a CBSNews.com post, which declares: A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to […]
The New York Times (9/13/09) attempted to fact check a Barack Obama speech on healthcare. By all appearances, this is in the regular, non-satirical edition of the paper: Mr. Obama opened his 40-minute speech with what he called “disturbing news”: a report from the Treasury Department that, he said, “found that nearly half of all […]
A curious mention in the Politico today: One of the summer’s surprises has been the degree to which angry “town halls” filled with opponents of healthcare reform has driven the political narrative– no matter that Democrats own both the White House and Congress, no matter that many news organizations were slow to reckon with the […]
Somehow the Drudge-friendly news site Politico managed to write an entire piece today about pressure on the White House from anti-war left (“W.H. Fears Liberal War Pressure”) without actually quoting anyone who might apply that pressure. Reporter Mike Allen did gather thoughts from Matt Bennett of the Third Way think tank (a self-consciously centrist group […]
In his Time column this week, Klein writes: So what should Obama do about Afghanistan? His dilemma isn’t as stark as has been posed in recent press accounts, with screamers on the right demanding slavish devotion to the military’s wish list and screamers on the left demanding a withdrawal. The U.S. military has become far […]
The Washington Post had another “Topic A” feature on August 31, headlined “Is the War in Afghanistan Worth Fighting?” A crucial debate, to be sure; the Post found one person (Andrew Bacevich) to argue that it is not, which is probably a position close to the majority view of the American public. That position is […]
The Washington Post gathered severalcontributors for an August30″Topic A” featureheadlined, “How Can President Obama Regain His Political Footing?” The list of contributors, though, leaned well to the right. There were six high-profile Republicans and/or conservatives: Newt Gingrich, Christine Todd Whitman, Dan Schnur, Ed Rogers and Ed Gillespie. There were three Democrats: former Mondale staffer Michael […]
If you had any doubt that the elite Washington press corps is too close to the political and corporate elites they are supposed to be scrutinizing, a recent scheme cooked up by the Washington Post might close the case. The plan, as revealed by the website Politico (7/2/09), would have seen Post publisher Katharine Weymouth […]
In his Week in Review piece wondering if Obama’s Afghanistan policy is akin to LBJ and Vietnam, New York Times reporter Peter Baker notes that the public mood is seeping into the media: That growing disenchantment in the countryside is increasingly mirrored in Washington, where liberals in Congress are speaking out more vocally against the […]
