FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The White House decision to send additional ground troops to Afghanistan (see Extra!, 4/09) is only part of the escalation of the war in Central Asia. The increased use of airstrikes and drone-fired missiles in both that country and neighboring Pakistan are likely to increase civilian deaths. Recent coverage, however, suggests that corporate media will […]
SIDEBARS: Proposed Cure: More of the Disease and Did Google Kill the Newspaper Star? Corporate media are in a state of severe business shock, it seems—layoffs at newspapers large and small, due to advertising revenue drying up and readers ceasing to pay for a printed copy of a newspaper that they can usually read for […]
This Associated Press story (“Debate Over Who Sotomayor Is a Sensitive One,” 5/29/09) sure is confused. Luckilyreporter Sharon Thiemermakes at least that much clear from the very start: There are two sides to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor: a Latina from a blue-collar family and a wealthy member of America’s power elite. The White House […]
According to today’s New York Times (5/29/09), there’s a scandal brewing in the Japanese media. Apparently in its coverage of a current political scandal, the Japanese press has “reported at face value a stream of anonymous allegations, some of them thinly veiled leaks from within the investigation.” The Times goes on to note that “big […]
The Wall Street Journal‘s Gerald Seib wrote a piece today (5/20/09–subscription required) that offers California as a model for understanding the difficulties in overhauling the healthcare system: California’s experience, in fact, represented a kind of trial run for the healthcare overhaul the president and Congress are about to attempt on the national level, offering useful […]
CBS anchor Bob Schieffer was profiled byMarketwatch, where we learn: But don’t get the false impression that Schieffer is a pushover for his important guests. When I asked him how he feels when subjects lie to him on the air or try to mislead the audience, he got right to the point. “I want to […]
Yesterday the Social Security and Medicare trustees’ reports were released. This annual ritual often gives reporters a chance to exaggerate the long-term problems of the Social Security system. This year, the news was more or less what folks were expecting: By the trustees’ forecasting, Social Security’s trust fund will be depleted in 2037, while Medicare’s […]
The New York Times‘ Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner (5/9/09) wrote about the Israeli government’s development planin Jerusalem–a “$100 million, multiyear development plan in some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City here as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital.” […]
We’ve written about this before, but today (5/11/09) the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz turned in another example of journalists who seem to believe Google is what’s killing their industry.Responding totalks between his employer and Google about some sort of collaboration, Kurtz writes: Hanging over the talks is the reality that the search giant, while funneling […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses the Frank Ricci Supreme Court case to attack affirmative action: The justification for affirmative action gets weaker and weaker. Maybe once it was possible to argue that some innocent people had to suffer in the name of progress, but a glance at the White House strongly suggests that things […]
Two newspapers have flagged some concerns about Barack Obama’s popularity, citing a new poll to raise questions about the public’s enthusiasm for White House policies so far. Both accounts, though, seem to try to hard to stretch the rather awkward poll results to match their arguments. In the Los Angeles Times (5/3/09), Peter Nicholas noted […]
The Washington Post editorial page regularly slams Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, so it was no surprise to see it do the same on April 30. Their real point, though, was to suggest that Barack Obama’s desire to change the tone of the U.S.-Venezuelan relationship wasn’t going to work: The administration’s strategy–to open up a constructive […]
Most opinion polls show that the American public gives President Barack Obama high marks so far. Those are not the pollsFox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly reads. As he announced at the top of his show on Thursday: A new Rasmussen poll on President Obama is somewhat startling and worth analyzing because Rasmussen is very […]
In his column today, Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen tells us that he is against torture, which itself is not remarkable. His real point is this: Yet the debate over torture has been infected with silly arguments about utility: whether it works or not. Of course it works—sometimes or rarely, but if a proverbial bomb is […]
We noted recently that a New York Times story about the waterboarding of two Al-Qaeda detainees included a bit of media criticism. The Times mentioned that in 2007, ABC featured an interview with former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who claimed that “Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything […]
Newsweek‘s Fareed Zakaria is giving Obama high marks on his first 100 days in office in the magazine’s May 4 issue. What’s interesting, though, is when Zakaria explains why. He writesthat while the country is more liberal than its been in 20 years, he(predictably enough) zeroes in on Obama’s geniusin charting a “middle course”: no […]
Fox host Bill O’Reilly has been passionately defending Bush-era torture for some time. But onApril 23 he went further; not only does torture “work,” butit is actually broadly popular, too: According to a new Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll, most Americans want tough interrogations of top terror killers. When asked if they would support using torture […]
New York Times reporter Robert Pear (4/23/09) joined the rest of the media world expressing discomfort with the idea that the Senate Democrats might adopt budget reconciliation rules, which wouldthey would use to pass major legislation on a majority vote rather than seeking 60 votes. His lead: With solid majorities in both houses of Congress, […]
The school voucher program in Washington, D.C., has been the subject of serious research, with opponents and supporters of vouchers using at as a test for whether the idea works in practice. Conservativestend toinsist that it’s been a success, though the studies of the program don’t seem to bear that out. Washington Post columnist George […]
Today the New York Times is reporting that waterboarding was used far more often than we have been told—almost 300 times on two prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah.This stands in rather stark contrast to what we heard about the instant, positive effects of waterboarding—as the Times notes: A former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News […]
