FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Walter Isaacson’s Time cover story (“Howto Save Your Newspaper”) finds the magazine’s former editor offering advice for the ailing corporate media. As he (and others in the business) see it, the problem is that newsis now being consumed onlinefor free, which of course makes it difficult to turn a profit (or, more to the point, […]
Yesterday the New York Times reported on the status of a new PBS news program Worldfocus. Amidst budget cuts at the New York station where it originates, the program has received some unusual financial support–a $1 million grant from thePeter G. Peterson Foundation. What does the funder expectto get out of it? The Times reported […]
New York Times reporters Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise went to Gaza (2/4/09) to look into stories of civilian atrocities, and turned up some very powerful examples. Unfortunately, the impact of that reporting was undermined by the all-too-familiar tendency to “balance” these facts with criticisms of Palestinians. Fora piece that is attempting to get a […]
The roundtable on Sunday’s Meet the Press (2/1/09) sure didn’t look promising: Republican flat tax enthusiast Steve Forbes, former McCain economic adviser Mark Zandi and CNBC reporter Erin Burnett. It was Burnett, though, who delivered a head-scratching defense of the$18 billion bonuses recently doled out at Wall Street firms (many of which are still standing […]
In a top-of-the-show rant about the dangers of the Guantanamo detainees, Fox‘s Bill O’Reilly declared (1/25/09): Just hours after President Obama announced he was going to shut down Guantanamo Bay, the feds confirmed that a released Gitmo inmate, 35-year-old Sahid al-Shahiri, had resumed terrorist activities in Yemen. Now if this isn’t a warning, ladies and […]
Reading this at the bottom of neo-con William Kristol‘s column in the New York Times (1/26/09): This is William Kristol’s last column. Homer says, “Woohoo!” Then reading this at the Politico: EXCLUSIVE: Progressives will delight when they get to the italic note at the end of Bill Kristol’s column in the Times today say, “This […]
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman helpfully debunks (1/26/09) some of the more tendentious and misleading criticisms of the White House’s economic stimulus package. Here’s one such trope: First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of […]
Sometimes you don’t need to read more than a headline. Take today’s Washington Post: Senate Gets Reacquainted With McCain the Maverick OK, let’s read just a bit: Two and a half months removed from his defeat in the race for the presidency, colleagues say, McCain bears more resemblance to the unpredictable and frequently bipartisan lawmaker […]
Wolf Blitzer and David Gergen, watching Obama sign official papers yesterday in the Oval Office: BLITZER: And if you’ve ever seen Barack Obama’s signature, he is very precise when he writes, and it’s — and if he writes, he scribbles some words before he signs an autograph, for example. His penmanship, I must say — […]
On Monday (1/19/09), Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz took a look at the health of Time and Newsweek, and almost immediately rendered a political judgment: The rival editors are turning out weeklies that are smaller, more serious, more opinionated and, though they are loath to admit it, more liberal. They are pursuing a more […]
The Pentagon inspector general’s report on the Pentagon Pundits scandal was released (to no one’s surprise) late on Friday. Also unsurprising were its contents–the report basically concluded that there was no serious wrongdoing, not to mention no clear idea of what constitutes “propaganda” in the first place. The report was summarized in the New York […]
Two newspaper stories today provide a false account of the context of the Israeli attacks on Gaza. The Washington Post: Hamas and its allies have fired thousands of rockets into Israel in the past eight years. The pace accelerated after the Islamist movement, which won Palestinian elections in 2006, routed forces loyal to the rival […]
Chris Matthews reacting Bush’s speech (as transcribed by the right-wing Media Research Center): The idea that we have some brand new neo-conservative ideology of freedom that’s going to bring peace over in that part of the world is not true, and he’s still selling it, and that’s the tragedy of the last eight years. The […]
The pundit panel fromSunday’s broadcast of ABC‘s This Week, introduced by the host: GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And I am here for The Roundtable with George Will as always, Tom Friedman of the New York Times, former Speaker Newt Gingrich and Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal.
Newsweek‘s cover story (1/19/09) is a look at the Cheney/Bush national security policies that will Barack Obama will soon inherit. In his editor’s note, Jon Meacham advises that the piece is definitely NOT a look backwards: .. to rehash the case against Cheney at this late hour in the life of the Bush administration would […]
Those who might expect the Paper of Record to ignore or bury stories about Israel using the incendiary white phosphorous in its attack on Gaza can point to yesterday’s paper (1/11/09), where the following sentence appears at the very bottom of one piece: Human rights groups are also concerned about the Israeli use of white […]
Today’s Washington Post (1/12/09) brings news that will probably surprise very few readers: President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation’s […]
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer continues to support Israel’s assault on Gaza in today’s paper (1/9/09). He displays a remarkably odd notion of what a cease fire is for, citing the lessons of Lebanon as a cautionary tale: The U.N.-mandated disarmament of Hezbollah in Lebanon is a well-known farce. Not only have foreign forces not […]
In today’s Times (1/9/09), reporter Steven Greenhouse has a piece headlined “Bill Easing Unionizing Is Under Heavy Attack” about the array ofcorporate opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act (a bill that would expandunions’ power to conduct “card check” organizing drives). But the piece seems to be more of an illustration of the lopsided media […]
The New York Times today,reporting the shelling of a U.N. school that killed dozens of civilians, offered a typical formulation: With another day of gory news reports inflaming the Arab world…. What should TV reporting of a civlian massacre look like, exactly? And are other news reports ever held to this standard? Was U.S. media […]
