FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
By the time the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries passed in early January, there had been several distinct cycles in the media coverage of the fight for the Democratic nomination. Hillary Clinton went from inevitable nominee to also-ran to comeback kid in the space of a week, for example, while Barack Obama was transformed […]
News stories about Rudy Giuliani’s campaign for the Republican nomination for president often refer to his supposed support for abortion rights. To much of the mainstream media, this is evidence of Giuliani’s admirable consistency in the face of a largely anti-choice GOP base, and a sign that Republican voters are pragmatic enough to accept a […]
Op-ed published in the Seattle Times With just a few weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses, polls are providing pundits and political junkies with fresh data to spin out a new round of the usual “who’s up, who’s down” campaign coverage. But while the press seems settled on a new narrative for the campaign, […]
When an apparent airstrike by Israel against Syria on September 6 was eventually linked to accusations of a secret Syrian nuclear program, the striking thing about the often muddled reporting was how much the credulous reaction to unsubstantiated claims resembled the similarly uncritical reporting about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. When the airstrike was […]
Historians analyzing the phases of the Iraq War might find one period particularly striking. The midterm elections of 2006 removed the Republican Party’s grip on Congress, and exit polls and political analysts agreed that the Iraq War was the principal cause for their defeat. And yet the public’s dissatisfaction produced, oddly enough, an escalation of […]
The disastrous end to the Vietnam War served as a historical reference point for many pundits urging Democrats to forget pulling out of Iraq. But the history lesson was shaky. Presenting the congressional fight over war funding as indicative of “what will likely become post-Iraq politics in America,” ABC World News (4/26/07) reported that Republicans […]
Once Rupert Murdoch’s bid to purchase the Dow Jones Company was made public, media watchers were nearly unanimous in bemoaning the ramifications of the deal. Observers warned that Dow Jones’ most important asset—the venerable Wall Street Journal—would be transformed from a respectable business-oriented national newspaper into a down-market, New York Post-style tabloid. As advocates for […]
When the International Association of Fire Fighters, the nation’s largest firefighters union, released a video challenging the portrayal of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as a hero of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, there were scattered media references to a possible re-run of the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry during the […]
FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, bills itself as a “nonpartisan, nonprofit, ‘consumer advocate’ for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.” But in its July 18 response to the International Association of Fire Fighters’ video critical of Rudolph Giuliani’s […]
With the public still many months away from choosing major-party presidential candidates, robust public debates with a wide sampling from across the political spectrum would seem to be an empowering democratic exercise. And for a press corps so often complaining about the scripted and stilted tedium of day-to-day political campaigning, wide-open debates and a freewheeling […]
After the August 7 Democratic debate, MSNBC reporter David Shuster weighed in with what the cable channel called a “truth squad” segment, ostensibly intended to fact-check various claims by the candidates. But the result had less to do with clarifying the facts than with protecting Bush from harsh criticism. In concluding his report, Shuster singled […]
A presidential campaign starting many months early isn’t necessarily a bad thing. With a crowded field of candidates in both parties and no clear frontrunners, there could be ample time to discuss major policy differences on Iraq, healthcare and the like. But the early primary season has instead seen reporters fixated on campaign fundraising and […]
When they’re discussed at all by corporate media, civilian deaths in Afghanistan are often presented as a tactical or public relations problem for U.S. military and political officials, or labeled as “accidental” or “errant.” The civilian deaths are not accidents, however; they are the predictable result of a deliberate decision to protect American troops by […]
Horserace polling’s predictive value, almost a year before any actual voting, is essentially nil.
On May 15, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Bush administration’s extraordinary efforts in March 2004 to gain legal approval for the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program. The story was startling, at the very least—involving top officials confronting each other in the hospital room of a […]
The prevailing body of scientific evidence for climate change more or less holds sway in news reports, but opinion journalism—where the policy agenda is defined and debated—is dominated by those who question or reject that evidence.
While much has been written about how credulous reporting about the Bush administration’s bogus weapons claims paved the way for the Iraq War, it’s important to remember that media cheerleading for the war only intensified once the bombs started falling—a dismal performance documented here with examples from the first celebration of “shock and awe” to […]
In the aftermath of the racist, misogynist outburst that got talkshow host Don Imus dropped from CBS radio and MSNBC—referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos”—a Washington Post editorial (4/10/07) posed a question many critics have been asking for years: How do prestigious journalists defend their cozy relationship with a well-known bigot? […]
While it certainly feels like the presidential election cycle has started earlier than ever, a more important issue is what sort of coverage of the process the media are providing citizens. Much of what voters are seeing is reporting and analysis of early polls, which show Rudolph Giuliani with a wide lead over his Republican […]
Like many prominent pundits, Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria has of late expressed his frustration with the foreign policy of George W. Bush. In the magazine’s March 19 issue, Zakaria lamented that the Bush administration “began intervening directly in the domestic affairs” of Latin American countries, a move he presented as a break from the recent […]
