FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
I remember the first time I heard of FAIR as if it were yesterday. I was a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Alexander Cockburn was giving a speech on campus. This was 1986, and Cockburn was in his full glory; his main beat at the time was media criticism, and […]
Good evening, I’m Congressman Bernie Sanders and I want to welcome you to what I believe is the first congressional town meeting ever organized to address the issue of corporate control of the media. Thus began the first of two public town meetings in late April 2002, where US Rep. Bernie Sanders (Vt.–Ind.) did what […]
The January announcement of the proposed merger of AOL and Time Warner–the largest deal in history–crystallizes one trend, and may trigger another, more ominous one. It can be seen as yet another of the colossal media deals that has dotted the past decade, such that only a handful of conglomerates now own almost all the […]
(From “The Global Media Giants,” by Robert W. McChesney, Extra!, November/December 1997) $25 billion – 1997 sales Time Warner, the largest media corporation in the world, was formed in 1989 through the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications. In 1992, Time Warner split off its entertainment group, and sold 25 percent of it to […]
A specter now haunts the world: a global commercial media system dominated by a small number of superpowerful, mostly U.S.-based transnational media corporations. It is a system that works to advance the cause of the global market and promote commercial values, while denigrating journalism and culture not conducive to the immediate bottom line or […]
