FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from investigative reporter Robert Parry’s new book, America’s Stolen Narrative. One of the book’s storylines examines corporate media’s role in squelching investigation into whether Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign in 1980 went behind President Jimmy Carter’s back to contact Iranian officials then holding 52 Americans hostage, a controversy dubbed the […]
George W. Bush’s success in manipulating information would not have been possible without the collaboration and/or incompetence of the major U.S. news media. However, that cozy relationship began to shift in spring 2006 as the bloody war in Iraq dragged on and the U.S. public grew restless over the steady rise in the death toll. […]
In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent U.S. foreign policy—the Reagan/Bush administration’s protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of the Nicaraguan Contra war in the 1980s. For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb […]
After months of intense media hype about Colin Powell, pundit Joe Klein carried the prevalent spin to its dizzying conclusion. “The key to the race” for the presidency in 1996, Klein wrote (Newsweek, 11/13/95), is that “ideas are not important. Stature is everything.” He added: “But if ideas don’t matter, what does? Civility does.” Mesmerized […]
“Above all it is about hypocrisy,” the Wall Street Journal editorial page explained (3/21/94) in one of its dozens of commentaries on the Whitewater scandal. Robert Bartley and his conservative editorial crew meant the “hypocrisy” of President Clinton who denounced the 1980s as “a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness” while himself trying to get […]
While the O.J. Simpson trial gobbled up endless TV hours and countless news pages, a concurrent criminal trial in Miami went almost unnoticed by the national media, even though it called into question the judgment of three U.S. presidents. President Clinton’s Justice Department had put on trial Teledyne Industries, a major military contractor, and two […]
This conservative media machine now rivals—and may well surpass—the power and the influence of the old-line press. It holds sway over much of the national agenda, deciding which ideas and individuals are accepted and which are marginalized.
