FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Corporate media approached election night with circuitous, often tepid reporting, scattered with euphemisms that obscured GOP voter suppression efforts and the clear possibility that Trump will try to steal the election.
Emerging as a corporate media frame is a sloppy, mystifying confusion that refuses to distinguish the racist and sexist slurs against Harris from an authentic discussion of the trajectory of her political positions.
Though many public officials and media outlets seem increasingly convinced that we are fighting a war against Covid-19, framing the pandemic in military terms obscures what we need to know and how we can cope with this virus.
Election Focus 2020: a piece by two of NPR’s leading political reporters, which aired just before the Iowa caucuses, provides a view of how journalists speak with authority on issues they seem to know very little about.
Election Focus 2020: a piece by two of NPR’s leading political reporters, which aired just before the Iowa caucuses, provides a view of how journalists speak with authority on issues they seem to know very little about.
The actions being taken by tech giants to battle fake news are currently having devastating effects on alternative media and freedom of speech, while leaving the worst hate speech and junk news spinning across the internet by right-wing trolls.
Parroting a president known to be inventing justifications for war does not fulfill the mandate of the First Amendment, the Fourth Estate, or even journalists’ own professional canons that emphasize the obligation to the public, not to the president or the executive branch.
After the Wisconsin loss, the Clinton campaign went into high gear, sending emails out announcing a new strategy of going negative. Political strategists know well that attacks can backfire, especially for candidates with high negatives such as Hillary Clinton. Their approach revealed the sophisticated media-handling of Clinton campaign strategists.
It isn’t news to those of us interested in knowing about the world that American journalism is in crisis. With The Newsroom and its dramatic condemnation of the state of news, HBO is jumping into the center of an industry storm, and what it portrays as a national disgrace. Though Newsroom could have focused on […]
Many have exposed the fictions of Argo; Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir described the film as “a propaganda fable.” But when the Academy chose Argo and almost ignored Zero Dark Thirty, I cheered.
A timeline of the horrific events that unfolded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina hangs on the wall of the conference room in the Treme production offices in New Orleans. The skeletal framework is fleshed out by a team of writers, many of them locals, determined to bring to life the story of people who […]
Reporter Thomas Ricks’ new book The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, documents the military changes that took place in Iraq after the controversial troop “surge,” which is commonly credited with having greatly reduced violence in the country (Extra!, 11-12/07, 9-10/08). A Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, Ricks […]
“Guantánamo, a prison in no way ready to close, is at the heart of a conversation that almost no one seems willing to open.” Since September 27, 2007, when Karen Greenberg closed an article on TomDispatch.com with that observation, a media conversation about torture has unexpectedly taken off. The New York Times (10/4/07) published a […]
Urgent Fury, carried out 20 years before Operation Iraqi Freedom, has faded from public and political memory. Yet there is much to be remembered, as there are many cogent parallels between Grenada and Iraq.
In the days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as the U.S. military planned a massive aerial bombing campaign on the densely populated city of Baghdad, the Pentagon phrase “Shock and Awe” was repeated with enthusiasm on television, part of the celebration of the power of modern warfare. At the same time, Deep Dish TV […]
George Gerbner was born in Budapest in 1919 and fled to the United States to escape fascism in 1939, but he never lost his Hungarian accent. What he said about U.S. media culture often sounded as foreign as the way he said it. Gerbner spent his life in an adopted country saturated with graphic depictions […]
On the occasion of FAIR’s 20th anniversary, it is appropriate to recall some of the early press critics who helped blaze the trail that FAIR has so honorably followed. George Seldes Like FAIR, George Seldes was dogged in his quest for journalistic accuracy. Seldes had been a journalist for five years in 1914, when the […]
The media build-up to war presented a military attack on Iraq as an overwhelming natural force whose momentum could not be stopped. “The clock is ticking,” NPR reported in early March (3/8/03), with soldiers in Kuwait complaining that there was “too much waiting around.” Military preparations were like a “huge gun and every day you […]
The Toyota 4 runner sits off-road in the middle of a fern-laden forest. The ad copy proclaims: THE ANSWERING MACHINE FOR THE CALL OF THE WILD From a rugged mountain vista to deep in the plush forest, nature calls out for us. And the 1997 Toyota 4-wheel drive is one of the only machines capable […]
Whatever the Gulf War will do to the political geography of the Middle East and the world, the war changed the landscape of the American and international news media forever. The clear winner is Cable News Network, in ratings, name recognition, praise, even envy. CNN has become the international channel of choice. When Iraqi foreign […]
