FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
AlterNet’s Sarah Lazare quotes Jim Naureckas on a call for an FBI crackdown on protesters appearing in the New York Observer, the paper owned by Trump son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner.
Michael Corcoran, writing in Moyers & Company, cites FAIR’s critique of media deregulation in the 1990s.
A Washington Post op-ed by John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, cites FAIR’s critique of the Post’s anti-Bernie Sanders bias.
African-American Deaths Literally Off the Chart; How Many Protesters Gunned Down? You Do the Math; From Hoax to Fox to Trump to NBC; Sanders: ‘Let Me Say Something About Media’–Media: ‘No’; Don’t Know Much About Recent History
Democrats: Pro-Bombing Softies Under the headline “The Ultimate Argument in Favor of the Iran Deal: The Agreement Would Make It Easier to Bomb Iran,” Politico (8/24/15) reported that “the pact would make it easier to bomb Iran, administration officials have told lawmakers.” Two days later, in a story on Senate campaigns, Politico (8/26/15) was reporting […]
When it comes to explaining election results, there’s no precise way to determine whether voters gave the winner a “mandate”–defined by Oxford as “the authority to carry out a policy, regarded as given by the electorate to a party or candidate that wins an election.” That makes it interesting to see how media use the expression–and which presidents they think earned one.
You’d think a massive hurricane that wreaked havoc along the East Coast might force the high-profile Sunday morning TV shows to talk about climate change. You’d be wrong. It’s time for us to tell the Sunday talkshows: Talk about climate change. Sign FAIR’s petition today. It is difficult for most people to keep ignoring the […]
Even as the devastation resulting from humanity’s ongoing alteration of the Earth’s atmosphere became more and more obvious, coverage of the 2012 presidential election campaign seemed completely impervious to the effects of climate change.
The establishment media figures who moderated the 2012 major-party candidate debates confined the discussion to a remarkably narrow range of topics, a FAIR analysis of debate questions finds. A wide variety of topics were never brought up in questions during the six total hours of debate. Among economic subjects, no questions were asked about poverty, […]
In an October 22 discussion of the foreign policy presidential debate, the PBS NewsHour‘s Jeffrey Brown stated that “Iran’s nuclear weapons program has been a particular flash point.” A few weeks earlier (10/5/12) on the NewsHour, Ray Suarez said that Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez had continued to thwart American efforts on a range of international […]
The September 11, 2012, attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, became a contentious issue in the October 16 presidential debate (FAIR Blog, 10/17/12). The discussion didn’t do much to illuminate U.S. foreign policy, but it exposed the essential uselessness in what corporate media offer as political “factchecking.”
Jim Lehrer is hopping mad. The New York Times (10/2/12) reports that the PBS anchor “has been seething. He said he was outraged by suggestions that he was a ‘safe’ and uninspired choice to moderate the first of four debates.” The focus of the Times piece is the fact that people have more ways to express their opinions about the presidential […]
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The Washington Post has responded to FAIR’s September 14 Action Alert, which criticized the paper for presenting a two-page energy “debate” that didn’t include critics of the industry–and didn’t disclose to readers that the discussion was sponsored by Big Oil. In his most recent column, Post ombud Patrick Pexton (9/21/12) largely agreed with FAIR’s take, acknowledging that the panel discussions […]
As corporate media tell and retell Republican vice presidential hopeful Paul Ryan’s life story, one theme emerges above all others: His “self-reliance. “David Fahrenthold and Paul Kane in the Washington Post (8/11/12) asserted that Ryan’s big ideas bear the stamp of his own story: They stress independence and self-reliance, the qualities that took him from the mailroom […]
Mitt Romney’s choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as his Republican running mate has unleashed yet another torrent of fawning coverage touting Ryan’s intelligence and bravery for advocating a fiscal plan of massive government spending cuts and massive tax breaks for the wealthy.
Sometimes the problem with corporate media’s coverage of elections is the absence of factchecking. And then there are times when the problem is more fundamental than that–when reporters suspend a minimal level of critical judgment in order to allow a political campaign to set a preferred storyline. Recent campaign coverage has focused on a supposed Barack Obama “gaffe” that was made to appear to be an attack on small business owners.
What would you call someone who insists the Earth is not warming, but cooling? Or who recommends that a media outlet “cool the global warming mumbo jumbo”? On CBS Evening News, they call him an expert–the network’s “severe weather consultant.” Florida TV meteorologist David Bernard makes frequent appearances to talk about weather and climate on CBS Evening News and other CBS News shows. As FAIR and others have noted, recent TV coverage of weather disasters tends to downplay the effects of catastrophic climate change.
Barack Obama’s July 9 announcement that he would extend the Bush tax cuts for income below $250,000 prompted the expected response from Republican politicians and presidential candidate Mitt Romney: This is a tax increase on “small businesses.” That is false. But most news reports won’t say so. The New York Times (7/10/12) told readers that […]
If you’ve paid much attention to media reports about the “Fast and Furious” scandal, you may be under the impression that government agencies inexplicably allowed guns to be purchased in the United States and shipped across the border to drug lords in Mexico, where they ended up being connected to the December 2010 death of […]
