FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Fairness Doctrine an Essential Tool Thanks for all you do to open and keep open America’s lines of communication. FAIR’s Extra! is itself an important channel of information on which I and many rely. Jim Naureckas’ “Public Media and the Decommodification of the News” and Julie Hollar’s “Putting the Public Back in Public Media” (11/09) […]
What standard for truth in advertising does the New York Times use in publishing advocacy ads? A double standard, an exchange of letters received by FAIR suggests. The first letter was sent by Sam Husseini, media director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (and former FAIR staffer), when he saw an ad in the New York […]
Robert Wright, the CEO of NBC, spoke at the National Press Club on January 24, providing a revealing glimpse into the thinking of one of the people at the top of the TV industry. One surprise was that for someone in such a powerful position, he sure does feel sorry for himself. Here’s a sample: […]
The Tipping Point In a USA Today interview (10/2/06) on the occasion of Fox News Channel‘s 10th anniversary, Fox chief Roger Ailes recalled being asked at a dinner party, “Isn’t Fox News too conservative?” Ailes related his response: “I said, ‘Are you comfortable with CNN?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ How about CBS, ABC, NBC? ‘Absolutely.’… National […]
The Washington Post‘s Shailagh Murray (11/17/09) wrote a profile of Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D.-Ark.) as one of the Democratic senators most likely to break with the rest of the party on healthcare reform. The article seemed to invert the advice Deep Throat once gave to the Post‘s Woodward and Bernstein into a new rule: Don’t […]
TV host Lou Dobbs abruptly quit his CNN program yesterday, bringing a sudden end to a television program most notable for its remarkably one-sided presentation of immigration issues. Since 2003, Dobbs has regularly used his CNN platform to issue misleading and alarmist warnings about the threats posed by undocumented immigrants. Dobbs has spoken of an […]
Republican candidates won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday; meanwhile, Democratic candidates won two special elections for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York and California. But it was very clear which set of elections corporate media wanted to portray as sending an important message about national politics–that voters were discontented […]
There have been various proposals to “save journalism” from the crisis brought on by digitalization. But by and large these ideas have less to do with meeting the information needs of a democratic society than with preserving the profit potential of existing media outlets. Take the various suggestions as to how to get news outlets […]
After a campaign led by Fox News’ Glenn Beck led to the resignation of White House staffer Van Jones, New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson offered something of an apology for being “a beat behind on this story.” “We should have been paying closer attention,” she wrote in an online Q&A (9/07/09)—even while accurately […]
Wake Up and Sell the Coffee The October 5 edition of Time magazine reported that some people are wondering if Fair Trade coffee is too cheap—in other words, if the program that is supposed to provide a better deal for coffee growers is paying too little for beans. The minimum price for Fair Trade coffee […]
Murdoch and the Weekly Standard I was disappointed in Michael Corcoran’s article about Rupert Murdoch and the Weekly Standard (Extra!, 9/09). Corcoran’s conclusion is that despite selling the Weekly Standard, “Murdoch still has a powerful soapbox to push his policy preferences.” This gets Murdoch exactly backwards. Murdoch doesn’t have a political agenda. He has a […]
In the wake of Rush Limbaugh being booted from a group of investors bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams football team, a minor media tempest has been stirred by conservative commentators who charge that Limbaugh has been falsely accused of making racist remarks. Central to their charge are two quotes allegedly made by Limbaugh–in […]
In response to FAIR’s September 22 action alert, New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt agreed (10/11/09) that the paper’s September 20 article about Medicare for all excluded supporters of a single-payer healthcare system. FAIR pointed out that the article, written by Katharine Seelye, laid out many arguments against single-payer–it would mean a big tax […]
There have been recent discussions (e.g., New York Times, 9/29/09) about whether the press is doing a better job covering allegations about Iran’s nuclear program than they did during the run-up to the Iraq War. But in some crucial and very basic ways, many in the media are performing just as poorly as they did […]
Our exchange on the August 2009 letters page about September 11 conspiracy theories provoked a great deal of response. The following are a sampling of these letters. I take issue with your response to Reese Sullivan’s letter (8/09), and your explanation for why FAIR doesn’t deal with questions about mainstream media coverage of the events […]
A Little Help for His Friends Robert Novak was certainly a remarkable journalist; how many other pundits would complain about there being too much diversity at a Republican convention? (“What about white people? Not too many”—Crossfire, 7/31/00.) But the many eulogies for Novak upon his August 18 death generally revealed less about the columnist himself […]
This week, ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya returned to Tegucigalpa–though not to office. Unfortunately, press accounts are still misreporting the story behind his ouster, relying on those who supported the coup to supply the explanation for their actions. Some of the most misleading coverage has appeared in the Associated Press dispatches that have run in […]
Dear FAIR Supporter, FAIR loves being able to bring you recent successes we’ve had in standing up to the corporate media. On July 28, FAIR led an inspiring activist action where we delivered our petition signed by more than 13,000 physicians, activists and concerned citizens to ABC News headquarters in New York, demanding that the […]
The New York Times devoted some rare space on September 20 to discussing single-payer (or Medicare-for-all) health reform. The result? A one-sided account of why such a system couldn’t work. With a headline like “Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely,” readers probably had a sense of what the Times had in mind with the […]
August 29 marked the fourth anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The devastation wrought by both the hurricane itself and the government’s inept response prompted remarkably critical corporate media coverage that promised to fight for Katrina survivors and change the way we talk about poverty and race (FAIR […]
