FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
When asked by a reporter what he thought of Western civilization, Gandhi is said to have replied, “I think it would be a good idea.” The same could be said about U.S. public television. Public TV was born 40 years ago of an understanding of the limitations that advertiser funding and the profit motive put […]
Here we go again. Conservative activists and Republican politicians are calling—one more time—to defund public broadcasting. The supposed offense this time around is NPR‘s decision to fire analyst Juan Williams over comments he made on Fox News Channel about his fear of people in “Muslim garb.” The episode is proof, in the eyes of right-wing […]
The PBS ombud and representatives of the public television programs studied in FAIR’s new report, “Taking the Public Out of Public TV,” have responded (
It’s official: Need to Know has failed to pursue the kind of hard-hitting reporting, full of diverse perspectives, that was regularly supplied by the shows it replaced, Now and the Bill Moyers Journal. Now Friday night on PBS looks a lot like the rest of public television’s prominent news and public affairs shows–which, as FAIR’s […]
UPDATE: Sign FAIR’s petition to bring back Now to Friday nights. A multi-part FAIR exposé of PBS‘s most prominent news and public affairs programs demonstrates that public television is failing to live up to its mission to provide an alternative to commercial television, to give voice to those “who would otherwise go unheard” and help […]
This week, as the Afghan War entered its 10th year, there were the usual retrospectives in the media, as well as calls to rethink the war. What’s striking, though, is how little thinking media did about the war in the first place. —Some pundits were calling for indiscriminate attacks before the Afghanistan War even started, […]
Thanks to the efforts of independent media outlets like Free Speech TV (10/2/10), GritTV (10/4/10) and Democracy Now! (10/4/10), you may have been able to follow the happenings at last weekend’s One Nation Working Together rally. Organized and endorsed by hundreds of progressive citizens’ groups, labor unions and grassroots activists, the gathering drew tens of […]
Way back in 1983, corporate media helped sell the dubious notion that Social Security needed saving by a blue-ribbon commission (Extra!, 1-2/88). The panel—headed by future Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan—raised payroll taxes and the retirement age for the ostensible purpose of accumulating a large surplus to help finance the retirement of the baby boomers […]
O’Reilly Sticks Up for Scapegoating When a Pakistani-American suspect was arrested in the Times Square attempted bombing, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (USA Today, 5/7/10) declared that this should not lead to scapegoating by religion or ethnicity: “We will not tolerate any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers.” Who could argue with […]
One potential benefit of so-called “new media” is the chance that news outlets on the Web might offer a break from the tired old conventional wisdom of the corporate “old media.” But when Arianna Huffington (Media Decoder, 9/19/10) announced the Huffington Post‘s hiring of Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman, she described the move as a sign that […]
One of the core debates about federal tax policy concerns the expiring Bush tax cuts. A September 8 “factcheck” segment on ABC World News did more to propagate myths than to set the record straight. The White House position is that the Bush tax cuts, which under current law expire in 2010, should be extended […]
Lawmakers talking about U.S. policy issues are the bread and butter of the Sunday morning news shows—NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday. An Extra! study of the lawmakers who appear on these shows finds they have voting records that tilt to the right. Extra! studied the […]
Concern for Kindle I love Extra!, but I have a concern with the August 2010 cover. Having the titles of the three main articles appear inside the Amazon Kindle leads the reader to assume, as I did, that the articles are critical of Amazon’s book reviewing, Amazon stealing literature from the public and Amazon’s profits […]
How Not to Report on the Estate Tax Under current law, after a one-year suspension, the federal estate tax rate will return to its pre-2001 level of 55 percent, with the first $1 million exempt. Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D.-Ark.) and Jon Kyl (R.-Ariz.) have proposed a change that would lower the rate to 35 percent […]
Thousands have signed on to FAIR’s petition–add your voice today and keep the pressure on NBC to have a real war debate! July saw more U.S. troop fatalities in Afghanistan than any month since the war began nine years ago. Gen. Stanley McChrystal was removed from his commanding post amid controversy, and WikiLeaks released a […]
The war in Afghanistan has re-emerged as a major news story, thanks to the controversies surrounding the removal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the WikiLeaks release of classified documents. But on NBC‘s Meet the Press, the opportunity to engage in a robust debate about the war has taken a back seat to promoting the views […]
The August 5 reports from the Social Security and Medicare trustees declared Social Security’s long-term financial outlook mostly unchanged from the previous year, and the projections for Medicare were greatly improved from previous forecasts. But on CNN‘s Situation Room, this news amounted to a crisis in Social Security and a threat to the country. On […]
On August 2, the New York Times published an op-ed arguing that Arabs do not care much about Palestinians–and that this is a good thing, especially for Palestinians. But the argument relied on a “poll” of the Arab world that does not exist. The piece, by historian Efraim Karsh, intended to show that the “conventional […]
After FAIR criticized PBS for airing Turmoil and Triumph, a documentary about Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz that was funded almost entirely by his friends and associates (Action Alert, 7/12/10; Activism Update, 7/20/10), the program’s producer/writer/director David deVries (PBS.org, 7/16/10) complained that FAIR (and Nation critic Greg Mitchell—7/12/10) hadn’t “[paid] much attention to the […]
Newsweek Blames the ‘Left’ for Bush-Era Disasters Jon Meacham’s editor’s note in the June 7 Newsweek, looking back on the failures of the last decade, made a fervently centrist point: “The history of these years fails to fit neatly into the ideological categories of left or right, for both public and private enterprises have managed […]
