FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The New York Times today (12/8/11), reporting on the CIA drone that went down in Iran, refers in passing to the recent public debate in Israel about whether time is running out for a military strike to slow Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon. Of course, the assumption here is that Iran is making “progress […]
Political campaign watchers seem to agree that the election will be about the economy, and that Republicans probably won’t have much to say about Obama’s foreign policy (partly because it doesn’t much differ from what a Republican president might be doing). The New York Times‘ Richard Oppel has a piece today headlined, “Republican Candidates Aim […]
The Republican Party is in something of a bind. Many oppose White House efforts to extend–and perhaps increase–a Social Security payroll tax cut next year. This might sound strange, since if conservatives are supposed to be fond of anything, it’s tax cuts. So they have some explaining to do. They’re given a valuable assist when […]
USA Today‘s Rick Hampson has a piece today (12/7/11) on Occupy Wall Street’s Occupy Our Homes actions, which include efforts to move families into vacant housing. This coverage is a good sign if you think there is still something happening with this movement after the evictions in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. But why […]
Imagine that the company founded by the frontrunning Republican presidential candidate also owned a massive radio company–say, the largest one in the country. And imagine that said company announced, right as the election season started, that it was ditching its progressive talk format in a major city for a mostly conservative lineup. Stop imagining–Brad Friedman […]
Is Fox News Channel going soft? In an election year? Some media figures seem to think the hard-right channel is going to the “middle,” but this seems to be a figment of the centrist imagination. New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman has a short piece trying to make this case. His first bit of evidence is […]
Many big papers have rules about when reporters can use anonymous sources. It should be rare, and the information generated should be important and difficult to get without granting a source the privilege to speak anonymously. Of course, reality is different–as Janine Jackson documented in the new issue of Extra!. Anonymous sources supposedly aren’t allowed […]
USA Today‘s front page today (12/2/12) seemed to know– their “Newsline” headline was, “Flip-Flops by Gingrich Fail to Alarm His Conservative Base.” The piece inside by Jackie Kucinich–which is actually fairly comprehensive–unfortunately bore this headline: Gingrich Endures Shifts in Policy Candidate sees no backlash from base So he’s able to endure himself?
In the new issue of Time (12/12/11), Fareed Zakaria writes in the first sentence of his column: It is difficult to find a country on the planet that is more anti-American than Pakistan. In a Pew survey this year, only 12 percent of Pakistanis expressed a favorable view of the U.S. It’s not that difficult. […]
If you’ve paid attention to the presidential campaign season, you’ve no doubt been entertained by the string of embarrassments and gaffes: Rick Perry blows the voting age! Herman Cain can’t remember what to say about Libya! Mitt Romney talks about the upside of a murderous dictatorship! Wait–what? In the November 22 debate, Romney gave this […]
The New York Times today (11/29/11) has a somewhat cheeky piece about Republican candidate Newt Gingrich‘s background as a historian–which, according to reporter Trip Gabriel, means he’s unusually smart: In an election season rife with factual misstatements, deliberate and otherwise, Mr. Gingrich sometimes seems to stand out for exhibiting an excess of knowledge. I don’t […]
A New York Times piece today (11/29/11) about the U.S. airstrikes that apparently killed 24 Pakistani soldiers opens with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani speaking publicly about the incident, as does Pakistani military spokesperson Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas. Readers are then treated to a lesson in how U.S. officials speak to important news outlets […]
Sam Husseini asked a tough question of a member of the Saudi royal family at a National Press Club event—which got him into some trouble with folks at the Press Club. (Good news—his suspension has been lifted.) Part of what motivated Husseini to question Turki al-Faisal was the fact that a representative of such a […]
International efforts to ban cluster bombs fell apart late last week. If you were reading about this in the New York Times, you might have been led to believe that the United States was pushing to get rid of the weapons—instead of the opposite. Here’s the lead sentence from a story in Saturday’s paper (11/26/11): […]
Huffington Post reporter Jon Ward did what reporters should do when covering political campaign ads. He told readers, at the top of his story, that the new Mitt Romney ad was based on a lie: The 60-second Romney ad quoted Obama as saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” It […]
News that Newt Gingrich was receiving millions of dollars to advise Freddie Mac has to be a little unsettling for at least some conservative voters, who are accustomed to demonizing the government-sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for causing the housing bubble, and hence the recession. But it’s not just right-wing pundits like Bill […]
The public TV show Nightly Business Report has gone through some serious changes over the past year or so–sold by the public station that had produced it for years to a somewhat mysterious private company run by an entrepreneur whose been the subject of various controversies and lawsuits. The show’s been sold once again, and […]
Paul Krugman argues in the New York Times today (11/18/11) that the failure of the Congressional supercommittee might be a good thing, and that public understanding of what’s really happening is hampered by a familiar media problem. He also makes a pretty safe bet about what coverage is going to look like if they fail […]
One more thing about free speech hero Michael Bloomberg’s shutdown of Occupy Wall Street. During the early morning raid on the Occupy Wall Street camp journalists were blocked from covering much of what was happening. Josh Stearns from Free Press has a rundown—as he points out, “By dawn, 10 journalists, including reporters from NPR, the […]
The general line in corporate media coverage of the so-called “Supercommittee” tasked with coming up with a long-term budget plan is that both sides aren’t willing to budge: Republicans won’t agree to raise taxes, and Democrats want to protect “entitlements” like Social Security and Medicare. While some might find the idea of Democrats standing up […]
