FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
No matter where you live, local TV newscasts tend to be pretty awful: a mash-up of crime, spectacle and celebrity–along with sports and weather. According to an item in the Hollywood Reporter, though, ABC has told its local affiliates not to cover one celebrity in particular: actor Johnny Depp. The actor is doing interviews to […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/24/11), tipped off by at least one of his Post colleagues, decided to pay a visit to Liberty Plaza to see the festival of antisemitism firsthand. Lo and behold, he found none: Reckless Jew that I am, I muscled my way into the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan […]
There’s an old joke about how the pundit spectrum in corporate media debates goes from GE all the way to GM. On Sunday‘s Meet the Press, viewers got a chance to see that joke come to life. On the panel was conservative former GE CEO Jack Welch, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks and […]
Conservative writer/commentator David Frum—the man responsible for writing the Bush “axis of evil” speech—has been doing left/right debates for the public radio show Marketplace. Until now, that is. This week (Marketplace, 10/12/11), Frum came to the conclusion that while he’s still conservative, he doesn’t do a good job representing the right-wing position in that kind […]
As one would expect, corporate media reacted to the developments in Libya by turning to one of their favorite sources: Republican Sen. John McCain. He was on CNN this morning (and last night as well), and odds are that he’ll be on a Sunday show. McCain’s line on Libya is that the White House should […]
There’s quite a controversy brewing over freelance radio host Lisa Simeone for her participation with an activist group occupying a park in Washington, D.C. It’s a worth a look at how this unfolded– especially since it appears to have cost her one of her jobs. A report at the Roll Call website (10/18/11) noted that […]
The country is on the brink of bankruptcy, Fox host Bill O’Reilly warned last night—all because Barack Obama is spending too much money. Drastic cuts are required, but “the far-left loons want to spend more.” And he’s got the number to prove it: In 2007, during the Bush administration, federal deficit spending was $161 billion, […]
An article in the new issue ofNewsweek (10/24/11)–“Obama’s Big Green Mess: How the White House lost its Eco-Mojo”–presents White House policy as a series of failures. It starts off with federal inspectors finding serious problems with various weatherization projects. That’s just the tip of the iceberg–from Solyndra to stimulus, things aren’t looking good. But writers […]
Liberal writers are zeroing in on a new study from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that found Barack Obama has been subjected to far more “negative” coverage than any of the Republican presidential candidates. The graphic accompanying the study is dramatic: Slam dunk, right? One of Eric Boehlert’s blog items at Media Matters is […]
With all the chatter about the inevitability of Mitt Romney winning the Republican nomination, it might be useful to recall the last time the media were sending the same message about an early favorite, at least according to the national polls: Democratic Nomination Preferences Oct. 4-7, 2007 Gallup Poll Candidate % Support Hillary Clinton 47 […]
The New York Times has an interesting profile today (10/18/11) of a retired Wall Street trader named Robert Halper who, it turns out, made an early donation to Adbusters to help with the Occupy Wall Street movement: Mr. Halper, who lives on the Upper West Side, had long been a supporter of the magazine, donating […]
On his MSNBC show (10/15/11), Chris Hayes went through the NBC archives to look at Martin Luther King’s appearances on Meet the Press. He was struck by the tone of the questions King was asked–and the show put together this clip reel (apologies for the ad you’re likely to be forced to watch before the […]
Fox‘s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement has often looked and sounded like Glenn Beck were still working there. On Friday’s broadcast of the O’Reilly Factor (10/14/11), Beck was there to show how wild conspiracy-mongering is done: O’REILLY: What’s the George Soros factor here? BECK: George Soros is connected with this through the Tides […]
Squint or you’ll miss it–the Sunday front page of the Washington Post: In case you’re having trouble finding it, it’s in the lower right-hand corner: a blurb approximately one column inch long, directing people to page A20 to find news about protests in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street in “more than 900 cities in Europe, […]
The new Time poll that found the public more favorably inclined towards Occupy Wall Street protesters than the Tea Party has been making the rounds. From the magazine’s write-up of the poll: A new Time/ABT SRBI poll finds 54 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the new protest movement, despite the images of […]
Last night’s O’Reilly Factor (10/13/11), with guest Megyn Kelly, talking about how to deal with Iran: BILL O’REILLY: What do we do? MEGYN KELLY: It’s a political question for President Obama and a military question for him, but it’s not really much of a legal question because legally he can do it. O’REILLY: OK. KELLY: […]
That might explain the piece the wire service ran today, under the headline, “Who’s Behind the Wall Street Protests?” Reporters Mark Egan and Michelle Nichols suggest that Glenn Beck’s demented chalkboard scribbles might have actually been on the right track; the protests “may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world’s richest […]
Corporate media’s incredibly uncritical boosterism of so-called “free trade” deals has been remarked on many times, and continues to be remarkable. What else but blind faith would allow a story to carry a line like one in the October 12 New York Times, about textile industry opposition to the new deal with South Korea: “The […]
Without further evidence, the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States is rather hard to believe. See Glenn Greenwald’s take, for example, to appreciate the need for skepticism about U.S. claims–and the eagerness of many elite pundits to take the government story more or less at face value. Jim Lobe’s […]
NBC Nightly News (10/7/11) marked the 10th anniversary of the Afghan War on October 7 with a segment that linked the war to the Occupy Wall Street protests. As anchor Brian Williams put it in the introduction: Tonight protesters remain in the streets of a dozen U.S. cities, angry over what’s happened to their lives […]
