FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory, interviewing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Sunday (10/10/11): GREGORY: What’s going on in the streets of Occupy Wall Street? EMANUEL: Yeah. GREGORY: Complaining about the unfairness, railing against Wall Street. The president has sympathized with those protesters in the street. Is demonizing Wall Street the way to create […]
ABC‘s This Week (10/10/11) had a normally tilted panel on Sunday talking about, among other things, Occupy Wall Street. The show had three different types of conservatives (former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd, fixture George Will and columnist Peggy Noonan) along with Democratic pundit Donna Brazile. But then host Christiane Amanpour actually interviewed someone involved with […]
New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a tedious column today (10/11/11) about how the real radicals are the centrists, not the Wall Street occupiers. (Read Dean Baker to see what Brooks is getting wrong.) But this jumped out at me: A third believe the U.S. is no better than Al-Qaeda, according to a New […]
Leave it to the New York Times (10/7/11) to find a guy collecting unemployment who opposes the extension of unemployment benefits. He’s “Dan Tolleson, a researcher and writer with a Ph.D. in politics…whose last good job was working for a group that aims to replace the income tax with a national sales tax.” But don’t […]
In the When Will They Learn? department, incoming National Public Radio president Gary Knell seems to suffer from the same misunderstanding that has plagued public broadcasting executives for years. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik reports that Knell says he hopes to “calm the waters a bit” at NPR after recent political controversies, and to “depoliticize” […]
It sounded like it, but it was just Bill O’Reilly channeling Beck’s Soros/MoveOn/Big Labor paranoia, minus the chalkboard: On Wednesday in New York City, there was another far-left demonstration as a bunch of people marched on Wall Street. Why? We aren’t exactly sure. What we do know is that these folks are zealots who are […]
Last night (10/4/11) CNN host Erin Burnett noted that her fact check of the Occupy Wall Street protests had drawn some criticism. But she still doesn’t seem to get it. “Well, our story got noted documentarian Michael Moore, who watched the show last night,” she reported before playing a video response from Moore: I just […]
New York Times business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has been criticized for being too chummy with the Wall Street tycoons he’s supposed to be covering. Today he has a piece in the Times (10/4/11) about Occupy Wall Street–which he’s decided to check out because it’s beginning to make some CEOs nervous: I had gone down […]
I checked out a post from the Web-based publication Capital (9/28/11) about media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protest because CJR (9/29/11) told me it was a “smart post” that “crunched the numbers” and showed “how there really is no media blackout.” I have to say I would have thought CJR would have higher […]
A full-page ad in USA Today reminded me that today is the debut of Erin Burnett’s CNN show OutFront. Burnett gained a following at CNBC, and came to the attention of many conservatives with a report on the Today show (7/17/07) that managed to touch on almost every conservative myth about the economy, earning praise […]
The New York Times had a headline on Saturday that read, “Imagining a Christie Campaign for President.” That seems appropriate–if we’re talking about how it’s the corporate media doing the imagining. On ABC‘s This Week (10/2/11), Jonathan Karl announced that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie‘s speech at the Reagan Library “was the most electrifying event […]
Under the somewhat nonsensical headline, “Wall Street Demonstrations Test Police Trained for Bigger Threats,” New York Times reporter Joseph Goldstein may have managed to turn in (9/27/11) a more offensive piece than Ginia Bellafante’s June 25 dispatch (picked apart by Allison Kilkenny here). The piece begins: When members of the loose protest movement known as […]
It is very unusual to see such direct criticism of the New York Times in the Times itself (9/27/11)–this is something to celebrate. To the Editor: Anyone who has spent a few days–or nights–in occupied Zuccotti Park near Wall Street this past week would have trouble recognizing what they’ve seen in “Gunning for Wall Street, […]
ABC This Week (9/25/11): CHRISTINE AMANPOUR: And coming up, Rick Perry on the ropes. PERRY: Yep, there may be slicker candidates and there may be smoother debaters, but I know what I believe in, and I’m going to stand on that belief every day. I will guide this country with a deep, deep rudder. AMANPOUR: […]
There’s a piece at the CBS website (9/21/11) by Robert Hendin marking Bob Schieffer‘s 20 years hosting the network’s Sunday morning show Face the Nation. Hendin, a senior producer for the show, writes: From the get go, Bob made his plans known. “Our aim is to going to be very simple here: to find interesting […]
At the top of Meet the Press yesterday (9/25/11), NBC anchor David Gregory announced one of the topics to come: Is the president’s plan basic fairness or class warfare? As with too many other media debates, an absurd proposition—that returning tax rates for certain wealthy people to levels seen in the 1980s and 1990s is […]
The PBS NewsHour did a pretty strong piece last month (8/16/11) on inequality in America. So perhaps it was a sense of “balance” that drove them to do a follow-up segment on September 21 that argued that things aren’t so bad after all. As anchor Jeffrey Brown put it: NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman has […]
Charles Krauthammer‘s column today in the Washington Post (“Return of the Real Obama,” 9/23/11) reveals the Barack Obama, who’s apparently been hidden away for the past few years: In a 2008 debate, Charlie Gibson asked Barack Obama about his support for raising capital-gains taxes, given the historical record of government losing net revenue as a […]
In the L.A. Times today (9/21/11), media reporter James Rainey asks a very important question: In a week that saw the number of people in poverty hit a half-century high and President Obama propose a tax increase on those with million-dollar incomes, will America and the American media finally dig in for a serious conversation […]
Politicians beware: Thomas Friedman is still threatening to launch a third party. In his New York Times column today (9/21/11), Friedman moans: One would hope that our politicians would rise to the challenge by putting forth fair and credible recovery proposals that match the scale of our debt problem and contain the three elements that […]
