FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
One thing Thomas Friedman demonstrates over and over is that you don’t need to know much to be an expert. Take today’s column (New York Times, 4/13/11), which is based around a contrast between the European wave of democratization in 1989 and the current “Arab spring”: Think about the 1989 democracy wave in Europe. In […]
The uncritical coverage of Paul Ryan’s budget plan continues. In the new issue of Time magazine, Michael Crowley and Jay Newton-Small tell us that Ryan is “the new face of federal frugality”: Just 41 years old, with jet black hair and a touch of Eagle Scout to him, the House Budget Committee chairman unveiled an […]
The big Israel/Palestine news of the week is Richard Goldstone’s op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday (4/3/11). The short version you pick up from the media is that Goldstone has “retracted” his UN-sponsored report on war crimes during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead war in Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009. The “retraction” language […]
Protests were held across the country yesterday to pay tribute to the legacy of Martin Luther King and to push back against attacks on workers’ rights. Alex Seitz-Wald at Think Progress provides this take on one DC rally: In Washington, DC, today, an estimated 2,000 protesters marched on Koch Industries’ Washington, DC, offices, and […]
In a New York Times science article (3/29/11) about the CIA and Pentagon’s psychological profiling of foreign political figures, reporter Benedict Carey adds a note of caution: Yet the assessments can also be misleading, even embarrassing. Profiles of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq that circulated in the early 1990s suggested that he was ultimately a […]
In his New York Times column today (3/24/11)–headlined “Hugs From Libyans”–Nicholas Kristof boils down the argument in favor of the war in Libya: Then, on Wednesday in Benghazi, the major city in eastern Libya whose streets would almost certainly be running with blood now if it weren’t for the American-led military intervention, residents held a […]
Washington Post Dana Milbank (3/19/11) skewers the Republicans for their “emergency meeting” to defund NPR: This particular emergency involved the lower end of the FM radio dial. Republicans, in an urgent budget-cutting maneuver, were voting to cut off funding for National Public Radio. All $5 million of it—or one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the […]
How can you tell that your country has gone to war again? Here are at least two signs. –The same military official is on every Sunday morning chat show: Yesterday Joint Chiefs chair Mike Mullen was on CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, Fox News Sunday and ABC’s This Week. –You can watch […]
From Wednesday’s NBC Nightly News (3/9/11), courtesy of reporter Lisa Myers: We last saw O’Keefe wearing a fur coat and playing a pimp when he managed to take down the liberal group ACORN. No we didn’t. As should be well-known by now, O’Keefe used footage of himself wearing a “pimp” costume in his ACORN videos–but […]
After his fraudulent ACORN videos, the lesson media should have learned about right-wing “citizen journalist” James O’Keefe is not to trust him. But they didn’t, so here we are with his NPR stunt, which allegedly shows NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller saying mean things about the Tea Party in a meeting with phony Muslim Brotherhood-connected donors. […]
To make his claim that the right hasn’t been responsible for a terrorist act since 1995, O’Reilly even had to overlook at least two domestic terror acts apparently inspired by his Fox News colleague Glenn Beck.
From David Carr‘s piece on Glenn Beck in the New York Times today (3/7/11): “When I first came here,” he told his audience on Wednesday, “I had this pie-in-the-sky belief that if I told you the truth, if I verified all of my facts and double-checked, and we could make that compelling case with facts […]
You get an impression from the headline and thrust of the Times piece that would lead you to believe that Assange consorts with anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers, gets angry when they are exposed as such and alleges that a Jewish conspiracy is out to get him.
Richard Cohen recently (FAIR Blog, 2/15/11) took to the Washington Post to argue that Teach for America is wonderful because…. Well, it just is. He predicted that the “best teacher in America” is likely to be drawn from the ranks of the program, which draws recent graduates from elite universities into the teaching profession. His […]
“Being independent right now is a really good thing. Being too far right or left right now is a bit dangerous, given what’s going on in the Middle East.”
On Monday (2/21/11), ABC World News wanted to set the record straight on Wisconsin’s budget problems. As host George Stephanopoulos put it, the debate is over whether pensions and other benefits for public workers are to blame for the crippling budget shortfalls in Wisconsin and other states. Tonight Barbara Pinto has a reality check. What […]
The Washington Post has an interesting piece on the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan (2/21/11), pointing out that the drones are killing plenty of Pakistanis, but not the “high-value” ones: CIA drone attacks in Pakistan killed at least 581 militants last year, according to independent estimates. The number of those militants noteworthy enough to appear […]
New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie is the object of intense devotion among some on the right (Glenn Beck in particular). No surprise, then, that he’d get a lot of attention for going to Washington and delivering a stern lecture about how to fix the deficit. And no surprise that he’d talk about Social Security. […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen‘s Teach for America column today (2/15/11) demonstrates a real problem with logic. “Cut Teach for America Funding and We’ll Be Closer to Flunking the Future,” declares the headline, with Cohen kicking things off this way: The best teacher in America was in Washington over the weekend. So was the best […]
For a good example of how not to report the Afghan War, check out the lead story in today’s USA Today (2/15/11): General: Taliban ‘Beaten’ by Surge Momentum Shifts in Afghanistan The piece—by Jim Michaels, who has an unfortunate history of this kind of reporting—is mostly sourced to Richard Mills, the Marine general who’s […]
