FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
CNBC‘s Erin Burnett discussing the tax deal on the Today show yesterday (12/7/10): “With capital gains and dividend taxes staying low, the half of Americans that own stocks get a benefit there as well.” Oh, really? Here’s some figures from the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities (1/30/06): Over half—54 percent—of all capital gains and […]
Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas visited Germany recently, and came away thinking the United States is headed for some serious trouble. The country is falling apart—polarized, susceptible to populist demagoguery and so on. Forces on both sides are to blame; they’re not all bad (“I think the Tea Partiers, despite their contradictions, are not all wrong about […]
Fox host Bill O’Reilly warned viewers on December 3 about “a disturbing development at the FCC”: Commissioner Michael Copps has been criticizing the failure of the media to provide citizens with substantive political information and discussion. O’Reilly zeroed in on these comments Copps made in a BBC interview (12/1/10): I think American media has a […]
New York Times reporter Matt Bai uses the debt commission (12/1/10) to ask whether Barack Obama will finally stand up to the liberal base of the Democratic Party. As the headline puts it, “Debt-Busting Issue May Force Obama Off Fence.” You see, in Bai’s world, Obama was never much of a Clinton-style “triangulator,” which is […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses WikiLeaks as a jumping off point to talk about George W. Bush’s new book and the run-up to the Iraq War (11/30/10): As my colleague, the indefatigably indefatigable Walter Pincus, has pointed out, Bush manages to bollix up both the chronology and the importance of the various inspections of […]
Patrick Cockburn has a wonderful piece in the Independent (11/23/10) on the hazards of embedded journalism that is a must-read. He points out: “Embedding” also puts limitations on location and movement. Iraq and Afghanistan are essentially guerrilla wars, and the successful guerrilla commander will avoid fighting the enemy main force and instead attack where his […]
The Irish economy is in need of a $100 billion bailout, thanks in large part to the bursting of its housing bubble. But for years the Irish model was lionized by U.S. pundits. ThinkProgress blogger Matthew Yglesias digs up a 2005 piece by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman that said: There is a huge […]
Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia caused a bit of an uproar at a hearing yesterday. As Brian Stelter reported at his New York Times blog (11/17/10), Rockefeller mused: There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to Fox and to MSNBC, “Out. Off. End. Goodbye.” It […]
I agree with Keith Olbermann (11/15/10) about the dubious value of “objectivity” as a journalistic value; he makes a telling point about how journalistic icons like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow are most honored for the moments when they reached conclusions and asserted values. And I think he’s right that the U.S. media establishment’s […]
Last Wednesday (Glenn Beck Program, 11/10/10), we got a glimpse of how low Glenn Beck will go to smear a political opponent. Beck’s lie that philanthropist George Soros helped “send the Jews to the death camps” during World War II, was, in essence, an attack on a Jewish child for the heartbreaking things he was […]
As you may have gathered by now, the deficit reduction plan offered by debt commission chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles is pretty unpopular, particularly on the left. But one place it was well-received: The Charlie Rose Show, a comfortable place for CEOs and insiders to pontificate. The fact that this show is a staple […]
Bill O’Reilly‘s recent “joke” about decapitating Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank was only the latest example of a demented Fox News culture that permits on-air personalities to fantasize about assassination and other forms of violence against those deemed enemies of the station, its personalities or their worldview. During the cable channel’s 2008 election coverage, in […]
NBC star Matt Lauer’s one-on-one interview with George W. Bush revealed very little in the way of information, though some lessons could be drawn from Lauer’s mediocre performance. Here was one comment from near the top of the interview: The Florida recount. Hanging chads. A divided Supreme Court. George Bush had a rough road to […]
New York Times political analyst Matt Bai writes in a post-election piece (11/4/10): A powerful force in the party, Ms. [Sarah] Palin represents an aggrieved, anti-elitist strain of conservatism that goes back to Richard M. Nixon’s Silent Majority. It is a rural conservative impulse, rooted most firmly in the South and West, that equates liberal […]
It’s probably better for American political leaders that we forget the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. “A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves,” was how Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it in 1970 (NY Times, 5/27/04), reflecting Richard Nixon’s concern that the large-scale aerial bombing wasn’t doing enough damage. […]
Scientific American editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina (10/28/10) responded to criticism from Climate Progress‘ Joe Romm (10/26/10) and FAIR Blog (10/27/10) of the magazine’s recent coverage of climate change: In actuality, Scientific American reports on climate-related science in depth in nearly every issue and frequently online. You can see a sample list of past print and online-only […]
A guest post by Frances Cerra Whittelsey, Extra! contributor and journalism scholar: Whether or not Juan Williams is truly a liberal or just playing the role to give Fox an appearance of balance begs the question of whether his comment about fearing Muslims on airplanes justified his firing by NPR. Williams is waving the free […]
Has Scientific American jumped the shark on climate change? That’s the contention of Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm (10/26/10), who accuses the magazine of treating human-caused global climate change as an open question. Romm points to an article by Michael Lemonick (11/10) about Judith Curry, a climate scientist whose critiques of the Intergovernmental Panel on […]
Fox News must be a funny place to work. The biggest star there is constantly talking about how the Obama administration is leading us toward tyranny, slavery and dictatorship. Meanwhile, on the FoxNews.com website (10/25/10), you’ve got “frequent contributor” and Bush State Department alum Christian Whiton (you couldn’t make these names up) complaining bitterly that […]
I was struck by this New York Times headline on Saturday (10/23/10):”Effort to Rehabilitate Suharto’s Reputation Grows in Indonesia.” (The headline seems to have been changed somewhere along the way.) The piece led with this: JAKARTA, Indonesia— To millions, Suharto, the military strongman who ruled Indonesia for 32 years, was a tyrant, a thief and […]
