FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
A USA Today story by Susan Page (7/27/10), on the impact of the WikiLeaks revelations, reports that despite some erosion, “Most Americans continue to support the war in Afghanistan.” To back up this assertion, Page cites Gallup poll findings (7/8–11/10) that 58 percent of Americans think it was “not a mistake” for the US to […]
Fresh from her comments slamming Rolling Stone‘s Michael Hastings for reporting things the military wouldn’t like, CBS reporter Lara Logan weighed in on the WikiLeaks story on last night’s CBS Evening News, where she argued that reporters should do more to stress the Taliban’s record of killing civilians: KATIE COURIC: Also mentioned in these documents […]
Former special ops squad leader/current think tank fellow Andrew Exum noisily yawns at the WikiLeaks Afghan document release on the New York Times op-ed page today (7/27/10): The news media have done a good job of showing the public that the Afghan war is a highly complex environment stretching beyond the borders of the […]
Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger sent a memo to staffers on July 8 with the subject line “How Social Media Impacts Your Professional Life,” suggesting new rules for journalists’ private expressions of opinion. So far, the memo seems to have only been discussed on a German language media blog (Ruhr Barone, 7/22/10). Jumping off from the […]
The lesson of the Shirley Sherrod story would seem to be a simple one:A conservative blogger with a history of promoting inaccurate, racially chargedstories published another one, and people in the media (not to mention the White House) fell for it–again. But New York Times reporter Matt Bai wrote a piece in the paper’s Week […]
Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (7/22/10) defends Fox News against charges it promoted Andrew Breitbart’s fraudulent Shirley Sherrod story—because, he says, Fox‘s news division didn’t even address the story until after Sherrod resigned. In an extensive defense of Fox, Kurtz also cites an e-mail circulated by a Fox executive to the channel’s news division, […]
Web-based outlets like Salon (7/21/10) and Talking Points Memo (7/21/10) have picked up on the connection—apparently first pointed out by dagblog (7/21/10)—between shooting suspect Byron Williams and Fox News host Glenn Beck. But to judge from a Nexis search, traditional media have ignored the story almost completely. (One exception, found via Facebook: local CBS station […]
The list of First Amendment–trampling rules for Guantánamo reporters makes for dispiriting reading in today’s New York Times (7/21/10)—e.g., “If information the government deems protected is inadvertently disclosed, the Pentagon can order reporters not to reveal it.” But perhaps the most discouraging part of Jeremy Peters’ article is the list of reporters who fell afoul […]
In his New York Times column today (7/19/10), Paul Krugman offers a prediction about the likely pundit response to the drubbing Democrats are expected to take in the November elections: What I expect…if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects will say that it was because Mr. Obama was too liberal—when […]
Ever since the Israeli raid on a Turkish group’s boat filled with aid for the Gaza Strip, there has been a lot of attempts in the press (FAIR Blog, 6/10/10), following Israel’s lead, to label the Turkish humanitarian group IHH a supporter of “terrorism.” The latest salvo comes from a New York Times article (7/15/10) […]
Noting that policies like the stimulus plan tend to poll pretty badly, New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes (7/16/10) that Obama says he has pursued such policies because they’re “the right thing to do for America.” To Stolberg, that sounds familiar: It is an argument that sounds eerily similar to the one Mr. […]
The fact that the Federal Reserve could be doing much more to stimulate the economy—but so far has chosen not to do so—is finally getting some prominent corporate media attention. The New York Times wrote today (7/15/10), referring to Fed chair Ben Bernanke: As Mr. Bernanke pointed out in a speech in 2002, when he […]
In a news report on the Israeli military’s investigation of its own deadly raid on the Gaza aid flotilla, the Wall Street Journal (7/13/10) passes off as fact, with no qualifier, the Israeli government’s claim that members of IHH, a Turkish humanitarian organization, “attacked the Israeli soldiers as they boarded the ship.” While it’s true […]
Back in May FAIR wrote about the problems with a new factchecking project, where the PolitiFact website evaluates ABC‘s This Week. As we said then, this is theoretically a fine idea; the problem is that, in practice, what PolitiFact decides to analyze is almost as important as what is said on the show. A completely […]
L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan (7/2/10), reviewing Oliver Stone’s documentary South of the Border, remarks in passing that “a recent piece in the New York Times pointed out numerous errors” in the film’s discussion of Latin American politics. Turan might have noticed that the Times‘ supposed debunking, by former Latin American correspondent Larry Rohter, […]
Time’s Alex Perry, the magazine’s Africa bureau chief, responded in the FAIR Blog comments section to FAIR’s Julie Hollar, who recently (FAIR Blog, 6/25/10) criticized Perry for neglecting to mention the U.S. and Belgium’s role in propping up the Mobutu regime in Congo. Perry said: The idea that the U.S. created Mobutu and maintained him […]
New York Times reporter Larry Rohter turned in a factually challenged fact-check of Oliver Stone’s new film South of the Border. So Stone and the film’s co-writers Mark Weisbrot and Tariq Ali wrote a devastating rebuttal. A reader passed along a link to that piece to Rohter, suggesting that he “should be embarrassed” by his review. […]
It’s not a huge surprise that a correspondent for a newspaper that supported the coup that ousted Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez would dislike a film that offers a more sympathetic view of Chavez’s politics. That said, Larry Rohter’s review (New York Times, 6/26/10) of the new Oliver Stone film South of the Border still manages […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald has an illuminating post (6/27/10) that argues that the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg, with his “self-praising, desperately insecure need to tout his own wisdom, knowledge and expertise, while demeaning those who are not admitted to his Special Club…is a perfectly illustrative face of the American establishment media.” Responding to Goldberg’s assertion (Atlantic, 6/25/10) […]
National Review senior editor Jay Nordlinger (Corner, 3/24/10), responding to CNN pairing disgraced Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer with a not-conservative-enough-for-National-Review Kathleen Parker, muses: I’m reminded why conservatives had to build their own media outlets. It’s sort of like Jews and country clubs. Jews built their own, not because they wanted to, necessarily, but because the […]
