FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Fox News host Glenn Beck (4/13/10) came out against Social Security yesterday: Have you ever wondered why we even have Social Security? It’s not an American idea. It’s first from Germany in the late 1800s. Hmmm, lets see, who else was prominent in Germany at that time…Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche. This is where the first […]
New York Times reporter Ethan Bronner has a piece today (4/7/10) headlined “Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance,” which attempts to show that there is a new move away from armed resistance to Israeli occupation. You get that message pretty clearly from Bronner’s language: He calls it a “new approach” and argues, “Nonviolence […]
One of USA Today‘s regular op-ed features is a “right-left” conversation between conservative columnist Cal Thomas and “liberal” Democratic strategist Bob Beckel in which they seek “Common Ground”—the name of the op-ed feature—on “issues that lawmakers in Washington cannot.” Last week (3/25/10) Thomas and Beckel tackled the issue of “Bias and Fox News“—and really, what […]
The Vatican is lashing out at mounting news reports suggesting that, before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger used his positions to cover up the the church’s sex abuse scandals, with little regard for the child victims of the abusers or the law. A Vatican spokesperson denounced the reporting as an “ignoble attempt” […]
The New York Times, thanks in large part to FAIR activists, printed an ACORN correction today (3/23/10): Several articles since September about the troubles of the community organizing group ACORN referred incorrectly or imprecisely to one aspect of videotaped encounters between ACORN workers and two conservative activists that contributed to the group’s problems. In the […]
…he would have to take a leave of absence to recover from the shame of having heaped ridicule on a guest who tried to explain to him how Congress could and would pass a healthcare reform bill.
Offering a critique of the Iraq War drama Green Zone, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (3/15/10) offers a “narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told,” that ends with: And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have WMD was the best way to keep his […]
Actual Washington Post headline today (3/11/10): Rise in Washington Area Unemployment Seen as Good Sign for Economy’s Recovery Reporter V. Dion Hayes tries to explain: Rising unemployment as a positive sign may sound counterintuitive, but economists explain it this way: The increase suggests that long-term unemployed people in the D.C. area who had given up […]
Yesterday (3/10/10) there was a House floor debate on Rep. Dennis Kucinich‘s push to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. Kucinich’s bill–which is based on the War Powers Act–was defeated, but it sparked hours of rare discussion of the White House’s war policy (in spite of the Washington Post‘s efforts to minimize the discussion as left-wing “venting”). […]
Newsweek devotes several pieces this week to public schools. But the lead piece, “Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers,” by Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert, lays out the magazine’s skewed vision: Teacher unions protect the worst performers, while charter schools offer an easy solution. (“In the past two decades, some schools have sprung up that […]
White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has always been a controversial figure—famously profane and short-tempered, and politically speaking a center-right Clinton Democrat. As of late, though, there’s been a strange effort—particularly in the Washington Post—to present Emanuel as the confidant whose political advice Barack Obama has too often ignored and who offers a clear […]
A headline over an Evan Thomas story in this week’s Newsweek (3/8/10) tells us: “We the Problem: Washington Is Working Just Fine. It’s Us That’s Broken.” Thomas blames, among other things, “our ‘got mine’ culture of entitlement,” adding: Politicians, never known for their bravery, precisely represent the people. Our leaders are paralyzed by the very […]
In his New York Times column today (2/24/10), Tom Friedman presents a bizarre view of the Iraq War. Attempting to answer the question of whether Iraq is dysfunctional because of its culture (the “conservative” argument) or because of its politics (the “liberal” argument), he writes: Ironically, though, it was the neo-conservative Bush team that argued […]
Yesterday Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times (2/18/10) turned in a piece on the one-year anniversary of the stimulus plan—a favorite target of Republican lawmakers (when they’re not happily enjoying the federal funds in their states and/or districts, that is). The piece tells us that there’s a rather bitter partisan dispute over the […]
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank thinks it’s pretty silly for Republicans and climate change deniers to say that the recent snowstorms mean that climate change is phony. BUT…. don’t think for a second that Milbank’s going to let “greens” off the hook that easy. No way. As he put it on Sunday (2/14/10): “There’s some […]
The Financial Times‘ Edward Luce (2/3/10) had a report last week that blamed some of the Obama administration’s problems on the president’s overreliance on four top advisers—particularly chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who “in addition to hurling frequent profanities at people within the administration…has alienated many of Mr Obama’s closest outside supporters.” More illuminating than […]
Last month CJR blogger Curtis Brainard (1/29/10) complained that the media were not giving enough attention to some complaints—mostly from climate change deniers—about the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and complaints about IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri. Jim Naureckas suggested right here that this was a bad idea, but today the New York Times […]
The Washington Post‘s Eli Saslow (2/3/10) on Obama: He is a rare president who comes from the middle class, yet people still perceive him as disconnected from it. It’s true that very few presidents come from the middle class—except for Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, […]
AP‘s Calvin Woodward, who has the standing assignment of “factchecking” political speeches, continues to be an embarrassment to genuine factcheckers everywhere–substituting his own weird value judgments, semantic games and crystal-ball gazing for genuine examination of facts (FAIR Blog, 10/30/08, 2/25/09, 4/30/09). In his post–State of the Union effort (1/27/10), he singles out Barack Obama’s call […]
An enterprising Washington Post report by Joe Stephens (1/23/10) uses the Freedom Of Information Act to uncover the close and creepy relationship between folksy far-right broadcaster Paul Harvey and longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The documents Stephens uncovered show Harvey as just the kind of journalist that Hoover liked: sycophantic (“If the Republic has […]
