FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes today of Iran’s nuclear program: They then turned themselves in to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and, as usual, said the site was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. These Persians lie like a rug. Classy. The fact that this appears in a column chastising […]
CIA employees in recent years have been more likely to be engaged in waterboarding and other forms of torture than to have performed death-defying, world-saving undercover work.
“It is difficult to overstate President Obama’s unpopularity in most of Louisiana,” writes Campbell Robertson in a front-page New York Times article (9/11/09). Yet Robertson managed to pull it off. Robertson continues: “He lost handily to Senator John McCain here, picking up only 14 percent of the white vote. (The state is roughly two-thirds white.)” […]
The Washington Post had another “Topic A” feature on August 31, headlined “Is the War in Afghanistan Worth Fighting?” A crucial debate, to be sure; the Post found one person (Andrew Bacevich) to argue that it is not, which is probably a position close to the majority view of the American public. That position is […]
Eva Paterson (Huffington Post, 8/28/09), president and founder of the Equal Justice Society, has a response to Glenn Beck’s assertion that “I want to point out the silence; no one has challenged these facts” after having been “smearing White House special advisor Van Jones for days on his show.” Being “the person who first hired […]
On news that “today, a federal court threw out the Federal Communications Commission’s rule to cap cable ownership at 30 percent,” Free Press (8/28/09) comments “the rule served as an important consumer protection from media consolidation and growing cable cartels, and encouraged diversity in ownership in the cable industry.” The media advocacy group’s Ben Scott […]
Noticing that Democratic strategist Mark Penn “is the Wall Street Journal‘s ‘Microtrend’-spotting columnist” and “also CEO of PR giant Burson-Marsteller,” Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan (8/26/09) posits that “only a scumbag would abuse the former to drum up business for the latter.” Alas, “Scumbag spotted!” is Nolan’s cry when writing that Penn’s latest (old, and none […]
In his Week in Review piece wondering if Obama’s Afghanistan policy is akin to LBJ and Vietnam, New York Times reporter Peter Baker notes that the public mood is seeping into the media: That growing disenchantment in the countryside is increasingly mirrored in Washington, where liberals in Congress are speaking out more vocally against the […]
Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill (The Nation, Democracy Now!) appeared on HBO‘s Real Time With Bill Maher alongside NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd. Because Jeremy isn’t the type to let such an opportunity to go to waste, he used some of his time to castigate the corporate media for failing to question the White House […]
Think Progress‘ Matt Corley (8/19/09) has the depressing, if predictable, news that recent polling shows “‘all the misinformation out there’ about healthcare reform proposals in Congress is taking root with many Americans.” Corley is discouraged to see that, “for instance, 45 percent believe the false claim that legislation includes ‘death panels‘ while 55 percent believe […]
The escalation of the Afghanistan war is the “Topic A” discussion on the Washington Post op-ed page on Sunday. (It’s a regular feature where they ask a panel of Important People to weigh in on an issue of the day.) The title was “How Many Troops for Afghanistan?”—one can already spot the problem with that—but […]
WashingtonMonthly.com blogger Steve Benen (Political Animal, 8/12/09) has words for corporate pundits lambasting Barack Obama’s “Attention to Detail” as “going “into the weeds”: A few weeks ago, MSNBC‘s First Read had an item questioning whether President Obama “knows too much” about healthcare policy. The piece complained that the president is willing to offer Americans details […]
The dominant story from Hillary Clinton’s trip to Africa was not her comments about combating rape and sexual violence in Congo. No, the top story was Clinton’s testy response to a question about what her husband thought of Chinese business interests in Kenya Congo. That exchange prompted a whole story in today’s New York Times […]
Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Conn Hallinan (8/6/09) has yet another debunking of “the story most U.S. readers are getting about the coup” in Honduras, being “that Zelaya–an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez–was deposed because he tried to change the constitution to keep himself in power.” Calling this dominant media narrative “a massive distortion […]
National Public Radio monitor mytwords (NPR Check, 8/9/09) has observed what he dubs a “Blackwater Blackout” on the publicly funded “alternative” to corporate radio: On Tuesday, August 4 Jeremy Scahill broke the story about two sworn statements implicating Blackwater (now Xe) founder Erik Prince in the murder of employees or former employees who were cooperating […]
Reporting for Associated Press (7/3/09), David Bauder has an update on CNN‘s insistence on “standing behind” Lou Dobbs, who has “become a publicity nightmare for CNN, embarrassed his boss and…on top of all that, his ratings are slipping.” Bauder asks outright: “How does Lou Dobbs keep his job” while plugging the conspiracy theory that Barack […]
In another example of how the racist record of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s top Republican questioner has gone down the memory hole, Associated Press had a whole story (7/19/09) about Sen. Jeff Sessions’ assertions that Sotomayor was too prejudiced to get his vote without mentioning that the Senate Judiciary Committee had rejected Sessions when […]
The UNITY: Journalists of Color organization has a new press release (7/14/09) denouncing July 8 comments by Fox and Friends‘ Brian Kilmeade, in which he “made a crude and bafflingly ignorant attempt to dismiss a study on marriage and Alzheimer’s that was conducted in Sweden and Finland.” Kilmeade’s remarks that “we [Americans] keep marrying other […]
The latest segment to be made available online (7/7/09) from Robert Greenwald’s Rethink Afghanistan documentary features the president of the Global Fund for Women Kavita Ramdas challenging U.S. media tropes about improved women’s conditions since the U.S. invasion: “The perception of the women of Afghanistan having been severely oppressed only under the regime of […]
On June 29, the day he was installed by Honduran coup leaders as the country’s new interim foreign minister, Enrique Ortez Colindres repeatedly used racist slurs to describe U.S. president Barack Obama. Using the word “negrito,” a well-recognized and profoundly racist epithet, whose literal translation means “little black man” or “little black boy,” Ortez referred […]
