FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
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 […]
The Washington Post‘s editorial (7/7/09) on the death of Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara managed to outdo even the New York Times‘ victim-erasing obituary. The Times cited the number of invading troops killed by McNamara’s war of aggression while ignoring the vastly larger number of Indochinese deaths—but for the Post, neither the aggressors nor their […]
Reading Caitlin Flanagan’s Time magazine cover story (7/2/09) on the “increasingly fragile construct” of marriage—which claims that “the divorce culture became a fact of life” over “the past 2½ decades”—one would never guess that U.S. divorce rates have actually dropped by almost a third since 1992, from 4.8 per thousand people to 3.5.
In the sixth paragraph of his front-page obituary of Vietnam War–era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (7/7/09), the New York Times‘ Tim Weiner tries—and fails—to give some idea of the human cost of McNamara’s war: Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the […]
Posting on Canada’s Centre for Research on Globalization website (6/29/09), economic historian Michael Hudson notices that “Happy-face media reporting of economic news is providing the usual upbeat spin on Friday’s debt-deflation statistics. The Commerce Departmentâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) for May show that U.S. ‘savings’ are now absorbing 6.9 percent of income”: I […]
Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research had one of the most informative pieces I’ve seen on the Iranian election, published on WashingtonPost.com (6/26/09). Weisbrot examines the actual Iranian vote-counting procedures, and concludes that in Iran, “large-scale fraud is extremely difficult, if not impossible, without creating an extensive trail of evidence.” Since […]
I wrote a short item on Dan Froomkin’s firing for FAIR’s radio show CounterSpin today: One of the bright spots at the Washington Post media enterprise was Dan Froomkin’s column, “White House Watch,” for WashingtonPost.com. It often struck us that Froomkin had a whole different attitude—skeptical of those in power, and critical of their journalistic […]
Amanda Terkel of Think Progress (6/18/09) has posted video and transcript of an MSNBC segment in which Joe Scarborough asked CNBC‘s Jim Cramer about “a stunning poll the New York Times has this morning suggesting that Americans are more concerned about deficits than stimulus”: Cramer claimed that Americans aren’t buying into healthcare reform right now […]
In an affidavit supporting a lawsuit against a new novel related to J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (New York Times, 6/17/09), Salinger’s literary agent makes a statement that encapsulates a common misunderstanding of what copyright is for. Referring to Salinger, the agent said, “He feels strongly that he wants his fiction and his characters […]
Washington Post columnist David Broder has made a career out of advocating a certain type of corporate centrism–earning him the honorary (?) title of the Dean of the D.C. Press Corps. The formula is pretty simple: Argue that Democratic politicians should move to the right. So with healthcare reform a major issue, Broder’s formula is […]
The website Gawker (6/9/09) caught Newsweek making some sneaky changes in an online article—changes that were ordered by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, and which just happened to favor the host of a show that Meacham appears on regularly. On the afternoon of Friday, June 5, Newsweek‘s website put up an interview with Joe Scarborough, the […]
Progressive critic Dr. Roberto Rodriguez has a new commentary (New America Media, 6/2/09) demonstrating how the miserable press reaction to Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s U.S. Supreme Court “nomination clearly shows us is that what this nation needs is more incisive journalism, not less.” But, Rodriguez laments, “to be sure, the rise of right-wing media, which include […]
Claiming that he doesn’t “know at this point whether Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a good choice for Supreme Court justice or a bad one,” critic Dave Lindorff (ThisCantBeHappening.net, 5/28/09) does note that she “is a lousy judge for writers and other creative people” for ruling “that the [New York] Times and periodical publishers could reprint, […]
Politico‘s Mike Allen writes (5/27/09): The media’s left-of-center bias is rarely more apparent than during court fights. The coverage running up to the pick was slanted heavily toward the notion of how “pragmatic” Obama’s legal views are and how unlikely he was to pick a liberal. So coverage of Supreme Court fights is one […]
The New York Times had a story yesterday (5/21/09) about the test of an Iranian missile “that was capable of striking Israel and parts of Western Europe.” This was an important point in the article—reporters David E. Sanger and Nazila Fathi included it in their lead paragraph, and later listed it among “three technologies necessary […]
Jonathan Hiskes of Grist—who recently exposed “The NYT‘s Favorite ‘Climate Change Denier’”—has now (5/13/09) caught Fox News giving airtime to Marc Morano’s charge of Al Gore “profiting off global warming campaign” : Say you’re a harried cable news producer with 24 gaping hours to fill with finished material every day of the week. Say you’re […]
When influential institutions treat those responsible for torture as worthy experts, society risks losing things even more valuable than “thoughtful conversation.”
Responding to a “stupid” critique of his May 1 column defending the use of terror in “ticking timebomb” scenarios, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (5/15/09) asserts that there has too been a real-life example of such a situation: On October 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the […]
The Washington Post editorial (5/14/09) on the Social Security and Medicare trustees’ report didn’t break much new ground, other than perhaps a uptick in the sarcasm quotient. (“Oh, please,” is their retort to critics who point out the paper’s demonstrable hostility to the Social Security program.) But this line jumped out at me as noteworthy: […]
Yesterday the Social Security and Medicare trustees’ reports were released. This annual ritual often gives reporters a chance to exaggerate the long-term problems of the Social Security system. This year, the news was more or less what folks were expecting: By the trustees’ forecasting, Social Security’s trust fund will be depleted in 2037, while Medicare’s […]
