FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Looking back on the good old days when we all supported torture, Richard Cohen writes today in the Washington Post (1/27/09): “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be […]
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman helpfully debunks (1/26/09) some of the more tendentious and misleading criticisms of the White House’s economic stimulus package. Here’s one such trope: First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of […]
Critic Mark Howard catches (News Corpse, 1/13/09) new Fox hire Glenn Beck spouting more of his “fabulist” views: “On his radio program, Beck spun a tale of McCarthyistic intrigue that slammed President-elect Barack Obama, his designated climate change adviser Carol Browner and environmentalism in general.” Beck’s evidence?: “Browner’s association with the Global Warming initiatives of […]
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer continues to support Israel’s assault on Gaza in today’s paper (1/9/09). He displays a remarkably odd notion of what a cease fire is for, citing the lessons of Lebanon as a cautionary tale: The U.N.-mandated disarmament of Hezbollah in Lebanon is a well-known farce. Not only have foreign forces not […]
The Associated Press reported on December 27 that “thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons.” In his latest column (1/2/09), Charles Krauthammer pointed to that report to prove just how obvious it is that Israel is the moral actor in […]
The New York Times‘ Charles Blow writes on the op-ed page (“Heaven for the Godless?,” 12/27/08): “The Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life: No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.’” He then expresses […]
David Ansen (Newsweek, 12/22/08) has a point when he says that the movie Borat “epitomized the [Bush] era.” But he strikes a jarring note when he says: Racism, misogyny and homophobia come pouring out of the mouths of [Sasha] Baron Cohen’s unsuspecting dupes, and in a time of political correctness, when the slightest suggestion of […]
With Bob Kerrey back in the news (New York Times, 12/11/08) as the faculty of the New School University that he heads gives him a vote of no confidence, it’s worth recalling the kid-glove treatment given to him by most of the media when his involvement in Vietnam-era war crimes was revealed (Extra!, 7–8/01). Oddly, […]
At a screening of the film Frost/Nixon, Fox News Channel‘s Chris Wallace defends George W. Bush against the assertion—which doesn’t seem to have been made by anyone present—that Bush’s crimes were worse than Richard Nixon’s (Salon, 12/2/08): It trivializes Nixon’s crimes and completely misrepresents what George W. Bush did. Whatever George W. Bush did was […]
A recent New York Times article (11/29/08) offers fresh documentation of conflicts of interest involving one of TV’s most famous retired generals, Barry McCaffrey, who continues to be employed as an NBC military analyst even as he rakes in profits from military contractors. The story of how McCaffrey and at least 74 other retired generals […]
Noam Chomsky points out that a Boston Globe analysis (11/9/08) of the Obama victory claims that the president-elect owes nothing to “traditional Democratic constituencies” like labor, women, ethnic minorities and the peace movement, because a “grassroots army of millions”—seemingly unconnected to such constituencies—”propelled” Obama’s win. It’s worth noting, however, that this idea of a Democratic […]
The announcement that Alan Colmes is leaving Fox News Channel‘s Hannity & Colmes show, where he serves as co-host to Sean Hannity, raises the pressing question: Will anyone notice? Fox News executives have long represented the show as an evenhanded nightly debate. Yet a reviewer in Britain’s Sunday Business Post (8/24/03) perhaps summarized the peculiarity […]
Glenn Beck has been telling a personal story illustrating what he says is a particularly intense level of hatred on the left. According to the newly signed Fox News host, he was verbally assaulted by a truck driver while standing in line at a Wendy’s restaurant at a truck stop. Writing on his blog, Beck […]
After giving a dubious account of the causes of the Democrats’ 1994 electoral disaster, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson (11/14/08) provides an inaccurate description of the Fairness Doctrine, which he calls a federal regulation (overturned by the Reagan administration in 1987) requiring broadcast outlets to give equal time to opposing political viewpoints. Under this doctrine, […]
Washington Post ombud Deborah Howell (11/9/08) charged her paper with “a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama.” But her evidence for this pro-Obama bias was remarkably weak. She presented some counts of stories and pictures, like “the number of Obama stories since November 11 [2007] was 946, compared with [John] McCain’s 786.” But she noted that […]
The “media bias” against Sarah Palin is a key ingredient of the conservative victimology of 2008, even though when you see negative reports about Palin these days, they’re generally sourced to her erstwhile Republican colleagues—and corporate media sometimes go to absurd lengths to give the attacks a semi-positive spin, as in this Alessandra Stanley piece […]
Editor & Publisher‘s Greg Mitchell (11/8/08) notes conservative columnist Kathleen Parker’s “misty-eyed” writing (11/7/08) about the Obama victory: “The little speck of difference that kept us imperceptibly apart had been dissolved in a lovely instant of national consensus that race no longer matters.” But he notes that not so long ago, that “little speck of […]
There’s been a fair amount of speculation about what Fox News Channel will do in the new political climate.The online teaser for tonight’s edition of the O’Reilly Factor gives us some sense of the, uhh, future: Monday, November 10: The Factor confronts Rev. Jeremiah Wright! You won’t want to miss it!
You see some absurd standards being set for how far President-elect Barack Obama should tip his cabinet to the right. Al Kamen in the Washington Post (11/7/07) writes that if “he’s serious about this bipartisan thing…then he’s going to have to do better than his predecessors, probably putting at least three non-D’s in the cabinet […]
The point of Michael Shear’s post-mortem in today’s Washington Post (“Right Turn in July Put McCain on Unfamiliar Path“) is that John McCain ditched his “maverick” shtick only this summer: Starting in July, McCain largely abandoned the well-known brand he had built over a decade: a moderate, steady, experienced maverick whose great political skill was […]
