FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
For those who have had enough election coverage, here’s the alternate story of the day: “Sex on TV Increases Teen Pregnancy, Says Report” (Time, 11/3/08). “Teen Pregnancies Tied to Viewing Sexy TV Shows” (AP, 11/3/08). “Study First to Link TV Sex To Real Teen Pregnancies” (Washington Post, 11/3/08). Stories like these are catnip for the […]
The Associated Press (10/29/08) does its usual sad job trying to fact-check candidate statements—this time working a hefty dose of neo-Hooverism into the mix. AP‘s Calvin Woodward charges that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial Wednesday night about the costs of his programs and the crushing budget pressures […]
Local CBS reporter Cynthia Fodor’s revelation that she “had to submit which topics we wanted to discuss ahead of time” to get an interview with Sarah Palin has Think Progress‘s Ben Armbruster (10/27/08) putting the censorious nature of Palin’s handlers into perspective: Fodor’s revelations come at a particular disturbing time. Just last week, press freedom […]
Looking past the election, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham explains in this week’s issue that the incoming administration could use some advice: Even stipulating that giving advice is easy and taking action is hard, though, it is pretty clear that what we are calling the “Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue” (the economy, the wars, the lack of […]
The story of the McCain worker who faked an assault and blamed it on an imaginary Obama supporter sheds a queasy light on the thinking at the top of the right’s most important media outlet. John Moody, the executive vice president responsible for the editorial direction of Fox News Channel, had this to say (on […]
Perhaps CNN and Headline News will take the lesson that at the very bottom of the barrel, there isn’t much worth eating.
Bill Scher of the Campaign for America’s Future has some strong media criticism on AlterNet (10/23/08), focusing on an L.A. Times piece by Stephen Braun (10/23/08) that claims, as the headline says, “Obama and McCain in Denial About Deficits, Economists Say.” “The article repeatedly assumes budget deficits as unequivocally bad,” Scher notes, even though “many […]
Editor & Publisher (10/22/08) notes that Barack Obama is getting a wide lead in newspaper endorsements, winning 125 so far, by the newspaper trade journal’s count, to McCain’s 46. E&P further notes that this is, from a historical perspective, unusual. John Kerry edged out Republican George W. Bush in 2004, 213-205, Bill Clinton got 149 […]
In Michael Powell’s piece in the New York Times (10/22/08) on Barack Obama “changing his tempo,” I found this passage to be a little creepy: Mr. [Jim] Webb, a red-haired, proudly Scots-Irish pol with a John Wayne cadence, introduced Mr. Obama in Roanoke and began: He’s one of you. Mr. Webb offered a complicated formula […]
You don’t compare the size of political rallies to rock concerts, but to other political rallies, and compared to other political rallies, Obama’s are quite large. But *does* Fall Out Boy really get crowds as big as Obama’s?
ABC‘s John Stossel is known for his far-fetched logic, but in his special last night he may have outdone himself. In John Stossel’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics (10/17/08), he shouted instructions to ice skaters through a bullhorn to demonstrate—well, it’s not clear what. Here’s how he previewed his experiment in an email to his […]
You don’t generally expect to see a member of a terrorist movement portrayed sympathetically in the pages of a major U.S. newspaper, but that’s what the Washington Post gave us this week (10/15/08) in a report from the West Bank by Linda Gradstein: Avi Ben Yakov is a soft-spoken Jewish settler who loves playing with […]
The Washington Post‘s editorial endorsement of Barack Obama (10/17/08) is not a total shock, and neither are the paper’s caveats about supporting Obama. In fact, what the piece offers is a helpful reminder of the establishment media’s center-right politics: Obama’s apparent desire to achieve universal healthcare is deemed acceptable, “though we question whether his plan […]
Even a group of respondents generous enough to give “CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer a thumbs-up for his moderation of the third and final presidential debate” tells Free Press/Tyndall pollsters (10/16/08) they “felt the moderator could have done more to challenge the candidates’ spin”: Despite their general praise of Schieffer, the debate raters agreed that […]
Washington Post fact-checker Michael Dobbs weighs in (10/16/08) on last night’s debate—the headline more or less gives it away (“Both Campaigns Distorting Facts on Money Matters”). His first fact-check, though, hardly clears the air. Some of the sharpest back-and-forth over economic issues concerned the taxes that an Ohio plumber named Joe Wurzelbacher stands to pay […]
A piece in the Politico (10/16/08) wonders whether media fact-checking is actually useful. While of course bad fact-checking—of which there are examples aplenty—is a problem, Politico gets a McCain aide to complain about the whole enterprise: “In 2004, Factcheck.org was considered [the] authority,” said a senior McCain aide, who was provided by the campaign to […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald sees (10/12/08, ad-viewing required) “Bill Kristol in a Nutshell” when observing the New York Times columnist’s statements over the past week. First Greenwald points to an October 5 column in which Kristol “agreed [with Sarah Palin] that the McCain/Palin campaign must attack Obama harder on his ‘associations,’ particularly with Bill Ayers.” Then […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen was one of John McCain’s strongest media defenders—and that’s saying a lot—up until about the time of the Sarah Palin pick, which seemed to convince Cohen that it wasn’t true that there was only so far McCain would go before “his pride or his sense of honor takes over.” Since […]
Here’s George Packer in the New Yorker (10/13/08) seeming to debunk Tom Frank: Until the mid-’70s, the white working class—the heart of the New Deal coalition—voted largely Democratic. Since the Carter years, the percentages have declined from 60 to 40, and this shift has roughly coincided with the long hold of the Republican Party on […]
On October 3, NBC Nightly News presented a “fact check” of the Palin/Biden debate, courtesy of reporter Andrea Mitchell. The report adhered to the unfortunate (and much discussed here at fair.org) tendency of media “false balance.” Here’s Mitchell’s first catch: MITCHELL: Both candidates exaggerated, Palin on a natural gas pipeline in Alaska. PALIN: We’re building […]
