FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
What better time to vilify the popular former leader of a country under deadly US siege than a deadly pandemic? Such was clearly the reasoning of Guardian journalist Rory Carroll when he penned an op-ed headlined, “Blunder, Distraction, Denial: Trump Follows Chávez’s Successful Template” (4/19/20). Seemingly immune to irony, Carroll compares Venezuela’s late socialist […]
What is considered acceptable or “strange” meat is often the result of arbitrary cultural norms, and Chinese food is being stigmatized by racist and propagandistic news coverage following the Covid-19 outbreak.
Election Focus 2020: Gutting the Postal Service now has the potential to undermine the integrity of the November election. Yet establishment media seem remarkably uninterested in connecting the dots.
As the number of official deaths in Britain now exceeds those who died during the Blitz in World War II, British media have no alternative but to throw Johnson under the bus.
CNN should note that accepting a 60–70% infection rate means accepting a million deaths or more, assuming a fatality rate of 0.5%—which may be a conservative estimate.
For a perfect illustration of how corporate media function as ruling class propaganda, watch how they spin a titanic upward redistribution of wealth as a “rescue plan” for the US economy, and paint a robber baron like US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as a “savior” of the American public.
Though many public officials and media outlets seem increasingly convinced that we are fighting a war against Covid-19, framing the pandemic in military terms obscures what we need to know and how we can cope with this virus.
What the New York Times describes as being “as successful in controlling the virus as most other nations” really means having the tenth-worst per capita death toll from the coronavirus in the world.
The North Korea Law of Journalism is a phenomenon in which editorial standards among US corporate media “are inversely proportional to a country’s enemy status.”
More testing is good, but media shouldn’t let states use it as an excuse for out-of-control viral transmission—or as cover for a premature reopening of the economy.
If you’re looking for corporate media to celebrate the good news of the drop in demand for oil, you will be disappointed. Heck, you won’t even find an acknowledgement of the tradeoffs of oil demand and planetary health in last week’s breathless coverage of the unprecedented market collapse.
Unfortunately, for journalists stuck in a corporate media system that promotes deference to authority and finds equivalency even when there is none, the president’s dangerous ramblings need to be treated as legitimate and worthy of discussion, even in apparently adversarial media.
Editorial boards and journalists should frame economic and public health problems in more structural and systemic terms going forward as they consider the scope of the pandemic.
Despite the Washington Post’s unique ability to bring about area-wide change, the paper has mostly kept quiet about the DC region’s dangerous construction sites, thereby inviting human tragedy.
Election Focus 2020:Looking at corporate media’s coverage of corporate media, one gets the sense that anyone who dares to suggest that media corporations like Comcast-owned MSNBC, AT&T-owned CNN or News Corp–owned Fox News have their own commercial interests—which incentivize them to push pro-corporate politics—are kooky “conspiracy theorists.”
Election Focus 2020: Rather than respond by focusing blame for the crisis squarely where it belongs—on Trump’s incompetent, reckless and self-centered management—and working to beat back the dangerously rising anti-Asian sentiment in this country, Biden and some of his supporting super PACs are choosing to adopt rather than challenge the anti-China premise of the attacks.
Speculations, rumors and outright lies have a way of starting in partisan media and bubbling up to a level where they affect our political discourse and public health.
Criticism of Trump, no matter how smart or funny, is no substitute for the radical undoing of the systems that made his presidency possible, the levers he was and is able to pull.
A New York Times piece on the Venezuelan healthcare system would be outstanding reporting, had it not fumbled the most important aspect of the story: how and why the system is as bad as it is.
The Trump administration unveiled on March 31 a “democratic transition” plan to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from office. Washington’s stenographers in the corporate press were quick to present the initiative as “sanctions relief.”
