FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
It’s possible that the response to the coronavirus’ pronounced lethality and asymptomatic infectiousness—a drastic physical separation necessary to prevent a quickly mounting death toll—means that Covid-19 will not be a normal disease with a steep arrival curve and an equally sudden departure.
Cuba’s coronavirus performance is a welcome bit of uplifting news in an otherwise mostly dismal international panorama. Lest anyone start feeling too inspired by the idea of humanity, however, sectors of the US corporate media are dutifully standing by to burst the bubble.
Election Focus 2020: The journalistic principle is clear: If the powerful are spreading life-threatening lies, do not freely give them a huge platform to reach more people with those lies.
Does Jair Bolsonaro’s initial reaction to and handling of the coronavirus crisis really differ in any significant measure from what US and UK leaders, and their media sycophants, have been saying and doing?
Media can be most helpful right now by investigating and reporting how the virus is continuing to spread.
Election Focus 2020: In the New York Times’ world, it’s apparently OK to bemoan a society and an economy that privileges the rich over the poor, but it’s unacceptable to run for the presidency on a promise to reverse those priorities.
With the official Covid-19 death toll in the United States now exceeding 14,000, the federal government has found it opportune to reignite the “Fake News” scare, censuring two familiar foes: Russia and China.
Because the US government is directly responsible for Iranian deaths, Washington’s role should be a central concern to US media. Yet that’s not the case, according to an examination of stories.
Ardern’s Easter Bunny comments got the kind of widespread coverage that has largely been absent for an important piece of the pandemic puzzle: What can nations that are at the center of the second wave of the coronavirus outbreak, like the US and much of Europe, learn from those that were in the first wave, particularly China, South Korea and Hong Kong?
Election Focus 2020: With only about half the states having cast their votes in the Democratic primaries, the Covid-19 pandemic has frozen the majority of campaign activity, but the New York Times has already chosen its winner.
Election Focus 2020: Seeing its chance to thwart Sanders’ second bid for the presidency, the Washington Post risked voters’ health by staying silent about the dangers of in-person voting, even encouraging it.
Election Focus 2020: Reporters may think this is tactful, grown-up language, when it’s actually misleading, milquetoast language that does the opposite of what journalism is meant to do
Corporate media coverage of the global race for a coronavirus vaccine marginalizes the most effective and safe route to discovering one quickly: eschewing corporate profitability and intellectual property rights in favor of international cooperation through open and shared, publicly funded research.
The reality is that it’s very hard to hide an epidemic. Stopping a virus requires identifying and isolating cases of infection, and if you pretend to have done so when you really haven’t, the uncaught cases will grow exponentially.
Given the blasé response to the market’s inability to deliver life-saving equipment to those who need it, because it’s not “sufficiently profitable,” it is perhaps not surprising that the view that profits are more important than lives has been treated as a reasonable opinion by corporate media.
Right-wing US media—led by Fox News, Donald Trump’s main press cheerleader—joined the Trump administration in minimizing the dangers of a global pandemic.
Choosing to keep cameras trained on the president necessarily means devoting less time to other stories that might actually inform viewers about the course of the pandemic and how to fight it—whether it’s talking to infectious disease experts on what measures are necessary to limit the death toll, or reporting on other nations’ successes and failures.
Election Focus 2020: Particularly in times of crisis, when executive power tends to expand dramatically, media should be holding the powerful to account, not settling for “better than Trump.” And there is plenty to hold Andrew Cuomo to account for.
Please tell the Associated Press to include a serious warning about the dangers of Covid-19, based on CDC guidelines, in its standard description of the coronavirus.
Election Focus 2020: After the CDC on March 15 advised the public to cancel all gatherings of more than 50 people, a senior adviser to Joe Biden went on CNN and claimed the CDC had deemed in-person voting safe. And not a single major media outlet reported on it.
