FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
A Los Angeles Times editorial (2/7/12) begins: When the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism released a report Sunday claiming that U.S. drone strikes have killed dozens of civilian rescuers and mourners in Pakistan, the American media scarcely noticed. It’s a good point.The Bureau‘s report got remarkably little media attention. A New York Times story (which […]
On the one hand, NBC‘s Meet the Press gives us Republican Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (2/5/12): DAVID GREGORY: Governor Daniels, one of the things you hear from the campaign trail, Mitt Romney said it just the other day, is that the recovery should have been so much stronger. You know, it’s very difficult to prove […]
The conventional understanding you get from the media is that Israel is worried that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a serious threat to the country’s existence. Is that really what’s happening, though? Another interpretation is that Iran might want nuclear weapons not to launch any such an attack but to prevent an attack on its […]
New York Times columnist David Brooks, who’s been called the “bard of the 1 percent” for his writings in defense of the economic elite, is at it again–telling people not to worry about the concentration of wealth at the very top of the income scale. Brooks writes in his January 31 column that the claim […]
From Amanda Terkel in the Huffington Post (2/1/12): Newt Gingrich Florida Primary Results 2012: The Candidate Who Refuses to Operate Within Reality …From the beginning to the end of Gingrich’s election night party, the campaign and its supporters seemed to be operating outside of realities, denying the importance of this large state’s primary contest and […]
“Ron Paul Ignored by the Media? Not So Much” was the headline on a National Journal post yesterday (12/21/11). “The Texan’s campaign has raised millions of dollars to combat the alleged media conspiracy that, they claim, is out to destroy the candidate the media fears most,” the Journal‘s Sarah Mimms reported. “There is just one […]
Conservative David Frum writes in the new issue of New York: Back in 2009, I wrote a piece for Newsweek arguing that Republicans would regret conceding so much power to Rush Limbaugh. Until that point, I’d been a frequent guest on Fox News, but thenceforward some kind of fatwa was laid down upon me. Over […]
New York Times media reporter David Carr has written some interest pieces on Occupy Wall Street. His piece today tries to work out where things go from here, but one comment in the piece about how Occupy Wall Street compares with protests of the past caught my attention: There were citizens screaming invective about the […]
Sam Husseini’s encounter with Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud makes me wonder once again–why do we call a person like Al Saud a “prince”? Al Saud was the longtime chief of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, and later served as ambassador to the United States and Britain. His grandfather, Abdul Aziz Al Saud, declared himself […]
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry’s new TV commercial is based on a lie. Will reporters say so? The ad starts with a Barack Obama quote: ”We’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades.” To which Perry responds: ”Can you believe that? That’s what our president thinks is wrong with […]
When former FAIR staffer Sam Husseini found out that Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Sa’ud would be speaking at the National Press Club, he thought it might be a good chance to ask a tough question. The National Press Club apparently didn’t like that idea. Husseini writes: Before the end of the day, I’d received a […]
Today the New York Times (1/18/11) reports a big scoop. A “Tea Party commission” convened by Freedom Works is set to announce its crowd-sourced $6 trillion debt reduction plan—”A copy of the preliminary findings was provided to the New York Times,” Kate Zernike reports. The story’s second paragraph critiques the plan from the right for […]
CNN anchors Carol Costello and Ali Velshi today (9/26/11) provided some rare TV coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Lower Manhattan: VELSHI: A group of people protesting Wall Street greed are now screaming abuse after they were arrested over the weekend. The incident happened Saturday in Lower Manhattan. The protesters say they […]
Frontrunner-of-the-moment Rick Perry is getting a lot of press for his performance at the recent Republican debate—especially because he’s standing by his belief that Social Security is a “monstrous lie” and a Ponzi scheme, and that climate change is an untested theory advanced by corrupt, discredited scientists. You can call such ideas a lot of […]
As progressive criticism of the Obama administration has intensified, the critics of the critics have stepped forward to defend the White House. Much of the case comes down to saying that Obama’s lefty critics don’t know how the game is played in Washington. Jonathan Chait from the New Republic had a New York Times Magazine […]
Fareed Zakaria cheers the Libya War in Time magazine this week for not following the Iraq model: It has been prosecuted with the memory of the Iraq war firmly in mind. Only this time the approach has been to view the last war as a negative example. The international coalition—and even the Libyan opposition—is doing […]
It’s an article of faith in mainstream media discussions of the budget: Social Security and Medicare are the “entitlements” driving our debt problems. That’s not really true, but that’s overwhelmingly the starting point for these discussions. Occasionally, perhaps by accident, someone questions that assumption. That’s what happened on NPR‘s Morning Edition on Monday (8/8/11), when […]
If the White House encouraged Americans to prevent colds by wearing sweaters, one would hope that media outlets would point out that there’s no evidence that being chilly has anything to do with catching a cold. Likewise, if the Interior Department green-lights a plan to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean in order to […]
There’s an interesting piece by Alexander Bolton in the Hill (8/3/11) that suggests Senate Democrats are frustrated by the Beltway media’s tendency to cover political standoffs between the parties as situations where everyone’s to blame. Bolton writes: This frustration boiled over during a Wednesday press conference on the partial shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration […]
New York Times reporter Dan Barry has an “outsider visiting the Capitol” piece (8/3/11) about the strange things one encounters in the legislative sausage factory. In some rooms you are required to wear a necktie; others have no such rules. The place is confusing in other ways, too: “To reach the third level from the […]
