FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
There was something depressing about a recent discussion on the PBS NewsHour Monday night (9/13/10) about the debate over what to do with the Bush-era tax cuts. The politics of the tax debate is well-known; most Democrats want to extend them for all but the top brackets, while the Republicans want to renew the cuts […]
PBS‘s Nova is taking money from one of the biggest bankrollers of climate change denial—and, surprise surprise, the resulting programming tells viewers not to worry about climate change. But PBS‘s ombud doesn’t see this as a conflict of interest—because Nova is a “consistently first-rate program,” and he trusts it. Nova‘s conflict of interest was highlighted […]
Boston TV newscaster Barry Nolan was outraged to learn back in 2008 that Fox host Bill O’Reilly was getting an award from the local chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. So Nolan made flyers documenting various O’Reilly outrages and distributed them at the local Emmys ceremony—and did not do so in […]
When ABC announced that CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour would take over as host of their Sunday chat show This Week, there were rumblings about how different things would be. Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote a nasty hit piece on Amanpour in which he worried thattheshow focuses on “inside-the-Beltway palaver, an area where Amanpour […]
Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker (umm, PULITZER Prize–winning columnist) got a lot of feedback about her recent column (“Obama: Our First Female President,” 6/30/10) suggesting that Barack Obama is kind of girly. She carefully pointed out that she was “not calling Obama a girlie president. But . . . he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit […]
Under the headline “President Bush Is No Nazi Torturer,” Washington Post editorial writer Eva Rodriguez uses a blog post (6/9/10) to “take exception” to another Post blog item (6/9/10) written by Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. The point of contention: vanden Heuvel, responding to a report that the U.S. government has been conducting research on […]
One of the most prevalent (and wrong-headed) interpretations of the recent elections is that both parties are dumping their respectable members in exchange for wild-eyed radicals. As Cokie Roberts explained it on ABC‘s This Week (5/23/10): COKIE ROBERTS: I’m not sure, Donna, that the voters this year care about somebody being out of the mainstream. […]
The fact that Paul Krugman writes columns for the New York Times means that the paper’s readers are occasionally treated to a good media criticism—like today (2/5/10). He writes: These days it’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a news program without encountering stern warnings about the federal budget deficit. The deficit […]
Once again, the New York Times is setting up a false debate over healthcare policy, contrasting White House–style “pragmatism” with left-wing “ideology.” The lead of Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s piece today (12/18/09): In the great healthcare debate of 2009, President Obama has cast himself as a cold-eyed pragmatist, willing to compromise in exchange for votes. Now […]
In this world, it’s the public that’s skeptical of an endless pursuit of victory, with a majority of respondents in recent polling saying they oppose the war.
Dick Morris was on the O’Reilly Factor the other night (10/28/09) advocating a troop escalation in Afghanistan—and his argument was characteristically peculiar: Listen, terrorist gangs like Al-Qaeda are like HIV virus. They swim in your bloodstream. They don’t make you sick. When they latch on to a cell, a nation state, and they use the […]
By now it’s old news to any reasonably critical observer that corporate outlets’ “business reporters failed to see the crisis in the mortgage and credit markets as it brewed and bubbled,” as former City Limits editor Alyssa Katz puts it (CJR.org, 9/14/09), but Katz also gives props to others who noticed how “evidence of its […]
Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom—best known for his bestseller Tuesdays With Morrie—had a July 25 column that criticized the Obama healthcare reform with an argument that suggested an unfamiliarity with how the U.S. tax system works: In explaining why it was OK to sock a new 5.4 percent tax on the highest earners in […]
Linking to a Felice Pace piece of June 14 that connects the near-absence of single-payer-focused NPR reportage to millions of dollars in underwriting the broadcaster has received from insurance industry heavies, NPR Check‘s Mytwords (6/17/09) includes his own comment left under Weekend Edition Saturday‘s “Health Care Reform From The Insurer’s Perspective” segment: Congratulations NPR—as a […]
Washington Monthly contributing editor Art Levine has a piece for In These Times (5/31/09) reporting on economist Anne Layne-Farrar’s recent congressional appearance in which she warned about the horrendous impact of the Employee Free Choice Act. Its potential to increase union membership from between five and 10 percent, she said, ‘would result in an increase […]
What caused the financial crisis, according to an online educational primer from textbook publisher McGraw-Hill? “Good Intentions,” i.e., the government encouraging banks to make loans to low-income homebuyers. What did not cause the financial crisis, according to McGraw-Hill? Bogus estimates of credit risk issued by ratings agencies like Standard & Poor’s, owned by McGraw-Hill. See […]
It does not take 60 votes to pass an ordinary bill in the Senate; it takes a majority of the senators voting.
The capacity for U.S. editorial writers to twist reality when it comes to “free trade” is astounding. But when “free trade” collides with Colombia policy in the minds of the same editorialists, the potential for illogic becomes truly Orwellian. Take Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times editorial (“Obama Should Press for Colombia Free-Trade Pact”) pushing for passage […]
Media reporter DeWayne Wickham sees (USA Today, 3/3/09) the new Pentagon rules allowing photography of U.S. casualty coffins as “just the silver lining” around the dark cloud of a fact that “our free press is still being stage-managed by those who run the wars.” That the new regulations permit photos only “if the family of […]
You see it all the time: You need 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate. Not exactly. Under Senate rules—which can be changed by a majority vote—you need the consent of 3/5ths of the Senate to close debate on an issue; that’s 60 votes. To pass a bill, you need a majority of […]
