FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
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 […]
There’s a trope that you often see in corporate media discussions of the stimulus plan: Yeah, but do you really want to spend money on that? It may have started with the misrepresented contraceptive plan—which seemed to be grounded in a traditional media fascination/embarrassment at anything involving sex—but now it’s moved on to anything that…well, […]
Following up on the well-documented phenomenon wherein corporate news outlets justify their mode of getting “conservatives to dominate their shows, booking them as guests far more often than progressives” by using “the rationale… that Republicans were ‘in power,’” ThinkProgress (1/28/09) now shows that “it appears that old habits die hard.” Even with a Democratic president […]
Washington Post and CNN media critic Howard Kurtz has been sounding the alarm over pro-Obama bias in the media. On his Reliable Sources program on Sunday, he put this question about coverage of Obama’s transition to one guest: Isn’t there a bit of a free ride to Obama right now, since he gets to seize […]
Today’s column by Robert Samuelson (Washington Post, 12/1/08) is a classic of the “why the president-elect must break progressive campaign promises” genre. Usually, of course, the new president should keep such promises: Obama won the election, and in normal times, his campaign agenda ought to be front and center. But these are not normal times, […]
Anyone who followed the results of Venezuela’s regional elections last Sunday will know that President Hugo Chavez’s party won 17 out of 22 contests up for grabs, garnering 52.5 percent of the popular vote to the opposition’s 41.1 percent. Unless, that is, they were relying on New York Times Latin America correspondent Simon Romero. Despite […]
New York Times TV reporter Jim Rutenberg (11/2/08) tries to make a case that Fox News and MSNBC are (in Tom Rosenstiel’s words) “reverse images of each other.” Here are the actual quotes used by Rutenberg to demonstrate this supposed parallelism—first, Ann Coulter on Fox (10/30/08): I feel like we are talking to the Germans […]
The dean of D.C. press corps’ column yesterday was headlined “What We’ve Learned About McCain,” but it’s not clear “we” were watching the same campaign. After paying tribute to McCain’s heroism, his “backbone,” his “patriotic impulses,” and on and on, Broder got down to supposed lessons– McCain didn’t manage his relationship with a wounded GOP, […]
As the editor of a magazine of media criticism, I make it a rule never to edit the words of someone we’re criticizing in such a way that our readers would understand the quote differently if they saw the original context. We don’t want people looking up what we’re criticizing and saying, “Oh—so that’s what […]
Howard Kurtz once had a well-deserved reputation for going the extra distance to check what he printed. What happened to that reporter?
“America remains a center-right nation—a fact that a President Obama would forget at his peril,” Newsweek declares above a piece by Jon Meacham for the October 27 issue of the magazine. As Rick Perlstein observes in a dissenting passage in the article, it’s a difficult case to make from opinion polling; on contentious issues like […]
