Dear FAIRites,
We’ve had a lot of recent success at getting the corporate media to respond to criticism, in great part due to your letters and emails. The fact that this correspondence is individually generated by you makes it all the more effective.
• USA Today has run two corrections recently based on FAIR’s activism—one about the homicide rate in Chicago and another about the growth rate of US manufacturing.
• The New York Times, after a series of back-and-forth tweets with our editor Jim Naureckas, rewrote an article on the impact of climate change on extreme weather to clarify the fact that all weather is influenced by climate change.
• Responding to a FAIR email campaign, NPR‘s ombud acknowledged that a report that covered Fast Track’s victory by interviewing only corporate lobbyists “would have been stronger and more complete if it had included a voice representing the opponents.”
Our ability to call big media to account is bolstered not only by your letters and emails, but by the community of individual financial supporters who make our work possible.
For those of you who were able to help us with our Spring Matching Grant—THANK YOU for accomplishing this win for media activism. We don’t often receive matching grants, and your financial contribution allowed us to multiply the funder’s support.
The summer slump in financial support is hard on small nonprofits. Any contribution you can make now will help us push through to the fall. Each and every donation is appreciated, so please give today.
Your support keeps FAIR open for business each and every day. And that helps your voices be heard in corporate media.
Back to work!
Deborah, Jim & Janine
P.S. The new, improved FAIR Store is up and running.
Buy a FAIR T-shirt and a book, and hang up that hammock!
It is clear that FAIR’s survival depends on our support. What may not be so clear is the extent to which a media sell-out has occurred since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of 2010. Super-PACs now control the Congress, and thanks to the compliant media, the electorate remains largely oblivious to what it has lost.
The only decent major newspaper we have left, The New York Times, now routinely deletes blog comments that criticize it. Reader recommendations of negative comments on Times columnist David Brooks now run to the high hundreds, yet the top “NYT Picks” on Brooks are scarcely recommended at all. For example, the first reader’s pick of blog comments on Brooks’s July 24 column disagreed with him and has been recommended by 966 readers so far, while the first among NYT picks agreed with the column and has been recommended by two readers.
For years The New York Times has ignored the reality of man-made global warming, which now threatens extinction of human life on earth. Current Times articles and opinion pieces vaguely support gun “controls,” without noting that most gun murders are committed with registered guns or suggesting that state-of-the-art military firearms designed expressly to kill human beings en masse should not be in the hands of civilians. We now travel routinely in lines of cars several miles long, and the Times scarcely mentions the mass transportation crisis in suburban areas.
Things are getting worse, not better, and FAIR is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity.