FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
By now, millions of TV viewers have seen the video numerous times on television: Two police officers are beating a man on the pavement. It’s big news — because a camera was there. Robert Davis, a 64-year-old retired teacher, suffered injuries during the incident on the night of Oct. 8 in New Orleans. He’s scheduled […]
When the Bush administration fires off a new round of speechifying about “the war on terror,” the U.S. press rarely goes beyond the surface meanings of rhetoric provided by White House scriptwriters. But the president’s big speech at the National Endowment for Democracy on Oct. 6 could have been annotated along these lines: “We will […]
Several decades ago, “controversial” subjects in news media included many issues that are now well beyond controversy. During the first half of the 1960s, fierce arguments raged in print and on the airwaves about questions like: Does a black person (a “Negro,” in the language of the day) have the right to sit at a […]
It’s reasonable to estimate that more than a quarter of a million people demonstrated against the Iraq war on Saturday in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other U.S. cities. The next day, the Washington Post front-paged a decent story that described “the largest show of antiwar sentiment in the nation’s capital since the conflict […]
Dan Rather caused some ripples when he spoke at a law school in New York on Sept. 19 and warned that politicians have been putting effective pressure on the corporate owners of major broadcast outlets. Summarizing his remarks, the Hollywood Reporter said that the former CBS anchor contended “there is a climate of fear running […]
The New York Times began a new week with an editorial that typifies the media mind-set of the warfare state. The Sept. 19 editorial warns of dire consequences from a growing deficit that has been boosted by tax cuts — in combination with “the pre-Katrina priorities laid down by Mr. Bush.” Those priorities include a […]
This month we’ve heard a lot of talk about journalists who got tough with President Bush. And it’s true that he has been on the receiving end of some fiercely negative media coverage in the wake of the hurricane. But the mainstream U.S. press is ill-suited to challenging the legitimacy of the Bush administration. The […]
“The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula,” President George H. W. Bush said of the Gulf War victory in early 1991. He told a gathering of state legislators, “It’s a proud day for America — and, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for […]
Traveling from New York City in late September 2001, on a pre-scheduled book tour, author Joan Didion spoke with audiences in several cities on the West Coast. In the wake of 9/11, she later wrote, “these people to whom I was listening — in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Portland and Seattle — were […]
President Bush has evaded Cindy Sheehan’s question, “What was the noble cause that my son died for?” But he provided a partial answer on the day that the New Orleans levees gave way. The media coverage was scant and fleeting — but we should not allow the nation’s Orwellian memory hole to swallow up a […]
A spectrum of liberal responses to Cindy Sheehan has come into sharper focus. The message is often anti-Bush… but not necessarily anti-war. Frank Rich spun out his particular style of triangulation in the New York Times on Aug. 28. While deriding President Bush’s stay-the-course stance, Rich also felt a need to disparage the most visible […]
For a long time, the last refuge of scoundrels was “patriotism.” Now it’s “the war on terror.” President Bush and many of his vocal supporters aren’t content to wrap themselves in the flag. It’s not sufficient to posture as more patriotic than opponents of the Iraq war. The ultimate demagogic weapon is to exploit the […]
The Bush administration may ratchet up the Iraq war. That might seem unlikely, even farfetched. After all, the president is facing an upsurge of domestic opposition to the war. Under such circumstances, why would he escalate it? A big ongoing factor is that George W. Bush and his top aides seem to believe in red-white-and-blue […]
The day after Wednesday night’s nationwide vigils, the big headline at the top of the MoveOn.org home page said: “Support Cindy Sheehan.” But MoveOn does not support Cindy Sheehan’s call for swift withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Many groups were important to the success of the Aug. 17 vigils, but the online powerhouse MoveOn […]
The surge of antiwar voices in U.S. media this month has coincided with new lows in public approval for what pollsters call President Bush’s “handling” of the Iraq war. After more than two years of a military occupation that was supposed to be a breeze after a cakewalk into Baghdad, the war has become a […]
On Aug. 14, the New York Times published a piece by Frank Rich under the headline “Someone Tell the President the War Is Over.” The article was a flurry of well-placed jabs about the Bush administration’s lies and miscalculations for the Iraq war. But the essay was also a big straw in liberal wind now […]
Mid-August 2005 may be remembered as a moment in U.S. history when the president could no longer get away with the media trick of solemnly patting death on its head. Unreality is a hallmark of media coverage for war. Yet — most of all — war is about death and suffering. War makers thrive on […]
A lot of people want to believe that the current war on Iraq is some kind of aberration — a radical departure from the previous baseline of U.S. foreign policy. That’s a comforting illusion. Yes, the current administration in Washington is notable for the extreme mendacity and calculated idiocy of its claims. But — decade […]
When super-pundit Robert Novak stormed off the set of a live CNN show Thursday — just after uttering what the New York Times delicately calls “a profanity” — it was an unusual episode of TV punditry. With rare exceptions, the slick commentators of televisionland keep their cool. But we’d be much better off if they […]
On Tuesday, big alarm bells went off in the national media echo chamber, and major U.S. news outlets showed that they knew the drill. Iran’s nuclear activities were pernicious, most of all, because people in high places in Washington said so. It didn’t seem to matter much that just that morning the Washington Post reported: […]
