FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
FAIR studies explore particular media issues or outlets in-depth, adding hard numbers to debates over media content and journalistic practices.
“I challenge anybody to show me an example of bias in Fox News Channel.”—Rupert Murdoch (Salon, 3/1/01) Years ago, Republican party chair Rich Bond explained that conservatives’ frequent denunciations of “liberal bias” in the media were part of “a strategy” (Washington Post, 8/20/92). Comparing journalists to referees in a sports match, Bond explained: “If you […]
Booknotes is an entertaining program on the C-SPAN cable network. Hosted by general manager Brian Lamb, the show features hour-long author interviews every Sunday evening. Lamb is an intelligent interviewer, choosing guests who have written informative, politically interesting non-fiction and presenting them in a conversational, audience-friendly format. Unhappily, Booknotes also displays a pronounced conservative bias […]
Much like in the global economy, in the world of the think tanks that dominate the mass media, the rich have gotten richer. There has been little shuffling at the top of the most cited think-tank list, based on references to the group in major papers and broadcast transcripts in the Nexis database. Once again, […]
Introduction Public television has survived. The high profile assault from conservative critics, which was front-page news in the early 1990s, now seems like ancient history. As we enter the digital television age, we no longer hear Congressional threats to “zero out” public television, plans to “privatize” public broadcasting have receded from the opinion pages, and […]
To see who informs major network news discussions of Social Security reform, FAIR searched the Lexis/Nexis database for ABC, NBC and CBS evening news stories on the subject between January 1, 1998 and February 1, 1999. We identified all sources who appeared and spoke on screen, and classified them by whom they represented and what […]
If you’ve been watching the network news over the last year or two, you know that Social Security’s going broke and the only choices facing us are to cut benefits, raise taxes, push back the retirement age, or throw the system onto the mercies of the stock market. An Extra! review of more than a […]
Executive Summary The conservative critique of the news media rests on two general propositions: (1) journalists’ views are to the left of the public, and (2) journalists frame news content in a way that accentuates these left perspectives. Previous research has revealed persuasive evidence against the latter claim, but the validity of the former claim […]
For the third year in a row, conservative or right-leaning think tanks in 1997 provided more than half of major media’s think tank citations, according to FAIR’s third annual survey of major newspaper and broadcast media citations in the Nexis computer database. Think tanks of the right provided 53 percent of citations, while progressive or […]
American media seem never to run short of disillusioning experiences. When members of FAIR did a study of L.A. local TV news three years ago, we expected to find a lot of crime stories, and sure enough, we did. What we didn’t expect to find was zero campaign coverage only weeks before an election. So […]
Major news media continued to give greater prominence to conservative think tanks in 1996, according to a survey of major paper and broadcast media citations in the Nexis computer database. Of the 10 most-media-cited think tanks, six are conservative or right-leaning, three are centrist and one is left-leaning. More than half of the total citations […]
The media are liberal, CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg claimed in a recent column in the Wall Street Journal (2/13/96). His proof? CBS reporters are allegedly instructed to identify the Heritage Foundation as “conservative”–but in a story on the flat tax, his CBS colleague Engberg failed to label another Washington-based think tank, the Brookings Institution, as […]
When founded two decades ago, National Public Radio defined itself as an independent alternative to mainstream commercial broadcasting. Unlike the corporate giants, NPR would “promote personal growth rather than corporate gain,” and “not only call attention to a problem, but be an active agent in seeking solutions,” according to the network’s 1971 mission statement. To […]
FAIR’s four-month study of National Public Radio found that All Things Considered and Morning Edition devoted less than 2 percent of stories — 45out of 2,296 — to the environment. This parallels commercial broadcasting trends, where coverage of the environment has been declining since 1990 (Tyndall Report1/92). Here, as in other subject areas, NPR tended […]
Harvard professor Carol Gilligan, studying the psychological development of teenage girls in 1988, found that they experience a major drop in self-esteem as they reach adolescence. Only 29 percent of teenage girls said that they “felt happy the way I am,” as opposed to 60 percent of nine-year-old girls. Gilligan suggests that this adolescent crisis […]
While there was no shortage of polls published during the election campaigns, most opinion surveys offered little more than a snapshot of attitudes or voting intentions. FAIR’s survey of the U.S. electorate during the 1992 presidential election campaign, by contrast, was concerned not only with what people thought, but with the knowledge that lay behind […]
Today, the “drug issue” remains a blank screen of public concern upon which society’s most profound fears — about the urban poor, or dark-skinned foreigners — can be easily focused. Although polls indicate that public concern about drugs is again at an ebb, it remains a small matter for the media or the administration to bring the issue back to life.
As a background graphic for reports on abortion, TV has sometimes used a depiction of a late-term fetus hanging in space, with no connection to a pregnant woman. The “floating fetus” logo is in sync with the media’s tendency to push women out of the public’s mental picture of the abortion issue. In recent years, […]
FAIR noticed that the news outlets and journalists that attacked the film JFK the most vociferously were the ones with the longest records of error and obstruction in defense of the flawed Warren Commission inquiry.
The lives of 100 million working people—those who make the US economy and society run—are being routinely ignored, marginalized or inaccurately portrayed in the media.
The April 1990 release of FAIR’s study, “All The Usual Suspects: MacNeil/Lehrer and Nightline,” rekindled the debate over TV news bias. The study was reported by major U.S. dailies, was endorsed by numerous columnists and TV critics, and led to a TV debate involving FAIR’s Jeff Cohen and NewsHour co-anchor Robert MacNeil. The six-month study, […]
