FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
FAIR’s Action Alert network is a powerful activism tool that encourages the public to become critically engaged with media. FAIR distributes timely, focused reports via email, critiquing a particular instance of media inaccuracy or bias, and encourages members to communicate directly to journalists to demand more responsible reporting. This activism get results! With the help of our readers and podcast listeners, FAIR has forced rewrites of stories, propelled important but under-reported stories from the sidelines to the mainstream and succeeded in getting different perspectives into the news.
After over a month of scant media attention, mainstream U.S. outlets have begun to report more seriously about the “Downing Street Memo,” the minutes of a July 2002 meeting of British government officials that indicate the White House had already made up its mind to invade Iraq at that early date, and that “the intelligence […]
Cable news networks are devoting significant time to covering Natalee Holloway, an Alabama teenager who disappeared in Aruba. But the most popular cable host has urged the media to exercise some caution. On June 9, Fox News Channel‘s Bill O’Reilly explained, “As you may know, we do not speculate here on ‘The Factor.’ We have […]
Despite the widespread violence in Iraq, CBS Evening News offered a different take on its June 2 broadcast: Things are getting better. Anchor John Roberts acknowledged that while the past month has seen tremendous bloodshed, “Some U.S. and Iraqi officials are hopeful the terror campaign may soon begin to ease.” That storyline was advanced by […]
Following FAIR’s call for more mainstream coverage of the “smoking gun memo”—the secret British document containing new evidence that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify its plan to invade Iraq—a steady trickle of news reports have appeared. But that coverage has been downplayed in general and is still completely absent from the nightly news. […]
Newsweek ran a sensational claim based on an anonymous source who turned out to be completely wrong. While one can’t blame the subsequent violence entirely on this report, it’s fair to say that credulous reporting like this contributed to a climate in which many innocent Muslims died. The inaccurate Newsweek report appeared in the magazine’s […]
According to a May 16 New York Times report, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is considering “a study on whether NPR‘s Middle East coverage was more favorable to Arabs than to Israelis”—further evidence that the agency intends to police public media for content it deems too “liberal.” The Times reported that two of the […]
A front-page New York Times story (5/2/05) added to mounting evidence that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) under chair Kenneth Tomlinson is pressuring public television officials to produce more conservative programming, and to rein in shows it perceives as liberal. “The Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is aggressively pressing public television […]
NOTE: Please see the update to this alert. In an April 27 debate about extreme talk radio rhetoric, MSNBC‘s Scarborough Country turned to an unusual guest: right-wing talker G. Gordon Liddy, who ten years ago called for the killing of federal agents. The purpose of the MSNBC segment was to discuss a skit from Air […]
A week after she was praised in Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” issue (4/18/05), the magazine went a step further by making far-right pundit Ann Coulter the subject of a lengthy April 25 cover story. Readers who might have looked for a critical examination of the overexposed, factually challenged hatemonger found something else: a […]
NOTE: Please see the update to this alert. Mississippi Republican Senator Trent Lott’s efforts to rehabilitate his public image were given a valuable boost by the Washington Post, which ran an uncritical profile in its April 14 edition. Lott lost his position as Senate Majority Leader after comments he made at a December 2002 party […]
Over the years, media owners and editors have come up with different explanations for the lack of left or progressive voices across the media landscape. We’re told those ideas are unpopular with the public, for example, or that leftists aren’t as engaging or likeable as, say, Sean Hannity. The new CNN President Jonathan Klein offered […]
As the Bush administration carries out what the New York Times (4/5/05) describes as a “concerted effort” to block the return of the left-wing Sandinista party to power in Nicaragua, U.S. media are returning to the kind of distorted reporting on Nicaragua that characterized coverage during Washington’s war against that country in the 1980s. The […]
On the weekend of the two-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, media outlets took stock of the war‘s death toll. But the national newscasts undercounted the most dramatic loss of life: the deaths of Iraqi civilians. On the March 18 CBS Evening News, reporter Byron Pitts gave these figures: “Today, U.S. deaths number […]
CBS Evening News has presented two segments in recent weeks (2/9/05, 3/4/05) that purport to show how typical American workers would fare under George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security. But the segments rely on stock market projections that, if true, would make any “crisis” in Social Security almost impossible. CBS reporter Jim Axelrod […]
NOTE: Please see the update to this alert. In its February 3 edition, USA Today not only failed to challenge a George W. Bush distortion about Social Security— it actually changed Bush’s remarks to make them more accurate. Summarizing Bush’s case for privatizing the program, reporter Judy Keen explained: “Two days after winning re-election, Bush […]
On February 1, ABC‘s World News Tonight offered an uncritical platform to conservatives who complain that their free speech is being curtailed on college campuses across the country. ABC anchor Charles Gibson introduced the segment by saying that conservatives “claim they are victims of a double standard on college campuses,” and seemed to boost that […]
PBS has pulled an episode of the children’s show Postcards From Buster that includes children with lesbian mothers. The episode was yanked the same day that PBS received a letter from new Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings condemning the episode and asking PBS to “strongly consider” returning the federal money that went toward its production. […]
[Read the Times’s response to this Action Alert.] Facing significant opposition to its plan to privatize part of the Social Security program, the White House is pushing reporters and lawmakers to use the expression “personal accounts,” since polling data seems to indicate that “privatization” is an unpopular term with voters. While it’s not unusual for […]
As the debate over Social Security privatization continues, so do the mainstream media distortions of the debate. On January 11, ABC News muddied the waters further with two one-sided and inaccurate reports. On World News Tonight, anchor Peter Jennings started off the distortions in the show’s “A Closer Look” segment. Having allowed that there is […]
The debate over George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security seems to be heating up, and some media outlets are beginning to notice the flaws in the White House’s argument that there is an imminent “crisis” in the decades-old government program. On the January 11 NBC Nightly News broadcast, anchor Brian Williams seemed to […]
