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.
The Associated Press has issued a clarification to a story highlighted in a recent FAIR action alert. On September 3, FAIR alerted readers to an August 25 story about Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris. In the piece, the AP recalled the ballot recounts in Florida this way: “Some unofficial ballot inspections paid for by […]
In a reference to the disputed presidential election of 2000, the Associated Press rewrote history– history that AP itself helped make in the first place. In an August 25 report on a new book by Katherine Harris, who as Florida’s secretary of state played a major role in the election controversy, AP included this attempt […]
Time‘s August 26 cover feature on “The Green Century” promises to explain “How to Save the Earth.” The answer, according to a prominent article inside: blame environmentalists for a lack of environmental progress. Andrew Goldstein’s “Too Green for Their Own Good?” begins with this question: “How come, at a time when the environmental movement is […]
An August 8 USA Today article that described how Saddam Hussein is “complicating U.S. plans to topple his regime” repeated a common myth about the history of U.S./Iraq relations. Reporter John Diamond wrote that “Iraq expelled U.N. weapons inspectors four years ago and accused them of being spies.” But Iraq did not “expel” the UNSCOM […]
According to his e-mail newsletter and a commentary on the ABC website, reporter John Stossel will likely report a bogus account of an important environmental story on ABC‘s 20/20 program tonight. In his e-mail preview, Stossel claims that wildlife biologists tried to falsify data in order to show that Canadian lynx, a threatened species, were […]
(Note: See the update to this alert) President Bush’s June 14 commencement address at Ohio State University was a sign of a “revived” presidency, according to Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank. “Bush basked in the adulation of 55,000 people who treated him to waves of standing ovations in Ohio Stadium as he received an honorary […]
On May 7, the New York Times published an editor’s note about the paper’s coverage of a large pro-Israel demonstration on May 6. The Times hadaccompanied the story with a front-page photo with a small group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators in the foreground, despite the fact that they were a small minority of those present. As […]
Newsweek’s May 13 issue features a story about the use of child soldiers and “how the international community can roll back the growing exploitation of children in war,” but does not mention the United States’ own recruitment of child soldiers, nor the U.S.’s obstruction of international efforts to curb the practice. The centerpiece of the […]
How many Palestinian lives equal one Israeli life, according to the editors of the New York Times? The main headline on the front page of the New York Times‘ April 10 final edition was “At Least 8 Killed In Suicide Bombing On A Bus In Israel.” The late edition, which is available to more readers, […]
The numbers will have risen by the time you read this, but more than 300 Israelis and 1,200 Palestinians have been killed since the current Intifada began in September 2000 (Boston Globe, 3/31/02). Thousands more people have been injured. U.S. media coverage of the conflict has been intense in recent weeks, as the Israeli Defense […]
National Public Radio’s Morning Edition recently devoted two segments (3/20/02, 3/21/02) to allegations of media bias. Morning Edition host Bob Edwards explained that “one of the most common complaints about major news media, including NPR, is that they’re not objective– that they either lean too far to the right or too far to the left.” […]
Last week, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals overturned one of the country’s last-remaining regulatory protections against media monopoly, and ordered the review of another. The court overturned the rule that had prevented one company from owning both television stations and cable franchises in a single market. The court also ordered that the FCC […]
On January 10, FAIR put out an Action Alert asking people to write to National Public Radio about an apparent blind spot in its Middle East reporting. NPR had been referring to the situation in Israel and Palestine around the New Year as a time of “relative calm” or “comparative quiet,” explaining at one point […]
On its January 16 broadcast, ABC‘s World News Tonight aired this brief item about the annual report released that day by Human Rights Watch: “The international human rights group Human Rights Watch has released its annual report, and it says that several countries are using the U.S.-led war against terrorism as a justification to ignore […]
ACTION: Please contact the NPR’s ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin to ask for an end to NPR’s double standard in reporting on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and for equal treatment of all victims of violence, regardless of ethnicity or nationality.
Before the January 9 gun battle on the Gaza Strip, National Public Radio (NPR) had for weeks been telling its listeners that Israel/Palestine was in a period of “relative quiet.” Morning Edition anchor Bob Edwards on January 3 stated that U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni was coming to the region during “a time of comparative quiet.” […]
On December 30, U.S. airstrikes hit the village of Niazi Kala (also called Qalaye Niaze) in eastern Afghanistan, killing dozens of civilians. The attack was major news in several U.K. newspapers, with the Guardian and the Independent running front-page stories. The headlines were straightforward: “U.S. Accused of Killing Over 100 Villagers in Airstrike” (Guardian, 1/1/02); […]
The Federal Communications Commission is moving to eliminate one of the few remaining vestiges of public interest regulation on media concentration– the rules that limit the percentage of the national audience that a single cable company can reach. If existing rules limiting a single company to 30 percent of the national market are abandoned, the […]
How many civilians have been killed in Afghanistan since the start of U.S.-led bombing on October 7? Journalists and aid workers have limited access to the area, so it’s an admittedly difficult question to answer. But many U.S. media outlets don’t seem to be trying very hard. None of the three major networks’ nightly newscasts […]
If there’s a propaganda hall of fame, Newsweek has surely earned a place in it with its interview with George W. and Laura Bush (12/3/01). Written by Newsweek senior editor Howard Fineman and White House correspondent Martha Brant, the profile of the Bushes focuses relentlessly positive attention on the “First Couple’s” emotional responses to the […]
