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.
(Click here to read a response from Fox.) During the White House transition in January, one story proved irresistible to many conservative pundits: Departing Clinton staffers had gone on a wild rampage and “trashed” or “vandalized” the White House, even looting Air Force One. Allegations of the Clinton aides’ reckless destruction of public property swept […]
The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is moving to weaken or eliminate two of the few remaining broadcasting rules that protect some degree of media diversity. On April 19, the FCC voted 3-1 in favor of eliminating the “dual network” rule, which had prevented one television network from buying another. This rule change will immediately benefit […]
On April 4, USA Today announced the results of its long-anticipated re-examination of Florida ballots (done in conjunction with the Miami Herald) with the headline: “Newspapers’ Recount Shows Bush Prevailed in Fla. Vote.” The headline touting a Bush win referred to the paper’s estimate of what would have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court had […]
Conservative activist David Horowitz has generated significant media attention lately over his advertisement “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Is a Bad Idea for Blacks–and Racist, Too.” Horowitz has approached college newspapers across the country to buy space for the ad. Most papers have refused the ad, while at Brown University some students went so […]
While the McCain-Feingold campaign finance debate will often dominate political news over the next two weeks, one aspect of the story is rarely explained to TV viewers: Where does all the money go? Many media accounts correctly draw the links between the access that big money can buy and the political favors that donors come […]
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A14 LENGTH: 477 words HEADLINE: TOLERANCE 101 BODY: THE IDEAS AGAINST slavery reparations contained in an advertisement placed in student newspapers around the country may well be insulting to minorities on campus. But they are only ideas. Far more dangerous than offensive ideas is their censorship, because censorship knows no ideology and […]
On its March 7 broadcast, ABC‘s World News Tonight tried to give its viewers some background on the legal battle over pharmaceutical patents and AIDS drugs in Africa. But viewers only heard from one side in the debate: the drug companies and their supporters. The report, by ABC‘s Deborah Amos, relied on three sources: a […]
FAIR’s February 16 Action Alert criticizing the Washington Post‘s reporting on a lawsuit by the Miami Indian tribe generated hundreds of letters of concern to the Post. Commendably, the paper’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, responded by devoting a column to the controversy (2/25/01), and the article’s author, William Claiborne, sent FAIR a detailed reply to our […]
Despite the chorus of international condemnation that followed last week’s large-scale airstrikes on targets in Iraq, not a single word of criticism or dissent could be found anywhere in the New York Times‘ February 17 coverage of the attack. U.S. and British planes struck five Iraqi air-defense targets February 16 while patrolling their self-declared, internationally […]
RE: Feb. 16, 2001 FAIR Action Alert: I believe that Michael Getler, the Washington Post‘s ombudsman, is writing something in response to the large number of e-mails he received concerning my February 13 article about the Miami Indian Tribe’s land claim in southern Illinois. But because many of those e-mails were copied to me, I […]
A Washington Post report on a lawsuit by the Miami Indian tribe to regain ancestral lands in Illinois (2/13/01) severely trivialized the genocide and ethnic cleansing faced by Native Americans. Post reporter William Claiborne, attempting to put the dispute in context, wrote: As in similar Indian property claims that have been growing in number across […]
U.S. News & World Report‘s February 19 cover story on the Bush administration tax-cut plan featured the usual presidential-honeymoon puffery, marveling at Bush’s “derring-do” in facing down critics who “didn’t fully appreciate” how deeply he believed in his tax-cutting agenda. When the piece finally ventured into the tax plan’s specifics, it fell straight into the […]
The human rights situation in Colombia is in a state of “alarming degradation,” according to United Nations human rights observers (Associated Press, 1/20/01), but you won’t learn about it in the New York Times. According to a joint report from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), “political violence […]
It was hard to miss the theme of John Stossel’s January 27 ABC News special, “Mr. Stossel Goes to Washington.” Taxes are too high, the government squanders much of the money, and the “free market” provides the best alternative to the “central planning” of Washington bureaucracy. The report is produced by ABC‘s news division, but […]
The New York Times has given a pass to a deceptive Pentagon investigation into the No Gun Ri massacre. Sixteen months after the Associated Press published its Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of the massacre by U.S. forces in the Korean War (9/30/99), the Pentagon report states that although “an unknown number of Korean civilians were killed […]
The New York Times editorial the day after George W. Bush’s inauguration (“A Vision of Unity,” 1/21/01) predicted, based on the inaugural address, that Bush could “lift the nation to a new era of inclusion and social justice,” and found room to describe how “the gloomy light of a winter’s day was offset by splashes […]
The national management of Pacifica Radio has fired several long-time staffers at WBAI, the New York City community radio station that is home to the award-winning show “Democracy Now!”: program director Bernard White, producer Sharan Harper, and station manager Valerie Van Isler (see “Pacifica Management Move to Undermine WBAI‘s Independence,” https://fair.org/press-releases/van-isler.html). Accompanied by security guards, […]
Several news organizations have begun the process of evaluating the disputed ballots in the state of Florida. Reporters intend to use a variety of methods to help answer lingering questions about who might have actually won the vote in the state if a hand recount had not been halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. One […]
Delegates from over 160 countries are gathered at the Hague in the Netherlands this week for negotiations to finalize the Kyoto climate treaty, the 1997 protocol on combating global warming. Despite the high stakes involved in global warming, news coverage of the Hague talks in mainstream U.S. print media has been extremely sparse. National television […]
ABC News Middle East analyst and military expert Anthony Cordesman published a report last month advocating the use of “excessive force” against Palestinian civilians, including “interrogation methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture.” The report was released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an influential Washington think tank where Cordesman holds […]
