FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
One potential benefit of so-called “new media” is the chance that news outlets on the Web might offer a break from the tired old conventional wisdom of the corporate “old media.” But when Arianna Huffington (Media Decoder, 9/19/10) announced the Huffington Post‘s hiring of Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman, she described the move as a sign that […]
After FAIR criticized PBS for airing Turmoil and Triumph, a documentary about Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz that was funded almost entirely by his friends and associates (Action Alert, 7/12/10; Activism Update, 7/20/10), the program’s producer/writer/director David deVries (PBS.org, 7/16/10) complained that FAIR (and Nation critic Greg Mitchell—7/12/10) hadn’t “[paid] much attention to the […]
The website WikiLeaks posted tens of thousands of classified intelligence documents relating to the Afghanistan War on Sunday, July 25. Spanning the years 2004-09, the documents had been shared in advance with reporters from the New York Times, the British Guardian and the German Der Spiegel, all of which produced long pieces offering their […]
The media firestorm over the Rolling Stone profile (6/22/10) of General Stanley McChrystal mostly missed the real point of the article, which was a damning portrait of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Much of the media coverage stressed the criticism and insults hurled by McChrystal and his staff at various administration figures. Some of these […]
The May 31 Israeli attack on the Free Gaza humanitarian flotilla has returned some media attention to the humanitarian crisis faced by 1.5 million Palestinians living under Israeli blockade in the Gaza Strip. But some media figures have sought to deny the existence of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza at all. The Gaza Strip remains […]
On May 31, the Israeli military attacked a flotilla of boats full of civilians attempting to deliver humanitarian supplies to the Gaza Strip. Reports indicate that at least nine and as many as 16 of the activists on board were killed, though details remain sketchy due to Israel’s censorious limitations on media coverage. Much of […]
As the United States examines the origins of the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, one factor that should not be overlooked is media coverage that served to cover up dangers rather than expose them. When President Barack Obama declared a new push for offshore drilling (3/31/10), asserting that “oil rigs today generally don’t […]
On its surface, the announcement by ABC‘s This Week that the website PolitiFact would monitor the show’s content was a welcome development, despite the obvious downside that the Web-only factchecking would deprive the show’s TV audience of needed correctives. But an evaluation of the record thus far suggests that even this limited attempt to test […]
A leaked videotape of a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a dozen Iraqis was unveiled on April 5 by the website WikiLeaks. To much of the corporate media, though, it was either not worth reporting at all, or an unfortunate incident to be defended.
For 17 years our colleagues Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon have worked with FAIR to present the P.U.-Litzers, a year-end review of some of the stinkiest examples of corporate media malfeasance, spin and just plain outrageousness. Starting this year, FAIR has the somewhat dubious honor of reviewing the nominees and selecting the winners. It’s a […]
TV host Lou Dobbs abruptly quit his CNN program yesterday, bringing a sudden end to a television program most notable for its remarkably one-sided presentation of immigration issues. Since 2003, Dobbs has regularly used his CNN platform to issue misleading and alarmist warnings about the threats posed by undocumented immigrants. Dobbs has spoken of an […]
Republican candidates won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday; meanwhile, Democratic candidates won two special elections for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York and California. But it was very clear which set of elections corporate media wanted to portray as sending an important message about national politics–that voters were discontented […]
In the wake of Rush Limbaugh being booted from a group of investors bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams football team, a minor media tempest has been stirred by conservative commentators who charge that Limbaugh has been falsely accused of making racist remarks. Central to their charge are two quotes allegedly made by Limbaugh–in […]
There have been recent discussions (e.g., New York Times, 9/29/09) about whether the press is doing a better job covering allegations about Iran’s nuclear program than they did during the run-up to the Iraq War. But in some crucial and very basic ways, many in the media are performing just as poorly as they did […]
August 29 marked the fourth anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The devastation wrought by both the hurricane itself and the government’s inept response prompted remarkably critical corporate media coverage that promised to fight for Katrina survivors and change the way we talk about poverty and race (FAIR […]
The release of a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on the agency’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques, along with two other previously classified memos, has thrown a harsh spotlight on former Vice President Dick Cheney’s oft-repeated pro-torture arguments. But corporate media seem intent on deflecting much of that glare. Earlier this year, Cheney spent weeks on the […]
At this point, the confirmation battle over Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor will hinge in part on whether the media want to fact-check her critics. So far, the press is largely failing. Right-wing critics and politicians have been circulating comments Sotomayor made in 2001 at UC Berkeley. One quote has been replayed endlessly: “I […]
“Dick Cheney seems to be everywhere,” declared ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl (World News, 5/13/09), calling the formerly reclusive former vice president “the most visible Republican in the country these days.” Cheney has been hard to miss. Since leaving office in January, in addition to broad coverage of his May 21 speech at the American […]
The debate over Bush-era torture tactics like waterboarding has morphed into a full-blown Washington scandal. But the target isn’t the Bush administration officials who ordered the torture; instead, the corporate media’s focus is on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who claims that she was not fully briefed by the CIA on the use of waterboarding in […]
Early reports of a massive U.S. attack on civilians in western Afghanistan last week (5/5/09) hewed to a familiar corporate media formula, stressing official U.S. denials and framing the scores of dead civilians as a PR setback for the White House’s war effort. Scanning the headlines gave a sense of the media’s view of the […]
