FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
CNN/Time pundit Fareed Zakaria is considered one of the smartest guys in elite policy/media circles.Speaking with CNN host Anderson Cooper on Friday(3/4/11), he advocated CIA intervention in Libya. Deriding a no-fly zone as something less than a “magic solution,” he explained: ZAKARIA: There’s a lot of covert stuff we can do. We can effectively fund […]
Froma March 2 report on CNN about the U.S. killing nine Afghan boys: MICHAEL HOLMES: I mean, just another terrible thing. We’ve seen this happen before. DON LEMON: Yes. Sad all the way around. He did apologize, but still. HOLMES: It does a lot of damage to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. You don’t win […]
For a good example of how not to report the Afghan War, check out the lead story in today’s USA Today (2/15/11): General: Taliban ‘Beaten’ by Surge Momentum Shifts in Afghanistan The piece—by Jim Michaels, who has an unfortunate history of this kind of reporting—is mostly sourced to Richard Mills, the Marine general who’s […]
Sometimes words fail. Joe Klein, writing in the new issue of Time, wonders: How on earth do we get saddled with such creepy clients as Karzai and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, over and over again? Yes, why do they keep doing this to us?! His piece is a pox-on-both-houses rant about U.S. foreign policy: The […]
The Washington Post headline overa story about Joe Biden’s remarksthat U.S. military forces would stay in Afghanistan after the supposed 2014 withdrawal deadline “if the Afghan people want it” is: Biden Promises Long-Term Aid to Afghans Of course, if theU.S. troop presence in Afghanistancame down to what the “Afghan people want,” it might end sooner […]
Appearing on CNN‘s Reliable Sources (1/10/11), Time‘s Joe Klein denounced the “crap” on the Fox News Channel. And as many pundits are prone to do, he found the need to balance that by citing a comparable example from the “other” side: Well, that brings me to point number two…. Cable news chooses not to really […]
I always enjoy Andrew Tyndall‘s year-in-review report, which tallies the minutes each network newscast devoted to the important stories of the year. His 2010 report is worth a look. The most newsworthywoman of the year? GOP Senate hopeful and Tea Party favorite Christine O’Donnell from Delaware. Tyndall notes that the BP oil disaster was the […]
Stephen L. Carter has a piece over atNewsweek that points out that Barack Obama hardly differs from George W. Bush when it comes to war; as the subhead explains: “How does Barack Obama differ as a commander in chief from his swaggering predecessor? A lot less than you might think.” Now that’ssomethingyou don’t hearvery often […]
In FAIR’s recent study of the PBS NewsHour, we found that discussions of the Afghan War were incredibly narrow–no opponents ofa war that isbroadly unpopular among the American public were allowed to make their case. Last night’s NewsHour (12/16/10) offered a chance to see that narrow sourcing yet again. The showfeatured areported segment on the […]
Yesterday the Washington Post reported–and the Drudge Report heavily promoted–the idea that Richard Holbrooke’s final words were, “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.” Well, maybe not–at least according to Obama officials who have challenged that account. The Washington Post serves up a follow-up today,under the headline “Holbrooke’s War Remark Called Banter, Not Entreaty,” […]
ApparentlyRichard Holbrooke’s final words were, “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”This is being highlighted in a big way on the Drudge Report, which meansmedia people will be talking about it. Revealing, in an entirely different way, was this part of a Washington Post story (12/14/10) about the state of the Afghan War post-Holbrooke: […]
NewYork Times (12/3/10): Mr. Karzai first burst onto the international stage in the style of Che Guevara, slipping over the Afghan border from Pakistan in 2001 as United States forces pounded the Taliban, before being installed by the West. President George W. Bush invited him to his first State of the Union speech after September […]
Patrick Cockburn has a wonderful piece in the Independent (11/23/10) on the hazards of embedded journalism that is a must-read. He points out: “Embedding” also puts limitations on location and movement. Iraq and Afghanistan are essentially guerrilla wars, and the successful guerrilla commander will avoid fighting the enemy main force and instead attack where his […]
If you had concluded that the Afghan War was in disarray, the front page of the New York Times today probably didn’t do much to change your mind: Taliban Leader in Secret Talks Was an Impostor By DEXTER FILKINS and CARLOTTA GALL KABUL, Afghanistan – For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan […]
New York Times headline (11/15/10): U.S. Plan Offers Path to Ending Afghan Combat More accurate headline: U.S. Plan Extends Afghan Combat by Three Years
Wrapping up a panel discussion (10/31/10) on Barack Obama’s post-midterm political challenges, NBC reporter Chuck Todd raised the possibility that the Beltway debate on Afghanistan might change: On Afghanistan, the Democratic caucus that will be left, you brought this up, is going to be a very liberal caucus, very anti-war caucus. This is going to […]
This week, as the Afghan War entered its 10th year, there were the usual retrospectives in the media, as well as calls to rethink the war. What’s striking, though, is how little thinking media did about the war in the first place. —Some pundits were calling for indiscriminate attacks before the Afghanistan War even started, […]
An important story is happening right now that’s not getting a whole lot of media attention. A military court is investigating claims that members of a U.S. Army Stryker unit randomly killed Afghan civilians. Some of the soldiers say they were pressured by a commanding officer into participating in the crimes. There are also reports […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The WikiLeaks Afghan War Diaries prompted waves of media coverage, though much of that amounted to “move on, there’s nothing to see here.” But digging into the documents might reveal more about the Afghan War than we knew—like the existence of something called Task Force 373, set up to […]
