FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The dominant story from Hillary Clinton’s trip to Africa was not her comments about combating rape and sexual violence in Congo. No, the top story was Clinton’s testy response to a question about what her husband thought of Chinese business interests in Kenya Congo. That exchange prompted a whole story in today’s New York Times […]
In a News Analysis piece (7/11/09), New York Times reporter Adam Nossiter attempts to illustrate the difference between some African countries and more enlightened nations, writing: The gulf separating the West and many African leaders on fundamental issues like human rights was on display just last week. The African Union announced that it would refuse […]
Veteran actor and activist Peter Coyote (SFChronicle.com, 5/30/09) writes about big media’s overriding response to the “Largest Environmental Lawsuit in History–Silence.” Taking a look at “the practices that are going on behind Chevron’s carefully cultivated ‘green’ image” as they “drill for oil in the jungles of the Ecuadorian Amazon,” Coyote does give credit to the […]
Political science professors Sonia Cardenas and Andrew Flibbert survey the bloodthirsty media reaction to African pirates for CounterPunch (5/22/09): Across countless blogs and media outlets, here and abroad, thousands of people have called unequivocally–often in blunt, colorful language–for killing Somali pirates. “Kill the Pirates” was the headline of a Washington Post op-ed on April 13 […]
Taking the brave position (ScholarsAndRogues.com, 4/20/09) that the National Review Online is so bad that it makes William F. Buckley‘s print version look “semi-respectable” by comparison, former U.S. Navy Commander Jeff Huber writes that in his April 11 NRO post, “military historian and former classics professor Victor Davis Hanson comes across like a rabid war […]
ABC World News did a segment on March 31 with a bunch of short reports on how the global recession was hitting around the world. Most of them were like this: CLARISSA WARD (ABC NEWS): I’m Clarissa Ward in Tokyo. Japan is the second-largest economy in the world. And lifetime employment has always been the […]
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof issued a call in his column today for pundit accountability. After making a problematic argument about knowledge and experience being overrated, Kristof correctly pointed out that in the media, “the marketplace of ideas for now doesn’t clear out bad pundits and bad ideas partly because there’s no accountability,” and […]
The New York Times‘ Peter Baker reports today (3/18/09) that Obama has tapped “a Swahili-speaking retired Air Force officer who grew up in Africa as the son of missionaries” to be his special envoy to Sudan. Does Baker or his Times editors realize that they don’t speak Swahili in Sudan? It’s like reporting that Obama […]
Just last week (2/26/09), Nicholas Kristof, who has written often about the situation in Darfur, was rooting for the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president, as a step towards “help[ing] end the long slaughter and instability in Sudan”: Next Wednesday, the International Criminal Court is expected to issue an arrest […]
Harper’s Ken Silverstein is again bucking the media that condemned him for actually investigating U.S. lobbyists for foreign dictatorships–this time contrasting (1/8/09) how, “if the U.S. government deems a country to be a hostile state, the American media will devote significant time and energy reporting on that country’s political and economic problems” with the fact […]
Editor & Publisher reports that the musings of Bono will begin appearing on the New York Times opinion pages this Sunday–the latest episode in a long media tradition of choosing Western celebrities to address issues concerning Africa, one of Bono’s pet projects. Given Bono’s record of cozying up to Western leaders on issues like debt […]
There are two major conflicts in Africa that receive U.S. media attention. In Congo, it is estimated that 5 million people have died in a conflict that has raged for about 12 years. In the Darfur region of Sudan, estimates can range from 200,000 to 400,000. The Darfur conflict, though, has received much more press […]
As well as being infused with a modern-day “white man’s burden” mythology not exactly unheard of in media reporting on Somalia, Time magazine’s article “The Suffering of Somalia” (11/13/08) follows the well-documented pattern of misreporting on recent U.S. intervention on Somalia (see Extra!, 3-4/08)–downplaying the disastrous role of recent U.S. policy in that country: Somalia […]
In the upcoming December 1 issue of the Nation, Fatin Abbas extensively quotes Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina on “The Traps of Safari Journalism”: In his eloquent diatribe “How to Write About Africa,” published several years ago in Granta… Wainaina offers the following advice: “Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of […]
In yesterday’s New York Times (10/1/08), Steven Erlanger had a piece looking at the French reaction to the U.S. presidential election. He quoted French writer Bernard-Henri Levy: Obama is, certainly, black…. But not black like Jesse Jackson; not black like Al Sharpton; not black like the blacks born in Alabama or in Tennessee and who, […]
After years of paying scant attention to Somalia, U.S. media suddenly rediscovered the war-torn African nation in 2006 when a coalition of Islamic courts and their affiliated militias imposed peace on feuding warlords and began enforcing religious law. A U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion soon loomed, and the Bush administration made the preferred story line clear. “The […]
[Note: This piece is a sidebar to Bono, I Presume?] Even when it’s not an entertainment celebrity that brings the cameras to Africa, nearly as many TV news Africa stories are about Americans or other Westerners “making a difference” in Africa. Whether it’s a high-profile figure like Bill Gates fighting malaria (ABC, 10/31/05), a 12-year-old […]
Media coverage of Sudan has been lacking, surfacing only when the crisis has reached catastrophic levels. What’s the US role there and where is the press on this story?
A famine is raging through southern Africa—a famine that Doctors Without Borders has called among the worst in Africa in the past decade. The international relief organization CARE reports that the famine “is largely the result of one of the worst droughts in a decade” and that “severe hunger—even starvation—threatens millions, particularly among the […]
No one–least of all the US government–lifted a finger to stop the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans. And US media coverage played along with the Clinton administration’s policy of handwringing.
