FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Politicians beware: Thomas Friedman is still threatening to launch a third party. In his New York Times column today (9/21/11), Friedman moans: One would hope that our politicians would rise to the challenge by putting forth fair and credible recovery proposals that match the scale of our debt problem and contain the three elements that […]
Yesterday, Barack Obama made a speech outlining his deficit reduction plan—focusing attention on a variety of spending cuts and tax increases. The Associated Press, as is their habit, issued a “factcheck” piece by Stephen Ohlemacher that managed to bungle the issues involved, making it sound as if Obama was wrong about the taxes that wealthy […]
As progressive criticism of the Obama administration has intensified, the critics of the critics have stepped forward to defend the White House. Much of the case comes down to saying that Obama’s lefty critics don’t know how the game is played in Washington. Jonathan Chait from the New Republic had a New York Times Magazine […]
The New York Times has a story today (9/7/11) by Jeff Zeleny about how both sides are branding Obama: The White House is in the midst of rebranding the president as a pragmatic problem solver prepared to set aside ideology to address a compelling need (see last week’s concession on ozone regulations), a reasonable man […]
If you really believed, as many Americans claimed to after the September 11 attacks, that “they hate us for our freedom” (Extra! Update, 10/01), then it makes a certain kind of sense to protect against future attacks—by reducing our freedom. That would seem to be the only kind of logic that could justify the erosion […]
Today New York Times reporter Helene Cooper (8/10/11) surveys the bad economic situation and asks of Barack Obama: Is he willing to try to administer the disagreeable medicine that could help the economy mend over the long term, even if that means damaging his chances for re-election? What’s that mean, exactly? The first person she […]
There’s a lot of chatter—and presumably more to come—about this Politico story today (8/9/11): Obama Plan: Destroy Romney By Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin August 9, 2011 04:29 AM EDT Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, […]
There are plenty of thoughtful pieces—Drew Westen’s in the New York Times over the weekend being the most recent one—that try to figure out what’s going on with Barack Obama. Then there’s Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen today (8/9/11), who begins by retelling a story about FDR: In her autobiography, Helen Gahagan Douglas recalled telling […]
If the White House encouraged Americans to prevent colds by wearing sweaters, one would hope that media outlets would point out that there’s no evidence that being chilly has anything to do with catching a cold. Likewise, if the Interior Department green-lights a plan to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean in order to […]
In the debt ceiling debate, Republicans and corporate media have somewhat similar strategies: The GOP can’t reach an agreement with the Democrats, because that would be a win for Obama. The media, meanwhile, can’t say that the Democrats are doing the right thing, even when they’re doing exactly what media pundits demand that they do […]
Forget about “winning the future”–Barack Obama wants to win the center. That’s what the Washington Post is telling readers (7/25/11): Obama ‘Big Deal’ on Debt a Gamble to Win the Center Advisers think securing his plan would ensure general-election victory The Post‘s Zachary A. Goldfarb (who can’t be held responsible for the headline) explained that […]
Media love the “middle” in politics–where leaders of the two major parties come together to find common ground, renew the national spirit and/or live up to the ideals of the Founders. Time magazine (7/14/11) has a soppy piece about Barack Obama and Republican leader John Boehner‘s attempt to reach a budget deal. Those efforts–some of […]
The convention in mainstream journalism is that the new stories give you the facts, and the columnists give you their opinions (hopefully backed by facts). But in the coverage over the debt ceiling and budget debates sometimes you’re better off heading straight to the columns. Today offers a good example. In the Washington Post (7/15/11), […]
Barack Obama took questions via Twitter at an event yesterday. The queries they posed didn’t impress everyone– Michael Shear of the New York Times wrote: Most of the Twitter queries were not very tough-minded and gave the president the opportunity to repeat his talking points. Yeah– leave the question-asking to the professionals, who apparently know […]
Time magazine’s Mark Halperin called Barack Obama a dick on MSNBC this morning. The video clip is posted all over the web today, and Halperin and MSNBC have both apologized. Forget about that for a second, and ponder why Halperin said it. The media line on Obama’s press conference is that he was unusually feisty, […]
“Senators, congressmen and even President Obama have misquoted the Founding Fathers in recent years,” writes Washington Post reporter David A. Fahrenthold in a June 7 piece suggesting that there is a bipartisan trend of misquotation and misrepresentation of historical events. After citing Sarah Palin’s recent botched account of Paul Revere’s revolutionary ride, Fahrenthold implies that […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes (6/7/11): I once worked for an editor who banned the word “oxymoron.” I don’t know why. It’s a good word, meaning a contradiction in terms. The dictionary offers some examples: “wise fool” and “legal murder.” I would like to cite another: Barack Obama. He sends contradictory messages. That sounds […]
On the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, conservative pundit Shelby Steele lays out the argument that Barack Obama’s blackness is a unique asset that makes him difficult to beat in 2012. The argument–which, on some level, is worth taking seriously–is that “his presidency flatters America to a degree that no white Republican can hope to […]
Last week, Washington Post reporter Dan Balz explained that Newt Gingrich was “an idea-spewing machine” and a “one-man think tank”–even warning that “a keen intellect can also translate into the appearance of intellectual superiority.” Well OK. A few days in Balz’s paper, readers learned that in a recent speech Gingrich called Barack Obama a “food […]
The recent New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza about the development of Barack Obama’s foreign policy includes this memorable line: Obama had always read widely, and now he was determined to get a deeper education. He read popular books on foreign affairs by Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman. The magazine’s cartoons never make me laugh, […]
