FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Matt Bai has a piece in theNew York Times today (9/9/10) explaining how Barack Obama squandered an opportunity to make fundamental changes to the American economy. One claim in the piece jumps out; after explaining that large infrastructure projects–rail lines, broadband, etc.– are “things that only an active government could realistically do,” Bai claims: Getting […]
Barack Obama has long supported the idea of extending the “Bush” tax cuts for 98 percent of the population. The highest-earning 2 percent, meanwhile, will see their top tax rates go back up to where they were in the 1990s. The Washington Post has a story today (9/8/10)that more or less explains this fact. The […]
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs generated a huge controversy by slamming the “professional left” for being too critical of the Obama administration. People who compare Obama to Bush”ought to be drug tested,” according to Gibbs. Responses to the Gibbs remarks can be found almost anywhere you look–Glenn Greenwald’s post provides perhaps the most thorough […]
The lesson of the Shirley Sherrod story would seem to be a simple one:A conservative blogger with a history of promoting inaccurate, racially chargedstories published another one, and people in the media (not to mention the White House) fell for it–again. But New York Times reporter Matt Bai wrote a piece in the paper’s Week […]
The lesson of Shirley Sherrod’s disgraceful treatment by right-wing and not-so-right-wing media (followed by her equally squalid dismissal by an administration that took that media at face value) boils down to a single question: When will journalists see Andrew Breitbart as the serial promoter of journalistic frauds that he is, rather than as a legitimate […]
In his New York Times column today (7/19/10), Paul Krugman offers a prediction about the likely pundit response to the drubbing Democrats are expected to take in the November elections: What I expect…if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects will say that it was because Mr. Obama was too liberal—when […]
To hear some of the Beltway media tell it,on Sunday White House press secretary Robert Gibbs predicted that the Democrats could lose their congressional majority in the November midterms. The L.A. Times captured some of the sense of crisis (7/14/10), noting that party leaders also tried to improve the gloomy prognosis. White House Press Secretary […]
Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker (umm, PULITZER Prize–winning columnist) got a lot of feedback about her recent column (“Obama: Our First Female President,” 6/30/10) suggesting that Barack Obama is kind of girly. She carefully pointed out that she was “not calling Obama a girlie president. But . . . he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin, two angles on the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history, the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. BP is trying to control what you know about the catastrophe. What’s more, the company has enlisted federal and local government agencies to help censor information about the damage, […]
President Barack Obama does not like leaks coming out of his White House. Luckily, most of what is passed to reporters is not so damaging. Take this passage from the Washington Post (5/26/10): Although senior administration officials have voiced growing disapproval of BP, the company operating the rig and responsible for the cleanup, the mission […]
Another development in the Obama administration’s unprecedented efforts to criminalize the leaking of information to the press: Politico‘s Josh Gerstein (5/24/10) reports that a former FBI contractor was given a 20-month sentence for giving five classified documents to a blog. The former contractor, Shamai Leibowitz, said he wanted to expose activity he believed was illegal. […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Barack Obama has announced his pick for Supreme Court justice—former Harvard Law School dean and Solicitor General Elena Kagan. And the media debates have begun: about her record, her credentials and her likely impact on the court. We’ll sort through some of what you’re hearing and perhaps what you […]
In the first year of the Obama administration, the corporate media suddenly overcame their general aversion to citizen movements that criticize government policies, granting the staunchly conservative Tea Party activists enormous coverage—a decision that seems likely to impact politics for the foreseeable future. Citizen movements are hardly ever front-page news, even when they have clearly […]
The Obama Justice Department—or at least one of its top prosecutors—is cracking down on investigative reporting without regard for the First Amendment. The first disturbing development was the indictment of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, whose leaks to the Baltimore Sun helped expose how the NSA’s warrantless spying program deliberately failed to protect the privacy of […]
A New York Times article (4/23/10) by Peter Baker and David Herszenhorn remarks of Barack Obama: With his poll numbers sagging, the choreographed confrontation seemed aimed at tapping the nation’s antiestablishment mood as well as muscling financial regulation legislation through Congress. While Obama’s confrontation with the financial industry was no doubt choreographed, are his poll […]
Implicit in much coverage of the offshore drilling debate is that such oil has the potential to lower gasoline prices. The L.A. Times‘ report (3/30/10) on the Obama administration’s new offshore drilling plan provided this context: The announcement will come in the run-up to summer driving season, as gasoline prices have begun a national march […]
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (3/18/10) returns from his excursion into mocking right-wingers to return to his natural role of ridiculing single-payer advocates. His target today is Rep. Dennis Kucinich. You know what’s funny about him? He’s short! Or, in Milbank’s words, he’s a “little man,” a “little guy,” a “diminutive figure” and–because he announced […]
On his weekend NBC show, Chris Matthews regularly posts a question to 12 regular pundit/journalists–what he calls “The Matthews Meter.” This Sunday (3/14/10), the question was: “Should Obama Move to the Center Instead of the Left as a Reelection Strategy?” Matthews explained it on the show: Let’s go to the bottom line. We took it […]
That George W. Bush kept America safer from terrorism than Barack Obama is a conservative article of faith these days—and corporate media seem little inclined to challenge the blatant falsehoods used to advance this childish GOP talking point. The most prominent example came on Good Morning America (ABC, 1/8/10) during a discussion of the failed […]
Comparing anyone to Hitler is egregious. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Walter Mondale released a letter that Ronald Reagan had written to Richard Nixon 20 years earlier, in which Reagan compared John F. Kennedy to Hitler and Karl Marx—though Reagan contended he was only speaking of Kennedy’s economic proposals (UPI, 10/23/84). In 2004, the Bush […]
