FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The Washington Post editorial page regularly slams Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, so it was no surprise to see it do the same on April 30. Their real point, though, was to suggest that Barack Obama’s desire to change the tone of the U.S.-Venezuelan relationship wasn’t going to work: The administration’s strategy–to open up a constructive […]
Associated Press reporter Calvin Woodward has a history of straining to catch Barack Obama in factual errors. But today’s review of last night’s Obama press conference may have hit a new low in absurdity. In the piece, headlined “Fact Check: Obama Disowns Deficit He Helped Shape,” Woodward takes issue with Obama’s statement: “Number one, we […]
Newsweek‘s Fareed Zakaria is giving Obama high marks on his first 100 days in office in the magazine’s May 4 issue. What’s interesting, though, is when Zakaria explains why. He writesthat while the country is more liberal than its been in 20 years, he(predictably enough) zeroes in on Obama’s geniusin charting a “middle course”: no […]
Images of the U.S. media’s longtime foe, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, with Obama at last weekend’s Summit of the Americas in Trinidad prompted some corporate reporters to take the unusual step of questioning the political motivations behind an official photo-op. On ABC‘s World News, Jake Tapper referred to Chavez’s gift of The Open Veins of […]
When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave U.S. President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s book The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent at last weekend’s Summit of the Americas, the corporate media appeared to be caught off guard. In its initial report, CNN (Newsroom, 4/18/09) appeared to […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The White House’s proposed military budget comes to some $534 billion dollars, and that’s without including the costs of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. So why on earth are some saying Obama is “disarming America”. We’ll hear what this budget does and doesn’t do from Miriam Pemberton, research fellow […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin040309 Mark Weisbrot and Gareth Porter @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin040309.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Barack Obama’s military surge in Afghanistan has caught very little flack in the media, even though experts on the region say it doesn’t make sense and distorts realities on the ground in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. We’ll talk to journalist Gareth […]
Want to know if “the media did a great job” covering Barack Obama’s second major presidential press conference? Jason Linkins says (Huffington Post, 3/25/09) you can “just ask the media! Because they’ll tell you!” But “at the same time, the media is also quick to point out that the press conference was ‘totally boring!’” Among […]
A Washington Post piece this weekend by Scott Wilson (3/14/09) centered around this “gotcha”: In his inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.” It hasn’t taken long for the recriminations to return–or for the […]
Corporate media outlets treat U.S. intelligence agencies with solemn reverence when those agencies are reinforcing official views about American enemies and friends. This is true even when the same media outlets are duped by intelligence agencies time and again. But stray from the nationalist straight and narrow, and these otherwise respected sources risk becoming invisible, […]
In a typically half-empty David Brooks piece (3/13/09), the columnist praises Barack Obama for embracing “rigor” in education policy, for endorsing “testing and accountability,” for “mak[ing] sure results have consequences.” He complains about the “education establishment’s ability to evade the consequences of data” and that watered-down proficiency standards mean that “parents think their own schools […]
Under the Onion-ready headline “Obama Calls for Earmark Reform, Signs Earmark-Laden Spending Bill,” (3/12/09), the L.A. Times‘ James Oliphant and Christi Parsons begin their story: President Obama railed against pork barrel projects on Wednesday. Then he signed a massive spending bill stuffed with them. I’m not sure what the cut-off for something being “stuffed” with […]
Jane Kim of CJR.org (3/9/09) quotes some of the reactions to a New York Times reporter asking Barack Obama if he is “a socialist as some people have suggested”: Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post cracks that “the New York Times was THAT CLOSE to a journalistic coup!” and American Prospect‘s Ezra Klein wants to […]
This column by Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl has received some well-deserved criticism, largely for its peculiar claim that reforming the U.S. healthcare system is a lot like invading Iraq. What jumped out at me was this supposed parallel between George W. Bush and Barack Obama: After September 11, Diehl wrote, “The […]
Steve Benen of Political Animal points out a couple of strange questions posed by corporate journalists—one to each of last year’s major presidential candidates. In this post, Benen quotes an unnamed New York Times reporter (apparently either Sheryl Gay Stolberg or Steven Lee Myers) basically red-baiting Barack Obama: “The first six weeks have given people […]
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly tries to nail Obama on a “no more earmarks” flip-flop in his “talking points” commentary (3/4/09): O’REILLY: We begin with this: BARACK OBAMA: We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review. O’REILLY: That’s President Obama pledging last January to end […]
This AP “fact check” (2/24/09) of President Barack Obama’s speech is, as usual, a sad effort. You really need to have some threshold for calling “gotcha,” and some of these—maybe all of these—really don’t measure up. Obama says, “Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market,” […]
In the same column (2/16/09) that he cites Sam Donaldson’s reputation as a “blowhard liberal,” the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz has an item in which he complains that “the Vogue cover story on Michelle Obama, by editor at large André Leon Talley, is nothing if not laudatory.” Kurtz writes: The Talley article mentions briefly that […]
Newsweek‘s current coverdeclares, “We Are All Socialists Now.” But it’s actually another story from the magazine that pushes the notion that Obama is likely heading the country in a (gasp!) European direction. Michael Freedman’spiece certainly doesn’t start off on the right foot: Have you noticed that Barack Obama sounds more like the president of France […]
After President Obama’s press conference last night, Fox host Bill O’Reilly saw one to scorepoints against the White House–by mocking Obama forrelying ona list of pre-approved journalists when he took questions. Unfortunately for O’Reilly, his guest at the time was former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, who had to point out that this was… well, […]
