FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Today’s Washington Post (11/14/08) explains that Obama’s economic advisers “span the policy spectrum:” They include free traders and “fair traders,” deficit hawks, Wall Street executives, corporate moguls and labor advocates. Why the different typographical treatment of free trade and fair trade? The implication is that “free trade” really is free, whereas “fair trade” is just […]
Washington Post ombud Deborah Howell (11/9/08) charged her paper with “a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama.” But her evidence for this pro-Obama bias was remarkably weak. She presented some counts of stories and pictures, like “the number of Obama stories since November 11 [2007] was 946, compared with [John] McCain’s 786.” But she noted that […]
News Corpse blogger Mark Howard chronicles (11/12/08) how “pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, etc.” are not just “on the wrong side of public opinion in the recently concluded election,” but “are also losing listeners and viewers who are rapidly awakening to the dishonesty and hostility wafting through the conservative media’s airwaves”: In […]
Editor & Publisher‘s Greg Mitchell (11/8/08) notes conservative columnist Kathleen Parker’s “misty-eyed” writing (11/7/08) about the Obama victory: “The little speck of difference that kept us imperceptibly apart had been dissolved in a lovely instant of national consensus that race no longer matters.” But he notes that not so long ago, that “little speck of […]
Joshua Holland (AlterNet, 11/10/08) offers “more evidence that much of the traditional media’s analysis of American politics is utterly worthless, and should probably just be ignored out of hand”: Only moments after the networks declared Barack Obama the winner of a dramatic realignment election, William Bennett, the conservative icon, declared on CNN that “America is […]
Today’s USA Today editorial: How Obama Can Be a Uniter If Barack Obama wants to show he meant what he said about bridging the blue state-red state divide, there’s an easy way do it: Ask the best of President Bush’s appointees to stay on and adopt some of Sen. John McCain’s better ideas. If Obama […]
The U.S. election, to no one’s surprise, was of great interest to Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s letter of congratulations to Obama is being widely covered, though this passage in today’s New York Times jumped out: Mr. Obama has said that he would engage in aggressive diplomacy with Iran, and that he might offer economic incentives if […]
The New York Times‘ Carol Giacomo promises (11/3/08) to “certainly be a lot more skeptical” in covering the arguments for war with Iran than she was when she covered the march to war with Iraq as a diplomatic correspondent for Reuters. That’s good to hear, but this passage in her column made me skeptical about […]
Whether or not Barack Obama wins the election, there will be a substantial argument from conservatives–and even many centrist pundits and commentators–that the press was overwhelmingly biased in favor of the Democratic candidate and against John McCain (Extra!, 9-10/08). But the main evidence for this charge does not actually support the case. Throughout the campaign, […]
After the Washington Post‘s David Broder weighed in with his thoughts on what he “learned” about John McCain in the course of the campaign–among other things, that it was a “falsehood” to suggest McCain was similar to George W. Bush–it was time for Post readers to find out what the Dean of the Washington Press […]
The Associated Press (10/29/08) does its usual sad job trying to fact-check candidate statements—this time working a hefty dose of neo-Hooverism into the mix. AP‘s Calvin Woodward charges that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial Wednesday night about the costs of his programs and the crushing budget pressures […]
Analysts have projected that Barack Obama’s ad spending would this week “surpass the $188 million Mr. Bush spent in his 2004 campaign.” During the last two weeks of the election, the Obama campaign has budgeted $30 million for ads in contested states, according to MSNBC. Last week alone, he also spent about $12 million on […]
In Michael Powell’s piece in the New York Times (10/22/08) on Barack Obama “changing his tempo,” I found this passage to be a little creepy: Mr. [Jim] Webb, a red-haired, proudly Scots-Irish pol with a John Wayne cadence, introduced Mr. Obama in Roanoke and began: He’s one of you. Mr. Webb offered a complicated formula […]
You don’t compare the size of political rallies to rock concerts, but to other political rallies, and compared to other political rallies, Obama’s are quite large. But *does* Fall Out Boy really get crowds as big as Obama’s?
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, […]
The New York Times‘ Jim Rutenberg had a follow-up piece on Friday’s debate headlined “The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won.” The story described the McCain and Obama camps’ attempts at “influencing the public perception of who won an encounter that produced no clear winner or loser.” Except–is it really true that the […]
To illustrate what he deems corporate media’s “arbitrary and often contradictory standards set for Barack Obama as a black candidate,” Tapped blogger Adam Serwer (9/26/08) quotes a New York Times “Political Memo” by Patrick Healy that complains the candidate “is sometimes out of sync with the visceral anger of Americans who are losing their jobs […]
If there has been one unquestioned assumption of the 2008 election, it is that the media love Barack Obama. Rush Limbaugh declared that the media were following Obama with “their tongues dragging along the concrete to the floors.” “Lenin, Stalin never got this kind of coverage from their media,” Limbaugh claimed (7/22/08), which he blamed […]
ABC‘s Good Morning America (8/24/08) inaccurately described Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as opposing funding for U.S. troops in Iraq–an erroneous charge being circulated by the McCain campaign. In the wake of Barack Obama’s selection of fellow Democratic Sen. Joe Biden as running mate, ABC reported: “There are some policy differences between Biden and Obama. […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin080808 Adam Serwer and Eric Boehlert @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin080808.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Playing the race card. John McCain expressed outrage after Barack Obama suggested his critics would use his race to dismiss his candidacy. Much of the media conversation about the back-and-forth seemed to support McCain’s claim that he was the victim. What […]
