FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
A September 7 Washington Post report on Japanese healthcare claims that “more than one-third of the workers’ premiums are used to transfer wealth from the young, healthy and rich to the old, unhealthy and poor.” Which Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 9/7/09) understatedly calls “a striking statement”: Fire insurance transfers wealth from people who don’t […]
“Robert Samuelson Doesn’t Like Trains” is what Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/24/09) takes to be “the unifying theme from his column today, since his arguments against high-speed rail do not make a lot of sense.” In his August 24 broadside against what he dubs Barack Obama’s “Rail Boondoggle,” Samuelson trots out the tired argument […]
Economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/9/09) sees the Washington Post as simply “keeping with its strict editorial policy of only letting others tell readers what ‘populists’ think,” when publishing its August 9 “front-page article on setting executive compensation at banks receiving bailout money”—one which “never presented the views of an actual populist.” Instead, Baker […]
Quipping that “usually newspapers are big defenders of free speech, but not the Washington Post,” economic reporting critic Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/2/09) takes down the paper’s recent piece giving over “nearly 2,000 words to complain that a website had ripped off” one reporter’s story. Careful to say that “the problem was not that […]
Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/21/09) has synopsized the latest fiasco of a David Brooks column under the headline “David Brooks Wanted Tax Increases to Pay for Stimulus”–since, Baker writes, “that is presumably the implication of his complaint that the Democrats paid for the stimulus package ‘with borrowed money.’” Predictably, “this is not the only […]
Stating quite succinctly how “there is an ongoing issue about whether global warming deniers should be treated seriously by the media, given that they have about as much scientific support for their position as the flat-Earth crew,” economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/11/09) notes how the July 11 “New York Times goes them one […]
Writing at his regular Beat the Press blog (7/8/09), economist Dean Baker says that the New York Times‘ David Leonhardt “rightly complains that President Obama’s healthcare plan does nothing to change the incentives for doctors to prescribe expensive forms of care, even when there is no evidence that this care will lead to better outcomes.” […]
Tying the urgent present-day topic of economic reporting in with the most pressing global emergency of climate change, Dean Baker has posted at his Beat the Press blog (6/29/09) on “What Does ‘Free Trade’ Have to Do With Taxing Greenhouse Gas Emissions?”: That is the question that the New York Times should have been asking […]
Economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 6/20/09) has requested you try to “imagine a front-page Washington Post article that talked about how the United States had a shortage of small cars.” He reasonable assumes such a piece would address “the limited capacity of the various small-car assembly plants” and “discuss the amount of lead time […]
Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 6/14/09) has caught “Fox on 15th (a.k.a. ‘The Washington Post‘)” once again “departing from normal news practice” with “another editorial complaining about President Obama’s deficits on the front page.” The piece‘s subhead–“Concern Mounts in White House as 2010 Elections Loom”–prompts some hard questions from Baker: “Who is concerned? The story […]
Spotting a May 31 Washington Post column “that blamed the United Auto Workers for the bankruptcy of Chrysler and GM,” Dean Baker declares (Beat the Press, 5/31/09) that the D.C. daily “showed yet again why it is known as “Fox on 15th Street”: So what if Toyota has managed to profitably run a plant in […]
Blogging (Beat the Press, 5/26/09) about how the “New York Times Cooks the Books on Europe’s Auto Industry,” economist Dean Baker catches the paper “touting the layoffs in the U.S. auto industry as a virtue”–since “it notes that auto industry employment in Europe is remaining steady at around 2.3 million, while it is falling to […]
Asking “Can We Get Reporters to Stop Saying That EFCA Takes Away the Secret Ballot?” Dean Baker bluntly states (Beat the Press, 5/7/09) that “it’s not true.” Even though this is one of the “most often repeated lines of the opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act”–“that it will deny workers the right to vote […]
While asserting the extremely simple journalistic principle that “Past Records Should Matter In Assessing Views on the Economy,” Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/2/09) is willing to admit that everyone makes mistakes, but the odds are that anyone who couldn’t see an $8 trillion housing bubble is not a really good person to rely upon […]
Asking a simple question about a large issue–“How Do Trillion Dollar Bank Bailouts Fit With ‘Free-Market Fundamentalism?’”–Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 4/19/09) tells his readers that “the obvious answer is, they don’t”–since, “if you are a free-market fundamentalist, then you are absolutely opposed to bank bailouts” that “involve taking taxpayer dollars and handing them to […]
