FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
I was struck by an election night panel I saw on CNN last night (3/6/12). “Contributors here on the left and the right,” as host Anderson Cooper told viewers. On the right: former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer and right-wing blogger Erick Erickson. On the left? Frequent TV pundit and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile and… Hilary […]
When former FAIR staffer Sam Husseini found out that Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Sa’ud would be speaking at the National Press Club, he thought it might be a good chance to ask a tough question. The National Press Club apparently didn’t like that idea. Husseini writes: Before the end of the day, I’d received a […]
New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera is being promoted to the Times‘ op-ed page, where he’ll appear twice weekly. Regular FAIR Blog readers may recall Nocera as the star of this item (7/1/10): On Saturday (6/26/10), Times business columnist Joe Nocera argued against a proposed moratorium on deepwater drilling. One of his main points […]
The L.A. Times has an interesting piece (10/22/10) about KCET, the local PBS affiliate that is bolting from PBS because it says it can’t afford to pay the fees PBS wants to charge them. What happened is that KCET, for a little while at least, was very good at raising corporate money; the PBS fee […]
David Brooks (New York Times, 5/28/10) informs us that the idea that “government should have more control over industry” is one of the “predictably partisan and often puerile” reactions to the oil spill. The lesson that smart people derive from the spill, Brooks says, is “that humans are not great at measuring and responding to […]
A troubling article from Newsweek (5/26/10) reports on efforts by both BP and government officials to limit media access to the aftermath of the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion […]
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 […]
The New York Times ran a story on May 4 that advanced a rather unusual argument: BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill was probably bad, but not that bad. Helping the paperflesh out that line was a group called the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, which the Times dubbed”a conservation group in Corpus Christi, Texas. ” […]
When FAIR released a study of the PBS‘s NewsHour (then known as the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour) in 1989, one finding stood out: The Exxon Valdez oil spill was the major environmental story of the period. MacNeil/Lehrer had seven segments on the spill; not one included an environmental representative. Several discussions were limited to Exxon officials and […]
