FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The uncritical coverage of Paul Ryan’s budget plan continues. In the new issue of Time magazine, Michael Crowley and Jay Newton-Small tell us that Ryan is “the new face of federal frugality”: Just 41 years old, with jet black hair and a touch of Eagle Scout to him, the House Budget Committee chairman unveiled an […]
Dean Baker’s Beat the Press is the best Early Warning Media Mythbuster. It’s simple: You read it every morning before you read the papers (he is up before you are, trust me) and you’re well prepared to deal with the economic nonsense you’ll be subjected to. Today (4/6/11) he proposes this headline for stories about […]
Corporate media’s preference for”centrism” canoftentranslate intoreporting that casts two sides of a debate as equally belligerent or unwilling to compromise. ABC reporter Jonathan Karl‘s report yesterday on This Week (4/3/11) offers a perfect example of the absurdity of this worldview. His focuses was on the battle over the federal budget. On one side are Tea […]
On Monday (2/21/11), ABC World News wanted to set the record straight on Wisconsin’s budget problems. As host George Stephanopoulos put it, the debate is over whether pensions and other benefits for public workers are to blame for the crippling budget shortfalls in Wisconsin and other states. Tonight Barbara Pinto has a reality check. What […]
The subhead sums up the point of USA Today‘s lead story today (2/14/11) about Barack Obama’s budget proposal: Obama Proposes Cuts to Trim Deficit; GOP, Others Want More The piece by Richard Wolf and Mimi Hall begins, “President Obama will send Congress a 2012 budget today that would trim the budget deficit by $1.1 trillion […]
The fact that Paul Krugman writes columns for the New York Times means that the paper’s readers are occasionally treated to a good media criticism—like today (2/5/10). He writes: These days it’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a news program without encountering stern warnings about the federal budget deficit. The deficit […]
You’d think that reporting on federal budget bills costing billions of dollars would be difficult. But it’s easy, really: All you have to do is remember that budget items involving animals or unusual foods are funny. ABC‘s Jonathan Karl has mastered the genre. Reporting on the ominous spending bill (World News, 2/24/09), he declared: “The […]
Today’s New York Times features a piece by Thom Shanker that dwells on suspected budget cuts at the Pentagon. As the headline tells us, “After Stimulus Package, Pentagon Officials Are Preparing to Pare Back.” The piece gives little reason to believe that there are any such plans afoot; Obama did not campaign on cutting the […]
