FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
I always enjoy Andrew Tyndall‘s year-in-review report, which tallies the minutes each network newscast devoted to the important stories of the year. His 2010 report is worth a look. The most newsworthywoman of the year? GOP Senate hopeful and Tea Party favorite Christine O’Donnell from Delaware. Tyndall notes that the BP oil disaster was the […]
CBS Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer (10/31/10) explained on Sunday that he hates the way college football’s Bowl Championship Series works–mostly because the computer model doesn’t give smaller schools a chance to compete for a national championship. Fair enough–criticism of the BCS system is plentiful. But Schieffer bizarrely went on to argue that our […]
Public support for the Afghanistan war continues to drop. Casualties mount. So why is NBC‘s Meet the Press giving viewers a parade of hawkish pundits and military officials? If you haven’t already done so, please join FAIR’s call to broaden the debate on the war on the most-watched Sunday morning chat show. And while you’re […]
Fresh from her comments slamming Rolling Stone‘s Michael Hastings for reporting things the military wouldn’t like, CBS reporter Lara Logan weighed in on the WikiLeaks story on last night’s CBS Evening News, where she argued that reporters should do more to stress the Taliban’s record of killing civilians: KATIE COURIC: Also mentioned in these documents […]
CBS‘s Face the Nation (3/28/10) covered the passage of healthcare reform by inviting Democratic National Committee chair Tim Kaine and two Republican critics on the program–one of whom spread misinformation that went unchallenged by host Bob Schieffer. What’s notable about this is that CBS has since posted on its website a debunking of the two […]
Disapproval and despair over the lost standards of journalistic objectivity are trotted out only for reporters whose opinions are at odds with official views.
Back in May, CBS‘ 60 Minutes aired a terrible report on the Air Force’s use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan– see FAIR’s action alert for all the details. CBS never responded to the criticism, but they did re-air the segment this past Sunday, without any major changes. To let CBS know how you feel […]
Former PR agent Wendell Potter’s stories of how he helped the health insurance’s industry’s campaign “to discredit Michael Moore and his film Sicko” calls to mind just how successful that campaign was. Corporate media coverage of the debate raised by the film’s expose of the for-profit insurance system went out of its way to demonize […]
Blogger Jonathan Schwarz (A Tiny Revolution, 6/24/09) has noted that when “CBS ran a story about the latest batch of Nixon tapes made public… they included a section of a February 21, 1973 conversation with Billy Graham that showed Nixon at his psycho best,” addressing anti-Semitism thus: “This has happened to the Jews, happened in […]
Veteran actor and activist Peter Coyote (SFChronicle.com, 5/30/09) writes about big media’s overriding response to the “Largest Environmental Lawsuit in History–Silence.” Taking a look at “the practices that are going on behind Chevron’s carefully cultivated ‘green’ image” as they “drill for oil in the jungles of the Ecuadorian Amazon,” Coyote does give credit to the […]
On May 10, CBS‘s 60 Minutes presented a remarkably one-sided report on unmanned Air Force drones firing missiles into Afghanistan and Iraq. Though the drones have been criticized for killing civilians in both countries, CBS viewers heard from no critics of the weapons. Instead, correspondent Lara Logan seemed awed by the drones from the very […]
Author and journalist Sheila Gibbons has some regrettably foreseeable news (Womens eNews, 3/30/09) on how female reporters who “worked hard to establish themselves in what had long been a male-dominated field” are faring in a time of massive media cutbacks and layoffs: By the end of 2009, a quarter of all the newsroom jobs that […]
Ira Forman set off a furor in the blogosphere this week when he reported that CBS‘s pick for senior VP of communications, Jeff Ballabon, had once suggested “that Democrats are inherently bad people.” (Forman—who is the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council—maintains that this is what Ballabon had stated during a debate between […]
CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric (1/27/09) introduced a segment on civilian casualties in Afghanistan by saying, “Our Elizabeth Palmer spoke with the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who says the Taliban have become masters of manipulating public opinion.” That commander, Gen. David McKiernan, was CBS’s sole on-camera source for the segment, making assertions like […]
Discussing the failed auto bailout on CBS Evening News (12/12/08): KATIE COURIC: And it’s almost, meanwhile, turning to Washington, Bob, impossible to figure out just what happened to this auto bailout in the Senate. There’s all this finger pointing going on. What is your take? Can you explain it to us in simple terms? BOB […]
Of all the strange stories to come out of the media’s debacle in Iraq, one of the most Orwellian is the fable in which Saddam Hussein tricked America into invading Iraq by making us believe that he had weapons of mass destruction (Extra!, 1–2/04, 5–6/04). Of all the lies, hypocrisies and half-truths of this war, […]
A January 27 report on CBS‘s 60 Minutes attempted to answer what CBS reporter Scott Pelley claimed was a key mystery of the Iraq War: Why didn’t Saddam Hussein tell the world he had no weapons of mass destruction, and thus avoid the U.S.-led invasion? But if Pelley had been watching his own network’s exclusive […]
There was much journalistic hand-wringing and finger-pointing during the week of January 10, after CBS News’ official report on its dubious story on George W. Bush’s Vietnam-era service record. (See Extra! Update, 2/05.) But another story released that week suggests that media self-criticism has its limits—especially when the press’s failures involve being too credulous rather […]
Can we trust what we see on CBS news broadcasts, even when reports are filmed live? Not necessarily; certainly not on New Years Eve. Viewers who tuned into Dan Rather’s live-from-Times-Square New Years Eve broadcast saw the CBS logo prominently displayed on billboards over Times Square. A savvy advertising purchase? Not quite. As news reports […]
Proving that irony is alive and well post-Sept. 11, a book deriding the national press corps for its flagrant liberal bias has been the subject of enormous attention in the same mainstream media that, the book argues, suppress conservative views. Bias, by former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg, is long on name-calling and vitriol, but short […]
