FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The New York Times reports that Wikileaks’ “journalistic reputation was…undercut by two prominent articles published by the New York Times.” But if anyone’s journalistic reputation was hurt by those articles, it was the Times’.
The Obama administration has not wanted to explain in any great detail how it justified killing an American citizen in Yemen. But there were apparently plenty of current and former officials willing to explain their case to the New York Times.
Under the headline “Future Nominations Are at Stake in Hearing,” New York Times reporters Peter Baker and Charlie Savage suggested that Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination is a given; the real battle among partisans and legal activists is “to define the parameters of an acceptable nomination in case another seat opens up during Mr. Obama’s presidency.” Interesting, […]
Charlie Savage did some good reporting on the Bush signing statements, but his front-page story in today’s New York Times on reproductive rights groups’ reaction to Sotomayor is way off course. His lead explains that abortion rights advocates are worried about Sotomayor, because “when she has written opinions that touched tangentially on abortion disputes, she […]
A blizzard of coverage gave the impression that Bill Clinton’s final pardons raised unprecedented ethical issues about pardons being given in return for favors or to questionable recipients. But are the issues really unprecedented–or have media simply failed to raise these questions with previous administrations? A look back at the elder George Bush’s pardons shows […]
It was a shocking story: The White House, driven to paranoia by unfriendly press coverage, was claiming to be the victim of a “conspiracy,” a “cabal of right-wing extremists” bent on Bill and Hillary’s destruction. It was straight out of The Caine Mutiny; one half-expected Mike McCurry to issue a statement accusing Bill Kristol of […]
Why do you need media critics when you’ve got Bob Dole? In the final weeks of the campaign, as Dole groped for some theme that would prevent him from being buried under a Clinton landslide, the Republican candidate hit on his party’s favorite imaginary enemy: the “liberal” media. At campaign stop after campaign stop, Dole […]
Phil Gailey was shocked by the thesis of the book he had been assigned to review: “To charge that reporters have got just about everything wrong is astounding,” he wrote in the New York Times Book Review (8/4/96). Gailey, a former New York Times reporter who now writes editorials for the St. Petersburg Times, was […]
Before we can talk about the media’s attitude toward Bill Clinton, we need to understand what the media are. Nearly every major news outlet in the United States is owned by a large for-profit corporation—whether a media conglomerate like Time Warner or Disney or a diversified industrial giant like General Electric (which owns NBC) or […]
The Washington Post (12/11/92) reported on Clinton’s economic team in an article headlined “Clinton Appointees Form a Collage of Varying Economic Views.” The piece claimed that Clinton’s administration would be a “tent big enough to accomodate a wide variety of viewpoints.” How wide are the viewpoints represented? The article cites Lloyd Bentsen, an “old-time wheeler-dealer” […]
