FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The prospect of CBS being taken over by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation–the biggest nuclear power plant manufacturer in the world; the No. 3 U.S. government contractor for nuclear weapons; the manager of a string of government nuclear weapons facilities, including several heavily polluted sites–is being met with sharp criticism by safe energy activists. “We now […]
Amid teenage girl magazines’ standard fare of earnest advice about boyfriends, self-esteem and cosmetics purchases, Sassy was always a stand-out. Take how Sassy dealt with the issue of flirting. The cover of the September 1994 issue might not have stood out on the newsstand—”How to Flirt Like an Animal” was the main story. But rather […]
Examines how newspapers sell their readership to advertisers. Reveals how bottom-line demands of corporate owners have resulted in papers putting the selling of “quality” audiences above quantities of papers to readers. How the Wall Street Journal views its readers. Extra! May/June 1995
The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, public television’s flagship news program, is being bought out by a private, for-profit media conglomerate. Liberty Media, a subsidiary of TCI, the nation’s largest cable systems operator, is buying two-thirds of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, the show’s producer. The mere fact that the NewsHour can be absorbed by a corporate media conglomerate illustrates how […]
General Electric‘s ownership of the NBC TV network has been in the news in recent months. As Extra! went to press, companies like Time Warner, Disney, ITT and Turner Broadcasting have reportedly been negotiating to either buy NBC outright or enter into some kind of partnership with GE. But a little-noted aspect of communications law […]
Editor’s Note: George Seldes is one of the premier journalists and press critics of the 20th Century. In his reporting on World War I, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Fascism and the Spanish Civil War, he always displayed a commitment to telling the whole truth — which often got him into trouble. From 1940 […]
Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935. By Robert McChesney (Oxford University Press, 393 pp.) Revisionist historians tell us stories that debunk dominant myths, discover new kinds of heroes and illuminate oppositional movements hidden beneath hegemonic tales of the status quo. In Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy, journalism professor […]
When citing the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, mainstream journalists often affix the label “union-backed” or “labor-supported” (e.g. New York Times, 3/13/94). By contrast, these reporters rarely if ever refer to the American Enterprise Institute as “corporate-backed” or “business-supported.” (A search on the Nexis database turned up 73 instances where major papers […]
A luxury car tools along a mountain road. A Citicorp bankcard gleams behind the slogan, “Anyhow. Anywhere. Anytime. Right Now.” Chase Manhattan advises viewers: “We believe that helping our customers realize their dreams is the best investment we can make.” Typical commercials? No — because they’re on “noncommercial” TV. According to PBS, these are not […]
There’s an old grade-school joke that about homework that went something like this: The more you study, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why study? Substitute “watch TV news” for study, and it still sounds like a joke, but it’s […]
Another Year of the “environmental decade” is upon us: Acid rain and ozone depletion are household words; nature calendars, dolphin-safe tuna and neighborhood recycling programs are a part of everyday life; and the “environmental president” is running for reelection. Surely, since Time magazine named the Earth “Planet of the Year” in 1989, the environment has […]
An investigative series on the Los Alamos National Laboratory by the Santa Fe New Mexican resulted in the sacking of the daily newspaper’s managing editor who edited the series, and a moratorium on nuclear technology stories by the newspaper. The editor, David N. Mitchell, told Extra! that due to the legal settlement reached after his […]
When People’s Dirk Mathison infiltrated the exclusive Bohemian Grove retreat, he got a view into the US elite that very few reporters have glimpsed. Unfortunately, that elite includes the management of Time Warner, the owner of People, which prevented Mathison from telling his story.
The increasing tendency of television throughout the ’80s to exploit young viewers reached some kind of breakthrough with Whittle Communications’ Channel One. For the uninitiated, Channel One is a television news program targeted to teenagers, and beamed to school classrooms around the country via satellite. Whittle offers this program to school systems, along with the […]
When I got a call from NBC‘s Today show in June 1990, telling me they were interested in airing a story on consumer boycotts, naturally, as the editor of National Boycott News, I was enthusiastic. But I suspected there might be a problem when Amy Rosenberg from Today asked me for “the biggest boycott going […]
Months after the Exxon Valdez spill, national media began to focus on the damage not done by Exxon’s blunder, heralding Big Oil’s efforts to preserve Alaska’s environment. Out of the jaws of catastrophe, Exxon snatched a news spin increasingly to its liking.
The New York Times is not only the newspaper of record for the Fortune 500, it is also a member in good standing of that elite group of corporate giants. Though a number of press critics have dissected the ideological biases, deadly prose and institutional arrogance of the Times, its business operations are less frequently […]
The Washington Times, the right-wing daily that bills itself as an alternative to the Washington Post, is owned and influenced by Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. But most journalists seem unable or unwilling to consider the political implications of this fact — despite the role of Washington Times executives in the Koreagate scandal of […]
From Extra! June 1987 FAIR is a media watch organization offering constructive criticism in an effort to correct media imbalance. We advocate for media access on behalf of those constituencies in our society that do not have the wealth to purchase their own TV stations or daily newspapers. We scrutinize media practices that slight public […]
In 1982, when I completed research for my book, The Media Monopoly, 50 corporations controlled half or more of the media business. The last time I counted, it was down to 26.
