FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
George W. Bush’s February 17 nomination of John Negroponte to the newly created job of director of intelligence was the subject of a flurry of media coverage. But one part of Negroponte’s resume was given little attention: his role in the brutal and illegal Contra war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the mid-1980s. […]
FAIR founder Jeff Cohen discusses Gary Webb’s work and the backlash he suffered at the hands of an establishment media bent on protecting the powerful. Also on the show: Workers at the Youngstown, Ohio daily The Vindicator are on strike. Eileen Loh Harrist explains why management at New Orleans’ Gambit Weekly is encouraging its reporters to go to Ohio to break the strike.
What should we know about the massive changes to intelligence practices, recently approved by both houses of Congress? And why is the press ignoring the details? Also this week: George Bush has plans to solve the Social Security crisis by partially privatizing the system, but is Social Security really in crisis? And who stands to benefit from this plan?
The Los Angeles Times revealed this week (12/1/04) that the U.S. military lied to CNN in the course of executing psychological warfare operations , or PSYOPS, in advance of the recent attack on Fallujah. This incident raises serious questions about government disinformation and journalistic credibility, but recent discussions of the government’s propaganda plans have excluded […]
Discussion with writer Jen Banbury on her reports of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Also with week: Professor Stephen Doig on newsroom diversity.
(NOTE: Please read the update to this alert.) In its eagerness to find a lighter side to the September 11 commission hearings, the New York Times ended up trampling on the news. In a “Reporter’s Notebook” feature in the Times’ April 15 edition, reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote a series of what might be called […]
Days after their son Greg died in the World Trade Center terror, Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez wrote a letter to the New York Times that counseled against violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. […]
It’s hard to remember a time in U.S. history when public attention was more sharply focused on issues of domestic security, civil liberties and the role of U.S. intelligence agencies. A prime-time dramatic series on the CIA could contribute mightily to public understanding — if rigorously independent and unencumbered. Unfortunately, that’s not the approach CBS […]
News stories about George W. Bush’s appointment of numerous Iran-Contra veterans to key posts have largely relied on past reporting and he-said, she-said soundbites rather than in-depth investigations into their complicity in one of the bloodiest scandals of the past 20 years.
When would-be papal assassin Mehmet Ali Agca was pardoned by the Italian government and sent back to his native Turkey in June, a New York Times editorial (6/16/00) typified the prevailing U.S. media spin. The lead of the editorial described the commutation of Agca’s life sentence for the May 1981 papal shooting as “a reminder […]
Reports in the Dutch newspaper Trouw (2/21/00, 2/25/00) and France’s Intelligence Newsletter (2/17/00) have revealed that several officers from the US Army’s 4th Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group at Ft. Bragg worked in the news division at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters last year, starting in the final days of the Kosovo War. In the U.S. media, so […]
More than 200,000 Guatemalan civilians were killed or disappeared during 36 years of civil war ending in 1996, according to a report from the Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission released in February. The nine-volume, 3,500-page report found that U.S. assistance was a key factor in human rights violations during the armed conflict. Yet Guatemala’s human rights […]
The recently de-classified second volume of the CIA’s internal investigation of Contra-drug connections was released last week (still censored in parts), and found the CIA had knowledge of allegations linking many Contras or Contra associates with drug trafficking. But how did the major media cover the story? It’s a good question to put to the […]
When the Central Intelligence Agency celebrated its 50th anniversary in September, press coverage spoke of the uncertainty of the spy agency’s mission in the post Cold War world. Apparently the press finds itself equally confused; how else to explain the litany of stories venerating the highly controversial CIA as if it were no more than […]
On May 16, days after his editor backed away from the contra-crack series and amid rumors that he would soon be fired, Gary Webb was interviewed by Laura Flanders and Janine Jackson on CounterSpin, FAIR’s radio show.
While the O.J. Simpson trial gobbled up endless TV hours and countless news pages, a concurrent criminal trial in Miami went almost unnoticed by the national media, even though it called into question the judgment of three U.S. presidents. President Clinton’s Justice Department had put on trial Teledyne Industries, a major military contractor, and two […]
The media guardians of the Conventional Wisdom long ago decided that the Iran/Contra scandal is an old, irrelevant story that we would be better off forgetting. When President George Bush, just after losing his re-election bid, pardoned many of the leading figures in the scandal, PBS‘s Robert MacNeil (12/24/92) asked, “Why not bring in the […]
In her novel Damage, Josephine Hart wrote that the modern expression of guilt brings its own absolution: “Say the guilt prayer ‘I feel guilty,’ and hey presto, that’s the punishment.” So it was with President Bush’s nominee to head the CIA, Robert Gates, who appeared (and said the prayer) before the Senate Intelligence Committee this […]
A New York Times editorial (7/24/91) typified much of the coverage of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal when it chastised “the sluggish reaction of Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and his Justice Department,” which failed to respond to mounting evidence of corruption in “what may well constitute the biggest banking scandal in […]
Documents obtained by FAIR, released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), show that George Bush, as head of the CIA in 1976, tried to bottle up a news story that exposed the apparent duplicity of another former CIA chief, Richard Helms. The story, broken on October 1, 1976, by David Martin (now CBS Pentagon […]
