FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
U.S. media had a soft spot for the 2012 Paralympic Games, featuring some 4,000 athletes with disabilities from around the world. Not that they thought people wanted to see much of them―NBC only aired a few hours’ worth, and no live coverage (AP, 8/23/12)―but the events “proved once again that whatever your obstacles, you really […]
Lives Worth Living, an independent documentary on the U.S. disability rights movement that aired recently on PBS, traces the emergence and growth of activism through the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act—a fact noted in a respectful New York Times review (10/26/11) that was all the notice big media appeared to take of […]
While it’s true elite media show no principled interest in citizen activism, you’d think some things would garner a word or two. Like 300 people, 200 or so in wheelchairs, occupying the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C., to protest Republican budget plans for Medicaid. Dozens of protesters, organized by the […]
On March 19, the two-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, tens of thousands of people across the country, and still more worldwide, turned out to protest the ongoing war. The protests had multiple goals, but given the general numbing of the population to the war, one objective was undoubtedly to keep the fact that […]
NBC correspondent John Hockenberry on Million Dollar Baby and its controversial Oscar victory. Also on the show: journalist Dahr Jamail on the recent Iraqi elections and misleading reporting about democracy on the march in the Middle East.
Despite some limitations, the 10-year-old Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is an historic call for an end to barriers facing this country’s 50 million disabled people in nearly every arena of life. But major news outlets present the ADA as mainly a regulatory issue affecting private businesses, rather than a human rights issue facing society […]
From the outset, press coverage of New York City’s efforts to provide self-cleaning toilets on the streets has had a single spin: Disabled ideologues are ruining this good project for the rest of us. “The issue most likely to doom the plan is access for the handicapped,” wrote New York Times Metro reporter Celia W. […]
Two thousand people gathered on the South Lawn of the White House on July 26, 1990, for the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was the largest gathering ever of journalists for a disability story, most of whose reporting ignored the fact pointed out by a lonely Associated Press dispatch a few days […]
