FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING

Challenging media bias since 1986.

FAIR

FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.

Challenging media bias since 1986
▶ ADVANCED SEARCH
Articles about: Disasters
FAIR
post
July 1, 2011
Patrick Cockburn on Libya, Jordan Flaherty on New Orleans trial

Patrick Cockburn on Libya, Jordan Flaherty on New Orleans trial

[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin070111 Patrick Cockburn and Jordan Flaherty @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin070111.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Congressional debate over the Libya War shows an apparently bipartisan sense of frustration and outrage over the NATO mission. This has triggered a serious debate over the legality of the war, among other things. But there is almost no discussion of […]

FAIR
post
June 10, 2011
Harvey Wasserman on Fukushima; Andrew Fieldhouse on Bush tax cuts

Harvey Wasserman on Fukushima; Andrew Fieldhouse on Bush tax cuts

[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin061011 Harvey Wasserman and Andrew Fieldhouse @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin061011.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: After a lull in reporting about the Japanese nuclear disaster comes news that officials there are admitting that radiation releases were much larger than previously claimed– not a surprise to critics who saw those early claims as part of a government/corporate/media […]

FAIR
post
May 1, 2011

After Fukushima, Media Still Buying Nuclear Spin

Ever since the start of nuclear technology, those behind it have made heavy use of deception, obfuscation and denial—with the complicity of most of the media. New York Times reporter William Laurence, working at the same time with the Manhattan Project, wrote a widely published press release covering up the first nuclear test in New […]

FAIR
post
October 1, 2010

Brian Williams Rehashes Katrina Violence Myth

For the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, NBC anchor Brian Williams (Dateline NBC, 8/22/10) recalled the experience as his own boy’s adventure tale: You know, I’ve been around a lot of guns and a lot of dead bodies, and a lot of people shooting at people to make dead bodies. But you put them all […]

FAIR
post
April 1, 2010
‘It’s Tough to Be Haitian, Isn’t It?’

‘It’s Tough to Be Haitian, Isn’t It?’

One of the most striking images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was of poor New Orleans residents crowded together outside that city’s convention center, days after the storm had subsided, chanting, “We want help!” It was a scene that shocked viewers and reporters alike, who had not realized that a major U.S. city could […]

FAIR
post
January 29, 2010
Charlie Cray on Supreme Court election ruling, Mark Weisbrot on Haiti

Charlie Cray on Supreme Court election ruling, Mark Weisbrot on Haiti

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court ruled 5-to-4 that corporations may not be limited in their spending to influence elections, because they have the same free speech rights as people. Among the many questions raised are not just what this means for elections, but what it means for “free” speech. We’ll hear […]

FAIR
post
January 15, 2010
Bill Fletcher on Haiti, Beau Hodai on Charles Overby

Bill Fletcher on Haiti, Beau Hodai on Charles Overby

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Haiti’s status as the poorest nation in the hemisphere has been mentioned time and again by journalists covering the current catastrophe, but where were journalists before the earthquake hit? And how are they doing in explaining the larger context of how Haiti got to this point? We’ll talk to […]

FAIR
post
September 4, 2009
Jordan Flaherty on Katrina anniversary, Sarah Anderson on executive pay

Jordan Flaherty on Katrina anniversary, Sarah Anderson on executive pay

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media promised to pay more attention to poverty and race after the Gulf Coast’s Katrina disasters in 2005, and for a short time they did a little more reporting. But where was the followup on this year’s August anniversary, when papers like the Washington Post and L.A. Times, […]

FAIR
post
September 2, 2009

Erasing Katrina

August 29 marked the fourth anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The devastation wrought by both the hurricane itself and the government’s inept response prompted remarkably critical corporate media coverage that promised to fight for Katrina survivors and change the way we talk about poverty and race (FAIR […]

FAIR
post
July 1, 2007

Disposable People

As Hurricane Katrina tore off roofs and exposed the destroyed interiors of homes, it also peeled back the genteel veneer on elite media opinion about New Orleans—revealing that some pundits and reporters viewed the majority of its residents to be essentially irrelevant, if not an outright impediment, to the restructuring of the city’s devastated economy. […]

FAIR
post
September 1, 2006
Sue Sturgis on Katrina anniversary, Heather Boushey on welfare ‘reform’

Sue Sturgis on Katrina anniversary, Heather Boushey on welfare ‘reform’

It has been one year since Hurricane Katrina. . . What’s happened on the Gulf Coast since all the cameras and TV anchors cleared away? Also this week: Another media anniversary, ten years since the passage of the so-called welfare reform. Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic and Policy Research joins to discuss what’s missing from the media’s glowing assessment of this law’s success.

FAIR
post
August 1, 2006
Katrina’s Vanishing Victims

Katrina’s Vanishing Victims

An Extra! analysis of media coverage since Katrina—of the hurricane’s aftermath along the Gulf Coast and of poverty issues in general—found that with few exceptions, the media’s rediscovery of impoverished Americans lasted barely a month.

FAIR
post
July 28, 2006

FEMA Reverses Media Access Policy

After sustained pressure from FAIR activists (7/21/06, 7/25/06) and continued scrutiny from the Baton Rouge Advocate, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that it had reversed its policy that severely limited media access to Hurricane Katrina survivors living in FEMA trailer parks. “We’re responding to your criticism,” FEMA representative James Stark told the Advocate (7/26/06). […]

FAIR
post
July 21, 2006

FEMA a Disaster for Freedom of the Press

(NOTE: Please see the Activism Update regarding this alert.) The Federal Emergency Management Agency prohibits journalists from having unsupervised interviews with Hurricane Katrina victims who have been relocated to FEMA trailer parks, according to a report in the Baton Rouge Advocate (7/15/06). “If a resident invites the media to the trailer, they have to be […]

FAIR
post
March 10, 2006
Amitabh Pal on India, Eric Deggans on Hurricane Katrina

Amitabh Pal on India, Eric Deggans on Hurricane Katrina

This week on CounterSpin: India and nuclear double standards, with Amitabh Pal of the Progressive magazine. Also on the show: Why didn’t journalists follow through on conversations about institutional racism and class bias post-Katrina? We’ll hear from Eric Deggans, media critic at the St. Petersburg Times.

FAIR
FAIR
post
November 1, 2005

Demonizing the Victims of Katrina

By September 1, residents of flood-ravaged New Orleans had been trapped for nearly 72 hours in a city with little shelter, food, drinkable water or dry clothing. As much as 80 percent of the city was under water as the Federal Emergency Management Agency seemed unable to respond to the situation. Police and first-responders abandoned […]

FAIR
post
November 1, 2005

‘Saying What They’ve Been Thinking’

As columnist Dawn Turner Trice remarked (Chicago Tribune, 9/12/05), Hurricane Katrina “shed a light” on the often unspoken racist assumptions of many Americans. In particular, she noted, many of the elite have, through their comments about the tragedy, “unwittingly reveal[ed] themselves” and their fundamental prejudices. Of course, many pundits attacked the idea that racism had […]

FAIR
post
October 1, 2005

The World’s Most Generous Misers

In March 1997, a joint poll by the Washington Post, Harvard University and the Kaiser Family Foundation asked Americans which area of federal expenditure they thought was the largest. Was it Social Security (which actually constituted about a quarter of the budget)? Medicare? Military spending? Sixty-four percent of respondents said it was foreign aid—when in […]

FAIR
post
October 1, 2005

Covering Katrina

One of the most noted trends in the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina has been the aggressive and critical tone some journalists have adopted towards the White House and Bush administration officials. “How could the president be so wrong, so misinformed?” Tim Russert asked on Meet the Press (9/4/05). Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation […]

FAIR

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.