FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
When New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane wrote an essay about the CIA’s alleged attempt to recruit him, two clauses stand out for their confident attribution of benevolent motives to US foreign policy.
Former CIA chief Michael Hayden’s op-ed is long on fictional accounts of ultra-scrupulous drone planners worrying about striking civilians and completely lacking the real-life incidents where the US has mistakenly targeted weddings and deliberately hit funerals.
Meet the Press covers US drone attacks. But why do they want viewers to think it’s too hard to know how many innocents have died?
ABC botches an easy ISIS factcheck, and NBC’s Chuck Todd “disqualifies” a Senate candidate who gave an iffy response to a trivial question. Plus Malala Yousafzai wins the Nobel Peace Prize–but US media doesn’t seem interested in her peace message.
The New York Times seems to suggest that the ongoing wars in Yemen and Pakistan are limited to attacks on “leaders.” That is “a totally false statement,” one analyst notes.
Obama’s foreign policy is invariably analyzed as being either foolishly pacifistic or prudently diplomatic. The reality that the Obama administration has used military force on a large scale in many countries is not acknowledged.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about reports about the military strikes in Yemen.
Politicians go out of their way to denounce whistleblowers and “leakers” whose revelations of classified data, they claim, have harmed national security. But it’s always worth pointing out that the outrage is selective.
What seemed to be a US drone strike hit a wedding convoy in Yemen, killing over a dozen people. What kind of coverage does an event like that get on US television?
The New York Times’ report on yesterday’s drone strike in Yemen leads with the claim that “most of the dead appeared to be people suspected of being militants linked to Al Qaeda.” The paper has a pattern of this kind of reporting, often because they take the US or Yemeni government’s word.
The name of the CIA’s station chief in Pakistan is out, and it’s been out for a long time; concealing it from US readers doesn’t make anyone any safer. But it does help bolster the cult of secrecy,
This week we look at what the big TV networks covered instead of the new reports about US drone attacks. Plus CBS host Bob Schieffer calls for more discussions of issues that matter, and CNN is set to air some pro-nuclear power propaganda.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both released reports on civilian deaths from US drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. Despite being front-page news in the New York Times, the reports were absent from the network evening newscasts.
The United States has reportedly carried out nine drone attacks in the last few weeks in Yemen, generating headlines about the targeting and killing of suspected Al-Qaeda militants in the impoverished country. But how can media know for sure who is being killed? The uptick in attacks is apparently related to the alleged terrorist chatter […]
A headline is sometimes worth a thousand words, and this was definitely the case after a deadly drone strike occurred in Yemen last week. “Drone Strike Kills Six Suspected Militants in Yemen,” a Reuters headline (8/7/13) declared. “More Suspected Al-Qaeda Militants Killed as Drone Strikes Intensify in Yemen,” a CNN.com headline (8/8/13) offered. Whatever the […]
When Jeremy Scahill called out a CNN reporter for an error, she eventually corrected her mistake on the air. That’s good– and more outlets should be doing the same. Unfortunately the “non-correction correction” is more typical–or, as in the case of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, a media figure will simply ignore the issue.
Hollywood’s latest superhero movie has a political message that’s not particularly hard to decipher. Yet fail to decipher it New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis evidently did.
In a moment when media are fixated on terrorism and the possibility that some people might be motivated to carry out acts of violence against the United States in part because of the effects of U.S. wars, a Yemeni writer’s account of the effects of drone strikes on his village would be well worth covering.
This week on FAIR TV: Joe Scarborough remembers some things about the Iraq War–but forgets the things he said back then. We’ll take a look at the CNN Steubenville coverage that had so many critics outraged. And the Washington Post presented two takes on drone deaths in Pakistan.
The new issue of Time has a pretty interesting piece on the debate over Obama’s drone program. One way to measure the shift in official opinion is to consider that a little more than a year ago, the magazine hardly seemed to think there was any debate at all.
