FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
If it’s “spin” to back up your arguments with bogus facts and statistics, and to dismiss numbers that don’t fit in with your preconceptions, then Bill O’Reilly‘s Fox News Channel show isn’t, as he repeatedly claims, a “no-spin zone”—it’s Spin City. During an interview with National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy (O’Reilly Factor, 2/5/02), […]
On its March 7 broadcast, ABC‘s World News Tonight tried to give its viewers some background on the legal battle over pharmaceutical patents and AIDS drugs in Africa. But viewers only heard from one side in the debate: the drug companies and their supporters. The report, by ABC‘s Deborah Amos, relied on three sources: a […]
1980: The Washington Post‘s front-page profile (9/28/80) of “Jimmy,” a black eight-year-old junkie, ignited pandemonium. Mayor Marion Barry ordered police and teachers to inspect children’s arms for needle holes. Despite a $10,000 reward and intensive searches, neither Jimmy nor any other child addict was found. “Jimmy” did not exist, Post reporter Janet Cooke later confessed. […]
Once again, White House Drug Czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey is using federal funding to bribe corporations to surreptitiously insert government-approved messages into media content. Salon.com (1/13/00) first broke the story that McCaffrey was giving TV networks a financial incentive to put messages about drugs into entertainment programming. Congress authorized McCaffrey’s Office of National Drug Control […]
After the crash of a U.S. Army reconnaissance plane in July 1999 that killed seven people (including five U.S. military personnel), the question of U.S. involvement in Colombia re-emerged on the media radar screen. Journalists wondered whether “the U.S. could wind up in a fight it doesn’t want” (NBC Nightly News, 1/16/00), with many reporters […]
On July 8, ABC‘s World News Tonight aired two stories on the subject of treating AIDS in African countries. ABC‘s conclusion: It’s better for poor Africans to die than to have access to cheap AIDS drugs. The South African government is currently in a trade dispute with the United States over this issue: South Africa, […]
Time magazine’s May 17 issue ran a feature on the funding of the Kosovo Liberation Army, titled “A Fighting Chance,” suggesting that the KLA is sustained by donations from ethnic Albanians outside of Kosovo. The article reports that the Republic of Kosova Fund holds “more than $33 million” in a bank in Albania, yet in […]
There have been numerous instances when media have seized on a supposed medical “phenomenon” and hyped it beyond recognition, distorting facts irresponsibly or simply getting them wrong. But few media fabrications have been as invidious, persistent or politically devastating as that of the so-called “crack baby.” Mid-1980s case studies suggested a possible link between women’s […]
One man’s prison rape story doesn’t come close to filling this kind of vacuum and mis-reporting in the newspaper of record. “Newspapers in New York could have a full time corrections reporter, there’s so much out there,” says Gary Craig. Not a bad idea.
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.
As America’s officially ignored death toll from overdoses of heroin, cocaine, prescription drugs and alcohol mixed with dope took another huge jump in 1995 (taking 10,000 lives, up 65 percent since 1992), America’s media raged with the threat to the republic posed by . . . sick people smoking marijuana to relieve pain.
Gary Webb’s Mercury News reporting has provided solid evidence that the contras were not just involved with the cocaine trade, they were major players in it. But the New York Times still seems to be more worried about shattering republics than reporting the truth.
When the United States and Mexico went to war 150 years ago, the conflict stirred fierce arguments north of the Rio Grande. Controversy raged as Congress approved a declaration of war on May 13, 1846. Most newspapers endorsed the war with Mexico. The New York Herald claimed, “It is a part of our destiny to […]
Today, the “drug issue” remains a blank screen of public concern upon which society’s most profound fears — about the urban poor, or dark-skinned foreigners — can be easily focused. Although polls indicate that public concern about drugs is again at an ebb, it remains a small matter for the media or the administration to bring the issue back to life.
“The senior editor leveled with me,” the reporter told Extra!. “His words were: Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.’”
If journalists had reported the backgrounds of the new Panamanian leaders installed by the U.S. invasion, and their connections to drug-laundering banks and drug traffickers, a primary rationale for the invasion of Panama would have been shredded.
The media showed little interest when subcommittee chairman Hughes recently disclosed he had new evidence that the entire Sandinista connection was a US intelligence fabrication
A key money-launderer for the Medellin cocaine cartel told Congress in February that he worked with the Central Intelligence Agency, but this information was not reported by the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the three major networks, even though all covered the hearings.
Since 1985, reports linking Contra arms suppliers to cocaine smuggling have run in progressive publications and a few mainstream outlets. But CBS West 57th’s well-documented segment on the CIA/Contra drug connection (4/6/87) was the first serious network probe.
