FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
With an unemployment rate at just over 26 percent and regular street protests against government austerity policies, it’s hard to imagine anyone holding up Spain as a model. But Howard Schneider, writing in the Washington Post, does just that–warning France that it had better shape up and be more like Spain:
Republicans and various right-wing commentators have had a thing for talking about the supposedly “anti-business” tilt of the Obama administration. It’s never made much sense–and it doesn’t make any more sense now that pundits are reacting to news that Obama will tap his current chief of staff Jack Lew to be his next Treasury secretary.
The Washington Post has never been fond of left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. As serious questions mount about the state of Chavez’s health, the paper’s editorial page found it a good time to take another swipe.
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Don’t expect much help from corporate media on understanding the “Chained CPI,” because selling the “grand bargain” requires citizens not really knowing what this part of the deal entails.
A “Right to Work” law passes in Michigan– what is missing from the press coverage? Labor writer and activist Jane McAlevey has some thoughts. And is Washington’s focus on the “debt crisis” misguided? Mijin Cha thinks we’d be better off focusing on the jobs crisis.
Politico has discovered the perfect fix for the American economy–a set of policies that would create a jobs boom,if our political leaders would summon the courage to act. What’s the plan? Cut Social Security and Medicare, lower corporate taxes, and encourage more fracking.
USA Today’s cover story today is a moving piece by Marisol Bello headlined, “For the Poor, ‘Recovery’ Is a Mirage.” And then, right beneath this story, another bit of front-page news: a glimpse of an entirely different world.
When pundits wax rhapsodic about the “colorblind” era we live in–or fulminate against affirmative action policies as interfering with that “post-racial” state–some of us think of cases like Wet Seal.
FAIR’s new alert takes CBS Evening News to task for relying heavily on CEOs associated with the corporate-backed Fix the Debt campaign in their recent reporting about the so-called “fiscal cliff.” If you’re sending an email to CBS, please consider pasting your message in the comments section below.
CBS Evening News has decided the best experts on the “fiscal cliff” are corporate CEOs who want to cut Social Security and Medicare. Let’s tell them what we think about that.
Some commentators and journalists have pointed out the metaphor for the impending tax increases and spending cuts in 2013–the “fiscal cliff”–is highly misleading, and probably intentionally so. There is no way to reverse course when you fall off a cliff; you are plummeting towards the ground, making a terrible mess upon impact. Thus the brakes […]
Post-election lessons are everywhere in the media, as pundits either try to explain how Mitt Romney lost or what Obama must do in his second term. My favorite example of this came on the front page of USA Today (11/8/12): If you think it’s somewhat odd that Obama would need to “soothe Wall Street,” then […]
Corporate media’s depiction of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is often cartoonish, but the lead from David Frum’s piece from CNN.com (10/9/12) takes the cake: Venezuela’s authoritarian president Hugo Chavez is a villain out of a Batman movie: buffoonish and sinister in equal measure. You want to be careful about throwing around words like “buffoonish,” though, […]
In his farewell column (8/26/12), New York Times ombud Arthur Brisbane writes: Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism—for lack of a better term—that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of the Times. Well, maybe we need a better term. Brisbane provides two examples of […]
Even if you’re not an expert in media ethics, you’d probably agree that a show about finance and business exclusively sponsored by one giant bank has an obvious conflict. The fact that the show is on public radio might make such an arrangement all the more curious. And the fact that the host of the […]
Some campaign disputes can be tricky to sort out. Others are not. That’s why media coverage that takes the both-sides-have-a-point approach can be so disappointing, if not dangerous. Take Mitt Romney’s recent claim that the White House was “gutting” the work requirements in the 1996 welfare “reform” law. As a Romney TV ad put it: […]
One of the most confusing terms in the media discussion is “objectivity.” In philosophy, it refers to a belief in a reality independent of the conscious mind, generally one that can more or less be known and meaningfully discussed. In journalism, on the other hand, it means “don’t scare away any potential customers.” “Objective” journalism […]
On Sunday (7/15/12), Meet the Press host David Gregory caught Barack Obama in a big-time flip flop on taxes. At least, that’s what he seems to think. Gregory said: What the president would like to do is extend the Bush tax cuts for those making less than $200,000, or $250,000, as a family, and then […]
Barack Obama’s July 9 announcement that he would extend the Bush tax cuts for income below $250,000 prompted the expected response from Republican politicians and presidential candidate Mitt Romney: This is a tax increase on “small businesses.” That is false. But most news reports won’t say so. The New York Times (7/10/12) told readers that […]
