FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Last year New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (7/8/11) wrote a sharp critique of those who argue that the federal government’s budget should be compared to a family. He called it one of the “right’s favorite economic fallacies,” pointing out: No, the government shouldn’t budget the way families do; on the contrary, trying to balance […]
In the Times Sunday Review Jesse Kornbluth writes (2/12/12): There are things that do not happen in the real world. Noam Chomsky becoming president. Unflattering photos of Jennifer Aniston. Apple doubling the price of iPhones so its Chinese assemblers can work a 40-hour week. OK, I know he’s being cheeky (Chomsky hasn’t declared as a […]
On the one hand, NBC‘s Meet the Press gives us Republican Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (2/5/12): DAVID GREGORY: Governor Daniels, one of the things you hear from the campaign trail, Mitt Romney said it just the other day, is that the recovery should have been so much stronger. You know, it’s very difficult to prove […]
New York Times columnist David Brooks, who’s been called the “bard of the 1 percent” for his writings in defense of the economic elite, is at it again–telling people not to worry about the concentration of wealth at the very top of the income scale. Brooks writes in his January 31 column that the claim […]
New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer (2/2/12) accurately reports how Republicans want to frame the disputed over the Keystone XL pipeline. But she does almost nothing to challenge that framing. Under the headline, “For GOP, Pipeline Is Central to Agenda,” Steinhauer explains: Republicans are framing Keystone as an urgent jobs and energy project at a […]
With the United States now years into a crippling economic downturn, and Europe facing a looming economic crisis, media have been covering the economy more than any other issue. The two most recent annual reports on U.S. media coverage from the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism (2009-10) conclude that “the No. 1 story of […]
At a time when millions of Americans are are experiencing massive unemployment, a painfully slow economic recovery, wage stagnation and the after-effects of the bursting of a multi-trillion dollar housing bubble, isn’t it time someone demanded that they suffer a little bit? Of course not, you might say. But that’s why you don’t work in […]
Niall Ferguson is undoubtedly an expert. As the bio on his Newsweek column points out, he’s “a professor of history at Harvard University. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.” His latest column (1/23/12) is about the need to sell the public […]
Today’s front page of USA Today: The paper adds that “Obama was putting politics ahead of jobs and the nation’s energy security by rejecting the pipeline now, Republicans and oil industry leaders said.” It closes with this: Business leaders and Republicans say approving the project now would create as many as 20,000 jobs for an […]
Remember last week’s uproar about the New York Times and factchecking? In today’s paper, we see a great example of how this works. Former Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd’s new job is as a lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America, which means he’s leading the charge in support of SOPA, the bill that big […]
There are two ways to approach being evenhanded: You can try to actually be evenhanded, which could mean that you find that one side is right and the other is wrong. Or you can strive for the appearance of being evenhanded, which means that you decide in advance that you’re going to find that there’s […]
George Will’s January 1 column in the Washington Post was a laundry list of familiar criticisms of progressives and Democrats—they worry too much about climate change, for instance. Another non-problem, in Will’s world, is student loan debt: Political logic suggests that this year Obama will try to rekindle the love of young voters with some […]
The failure of the Congressional “supercommittee” to come up with a $1.2 trillion, 10-year deficit reduction plan means that automatic “trigger” cuts might take place in discretionary spending—roughly half of which is supposed to come from the military budget. Corporate media have given extensive time to panicked warnings about the dangerous impact of military cuts, […]
When debate heated up in November over the Keystone XL pipeline—a 1,700-mile-long structure that would carry oil from Canada’s tar sands deposits to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast—reporters soon found themselves chasing the answer to a question: How many jobs would be lost if the pipeline didn’t happen? Wall Street Journal senior editor Mary […]
The Occupy movement has garnered, if not the respect, at least the acknowledgement of a corporate press corps inclined for any number of reasons to ignore it. Still, coverage is centered on the protesters themselves, without necessarily engaging their ideas or allowing those ideas to shape reporting. It’s entirely possible for media to say these […]
On Sunday (12/18/11), ABC‘s This Week presented an installment of what it’s calling “The Great American Debates.” What it really was, though, was a perfect example of how corporate media adopt right-wing assumptions when framing a discussion. In this case, it was a debate over Big Government. The show’s opening sounded like a Tea Party […]
Last night (12/15/11), MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes were impressed by a new Pew poll–flagged by Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent–showing that a vast majority of the public believes that corporations and the wealthy have too much power. The picture one gets from the poll is pretty dramatic: The question that seemed most […]
We know by now that Newt Gingrich thinks he’s smart. And we know there are plenty of people in the corporate media who believe the same thing. How do they show their love for the brainy Republican presidential candidate? Time‘s Joe Klein shows the way in this week’s issue (12/19/11) of the magazine. He doesn’t […]
Huffington Post reporter Jon Ward did what reporters should do when covering political campaign ads. He told readers, at the top of his story, that the new Mitt Romney ad was based on a lie: The 60-second Romney ad quoted Obama as saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” It […]
News that Newt Gingrich was receiving millions of dollars to advise Freddie Mac has to be a little unsettling for at least some conservative voters, who are accustomed to demonizing the government-sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for causing the housing bubble, and hence the recession. But it’s not just right-wing pundits like Bill […]
