FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry’s new TV commercial is based on a lie. Will reporters say so? The ad starts with a Barack Obama quote: ”We’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades.” To which Perry responds: ”Can you believe that? That’s what our president thinks is wrong with […]
The public TV show Nightly Business Report has gone through some serious changes over the past year or so–sold by the public station that had produced it for years to a somewhat mysterious private company run by an entrepreneur whose been the subject of various controversies and lawsuits. The show’s been sold once again, and […]
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (11/9/11) went to India in order to appreciate how the grassroots movement to stamp out political corruption there is superior to Occupy Wall Street. Still, he sees a common thread: The world’s two biggest democracies, India and the United States, are going through remarkably similar bouts of introspection. Both […]
The November 1 broadcast of ABC World News couldn’t have been any clearer about what’s happening in Greece: Their pampered, early-retiring workforce is stealing from Americans. Anchor Diane Sawyer explained: If you were watching your stocks today, you saw a nosedive. The Dow down nearly 300 points, so, what changed? Well, blame it on the […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin110411 Costas Panayotakis and Nusrat Choudhury @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin110411.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: This is how ABC anchor Diane Sawyer explained the Greek crisis: “The Dow down nearly 300 points, so, what changed? Well, blame it on the country of Greece, long criticized for being undisciplined and now threatening American retirements.” With the EU […]
After FAIR’s recent action alert (10/27/11) concerning the PBS NewsHour‘s reports minimizing–and even celebrating–economic inequality, NewsHour correspondent Paul Solman posted a long response on the PBS website (10/31/11) that attempted to answer the criticism. Solman began by expressing his appreciation for the “avalanche” of feedback, “hostile though most of it has been.” He admits that […]
A New York Times story today (10/28/11) by Jennifer Steinhauer on the state of bipartisanship in Washington noted: Outside of a few recent flashes of light–the passage of three trade bills this month, and an agreement on patent reform–there have been no big bipartisan jobs initiatives in this Congress. The idea that trade deals with […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin102811 John Feffer and Heidi Garrett Peltier @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin102811.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: When Barack Obama ordered armed military advisors to central Africa to help regional officials fight the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army and its leader Joseph Kony, few journalists asked why or why now. The fact that the LRA is bad seemed […]
With protesters around the country speaking out against income inequality, public television’s flagship newscast made time on October 26 for the pro-inequality side to be heard, featuring a guest who invoked a phony Abraham Lincoln quote to make his case.
The New York Times has a fascinating new poll out today (10/26/11); too bad the paper doesn’t emphasize the most newsworthy findings. The headline is: New Poll Finds a Deep Distrust of Government That’s based on the poll’s finding that the public doesn’t have much faith in government. But paragraph four offers a more striking […]
Conservative writer/commentator David Frum—the man responsible for writing the Bush “axis of evil” speech—has been doing left/right debates for the public radio show Marketplace. Until now, that is. This week (Marketplace, 10/12/11), Frum came to the conclusion that while he’s still conservative, he doesn’t do a good job representing the right-wing position in that kind […]
An article in the new issue ofNewsweek (10/24/11)–“Obama’s Big Green Mess: How the White House lost its Eco-Mojo”–presents White House policy as a series of failures. It starts off with federal inspectors finding serious problems with various weatherization projects. That’s just the tip of the iceberg–from Solyndra to stimulus, things aren’t looking good. But writers […]
Media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests started out exactly as one might expect. There was little coverage at first (FAIR Action Alert, 9/23/11), and as it expanded, much of it consisted of snide dismissals of demonstrators” ignorance, hygiene and so on. But then something happened. Following incidents of police abuse, including the […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin101411 Arun Gupta and Jasmin Ramsey @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin101411.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Did the corporate media turn on the Occupy Wall Street protests? When the protests started, the media story was a familiar one—the press ignored them, then derided activists for being leaderless, bongo pounding know-nothings. But then something happened, and suddenly anti-Wall […]
I think people are genuinely surprised by the corporate media’s shift on Occupy Wall Street: Things went from apathy, scorn and derision to front-page news rather quickly. USA Today‘s editorial today (10/12/11) is headlined “Five Good Reasons Why Wall Street Breeds Protesters.” It has the usual caveats–“The protesters’ rhetoric against capitalism and ‘corporate greed’ is […]
NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory, interviewing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Sunday (10/10/11): GREGORY: What’s going on in the streets of Occupy Wall Street? EMANUEL: Yeah. GREGORY: Complaining about the unfairness, railing against Wall Street. The president has sympathized with those protesters in the street. Is demonizing Wall Street the way to create […]
Leave it to the New York Times (10/7/11) to find a guy collecting unemployment who opposes the extension of unemployment benefits. He’s “Dan Tolleson, a researcher and writer with a Ph.D. in politics…whose last good job was working for a group that aims to replace the income tax with a national sales tax.” But don’t […]
New York Times business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has been criticized for being too chummy with the Wall Street tycoons he’s supposed to be covering. Today he has a piece in the Times (10/4/11) about Occupy Wall Street–which he’s decided to check out because it’s beginning to make some CEOs nervous: I had gone down […]
CNN‘s newest show–OutFront, featuring Erin Burnett–did a “factcheck” of the protest in Lower Manhattan that was long on attitude and short on accuracy. If you’d like the network to take another look, see FAIR’s latest Action Alert. Please leave copies of your messages to CNN, or responses to the alert, in the comment thread below.
I checked out a post from the Web-based publication Capital (9/28/11) about media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protest because CJR (9/29/11) told me it was a “smart post” that “crunched the numbers” and showed “how there really is no media blackout.” I have to say I would have thought CJR would have higher […]
