FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
There are plenty of thoughtful pieces—Drew Westen’s in the New York Times over the weekend being the most recent one—that try to figure out what’s going on with Barack Obama. Then there’s Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen today (8/9/11), who begins by retelling a story about FDR: In her autobiography, Helen Gahagan Douglas recalled telling […]
Corporate media coverage of budget deficits and debt often turns to blaming Social Security and Medicare for being the real problem. NBC‘s Meet the Press host David Gregory is especially fond of passing off such misleading claims as facts. In a question to Republican Sen. John Thune, Gregory put it this way (7/31/11): Senator, what’s […]
There are specific patterns in corporate media coverage of political debates: Progressive ideas are generally marginalized. “Compromise” between the major parties is encouraged. Democrats should “move to the center,” which in practical terms actually means moving to the right. All of these tendencies have driven the discussion over the federal debt and the debt ceiling. […]
The speculation about whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry will jump into the Republican presidential race boils down to one word: Jobs. Perry’s state has been generating jobs at an impressive rate–which Perry likes to think is due to low taxes and lax regulations. Some of the coverage points to important caveats–the booming oil economy, for […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin071511 James Galbraith and John Nichols @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin071511.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The United States is hurtling toward fiscal catastrophe as the dramatic standoff persists between Barack Obama and Congressional Republicans on a deal to raise the debt ceiling… that’s the story anyway. How much of this is political theatre and what’s the […]
Conservatives don’t just complain loudly, endlessly and inaccurately about liberal media bias. They also train right-leaning journalists to make their way into the supposedly hostile terrain of Beltway media. And one of the most famous alums of a conservative media training program is now a major star at a network news outlet: ABC’s senior political […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin062411 Susan Saladoff and Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin062411.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin we’re talking about two new films which, while journalism is not their central subject, directly engage news media’s influence and real world impact as a critical part of the stories they tell. First up: You’ve heard the one […]
One of the most common criticisms of the PBS NewsHour is that it too often mimics the elite bias of the commercial media. A recent broadcast of the NewsHour (6/8/11) had two segments about the debate over the Afghan War–the first a news report covering the Senate nomination hearings for Ryan Crocker, Obama’s nominee to […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin061011 Harvey Wasserman and Andrew Fieldhouse @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin061011.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: After a lull in reporting about the Japanese nuclear disaster comes news that officials there are admitting that radiation releases were much larger than previously claimed– not a surprise to critics who saw those early claims as part of a government/corporate/media […]
“Fed Wants Priority Put on Deficit” was the New York Times‘ headline over Binyamin Appelbaum’s June 8 story on the front page of the business section. Summarizing a speech Fed chair Ben Bernanke gave the day before, Appelbaum wrote, “He said that growth remained slow and uneven, but he made no mention of the possibility […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes (6/7/11): I once worked for an editor who banned the word “oxymoron.” I don’t know why. It’s a good word, meaning a contradiction in terms. The dictionary offers some examples: “wise fool” and “legal murder.” I would like to cite another: Barack Obama. He sends contradictory messages. That sounds […]
Thanks to the corporate media, you probably know all about Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan. After he unveiled his proposal to slash Medicare funding and cut taxes for the wealthy–all in the name of fiscal discipline–he was interviewed on all the network Sunday morning shows: NBC‘s Meet the Press (4/10/11), Face the Nation on […]
When protests against attempts to roll back state workers’ benefits swept across the nation in February and March, local and national media coverage largely portrayed it as the inevitable collision of generous worker benefits and tight economic times. The Columbus Dispatch (2/20/11), for example, reported that “the protests at the Ohio and Wisconsin capitols portend […]
Knight-Ridder’s Washington bureau distinguished itself in the run-up to the Iraq War by challenging Bush administration claims with fact-driven reporting (Extra!, 3-4/06). Now known as McClatchy, the bureau is still challenging dominant storylines. The idea that tax cuts spur economic growth goes unquestioned in much budget reporting. But McClatchy’s Tony Pugh (3/28/11) documented how questionable […]
The budget proposal released on April 5 by Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wisc.) includes tax cuts for the wealthy, tax hikes for the middle class, drastic cuts in social spending and a radical restructuring of Medicare that would shift most of the cost of healthcare to seniors. Its dubious claims of deficit reduction rely on fatally […]
The New York Times (5/25/11) is reporting, perhaps accurately, that Newt Gingrich may have trouble living down his $500,000 credit line at Tiffany’s. But this sentence by Sheryl Gay Stolberg is so Timesian: The way some voters out in the rest of America might see it, he’s a guy who paid more for jewelry than […]
The New York Times had a good editorial on May 20 headlined”Gas Prices and Political Pandering.” The paper slammed Republican rhetoric about domestic production and gas prices: [Sen. Mitch] McConnell said his bill would bring relief at the pump by raising domestic output. That is fiction. Production will take years to come online and even […]
Calling for more drilling for domestic oil to do something about rising gas prices makes little sense. This should be a simple matter of economics or math–there’s not enough oil to recover from U.S. territory to affect global supply, and since oil is a commodity traded on a global market, only an increase in the […]
NBC Nightly News on Saturday (4/29/11) had a pretty standard report on the politics of gas prices: Republicans blame Obama, and some Democrats are talking up the idea of raising taxes on oil companies. “Democrats call the profits excessive, and portray Republicans as wedded to oil interests,” correspondent Mike Viqueira explained. Then NBC introduced an […]
Working in a time-honored corporate media genre (Extra!, 9-10/97, 9-10/05, 7/10), the Washington Post‘s Edward Cody (4/24/11) tells us that Europe just can’t afford its generous social programs: From blanket health insurance to long vacations and early retirement, the cozy social benefits that have been a way of life in Western Europe since World War […]
