FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
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 […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin042211 Amanda Marcotte and Dave Lindorff @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin042211.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The budget battle over Planned Parenthood’s federal funding produced more than the average dose of media misinformation. And clues, mostly missed by the media about the GOP’s actual agenda. We’ll talk with journalist and blogger Amanda Marcotte about Planned Parenthood. Also […]
Renee “McMontagne” brought NPR listeners another McDonald’s PR story yesterday morning. On April 5, Montange and her Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep uncritically previewed McDonald’s big PR campaign revolving around a one-day hiring blitz to “recast its jobs not as dead-end work, but in ads starring its happy employees as desirable employment” (FAIR Blog, 4/6/11). […]
Newsweek‘s cover story this week is on the plight of college-educated white men aged 35-64. The magazine laments that “this hitherto privileged demo isn’t just on its knees, it’s flat on on its face.” The subhead of the piece asks, “Can manhood survive the lost decade?” Now, I have much sympathy for all who are […]
The budget proposal released last week by Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wisc.) includes tax cuts for the wealthy, tax hikes for the middle class, drastic cuts in 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 flawed assumptions […]
This New York Times piece by Jeff Zeleny on the budget deal was actually headlined: President Adopts a Measured Course to Recapture the Middle Zeleny explained: President Obama opened the week by calling on Democrats to embrace his re-election campaign. He closed it by praising Republicans for forging a compromise to cut spending this year […]
In coverage of the budget negotiations in Washington, which have largely revolved around how much money will be cut from the federal budget, it’s rarely acknowledged that the standard economic assumption is that reducing government spending at a time of diminished economic activity will destroy jobs. As a rule of thumb, every $1 billion in […]
The uncritical coverage of Paul Ryan’s budget plan continues. In the new issue of Time magazine, Michael Crowley and Jay Newton-Small tell us that Ryan is “the new face of federal frugality”: Just 41 years old, with jet black hair and a touch of Eagle Scout to him, the House Budget Committee chairman unveiled an […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin040811 Harold Meyerson and Lizzy Ratner @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin040811.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin:. Republican Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan unveiled his party’s budget plan this week. Media consumers learned that Ryan is gutsy, that he’s serious as a heart attack, that the plan is bold and sweeping… but what would it mean for peoples’ […]
Dean Baker’s Beat the Press is the best Early Warning Media Mythbuster. It’s simple: You read it every morning before you read the papers (he is up before you are, trust me) and you’re well prepared to deal with the economic nonsense you’ll be subjected to. Today (4/6/11) he proposes this headline for stories about […]
Corporate media’s preference for”centrism” canoftentranslate intoreporting that casts two sides of a debate as equally belligerent or unwilling to compromise. ABC reporter Jonathan Karl‘s report yesterday on This Week (4/3/11) offers a perfect example of the absurdity of this worldview. His focuses was on the battle over the federal budget. On one side are Tea […]
ABC World News’ five-part “Made in America” series (2/28-3/4/11) purported not so much to explore as to answer the question of how to create jobs for unemployed Americans, by exhorting those same Americans to buy more U.S.-manufactured products. Not just any jobs, but “America’s manufacturing workforce, our true grit,” contended anchor Diane Sawyer (2/17/11). And […]
The Wisconsin story, we were often told, comes down to numbers: a giant multi-billion dollar budget deficit and a Republican governor trying to fix it. But does it add up? Careful readers may have been confused by much of the reporting on the scale of the problem in Wisconsin. The current deficit was $30 million, […]
Bruce Springsteen occasionally writes a letter to the editor of his local paper, the Asbury Park Press. Yesterday (3/30/11) the Press published a letter from the musician congratulating the paper for some trenchant poverty coverage, that in his view was the exception. As FAIR’s work has shown, Springsteen is on to something. Here’s the full […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin030411 Chuck Collins and Laura Flanders @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin030411.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: As politicians of both parties and pundits of various ideological stripes discuss what services and rights need to be cut and stripped from working people, the subject of raising taxes seem almost taboo in corporate media discussions. Not so here. We’ll […]
Today the New York Times reports its new poll (3/1/11): As labor battles erupt in state capitals around the nation, a majority of Americans say they oppose efforts to weaken the collective bargaining rights of public employee unions and are also against cutting the pay or benefits of public workers to reduce state budget deficits, […]
The GOP took control of Congress by positioning themselves, with the help of corporate media, as the party of fiscal responsibility. As the press corps chastised Democrats for failing to get serious about the deficit (Extra!, 1/11)—ignoring economists’ warnings that running a deficit is necessary to recover from a recession—Republican policies past and present that […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin022511 Laura Dresser and Dean Baker @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin022511.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s move to strip collective bargaining rights from state workers, because he says he need to close his state’s looming $3.6 billion budget deficit, is being resisted in the streets of Madison, but not so much in the […]
As Josh Marshall noted recently, one of the assumptions in the media discussion about Wisconsin is that Republican politicians are playing on public outrage over the perks given to public workers. That assumption took a hit after a new Gallup Poll, reported on the front page of USA Today, found this: Americans strongly oppose laws […]
