FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The New York Times (9/16/10) points out in a write-up of its new poll : The economy and jobs are increasingly and overwhelmingly cited by Americans as the most important problems facing the country, while the deficit barely registers as a topic of concern when survey respondents were asked to volunteer their worries. Huh. The […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: As French protestors take to the streets against proposed austerity measures, the U.S. media have taken sides. Expressing scorn for spoiled French workers; and cheering the grown up, responsible attitudes of those, like French President Sarkozy who seek to cut promised retirement benefits. How are these same battles covered […]
After Hurricane Katrina, the airwaves were filled with media promises to pay attention to long-neglected stories about poverty and racism. As FAIR documented(Extra!, 9-10/07), that promise didn’t amount to much; three years of newscasts(coveringSeptember 2003 through October 2006) provided just 58 stories about poverty. On September 12, ABC World News devoted almost 100 words to […]
There’s a simple way of looking at the debate over the Bush tax cuts. The White House and most Democrats say they want to extend them for the vast majority of the population, but keep higher rates in place for families making over $250,000 a year. Republicans seem to know that “Keep Taxes Rates Low […]
One of the core debates about federal tax policy concerns the expiring Bush tax cuts. A September 8 “factcheck” segment on ABC World News did more to propagate myths than to set the record straight. The White House position is that the Bush tax cuts, which under current law expire in 2010, should be extended […]
Matt Bai has a piece in theNew York Times today (9/9/10) explaining how Barack Obama squandered an opportunity to make fundamental changes to the American economy. One claim in the piece jumps out; after explaining that large infrastructure projects–rail lines, broadband, etc.– are “things that only an active government could realistically do,” Bai claims: Getting […]
Barack Obama has long supported the idea of extending the “Bush” tax cuts for 98 percent of the population. The highest-earning 2 percent, meanwhile, will see their top tax rates go back up to where they were in the 1990s. The Washington Post has a story today (9/8/10)that more or less explains this fact. The […]
The New York Times‘ Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes today (8/31/10) about the possible steps Obama might take to bolster the economy: With voters angry about government spending, and economists divided about just what approach is the correct one, such aggressive steps are by now out of the question. “There’s a deep frustration among economists that […]
USA Today‘s lead story on August 10 was about the pay of public workers, a subject reporter Dennis Cauchon has complained about before. “Federal Workers Earning Double Their Private Counterparts,” the headline read, over a lead that reported that “federal employees’ average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn.” Well, […]
In his New York Times column on Monday (8/9/10), headlined “The Flimflam Man,” Paul Krugman took aim at Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, who has emerged as the GOP’s big thinker on budgets: One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past […]
Matthew Yglesias (8/3/10) has a good takedown of senators John McCain (R.-Ariz.) and Tom Coburn’s (R.-Ok.) list of supposedly wasteful stimulus projects that generated an “exclusive” on ABC‘s Good Morning America (8/3/10): Jon Chait observes that McCain and Coburn also seem to have decided that anything relating to animals is necessarily waste. Hence a small […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: As the corporate media would have it, the new Wall Street reform bill is the most “comprehensive” overhaul of financial regulation since the Great Depression, and a huge victory for President Obama who it is said squared off with Wall Street in order to deliver the “sweeping” reforms. We’ll […]
In his New York Times column today (7/19/10), Paul Krugman offers a prediction about the likely pundit response to the drubbing Democrats are expected to take in the November elections: What I expect…if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects will say that it was because Mr. Obama was too liberal—when […]
Noting that policies like the stimulus plan tend to poll pretty badly, New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes (7/16/10) that Obama says he has pursued such policies because they’re “the right thing to do for America.” To Stolberg, that sounds familiar: It is an argument that sounds eerily similar to the one Mr. […]
The fact that the Federal Reserve could be doing much more to stimulate the economy—but so far has chosen not to do so—is finally getting some prominent corporate media attention. The New York Times wrote today (7/15/10), referring to Fed chair Ben Bernanke: As Mr. Bernanke pointed out in a speech in 2002, when he […]
Reuters (7/14/10) has a report today on the efforts by senators Blanche Lincoln (D.-Arkansas) and Jon Kyl (R.-Arizona) to greatly reduce the amount wealthy estates owe in federal taxes. Under current law, after a one-year suspension, the federal estate tax rate will return to its pre-2001 level of 55 percent, with the first $1 million […]
Newsweek’s right-wing Latin American correspondent Mac Margolis (7/2/10) is once again playing games with statistics. After the obligatory attack on Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez as a “chest-thumping autocrat,” Margolis gets down to the business of praising his favorite Latin American country, Colombia, as a country that deserves “lead billing” among the “new stars of the emerging […]
Blogger Ben Somberg (7/3/10) notes that the New York Times is still telling readers that there isserious public concern about the budget deficit. This time the story is the debate within the Obama administration: Political advisers are channeling the widespread public anger at deficits while the economic team argues that the government should further spur […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: a special look at two issues that seem to bring out the worst in the corporate media. First up, the deficit. Worrying about the budget deficit is a corporate media staple, so President Obama’s deficit commission must appear a godsend. Early reports are that Social Security cuts, another media […]
Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress like to argue that public concern over federal budget deficits makes it impossible to pass a new round of job-creating stimulus spending. And corporate media like to echo these sentiments, despite there being little evidence that citizens are as concerned about these issues as inside-the-Beltway deficit hawks. In the […]
