FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The cover of Newsweek (4/26/10) proclaims: “Don’t Mess With Texas: What Governor Rick Perry’s Hard-Right Creed Tells Us About America.” I can’t say I learned much about America, but I guess I learned something about Newsweek: They really like Rick Perry. The story, by Evan Thomas and Arian Campo-Flores, beginswith the observation, “The myth of […]
Andrew Tyndall makes a good point about how the network newcasts covered the Upper Big Branch mining disaster (flagged by Liz Cox Barrettat CJR): Not once, in all five days of coverage, did a single reporter mention the organization that has worked hardest over the decades to make sure that mining management does not cut […]
The New York Times’ Jackie Calmes has a report today (4/15/10) about the brewing fight over the Bush tax cuts, which were passed for limited time period and will phase out if Congress does not pass legislation to extend them. The Obama White House will ask lawmakers to renew most of the tax cuts, but […]
Last week the Drudge Report flagged an Associated Press report (4/5/10) by Stephen Ohlemacher with the headline: “Rob Thy Neighbor: Half of American Households Pay No Fed Income Tax.” The piece in questionsaid more or less the same, making it a popular item for right-wing pundits eager to pounce on tax freeloaders. But the AP […]
Fox News host Glenn Beck (4/13/10) came out against Social Security yesterday: Have you ever wondered why we even have Social Security? It’s not an American idea. It’s first from Germany in the late 1800s. Hmmm, lets see, who else was prominent in Germany at that time…Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche. This is where the first […]
The Washington Post (4/8/10) continues its crusade against Social Security (Action Alert, 1/6/10; FAIR Blog, 5/15/09, 5/13/09, 4/1/09) in a front-page news story by Neil Irwin and Lori Montgomery: Social Security is already draining resources from the broader federal budget, as spending on benefits has risen above this year’s Social Security tax collections. While that […]
Right-wing columnist Jonah Goldberg leads his column today (USA Today, 4/6/10): Congratulations! This is your last week working for the man–at least for this year. The Tax Foundation calculates that Tax Freedom Day for 2010 is April 9, which means that by Friday, Americans will have spent nearly 100 days working just to pay their […]
The role of George W. Bush’s tax cuts in the current federal deficit is tremendous. Their role in corporate media’s current round of deficit obsession, however, is tenuous at best. Sometimes acknowledged in editorials or op-eds, the cuts generally only make it into news reports as assertions from the White House or Democrats, rather than […]
Implicit in much coverage of the offshore drilling debate is that such oil has the potential to lower gasoline prices. The L.A. Times‘ report (3/30/10) on the Obama administration’s new offshore drilling plan provided this context: The announcement will come in the run-up to summer driving season, as gasoline prices have begun a national march […]
Actual Washington Post headline today (3/11/10): Rise in Washington Area Unemployment Seen as Good Sign for Economy’s Recovery Reporter V. Dion Hayes tries to explain: Rising unemployment as a positive sign may sound counterintuitive, but economists explain it this way: The increase suggests that long-term unemployed people in the D.C. area who had given up […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin030510 Mary Bottari and Raed Jarrar @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin030510.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: A recent NBC–Wall Street Journal poll showed 74 percent of Americans believed not enough had been done to regulate the banking industry. But is the legislation the Senate is now considering anything like what those people had in mind? We’ll get […]
In a column headlined “A Word From the Wise” (3/3/10), New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lets us know what Intel CEO Paul Otellini thinks is wrong with the U.S. economy. And there’s a certain theme that runs through his critique: “The things that are not conducive to investments here are [corporate] taxes and capital […]
Yesterday Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times (2/18/10) turned in a piece on the one-year anniversary of the stimulus plan—a favorite target of Republican lawmakers (when they’re not happily enjoying the federal funds in their states and/or districts, that is). The piece tells us that there’s a rather bitter partisan dispute over the […]
The fact that Paul Krugman writes columns for the New York Times means that the paper’s readers are occasionally treated to a good media criticism—like today (2/5/10). He writes: These days it’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a news program without encountering stern warnings about the federal budget deficit. The deficit […]
From CNN‘s American Morning (2/1/10), an interview by anchor Kiran Chetry with White HouseOMB director Peter Orszag: CHETRY: You also talk about letting taxes expire for families that make over $250,000. Some would argue that in some parts of the country that is middle class. ORSZAG: Well, I guess it’s not the parts of the […]
David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist who speaks for the little guy who eats at the Applebee’s salad bar, has figured out (1/29/10) what Barack Obama ought to do: Force the country to accept common sacrifice. This is the issue that unlocks everything else…. Establish your credibility and offer to raise taxes on […]
AP‘s story (1/28/10) on Ben Bernanke’s reconfirmation as chair of the Federal Reserve states plainly what is more usually the unstated assumption in corporate media coverage of the Fed: The battle over Bernanke’s confirmation has been a test of central bank independence, a crucial element if the Fed is to carry out unpopular but economically […]
AP‘s Calvin Woodward, who has the standing assignment of “factchecking” political speeches, continues to be an embarrassment to genuine factcheckers everywhere–substituting his own weird value judgments, semantic games and crystal-ball gazing for genuine examination of facts (FAIR Blog, 10/30/08, 2/25/09, 4/30/09). In his post–State of the Union effort (1/27/10), he singles out Barack Obama’s call […]
Time‘s Joe Klein wrote on his magazine’s Swampland blog (1/25/10) that the American public doesn’t understand that the economy benefited from the Obama administration’s stimulus efforts. So far, so good–it’s true that economists generally feel that the stimulus bill had some impact in curbing unemployment, saving about 1.2 million jobs, according to one survey of […]
The New York Times is one of the most effective tools for limiting discussion in the U.S. political system. Falsely perceived as a left-leaning outlet, it has the power to make the most reasonable proposals seem ultra-radical by placing them beyond the pale. Take yesterday’s review by Times book critic Michiko Kakutani (1/19/10) of progressive […]
