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FAIR

FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.

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Articles about: Economy
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January 8, 2010
Sam Husseini on Gaza Freedom March, Dean Baker on WaPo & Fiscal Times

Sam Husseini on Gaza Freedom March, Dean Baker on WaPo & Fiscal Times

[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin010810 Sam Husseini and Dean Baker @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin010810.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: It had the elements of a nightly news story: Protestors, including some Americans, being abused by officials in an Arab country. But this story was a non-starter with U.S. media. We’ll talk to Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy, […]

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November 23, 2009

For Parade Magazine, the Middle Class Starts at 100K

Claiming that “something needs to be done–and fast” to save Social Security, Parade magazine’s Gary Weiss (11/22/09) suggests a downside to the idea of raising the ceiling on taxed income, so that income above the current $106,800 would be subject to the Social Security tax: “Raising the cap is popular among Social Security reformers but […]

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November 23, 2009

NYT Non-News Story Says It’s Time to Tighten Belts

The New York Times (11/23/09) has an editorial on its front page today disguised as a news story. Appearing under the headline “Federal Government Faces Balloon in Debt Payments,” Times business reporter Edmund Andrews makes an impassioned plea for the neo-Hooverist economics popular in corporate media: Claiming that “the government faces a payment shock similar […]

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November 23, 2009

David Broder’s (Selective) Deficit Worries

Washington Post columnist David Broder rounds up some “non-partisan” budget experts– one of whom, oddly enough, was John McCain’s Social Security adviser during his 2000 campaign — to agree with him that the Democrats’ healthcare bills are too expensive. He closes with this: The challenge to Congress — and to Obama — remains the same: […]

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November 6, 2009

David Brooks’ Special Suburbanites

In his New York Times column, David Brooks cheers the rise of suburban independent voters in this week’s midterms elections, crediting them with Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. Brooks has made a career out of singing the praises of suburban Americans, all the while suggesting that they are somewhat ignored. While liberals and […]

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November 6, 2009

Bill O’Reilly and Cuban-Style Tax Rates

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, commenting on a tax increase in California: That could happen on the federal level. Already Nancy Pelosi and her far-left crew want to raise the top federal tax rate to 45 percent. That’s not capitalism. That’s Fidel Castro stuff, confiscating wages that people honestly earn. Setting aside the truth of […]

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November 6, 2009

The Election Lesson: Hoover Was Right!

The Washington Post reported (11/5/09) that some Democrats are “questioning whether they should emphasize job creation over some of the more ambitious items on the president’s agenda.” A couple paragraphs later, reporters Michael Shear and Paul Kane elaborate: Moderate and conservative Democrats took a clear signal from Tuesday’s voting, warning that the results prove that […]

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November 6, 2009
Greg Gordon on Goldman Sachs, Phyllis Bennis on Israel/Palestine

Greg Gordon on Goldman Sachs, Phyllis Bennis on Israel/Palestine

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: A new investigative series by McClatchy newspapers’ Greg Gordon reveals that in 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs sold more than $40 billion in securities backed by risky home mortgages, “but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the […]

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November 1, 2009

Hard Times for the Overclass

It was Finley Peter Dunne who said that the job of newspapers was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But the other job of newspapers, as we all know, is to bring in advertisers—who want to reach a big-spending demographic. So what’s a paper to do in this current economic recession? Simply redefine […]

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October 9, 2009
Cyrus Safdari on Iran, Nomi Prins on bailouts

Cyrus Safdari on Iran, Nomi Prins on bailouts

[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin100909 Cyrus Safdari and Nomi Prins @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin100909.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The story of Iran’s nuclear program certainly isn’t going away; glance at the newsstands this week and you might see the Newsweek cover story ‘After Iran Gets the Bomb.’ And a leaked report suggesting Iran is indeed pursuing nuclear weapons made […]

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September 20, 2009

More ‘News’ from WaPo’s ‘Exciting Alternate Universe’

Under the headline “Washington Post Publishes More Information About Exciting Alternate Universe,” A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (9/13/09) lets us know that, while “lots of banks had to get a bailout from the federal government,” do “you know who didn’t? The ultra-smart guys at BlackRock investment management, that’s who”–at least according to the September […]

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September 16, 2009

Lauding ‘Those Who Chose to Look’ at Economic Crisis

By now it’s old news to any reasonably critical observer that corporate outlets’ “business reporters failed to see the crisis in the mortgage and credit markets as it brewed and bubbled,” as former City Limits editor Alyssa Katz puts it (CJR.org, 9/14/09), but Katz also gives props to others who noticed how “evidence of its […]

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September 7, 2009

WaPo Alarmed: Japan Health Insurance Actually Insures

A September 7 Washington Post report on Japanese healthcare claims that “more than one-third of the workers’ premiums are used to transfer wealth from the young, healthy and rich to the old, unhealthy and poor.” Which Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 9/7/09) understatedly calls “a striking statement”: Fire insurance transfers wealth from people who don’t […]

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September 4, 2009
Jordan Flaherty on Katrina anniversary, Sarah Anderson on executive pay

Jordan Flaherty on Katrina anniversary, Sarah Anderson on executive pay

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media promised to pay more attention to poverty and race after the Gulf Coast’s Katrina disasters in 2005, and for a short time they did a little more reporting. But where was the followup on this year’s August anniversary, when papers like the Washington Post and L.A. Times, […]

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September 1, 2009

Legal Transparency Another Victim of Ailing MSM

Adam Liptak of the New York Times (8/31/09) says that we can thank Riverside, California’s Press-Enterprise for having “fought ferociously” in multiple Supreme Court battles ensuring “the press and the public have nearly an absolute constitutional right to attend jury selection in criminal cases.” According to Liptak, “news organizations used to consider those kinds of […]

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September 1, 2009
The Deficit Distraction

The Deficit Distraction

Parroting the Republican Party, corporate media have recently devoted much energy to deploring the federal deficit and chastising President Barack Obama for not focusing enough on balancing the budget. Very soon, media warn, either spending must be cut or taxes will need to be raised across the board—an argument that rests on the assumption that […]

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August 24, 2009

WaPo Pundit: Mass Transit Good for Others, Not U.S.

“Robert Samuelson Doesn’t Like Trains” is what Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/24/09) takes to be “the unifying theme from his column today, since his arguments against high-speed rail do not make a lot of sense.” In his August 24 broadside against what he dubs Barack Obama’s “Rail Boondoggle,” Samuelson trots out the tired argument […]

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