FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Goldman Sachs, Wall Street profiteering and… vampire squids. Wait, what was that last one? Journalist Matt Taibbi wrote a long takedown of the venerable Wall Street firm in Rolling Stone. Business journalists pronounced themselves mostly unimpressed with Taibbi’s analysis, and troubled by his language—like calling the company ‘a great […]
Economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/9/09) sees the Washington Post as simply “keeping with its strict editorial policy of only letting others tell readers what ‘populists’ think,” when publishing its August 9 “front-page article on setting executive compensation at banks receiving bailout money”—one which “never presented the views of an actual populist.” Instead, Baker […]
Partisan blogger Nick (8/6/09) has republished a new email campaign from American Rights at Work that reviews how, “just before Bear Stearns went under, CNBC‘s Jim Cramer had strong advice for his Mad Money viewers: buy Bear Stearns stock, and fast!” Of course, “then the company imploded and thousands of ordinary people saw their retirement […]
A Tiny Revolution blogger Bernard Chazelle (8/2/09) thinks it’s possible that “people fail to appreciate how tough it is to run the government.” As evidence, he offers “two questions Treasury officials and politicians will soon have to answer”: Should a Connecticut trader receive $100 million in executive pay from a bank that would be dead […]
Presenting yet another example of corporate media failure to grasp the concept of “Adjusted for Inflation,” Kevin Drum (MotherJones.com, 7/26/09) has written up a Washington Post piece in which “David Brown says that as treatment for heart attacks has gotten better, it’s also gotten more expensive”: “Over the same period, the charges for treating a […]
The handclasp between U.S. President Barack Obama and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez at the Summit of the Americas grabbed U.S. media attention in April. But at the summit itself, there was a more pressing issue: the U.S.’s nearly 50-year-old embargo against Cuba. Before the meeting, Obama had made some moves to ease its impact, including […]
Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom—best known for his bestseller Tuesdays With Morrie—had a July 25 column that criticized the Obama healthcare reform with an argument that suggested an unfamiliarity with how the U.S. tax system works: In explaining why it was OK to sock a new 5.4 percent tax on the highest earners in […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: “Obama May Have To Wait for Health Reform” explained one July 22 headline. Leave it to corporate media to take a life-and-death issue for millions of Americans and reduce it to an item on a president’s wish list. But if they’re going to mainly cover healthcare policy as inside […]
Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/21/09) has synopsized the latest fiasco of a David Brooks column under the headline “David Brooks Wanted Tax Increases to Pay for Stimulus”–since, Baker writes, “that is presumably the implication of his complaint that the Democrats paid for the stimulus package ‘with borrowed money.’” Predictably, “this is not the only […]
Stating quite succinctly how “there is an ongoing issue about whether global warming deniers should be treated seriously by the media, given that they have about as much scientific support for their position as the flat-Earth crew,” economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/11/09) notes how the July 11 “New York Times goes them one […]
Viewing “two excellent pieces by the American News Project about the Fed’s astonishing actions during the current meltdown,” A Tiny Revolution‘s Jonathan Schwarz (7/12/09) confirms that “ANP does great work, and I commend them for taking on this subject–especially since it’s covered nowhere else, including on progressive blurms.” But he’s nonetheless reminded of a June […]
A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (7/9/09) has posted a reminder that “back in March Phillip Swagel, who’d been assistant treasury secretary under Hank Paulson, wrote a long article about the TARP bailout called ‘The Financial Crisis: An Inside View.’” Thinking that maybe “it would be news if Swagel had stated that Paulson, Bernanke and […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Some 25 million Americans, nearly 9 percent of the population–rely on food pantries. But with rare exceptions, and despite its devastating impact, big media just don’t seem to find a reportable story in chronic hunger. A new book hopes to make the issue more visible, by actually talking to […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Coverage of the Honduran coup ousting president Manuel Zelaya has often included the claim that the coup was prompted by Zelaya’s move to change the constitution, so that he could stay in power. The fact that this central claim is untrue shows how confusing that coverage can be. We’ll […]
Reacting to media noise over the economic costs of the Waxman-Markey environmental bill currently before the U.S. Congress, Dean Baker (ZNet, 7/1/09) looks to the damages of a different annual spending bill, this one perpetually unexamined in corporate news: Global Insight projected that after 20 years of higher defense spending, annual car sales would be […]
During an ABC Nightline interview on May 21, 2003, host Ted Koppel suggested that his guest was engaging in “class warfare” by arguing that the wealthy should pay increased taxes. While the exchange was not unusual—Koppel’s use of the term “class war” to characterize bottom-up or populist economic rhetoric is the norm—what was unusual was […]
Posting on Canada’s Centre for Research on Globalization website (6/29/09), economic historian Michael Hudson notices that “Happy-face media reporting of economic news is providing the usual upbeat spin on Friday’s debt-deflation statistics. The Commerce Departmentâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) for May show that U.S. ‘savings’ are now absorbing 6.9 percent of income”: I […]
Tying the urgent present-day topic of economic reporting in with the most pressing global emergency of climate change, Dean Baker has posted at his Beat the Press blog (6/29/09) on “What Does ‘Free Trade’ Have to Do With Taxing Greenhouse Gas Emissions?”: That is the question that the New York Times should have been asking […]
Activist David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 6/24/09) has some problems with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s and Congressmember Tom Perriello’s recent visit “generating a story and big color photo on page 1 of the Charlottesville Daily Progress” under the headline “In UVa Visit, Democrats Call Deficit Reckless“: The newspaper reported on Congressman Perriello warning that he could […]
Amanda Terkel of Think Progress (6/18/09) has posted video and transcript of an MSNBC segment in which Joe Scarborough asked CNBC‘s Jim Cramer about “a stunning poll the New York Times has this morning suggesting that Americans are more concerned about deficits than stimulus”: Cramer claimed that Americans aren’t buying into healthcare reform right now […]
