FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Regular Huffington Post media critic Marty Kaplan finds something especially “discomfiting” (Jewish Journal, 2/16/09) about recent stimulus bill coverage and “what it says about the role that the media have carved out for themselves in American public life”: If the job of the press were to help the public understand what’s really important, and to […]
There’s been a corporate media trope lately that the stimulus bill, despite Barack Obama’s assurances, contains “pork.” It’s not always clear what “pork” means, but the Washington Post today (2/13/09) had an example of the genre–headlined “Despite Pledges, Stimulus Has Some Pork”–that opens with a definition of what it means by the term. Unfortunately, it’s […]
Media Matters writer Eric H. Hananok notices (2/10/09) something fishy about an airing of the Fox News show Happening Now in which host Jon Scott introduced an overview of the government stimulus bill’s development thus: “We thought we’d take a look back at the bill, how it was born, and how it grew, and grew, […]
A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (2/8/09) quotes from yet another “Time magazine article about Larry Summers and how incredibly brilliant he is”: Perhaps as early as March, they’ll launch their biggest lift with the beginnings of a plan to reform Social Security and Medicare, the two entitlement programs that, even before the economy collapsed, […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin021309 Lori Wallach and Dan Beeton @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin021309.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The debate over the White House-backed economic stimulus package has featured all kinds of media misdeeds—an overreliance on Republican rejectionists and an absence of actual economists talking about the plan, just for starters. Pundits and editorial writers have warned us about […]
Writing that Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein’s tough questioning of President Obama was a healthy “confrontational question,” Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly‘s Political Animal blog thinks that (2/10/09) “more importantly, as Ezra [Klein at the American Prospect] noted, it was ‘confrontational from the left rather than from the center.’” Benen then looks at stimulus […]
Sometimes it’s really baffling that Thomas Friedman is considered one of our nation’s most important thinkers on political and economic matters. Here he is today (2/11/09) channeling what “non-Americans” have to say: Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing […]
Today’s lead New York Times story (2/1/09)–subheaded in the print edition “Scant Details, and Wall Street Reacts With a 4.6 Percent Plunge”–is a classic example of the fallacy of treating stock market prices as a kind of opinion poll. Reporters Stephen Labaton and Edmund L. Andrews wrote: “The initial assessment of the plan from the […]
Media Matters‘ Jamison Foser (2/6/09) has “one fact that should be made clear in every news report about the stimulus package working its way through Congress, it is this: Government spending is stimulative“–and Foser provides evidence that, “unfortunately, many of the reporters who have shaped the stimulus debate don’t seem to understand that.” After quoting […]
“Though seemingly forgotten by most TV talking heads,” it’s still fresh in Robert Parry’s mind (Consortium News, 2/9/09) how “it was only three years ago, when the Republicans had control of both the White House and Congress—and ‘filibuster‘ was a dirty word”: It was usually coupled with “obstructionist” amid demands that any of George W. […]
Chronicling how “media continue to do more to misinform the public than to inform them” about the current economic crisis, Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 2/8/09) spots “the absolute worst in journalistic practices” when “a front-page Washington Post article explains the Obama administration’s policy by telling readers that the ‘approach reflects Treasury Secretary Timothy F. […]
The folks at Think Progress recently brought us “a report showing that, in the debate over the House economic recovery bill on the five cable news networks, Republican members of Congress outnumbered their Democratic counterparts by a ratio of 2 to 1.” Now that the legislation “passed the House last week with zero Republican votes, […]
There’s a trope that you often see in corporate media discussions of the stimulus plan: Yeah, but do you really want to spend money on that? It may have started with the misrepresented contraceptive plan—which seemed to be grounded in a traditional media fascination/embarrassment at anything involving sex—but now it’s moved on to anything that…well, […]
As the BBC continues to come under fire for refusing to carry an aid appeal for Gaza, the U.S. media watch group FAIR is challenging the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for making false and biased claims after a campaign by groups that advocate for uncritical coverage of Israel. The campaign was launched in response to CBC’s […]
The roundtable on Sunday’s Meet the Press (2/1/09) sure didn’t look promising: Republican flat tax enthusiast Steve Forbes, former McCain economic adviser Mark Zandi and CNBC reporter Erin Burnett. It was Burnett, though, who delivered a head-scratching defense of the$18 billion bonuses recently doled out at Wall Street firms (many of which are still standing […]
Many journalists and pundits have reached one very early verdict about the Obama White House: The new president has not lived up to his campaign rhetoric when it comes to reaching out to Republican lawmakers. The evidence? Not a single Republican voted in favor of the White House-backed economic stimulus bill. Given the concessions made […]
Sometimes iconoclastic Washington pundit E. J. Dionne Jr. comes up with a winner (Washington Post, 2/2/09) in this description of the crucial media role in political chicanery on the national level: If achieving bipartisanship takes priority over the actual content of policy, Republicans are handed a powerful weapon. In theory, they can keep moving the […]
Jonathan Schwarz gives his answer (A Tiny Revolution, 2/1/09) to Political Animal blogger Steve Benen’s question of “why the [Washington] Post‘s op-ed editors feel compelled to publish the same misguided piece from [Amity] Shlaes, making the same misguided argument every month or so”: “Shlaes is employed by the Council on Foreign Relations to lie about […]
If corporate media really cared about workers rights, there probably would have been more than zero stories on those rights on the nightly broadcast news in the last year. And labor representatives would likely have provided more than the not quite 0.2 percent of nightly news sources found in a recent survey (Extra!, 5-6/02). Yet […]
Following up on the well-documented phenomenon wherein corporate news outlets justify their mode of getting “conservatives to dominate their shows, booking them as guests far more often than progressives” by using “the rationale… that Republicans were ‘in power,’” ThinkProgress (1/28/09) now shows that “it appears that old habits die hard.” Even with a Democratic president […]
