FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Writing at the Columbia Journalism Review‘s website (10/17/08), Elinore Longobardi points out the pure absurdity of Newsweek‘s persistence in the role of economic cheerleader: In the October 20 cover story, Fareed Zakaria… explains the problem: Two decades of easy money and innovative financial products meant that virtually anyone could borrow any amount of money for […]
As a new anti-“big government” documentary named IOUSA gets largely uncritical treatment from various newspapers around the U.S., the Center for Economic and Policy Research provides a typically valuable service in the form of a new report in which Dean Baker and David Rosnick give “a minute-by-minute viewers guide of the film to highlight potentially […]
Continuing to put U.S. media to shame by giving voice to leading U.S. intellectuals not heard in their own country’s corporate news, Real News Network founder Paul Jay interviews (10/22/08) author of the immensely popular A People’s History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn. Even after expressing intense skepticism of third-party candidates’ hopes for […]
Blogger JayaPrakash Telangana has posted (Japes, 10/21/08) a Free Press Action Fund call to “make sure media help us spot and overcome national crises, instead of distracting us with celebrities and trivia.” Free Press‘s Martin Kaplan and Norman Lear ask us to “just thinkâ┚¬Ã‚¦”: If mainstream media spent as much time covering the events that […]
ABC‘s John Stossel is known for his far-fetched logic, but in his special last night he may have outdone himself. In John Stossel’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics (10/17/08), he shouted instructions to ice skaters through a bullhorn to demonstrate—well, it’s not clear what. Here’s how he previewed his experiment in an email to his […]
Economist Dean Baker takes issue (Beat the Press, 10/16/08) with the moment in Thursday’s presidential debate in which Senator McCain blamed the housing market meltdown on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac‘s lending practices. While Fannie and Freddie, as huge actors in the mortgage market, certainly contributed to the bubble, it is absurd to point to […]
FAIR associate Norman Solomon pens (Columbus Free Press, 10/13/08) a “Requiem for the Bailout Storyline”: More recent events should not be allowed to obscure the reality that the news media played a pivotal role in stampeding the country into a bailout that was unwise and unjust….
Under the headline “Big Media. Bad Idea,” Sophia Banay argues (Portfolio, 10/15/08) that–for anyone “not named Murdoch or Redstone–big media just isn’t working.” Banay uses the language heeded by her audience when writing that you can “say what you want about the benefits of synergies and size for big media companies; for their shareholders, the […]
Dean Baker explains (Beat the Press, 10/13/08) his fantastical headline “USA Today Thinks It’s Possible That Elvis Caused the Financial Meltdown”: “Well, if the Republicans blamed the financial crisis on Elvis Presley, USA Today would probably just write it up politely and then note that the Democrats disagree.” Baker says “that is exactly what the […]
Real News head Paul Jay shares his personal vision (10/12/08) of how it takes crises like the the current financial state to jar corporate media into allowing us to “hear… words like capitalism and socialism in the mainstream grammar”: There’s, like, all this–I always thought of Katrina as this moment in Twilight Zone. There’s a […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin101008 David Cay Johnston and Isabel MacDonald and Steve Rendall @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin101008.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The bailout story turns again as Congress passes the White House’s bailout bill. Will reporters give up questioning the plan entirely now that it has that holy grail of “bipartisan support”? We’ll hear from one journalist who’s […]
Reporting on a trend he’s seen “laid out almost daily on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, in the National Review, and on the campaign trail,” Slate‘s Daniel Gross quotes Neil Cavuto of the Fox Business Channel: “I don’t remember a clarion call that said: Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and […]
Recalling a Washington Post quote of Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Henry Paulson’s assertion to George W. Bush that “there is no Plan B” to choose over the $700 billion bank bailout, economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 10/7/08) notes that “it looks like the Fed has discovered a Plan B” after all
Fed up with “economic reporting [that] relies almost exclusively on experts who managed to overlook both the stock market bubble and the housing bubble,” Beat the Press blogger Dean Baker (10/6/08) writes that the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz “still misses some very fundamental points on the media’s reporting on the economy”: First, reporters should recognize […]
Brad Johnson presents another argument (Think Progress, 10/3/08) against the “liberal media bias” myth: “These tired claims ignore the reality that the right-wing agenda actually benefits the ‘mainstream media’”: The multinational corporations that run the mainstream media–GE (NBC), Time Warner (CNN), Walt Disney (ABC), News Corporation (FOX), and Viacom (CBS)–stand to benefit hugely under a […]
Writing on the Progressive Democrats of America website (10/6/08), media critic and FAIR associate Norman Solomon is wary of the fact that “poll numbers so far in October, combined with ample media hype, have fostered the belief that the economic crisis is close to dooming the McCain campaign.” Solomon warns that “any crystal ball that […]
David Swanson’s latest piece in OpEd News (10/1/08) chronicles the fight against corporate media that report on the economic crisis as if, Swanson paraphrases, “the stock market is the same thing as the economy”:
This article is part of FAIR’s study, “Smearcasting, How Islamophobes Spread Bigotry, Fear and Misinformation.” Visit the report’s special micro-site at www.smearcasting.com or click here to download the full report. The term “Islamofascism” came into common use after the September 2001 attacks as a favorite way for neoconservatives to describe the ideology of extremist and […]
Continuing to prove himself as tenacious as the Washington Post is doctrinaire, economist Dean Baker provides another example (9/28/08) of how the “Post editorial board occasionally just makes up numbers to advance its arguments”
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin092608 Earth Jane Melzer and Sarah Anderson @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin092608.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Lose your house, lose your vote? A report from a new investigative journalism outfit says that Michigan Republican Party officials are planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to challenge voters on Election Day—targeting a largely poor, African-American pool […]
