FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“Small businesses understand very well that workers are also consumers. If there’s not enough money in the wage base of the economy, of people that they are hoping will come in and buy their goods and services, they feel it every day. “
“When there are issues that are harming communities of color, if you look at where the money’s coming from…right at the head of the pack you always have Wells Fargo. Racism isn’t just a side effect of what Wells Fargo does; it’s part and parcel of what it does.”
Activists are using the Wells Fargo scandal to call attention to a range of other problems at the bank—problems not addressed by a couple of top executives giving back some of their golden parachutes.
It is difficult to share the concern of Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor, that we will see increasingly dishonest public debates. Hiatt and his team at the editorial page have no qualms at all about making up nonsense when pushing their positions.
The problem with the account by New York Times Washington correspondent Binyamin Appelbaum is that the Fed is doing exactly what Trump, throughout the 2016 campaign, repeatedly demanded that it do.
In “How to Build an Autocracy,” David Frum leaves out the first step, which is to create an oligarchy that chooses to serve an economic elite rather than improving the lives of the majority–leaving the public ready to listen to a demagogue who promises to look out for them.
The Washington Post and New York Times attribute the rise in support for the right to people losing from globalization. In fact, people are suffering because of the insistence of the European Union that its members pursue austerity policies.
A CNN segment presents the very definition of corporate media diversity: the entire spectrum of opinion, from GE to GM.
In the wake of a disastrous Election Day, does the Democratic Party need to present economic policies that have more to offer the majority of voters? Don’t bother, argues New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
The Washington Post editorial page decided to lecture readers on the meaning of progressivism. The villains are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who, it tells us, “are embracing principles that are not genuinely progressive.”
“When there’s not enough demand in the economy, the government absolutely has the responsibility to run large deficits, because it has to make up for the shortfall in demand elsewhere.”
After more than a half century of bloody conflict that saw more than 200,000 mostly poor civilians killed, Colombia has a chance at a peace accord between the government and the FARC, the region’s oldest insurgent movement.
“This is not the first time this has happened. This is absolutely serial criminality from the largest, most elite financial institutions in America.”
You wouldn’t know it from corporate press, but what may have been the largest prison labor strike in the country’s history happened September 9. This country is supposedly taking a bipartisan “fresh look” at mass incarceration; so what does elite media’s collective yawn say about their actual interest in what happens to people once they are behind bars?
If Bloomberg were interested in views other than those of the financial industry, it might have found some people who supported a financial transaction tax to provide comments for its article. Or it might have tried some basic arithmetic itself.
Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, was given prime space on the New York Times’ op-ed page to declare that his bank was doing something about “wage stagnation” and “income inequality” by “giving thousands of employees a raise.”
A New York Times column by Phillippe Legrain denounced the supporters of Brexit by noting their contempt for economic expertise. It then went on to demonstrate good reasons for such contempt.
In “Trump Is a Much Worse Threat Than Brexit” (Washington Post, 6/6/16), Bill Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warned that a Trump presidency could “lead to a recession in 18 months.” The only problem is Summers, by many accounts, was instrumental in creating the last recession—an essential piece of context that’s left out of his latest warning and its subsequent coverage.
“When Did Optimism Become Uncool?” wonders a New York Times Sunday Review piece by Gregg Easterbrook. “The country is, on the whole, in the best shape it’s ever been in,” Easterbrook writes. “So what explains all the bad vibes?” It would be easier to be optimistic if the case for optimism didn’t involve so much manipulation and misrepresentation.
Andrew Ross Sorkin (New York Times, 4/28/16) presented a confused account of the state of the economy and economic policy under President Barack Obama. The account repeats many self-serving comments from Obama without comment and offers little useful context to readers.
