FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Presidential debates do as much to showcase corporate media priorities as they do the candidates. They provide a snapshot into what the media, in this case represented by NBC’s Lester Holt, prioritizes as issues worthy of discussion.
Terrorism has become the hot horserace topic of the year in a way that goes beyond the silly to the potentially damaging. Something missing from these reports is any discussion of the relative danger of terrorism.
In a piece for CounterPunch, Jill Stein cited FAIR’s correction of a false claim made about her.
In a moment of outright self-parody, Applebaum notes that “rumors of election fraud can create the same hysteria as real election fraud” while spending 800 words doing nothing but spreading rumors of election fraud.
It’s troubling that a presidential candidate would be unaware of one of the main battlefields in one of the world’s deadliest conflicts. But even more troubling is that the New York Times, the US paper of record, can’t seem to figure out what Aleppo is, either.
In pushing trade agreements, it is fair to say anything, even if it has no relationship to the truth. Therefore it is not surprising to see Fareed Zakaria pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) by claiming that it will boost growth.
Despite the Clinton Foundation’s financial relationships being a major news story in recent weeks, most media seem entirely uninterested in disclosing—let alone covering—their own industry’s donations to the foundation.
Debates are a natural opportunity to possibly pull candidates off script, force them to answer questions they didn’t write themselves. But, activists are saying, debates that include only the two major party candidates are far less likely to do that.
According to leading pro-Democratic media, the US cannot possibly work with Russia; they are fundamentally adversarial. This type of macho posturing, previously the domain of Fox News, has become increasingly commonplace as the the Clinton camp drives home the talking point that Trump is a Kremlin agent.
When US media—to say nothing of the leading contender to be the next president of the US—allege that foreign elements are steering our politics, that’s rational, serious discourse. When others do it, it’s laughable, unhinged blabbering.
Media interest in the issue of voter suppression is welcome; we hope they’ll remember that their spotlight is most useful where folks are still working in shadow.
The curious rise of Donald Trump has led to public soul-searching from establishment Republicans–who suffer from a severe case of dewy-eyed nostalgia over how reasonable and competent the pre-Trump GOP actually was.
That so many media elites threw their lot behind Michael Bloomberg—a man whose primary accomplishments as mayor were austerity and racist policing—shows just how little policy matters in so much of this conversation.
Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd asked WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange a total of eight questions, all of which were about alleged foreign hacking of the DNC, never asking about the substance of the leaks.
It is not until the 20th paragraph of the 21-paragraph article, on page A13 in the print edition, that the New York Times reveals a crucial point of clarification: Clinton “campaign officials acknowledge that they have no evidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to tilt the election to Donald Trump.
The first instinct of many in the US press and political class is to treat Trump as if he’s some foreign entity, an exotic outsider who can only be referenced with regard to Less Civilized Countries.
Wikileaks revealed thousands of hacked emails from within the DNC that showed what the New York Times described as “hostility” and “derision” towards the Sanders campaign from top party officials. Pro-Clinton pundits were quick to dismiss what was literally a conspiracy to railroad the Sanders campaign as nothing more than a yawn.
Media are cheering police “restraint” at the RNC because it controlled protesters in a way that didn’t look bad. While only 24 people were arrested and the most contentious event was a flag-burning, police suppressed free speech in a way that didn’t look like suppressing free speech.
The New York Times attempts to provide insight into how modern-day racists negotiate the contemporary racial terrain. But this is hard to do, given that the Times along with other establishment media outlets are a crucial part of that terrain.
A number of pundits are doing that most noxious of political commentary pastimes—equating right and left responses to the failures of globalization and advocating that “elites” should fight back against the forces of inconvenient democracy.
