FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
One of the more urgent tasks for the Serious Person Club of late is lumping Sanders and Trump together in an effort to discredit the former and apologize for the latter. Thursday in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria attempted to do just that.
The Intercept’s Lee Fang quotes FAIR on the unjournalistic offers media outlets are making at the political conventions.
Faced with the destruction of journalistic values by the corrupting effects of the profit motive, journalists can either stand up for the principles that brought many of them into the career in the first place—or else identify with the corruption, telling themselves that they’re siding with the smart money even as it destroys the institutions that form the basis for their profession.
The defendant in Utah v. Strief is white, but the suspicionless stops at the case’s heart disproportionately affect black and brown and poor people, marginalized in media as elsewhere.
In “An Expensive Reminder That Sanders Still Hasn’t Dropped Out: His Secret Service Detail,” the Washington Post used an eight-year-old stat to provide urgency to thesis that Sanders’ quixotic campaign is draining us, the good American “taxpayer,” of resources.
FAIR’s Jim Naureckas was interviewed by sibling podcasters John and Molly Knefel about coverage of Trump, Sanders and Clinton.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday (6/14/16) that Russian intelligence had hacked the DNC servers to steal opposition research on Donald Trump. Dozens of media outlets who picked up on the story uncritically presented Russian guilt in their headlines without qualification.
If it was worth NPR’s airtime to give a false impression of the connection between terrorism and electoral politics, isn’t it worth airtime to tell people what the actual historical record says?
For establishment outlets like the New York Times, more important than Bernie Sanders dropping out of the race is that his core policy goals be dismissed as fantasy. In its editorial look back at the Sanders campaign, the Times did some ideological policing.
Much coverage of anti-Trump protests in San Jose by liberal outlets also wound up depoliticizing the violence except as an attack on cherished American values, just like the right.
The Associated Press (6/6/16) has unilaterally declared Hillary Clinton to be “the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president,” based on the news agency’s own polling of unelected superdelegates.
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.
New York Times op-ed writer Thomas Edsall (6/1/16) sets out to examine the role resentment plays in fueling the movement behind Donald Trump—but does so in such an uncritical way that he seems to adopt Trump voters’ resentments as his own.
Hillary Clinton has a long, objectively verifiable track record of acting recklessly on matters of foreign policy that seems to have slipped into a memory hole as the prospect of a Trump presidency looms overhead. While one would expect this rewriting of history to come from Clinton surrogates, it’s increasingly bizarre coming from nominally independent media pundits.
At FAIR, we always say the primary measure of media in an election is not how fair they are to this or that candidate, but how fair they are to the people—all of the people who are affected by the outcome of this particular process, such as it is, and need to see how it functions in relation to them and their needs and concerns.
Trump’s constituency is largely thought to believe that the media, in general, has a liberal bias. As a result, the details of Trump’s lack of transparency, for several months—in regards to his veterans’ fundraiser—ended up being used by him to manipulate the media into making him sounding caring and patriotic, while portraying the media as nitpicking and disreputable.
“The major problem is that we have an establishment that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, led by a corporate media, which tries to condition the American people not to believe that we can accomplish those goals—or to even consider that those goals can be part of what American society is about.”
“Hillary’s fibs or lack of candor are all about bad judgments she made on issues that will not impact the future of either my family or my country,” says Thomas Friedman, whereas “Trump and Bernie Sanders have been getting away with some full Burger King Double Whoppers that will come crashing down on the whole country if either gets the chance to do what he says.”
The 538 crew have at times gone beyond the realm of punditry into the realm of hackery—that is, not just treating their own opinions as though they were objective data, but spinning the data so that it conforms to their opinions.
Vox reported on FAIR’s research on the lack of questions on poverty in the Democratic debates: “The moderators of the Democratic presidential debates did not ask a single question about poverty in any of the nine contests held over seven months, according to a new report released Friday.”
