NYT Steers Dems Away From the Obvious Formula for Defeating Trump
Election Focus 2020: The false impression that Trump was a moderate Republican on economic issues left voters free to be swayed by his appeal to a white racial identity.
‘Pragmatic’: How Corporate Media Praise Dems Who Abandon Progressive Values
Election Focus 2020: Corporate media hide their pro-business positions behind a veneer of pragmatism, presenting their ideas as common sense.
Corporate Media Filled With Nameless Voices Attacking Progressive Democrats
Election Focus 2020: Corporate media are granting anonymity to sources in the Democratic establishment looking to run opposition talking points against progressive lawmakers and organizations.
Here’s the Evidence Corporate Media Say Is Missing of WaPo Bias Against Sanders
Election Focus 2020: FAIR has been following the issue of the Washington Post’s bias against Bernie Sanders for quite some time, so we’re happy to offer the evidence CNN and the Post protest is lacking.
Media Defend Biden by Attacking Dems for ‘Attacking’ Obama
Election Focus 2020: Coming out of the second round of Democratic debates, a curious storyline crystallized in the media: The candidates are attacking Obama, and that’s a sure-fire way to hand the election to Trump.
CNN’s Industry Spin Shows Need for Independent Debates
Election Focus 2020: The second round of debates may not have enlightened the public much about the candidates, but they made one thing clear: We desperately need serious, independently run debates, not over-the-top industry-friendly spectacles of the like put on by CNN.
Do Debate Questions Reflect Concerns of Democratic Voters?
Election Focus 2020: The fiscally conservative, risk-averse, largely-happy-with-the-status-quo voter—which, by the way, probably fits the profile of most of the corporate media questioners—would haunt much of NBC’s debates.
MSNBC’s Anti-Sanders Bias Makes It Forget How to Do Math
Election Focus: The cable news network has repeatedly made on-air and online mistakes about Bernie Sanders’ polling and other numbers—always to his detriment, and never with any official correction.
The NYT’s Six Percent Solution for Student Debt
Election Focus 2020: According to the New York Times’ Upshot, Democratic candidates are proposing solutions to a student debt problem that has largely already been solved.
What Do Black Voters Want? NYT’s Edsall Says It’s What ‘Conservative’ Democrats Want
Election Focus 2020: Thomas Edsall is playing a shell game—lumping self-identified black and white “moderates” and “conservatives” together, even though they have very different policy preferences, and then using the amalgamated opinion to generalize about what African Americans really want.
Media Can’t Quit ‘Trump Supporters Support Trump’ Stories
Election Focus 2020: It’s a common theme of Trump coverage that now is extending to election coverage: When people protest something Trump does or says, corporate media feel the need to cover as well the people who aren’t reacting as a sort of faux-balance, giving us tautological Trump-supporters-support-Trump stories.
Brenda Choresi Carter on the Electability Myth, Lawrence Glickman on Racism & Euphemism
Election Focus 2020: The upshot for many seems to be that to beat Trump, Democrats should run someone as much like him as possible, and must on no account run a “nontraditional” candidate, no matter how excited people are about them.
To Media, No Democrat Can Possibly Be Right-Wing
Election Focus 2020: If there is a left wing of the Democratic Party, there must, logically, be a right. But when reporting on divisions in the party, media never identify the opponents of the left as representing the right.
ACTION ALERT: CNN Should Treat Left and Right Alike in Presidential Debates
Election Focus 2020: Please call on CNN to include a progressive journalist from an avowedly left media outlet as a moderator in its Democratic debates.
Why Does WaPo See Black as an ‘Identity’—but Not Multi-Millionaire?
Election Focus 2020: Yes, Robert Johnson is black. Robert Johnson is also extremely wealthy; his wealth puts him in a demographic that has entirely different economic views and interests than the vast majority of the African-American population.
‘This Is Designed to Shape the Electorate to Retain Political Power’
Election Focus 2020: “The people who tend to win out when you remove these forms of balancing tend to be white, entrenched majorities. This didn’t come out of nowhere. These folks have been fighting for years. And it’s pretty nasty stuff, quite frankly.”
Buttigieg Goes for Big Bucks as NYT Oversells His Small-Donor Support
Election Focus 2020: Being Wall Street’s favorite is not a good look, the financial industry being deeply unpopular with voters, particularly Democratic ones. So Buttigieg is being rebranded as a fundraiser who brings everyone together, rich and not so rich alike.
Warning to Progressive Dems: You’re Leaving Corporate Media’s Comfort Zone
Election Focus 2020: After the first round of Democratic primary debates, the line from corporate media and their overwhelmingly centrist sources was clear: The Democrats are moving dangerously to the left, at their own peril.
‘Government-Run Healthcare’ Is a Product of Health Industry–Run Media
Election Focus 2020: Power brokers in the for-profit health industry have worked to make the language of “government-run healthcare” the boilerplate description for a national health system in major media outlets.
Sydney Ember’s Secret Sources
Election Focus 2020: Ember’s articles on Sanders often quote as neutral authorities individuals who are on the other side of a wide ideological divide, with longstanding antipathies to Sanders’ left socioeconomic perspective.
