FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
USA Today insists, without offering evidence, that Democrats’ efforts to forge climate policy had an important role in the rise of the Tea Party and Republicans’ victory in the 2010 midterm elections.
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin081911 Jim Hightower and Glen Ford @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin081911.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: ‘Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be elected president of the United States, please pay attention.’ That was late columnist Molly Ivins’ advice near the end of the George W. Bush era. But lo and behold another […]
Of all the issues at stake in the midterm congressional elections of 2010, the one that hung most in the balance may have been the fate of the world’s climate. It was clear from early in the election cycle that incoming Republicans were uniformly in agreement that no government action to control carbon emissions was […]
As major participants in and beneficiaries of the influence-buying orgy, it’s hardly surprising that television outlets did not seriously examine the impact of the Citizens United decision.
The corporate media consensus is that voters sent a message: “You tried to do too much.” Does the actual vote match up to the post-election media spin?
MSNBC host Keith Olbermann has been placed on indefinite suspension without pay in the wake of a Politico report (11/5/10) that revealed Olbermann had donated $7,200 to three Democratic candidates, in violation of NBC‘s standards barring employees from making political contributions. A journalist donating money to a political candidate raises obvious conflict of interest questions; […]
With the Democrats suffering substantial losses in Tuesday’s midterms, many journalists and pundits were offering a familiar diagnosis (Extra!, 7-8/06; FAIR Media Advisory, 2/3/09): The Democrats had misread their mandate and governed too far to the left. The solution, as always, is for Democrats to move to the right and reclaim “the center.” But this […]
In his New York Times column today (7/19/10), Paul Krugman offers a prediction about the likely pundit response to the drubbing Democrats are expected to take in the November elections: What I expect…if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects will say that it was because Mr. Obama was too liberal—when […]
One of the most prevalent (and wrong-headed) interpretations of the recent elections is that both parties are dumping their respectable members in exchange for wild-eyed radicals. As Cokie Roberts explained it on ABC‘s This Week (5/23/10): COKIE ROBERTS: I’m not sure, Donna, that the voters this year care about somebody being out of the mainstream. […]
One of the frustrating things about corporate media coverage is that it’s so focused on horserace coverage—who’s likely to win or lose in voting that might be months or years away—and yet they’re so bad at it. Take the matter of Jonathan Tasini, running in the Democratic senatorial primary in New York against incumbent Kirsten […]
Republican candidates won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday; meanwhile, Democratic candidates won two special elections for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York and California. But it was very clear which set of elections corporate media wanted to portray as sending an important message about national politics–that voters were discontented […]
