FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Media remember Margaret Thatcher for turning around Britain’s economy. But do the numbers tell a different story? Also: Barack Obama’s plan to cut Social Security and Medicare is inexplicably deemed a move to the “center,” and pundits are monitoring the 2016 election by paying close attention to… Hillary Clinton’s haircut?
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from investigative reporter Robert Parry’s new book, America’s Stolen Narrative. One of the book’s storylines examines corporate media’s role in squelching investigation into whether Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign in 1980 went behind President Jimmy Carter’s back to contact Iranian officials then holding 52 Americans hostage, a controversy dubbed the […]
It’s not as if Bill O’Reilly has never uttered things reasonable people might consider racist. But the fact that he seems to believe that the White House is destroying the economy in order to provide free stuff to people of color is taking things to an entirely different level.
The polls showed that Ecuadoreans weren’t “apprehensive” about giving Correa another term. So why was the New York Times? Probably because his policies are the kind that institutions like the Times tell us aren’t supposed to work.
For a variety of reasons, Arab citizens of Israel don’t seem all that excited about voting in next week’s elections. And, for some reason, this strike the New York Times’ Jodi Rudoren as “apathy.” But the Arab sentiments she reports sure don’t sound like apathy.
New York Times media reporter David Carr (11/12/12) had some kind words for Fox News Channel‘s Election Night coverage: On Tuesday night, the people in charge of Fox News were confronted with a stark choice after it became clear that Mr. Romney had fallen short: was Fox, first and foremost, a place for advocacy or […]
This week on FAIR TV: How does Obama’s “non-mandate” compare to Bush’s 2004 “mandate”? Does corporate media factchecking need a reality check? And we look at how superstorm Sandy failed to generate talk about climate change on the Sunday shows. Please watch it–and share it with your friends.<!–preview-break–>
Time magazine’s Joe Klein found the lesson (11/7/12) in Obama’s re-election. And it involves… wait for it… moving to the right: It will, and should, be argued that the election was a mandate for moderation. The last month of Mitt Romney‘s campaign, when he rushed to the center and suddenly made it a race, ratified […]
Asked about the pre-election sense that Mitt Romney might win the election, CNN reporter Candy Crowley told viewers (11/7/12): There was an optimism in the Romney camp. But it wasn’t based on the numbers. It was based on the feel of things. And one thing you know when you cover a campaign, the feel of […]
The presence of reliable projections should free journalists to do the kind of issues-based reporting that could actually help voters.
With the election over, you’re seeing familiar corporate media advice about the need for Obama to move to the right and learn to compromise with Republicans. Some of this is based on a frankly nonsensical view of the polarization that accompanied his first term. Matt Bai of the New York Times writes (11/7/12): There are, […]
The New York Times has a news piece today (11/6/12) reporting that MSNBC is just like Fox News, and isn’t that awful. Now, MSNBC, for all its flaws, is not really anything like Fox News. And most of Times reporter Jeremy Peters‘ evidence for their similarity comes from a Pew study of “positive” and “negative” […]
Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler had his last election piece in the Sunday edition of the paper (11/4/12)– and it made you glad there won’t be any more. The article promised, in the headline at least, “The Best–or Worst?–Pinocchios of This Presidential Race.” What it delivered was something else: Eight themes of lying and […]
FAIR’s new alert takes aim at the Sunday morning chat shows (Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday) for ignoring climate change this weekend– right after “superstorm” Sandy devastated the East Coast. As we noted, NBC host David Gregory said early on his program: “Should more attention be paid to […]
After establishing that Karl Rove is a terrible political prognosticator, Dana Milbank did the false-balance thing and attacked polling blogger Nate Silver,
CBS‘s Bob Schieffer revealed his greatest fear on yesterday’s Face the Nation (11/4/12): Let me just say, David Gergen, I think the worst of all worlds would be if one of the candidates won the popular vote and other won the Electoral College. As the two made clear, they were talking about the possibility that […]
CNN reporter Erin Burnett‘s comment (10/29/12) that it was “kind of neat” to see New York City break its flooding record as the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy flooded Battery Park was bizarre, to say the very least: I just want to give everyone an update of where we are right now in terms of […]
NPR‘s Tom Gjelten had a story on Morning Edition today (10/25/12) that made an important point about a prominent fallacy in the energy debate–and then spent the second half of the story falling into the exact same fallacy. The story questioned the constant use of the phrase “energy independence” in political discussions of U.S. energy […]
Remember how corporate media’s campaign coverage used to offer wide-ranging, diverse perspectives? Me neither. But Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank apparently thinks that’s the way the world used to work, until Twitter came along and the press corps turned into one giant exercise in groupthink. He writes today (10/24/12) that campaign reporters have one eye […]
The Obama campaign has released a new ad criticizing Mitt Romney for having a Swiss bank account and wanting to keep tax breaks for corporations that offshore jobs. The commercial’s most devastating line: Romney once railed against the deadly pollution from a coal plant. I know what you’re thinking: Totally racist, right? That’s sort of […]
