FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Washington Post reporter Dan Balz has a front-page piece about Newt Gingrich’s announcement that he’s running for president. Balz calls Gingrich’s Twitter declaration a “milestone in presidential politics,” adding that Gingrich “is an idea-spewing machine,” a “one-man think tank” and “someone who has remained in the forefront of the public policy debate over a span […]
Donald Trump’s efforts to delegitimize Barack Obama by suggesting he’s not a native-born citizen, and questioning his qualifications for admissions to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, have drawn fire from prominent media figures like MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell (FAIR Blog, 4/29/11), CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer (CBS Evening News, 4/27/11) and even David Letterman […]
Some mystical power forces the corporate media to cover Donald Trump. In the New York Times today: But White House officials concluded about a month ago that the falsehoods had moved from “the nether regions of the Internet” into the mainstream political arena, thanks in large part to the efforts of Mr. Trump, the real […]
The New York Times‘s Michael Shear (4/27/11) has this odd reference to Ron Paul‘s presidential campaign: Surveys suggest that Mr. Paul’s support remains low. In most recent polls, Mr. Paul receives just over 5 percent of the support from potential Republican voters. That is similar to the level of support he received in contests four […]
The first role of the corporate press in an election cycle is to weed out candidates who they deem nonviable. This usually means choosing not to cover candidates whose ideas that fall outside the Beltway conventional wisdom (e.g., Dennis Kucinich), or those who reporters decide have no real chance of winning the nomination. The speculation […]
NBC anchor David Gregory on NBC Nightly News (4/9/11) explaining how sees Obama’s 2012 strategy: And I thought what was striking about what the president said, if you listen to his comments made Friday night, he sounded very much like a Republican talking about the need to cut spending. That’s the re-election play here. He […]
This New York Times piece by Jeff Zeleny on the budget deal was actually headlined: President Adopts a Measured Course to Recapture the Middle Zeleny explained: President Obama opened the week by calling on Democrats to embrace his re-election campaign. He closed it by praising Republicans for forging a compromise to cut spending this year […]
A Drudge Report headline today (4/6/11) representsthe tip of the rotten iceberg: RACE BASE: Obama looks to Rev. Al Sharpton for help in re-election…
On Sunday (2/13/11), the Washington Post had an odd piece about Obama’s budget proposal–starting with the odd headline, “Obama to Propose Spending Cuts in Budget Plan Aimed at Countering Conservatives.” Republicans have been stressing spending cuts, so Obama is “countering” that with… spending cuts? Huh. The piece tries to argue that these calls for austerity […]
A New York Times profile (1/8/11) of author/economist Robert Reich was headlined “Obama the Centrist Irks a Liberal Lion.” It’s hard not to see where reporter Michael Powell comes down in the debate over Democrats moving to the right: Mr. Reich sees a parallel with his former boss, Mr. Clinton, and draws no comfort from […]
Matt Bai (New York Times, 11/9/10), as a standard-issue corporate media political analyst, sees the Democrats being moved to the right as an upside to their disastrous showing in the ’10 midterms. But he’s worried that the party isn’t learning the obvious lesson. If there was any sliver of hope for moderate Democrats on a […]
Whatever lesson you want to draw the midterms, the nation’s top editorial pages want to make one thing perfectly clear: Now is the time to move on bipartisan, corporate-friendly “free trade” agreements. “A time for free trade,” was the Washington Post‘s November 7 headline. “The Democratic majority in the House was heavily influenced by organized […]
Thereare almost always stories in the Monday papers about what politicians said on the Sunday morning chat shows. Today’s New York Times is no different, and given the election outcome the quotes are primarily from Republicans taking their victory laps. None of that is surprising, but it would make sense for journalists to fact check […]
Meet the Press announced that its show this Sunday will feature two conservative Republican guests, Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Gov. Chris Christie (N.J.). Well, that’s only natural, because the GOP did so well on Tuesday, winning back the House…. Right? Oh wait…. Here’s Meet the Press‘s then-host Tim Russert on November 12, 2006: Our […]
New York Times political analyst Matt Bai writes in a post-election piece (11/4/10): A powerful force in the party, Ms. [Sarah] Palin represents an aggrieved, anti-elitist strain of conservatism that goes back to Richard M. Nixon’s Silent Majority. It is a rural conservative impulse, rooted most firmly in the South and West, that equates liberal […]
Here’s the sentence that sums up what was wrong with election coverage ’10, courtesy of the New York Times‘ Peter Baker (11/3/10): Was this the natural and unavoidable backlash in a time of historic economic distress, or was it a repudiation of a big-spending activist government? Clearly, the economy was the main thing on the […]
Wrapping up a panel discussion (10/31/10) on Barack Obama’s post-midterm political challenges, NBC reporter Chuck Todd raised the possibility that the Beltway debate on Afghanistan might change: On Afghanistan, the Democratic caucus that will be left, you brought this up, is going to be a very liberal caucus, very anti-war caucus. This is going to […]
CBS Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer (10/31/10) explained on Sunday that he hates the way college football’s Bowl Championship Series works–mostly because the computer model doesn’t give smaller schools a chance to compete for a national championship. Fair enough–criticism of the BCS system is plentiful. But Schieffer bizarrely went on to argue that our […]
The ubiquitous CNN pundit on Larry King last night: KING: Could the pundits be wrong? DAVID GERGEN: Absolutely. Absolutely. It was a wonderful piece in the Wall Street Journal this lastweek by Josh Lerner. He was a really interesting young man who went back to a lot of political science and said more often than […]
The conventional wisdom among corporate pundits has long been that Democrats have to move to the right in order to win. You’re likely to hear a lot of this after Tuesday, but there’s already plenty of advice being offered in advance of the Democrats’ likely midterm defeat. Time‘s Joe Klein has his take in the […]
