FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz quotes (11/12/08) Iraq War booster Michael Hanlon writing on the Politico website that “it is important that Senator Obama hear from centrists on Iraq, and Susan [Rice] may not be such a person on that subject.” In response to the Hanlon assertion that former Bill Clinton official Rice “is […]
Washington Post ombud Deborah Howell (11/9/08) charged her paper with “a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama.” But her evidence for this pro-Obama bias was remarkably weak. She presented some counts of stories and pictures, like “the number of Obama stories since November 11 [2007] was 946, compared with [John] McCain’s 786.” But she noted that […]
The “media bias” against Sarah Palin is a key ingredient of the conservative victimology of 2008, even though when you see negative reports about Palin these days, they’re generally sourced to her erstwhile Republican colleagues—and corporate media sometimes go to absurd lengths to give the attacks a semi-positive spin, as in this Alessandra Stanley piece […]
Beneath the TPM Café headline “Excitement Is Not Hysteria” (11/11/08), critic William Hartung takes on a Washington Post op-ed that gets scary about those celebrations of Barack Obama’s election: According to Anne Applebaum… the excitement around the world about the election of Barack Obama has reached the point of “mass hysteria.”… She says the following: […]
A current CNN interview of Sarah Palin gives the failed candidate yet more airtime in which she, in the words of In These Times editor Jarrett Dapier, “continues her campaign against Barack Obama and again calls forth the specter of Bill Ayers.” Wolf Blitzer opens the door wide yet again by asking her about her […]
Writing on his Consortium News website (11/11/08), Robert Parry warns Barack Obama–who “is being told to forego investigations of George W. Bush’s war crimes“–to “Beware the Lessons of ’93” when “the last Democratic president got burned with similar advice.” Parry lays odds that “had the full stories [of George H. W. Bush’s Iran/Contra involvement] been […]
The Media Matters staff has more (11/7/08) on the prominent press fallacy of “a ‘center-right’ country”: In a November 7 Washington Times column, [Heritage Foundation president Ed] Feulner claimed that Obama “campaigned on conservative themes throughout the fall,” and that Obama “took some conservative positions on issues like taxes (promising to cut them).” Yet prior […]
Joshua Holland (AlterNet, 11/10/08) offers “more evidence that much of the traditional media’s analysis of American politics is utterly worthless, and should probably just be ignored out of hand”: Only moments after the networks declared Barack Obama the winner of a dramatic realignment election, William Bennett, the conservative icon, declared on CNN that “America is […]
Currently a well-respected and widely published educator, Bill Ayers discusses the periodic “media episodes of fleeting notoriety” around his former membership in the Weather Underground–“it was always a bit surreal. Then came this political season”–and charts (In These Times, 11/7/08) how the ’08 campaign mania around him was amplified while bouncing from political operatives to […]
Recent Nobel laureate Paul Krugman uses his New York Times column (11/7/08) to answer the “many commentators” who are urging Mr. Obama to think small. Some make the case on political grounds: America, they say, is still a conservative country, and voters will punish Democrats if they move to the left. Others say that the […]
Writing on the military paper’s blog (11/5/08), Stars and Stripes ombud Dave Mazzarella tears down the Pentagon reasoning from trying to block reporters from having contact with military personnel on Election Day: What servicemembers say while in uniform can be construed as a position of the Department of Defense, the officials said. No matter that […]
Moving “beyond the use of the term Muslim as a pejorative” to ask “what did real Muslim-Americans think of the Chicago senator? And how did they vote?”, Newseek‘s Lorraine Ali (11/7/08) cites a 10-state survey that found “95 percent of Muslims polled cast a ballot” and “89 percent of respondents voted for Obama.” Ali sees […]
Immediately after Barack Obama was pronounced the victor in the 2008 presidential election, corporate media began to tell him how he ought to govern–in most cases, urging him to hew toward the center. To support their argument, many journalists pointed to President Bill Clinton’s first term to find lessons in centrism for Obama. But are […]
An NBC affiliate’s report that “if the results differ by 1 percent or less” in a Virginia congressional race, “the losing candidate can formally request a recount in court” gets David Swanson wondering (AfterDowningStreet.org, 11/7/08) how this unquestioning language could possibly apply to the current voting process: The interesting question is, if they do a […]
Tom Engelhardt muses (TomDispatch, 11/5/08) on 2008 U.S. presidential election coverage as “a tsunami of entertainment, or was it distraction?”: An eternal election campaign. Two years of the most everything–the most money… the most ads… the most places (Internet, email, YouTube, Facebook, bloggers, text messaging, cell phones), the most jokes, the most appearances by candidates […]
FAIR founder Jeff Cohen spots (Huffington Post, 11/5/08) a major factor in this election season that he thinks “is now so second-nature to us that we may overlook its transformative impact since just four years ago: the Internet and the progressive online boom”: The media terrain has changed dramatically since 2004, when Matt Drudge dominated […]
Salon has a grimly humorous collection (11/6/08, ad-viewing required) of idiocy intoned with supreme confidence by media pundits throughout the U.S. presidential campaign. Unsurprisingly, Fox News personalities are prominently represented. From Bill Kristol looking forward at the very beginning of the campaign and getting it entirely wrong (Fox News Sunday, 12/17/06): If [Hillary Clinton] gets […]
Tim Rutten writes today in the L.A. Times (11/5/08): What is perhaps most remarkable about the changed America to which we woke this morning is how the president-elect’s race seems, in most ways, the least remarkable thing about him. In large part, that’s a tribute to the fact that Barack Obama declined every opportunity […]
THEN (CNN‘s Capital Gang, 11/6/04): MARK SHIELDS: Bob Novak, is 51 percent of the vote really a mandate? BOB NOVAK: Of course it is. It’s a 3.5 million vote margin. But the people who are saying that it isn’t a mandate are the same people who were predicting that John Kerry would win. When -the […]
Matthew Yglesias sums up the likely electoral reactions of “liberal media”: In the real world, all responsible people know that when conservatives win elections, the only responsible thing is for the media to give more platforms to conservatives in order to reflect the country’s conservative sentiments. Meanwhile, when conservative lose elections, the only responsible thing […]
