FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
News Corpse‘s Mark Howard provides (11/3/08) an Election Day reminder of how the announcement of a winner “is not as straightforward as one might think”: At the nationâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s biggest and most dishonest cable TV news network, Fox News, the man in charge of making the final call… is John Moody, and he is also the […]
The New York Times‘ Carol Giacomo promises (11/3/08) to “certainly be a lot more skeptical” in covering the arguments for war with Iran than she was when she covered the march to war with Iraq as a diplomatic correspondent for Reuters. That’s good to hear, but this passage in her column made me skeptical about […]
Too many things to say, really, about this New York Times online opinion piece by former Dole advisor Douglas MacKinnon. But hereâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s just one: Regarding the Obama phenomenon and the media fascination with him, a senior staffer for a rival Democrat primary opponent offered up this theory to me for part of the bias. This […]
Writing in Newsweek, Allison Samuels considers what Michelle Obama would mean to African-American women if she were first lady–and also the kinds of problems she’ll confront with the mainstream media: Whatever she does, I hope she doesn’t fall victim to critics with little point of reference. Take this month’s issue of Town and Country magazine. […]
After the Washington Post‘s David Broder weighed in with his thoughts on what he “learned” about John McCain in the course of the campaign–among other things, that it was a “falsehood” to suggest McCain was similar to George W. Bush–it was time for Post readers to find out what the Dean of the Washington Press […]
Publishing (Nation, 10/30/08) an open letter from independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader to campaign media, John Nichols laments how “for the most part, Nader’s campaign–with its… worthy messages about the role of government, regulation of corporations, foreign policy and, above all, democracy–has been ignored by the print, broadcast, cable and even digital media”: To a […]
Elaborating on his Raw Story investigation of Colorado U.S. Attorney Troy Eid’s “Decision Not to Prosecute Obama ‘Assassination Plot’“, MediaBloodhound blogger Brad Jacobson writes (10/31/08) that Mark Hosenball, an investigative correspondent for Newsweek, is the only mainstream journalist that I could find on record who questioned Eid’s handling of this case. Yet not in the […]
The dean of D.C. press corps’ column yesterday was headlined “What We’ve Learned About McCain,” but it’s not clear “we” were watching the same campaign. After paying tribute to McCain’s heroism, his “backbone,” his “patriotic impulses,” and on and on, Broder got down to supposed lessons– McCain didn’t manage his relationship with a wounded GOP, […]
Hosting FAIR communications director Isabel Macdonald on his religion radio show State of Belief (10/25/08), Rev. Welton Gaddy raised the issue of corporate televangelist Pat Robertson‘s “really significant role in aiding and abetting Islamophobia.” Macdonald pointed out how Robertson made some of the most outrageous comments about Muslims and Islam, and in addition to his […]
Over at Conde Nasté Portfolio (10/29/08), Jeff Bercovici does a good job busting National Review writer Byron York for trying to “defend the focus of the political press on questions such as whether Obama was in church when Rev. Jeremiah Wright said ‘God damn America.’” York had argued that “this kind of lament that we […]
The Associated Press (10/29/08) does its usual sad job trying to fact-check candidate statements—this time working a hefty dose of neo-Hooverism into the mix. AP‘s Calvin Woodward charges that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial Wednesday night about the costs of his programs and the crushing budget pressures […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald (10/29/08, ad-viewing required) takes apart a “sentimental, cringe-inducing retrospective from the Los Angeles Times‘ campaign reporter Maeve Reston, wistfully lamenting the loss of affection and friendship between John McCain and the reporters who cover his campaign–what she twice calls ‘intimacy.’” Deeming the piece “an instant classic in illustrating how campaign reporters think […]
Economist Dean Baker is the highlight of a Politico feature (10/29/08) asking several political commentators the question, “Is the press really biased against McCain or does poor coverage reflect the reality of his campaign?”: No one would expect Saddam Hussein to get good press. The reality is that he was a pretty bad guy and […]
Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman (Truthdig, 10/22/08) writes on the extent, and consequences, of a political season in which “commercial broadcasters are cleaning up… like never before, and you’ll never hear them questioning the system that allows so much money to come back to them”: The Obama campaign has “flooded the zone” with advertising. It has […]
Tom Brokaw, the interim host of NBC‘s Meet the Press, and NBC analyst Chuck Todd expressed bafflement on last Sunday’s Meet the Press (10/26/08) at how Latinos had “turned on the Republican Party” and their “friend” John McCain: TODD: I mean, this, this Hispanic–one of the things we–underreported story of the cycle is how Hispanics […]
Looking at “the media attention granted the right-wing attacks on ACORN,” politics writer Glenn W. Smith poses a question to Editor & Publisher readers (10/15/08): “Why does it seem to be a greater sin to be suspected of voter registration mistakes than to publicly engage in voter suppression efforts?” Smith’s response to his own query […]
As we finally near the end of the U.S. presidential race, Norman Solomon looks back (Creator’s Syndicate, 10/25/08) at “a year when the dominant media spin has been upended time after time” and analyzes “the latest twist of political storylines that have been rendered pretzel-like long ago”: In a piece posted October 21 on the […]
Local CBS reporter Cynthia Fodor’s revelation that she “had to submit which topics we wanted to discuss ahead of time” to get an interview with Sarah Palin has Think Progress‘s Ben Armbruster (10/27/08) putting the censorious nature of Palin’s handlers into perspective: Fodor’s revelations come at a particular disturbing time. Just last week, press freedom […]
Today New York Times reporter John Harwood wonders what happened to the idea, voiced in the aftermath of the 2004 election, that the country would see a long era of Republican dominance: How did such a turnabout happen so fast? In part, the answer stems from developments so rare that, as the former Federal Reserve […]
Declaring (10/22/08) that “it’s hard not to read all the editorial plaudits for [Colin] Powell as something of an indictment of the opinion writers complimenting his courage,” Lester Feder also chides his own CJR.org for relative silence until, in his Sunday appearance on Meet the Press, Powell cited the persistent right-wing “Barack Obama is a […]
