FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Bill Scher of the Campaign for America’s Future has some strong media criticism on AlterNet (10/23/08), focusing on an L.A. Times piece by Stephen Braun (10/23/08) that claims, as the headline says, “Obama and McCain in Denial About Deficits, Economists Say.” “The article repeatedly assumes budget deficits as unequivocally bad,” Scher notes, even though “many […]
After quoting New York City Councilmember Charles Barron “offering the simplest route to continued democracy: Do nothing…. The people have spoken twice [against extending mayoral term limits] already. Why not just leave things as they are?”, Tom Robbins tells Village Voice readers (10/21/08) that Barron’s simple questions were matched only by the New York Times‘ […]
FAIR contributor Mark Crispin Miller and David Swanson are among those signed onto an “Open Letter to the Media from the Media” that asserts (We Do Not Consent, 10/23/08) that “federal election results are unprovable, even though the media reports them as fact.” Citing how “electronic voting machines frequently produce results impossible in a legitimate […]
Analysts have projected that Barack Obama’s ad spending would this week “surpass the $188 million Mr. Bush spent in his 2004 campaign.” During the last two weeks of the election, the Obama campaign has budgeted $30 million for ads in contested states, according to MSNBC. Last week alone, he also spent about $12 million on […]
Editor & Publisher (10/22/08) notes that Barack Obama is getting a wide lead in newspaper endorsements, winning 125 so far, by the newspaper trade journal’s count, to McCain’s 46. E&P further notes that this is, from a historical perspective, unusual. John Kerry edged out Republican George W. Bush in 2004, 213-205, Bill Clinton got 149 […]
Opening with the observation: Ralph “Nader, an independent, and [Bob] Barr, a Libertarian, are both on the ballot in 45 states. What they aren’t on: TV,” Glenn Garvin of the Miami Herald (10/21/08) gives props to a new FAIR release (10/21/08) that, in Garvin’s words, raises another argument that deserves even greater consideration–that elections should […]
Continuing to put U.S. media to shame by giving voice to leading U.S. intellectuals not heard in their own country’s corporate news, Real News Network founder Paul Jay interviews (10/22/08) author of the immensely popular A People’s History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn. Even after expressing intense skepticism of third-party candidates’ hopes for […]
Actual Fox News lower third, spotted today by Janine Jackson: “Obama Plan Treats Anyone Making Over $250,000 as Wealthy”
Providing a transcript of Andrea Mitchell perpetuating a “phony moral equivalency” on Meet the Press Sunday by calling Barack Obama’s newest campaign video “a remarkably negative ad,” Brad Jacobson (MediaBloodhound, 10/20/08) says Mitchell’s insistence that “Obama’s ads are somehow just as negative as McCain’s” has her “unintentionally entering Onion and Saturday Night Live territory”: With […]
On CNN‘s Reliable Sources (10/19/08), host Howard Kurtz and Time magazine’s Mark Halperin had the following exchange: KURTZ: Mark Halperin, we learned this morning that Barack Obama in the month of September raised $150 million…. If a Republican had not taken public financing and had raised all that money, and the Democrat was struggling financially, […]
From the New York Times report on Barack Obama’s huge rally in St. Louis: Even Mr. Obama, who can wear self-possession like an overcoat, seemed taken aback. Translation? Also in the Times on Sunday, Matt Bai’s magazine piece about Obama and white voters included this observation: Obama was wearing his classic starched white shirt. (How […]
Bill Kristol writes in his column in the New York Times today that media elites like telling us what’s going to happen. They’re always annoyed when people cross them. Pundits spent all spring telling Hillary Clinton to give up in her contest against Obama–and the public kept on ignoring them and keeping her hopes alive. […]
A Google News search for the term “William Timmons” yields trusty progressive publications like Think Progress, OpEd News, TPM, AlterNet and Democracy Now!, but days after it appeared at Huffington Post (10/14/08), no “mainstream” U.S. outlet has picked up the intrepid Murray Waas‘ new exposé on how Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has […]
The most quoted intellectual in the entire world, Noam Chomsky, happens to live in the United States–but in order to have his say about the upcoming U.S. presidential election he must go to a non-corporate Canadian outlet (Real News, 10/20/08), where he suggests “voting against McCain, which means voting for Obama–without illusions”: It’s not that […]
Anthony DiMaggio finds (ZNet, 10/19/08) “the massive attention surrounding ACORN” as much evidence of “media racism as it is their class prejudice”: In danger of losing its eight year hold on the Presidency, the Republican Party has become increasingly desperate in its attacks on poor and minority groups, who have registered in increasingly large numbers […]
As campaign reporters run wild with spurious accounts of vote fraud by left-wing bogeyman ACORN, Rolling Stone has published (10/30/08) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s and Greg Palast’s most recent warning of the real ballot threat: The new registrations thrown out, the existing registrations scrubbed, the spoiled ballots, the provisional ballots that were never counted–and what […]
It should be noted that Jon Meacham’s Newsweek cover story–dissected here–is matched in the magazine by a “Counterpoint” from columnist Jonathan Alter. It’s instructive to see the arguments side by side; Meacham argues for a center-right America (more right than center, it would seem), while Alter argues that, “since about 1980, we’ve been living in […]
“America remains a center-right nation—a fact that a President Obama would forget at his peril,” Newsweek declares above a piece by Jon Meacham for the October 27 issue of the magazine. As Rick Perlstein observes in a dissenting passage in the article, it’s a difficult case to make from opinion polling; on contentious issues like […]
Via TPM, we read about a reporter (Capital Beat, 10/16/08) who got knocked down at a Sarah Palin rally in North Carolina because he tried to interview an Obama supporter. This seems like the natural progression from the earlier report of Palin inciting her followers to hurl obscenities and racist insults at journalists. And, you […]
Economist Dean Baker takes issue (Beat the Press, 10/16/08) with the moment in Thursday’s presidential debate in which Senator McCain blamed the housing market meltdown on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac‘s lending practices. While Fannie and Freddie, as huge actors in the mortgage market, certainly contributed to the bubble, it is absurd to point to […]
