FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Proclaiming that, when moderating the last U.S. presidential debate, CBS‘s “Bob Schieffer lived up to his reputation,” activist David Swanson (Media With Conscience, 10/15/08) says “this debate was another awful one, and intentionally so. Dumb questions on dumb topics.” Some of Swanson’s blow by blow: Bob Schieffer demands that both candidates commit to cutting programs. […]
Billing the current debates as “a political sham,” David Rosen describes (Eureka Street, 10/08/08) how the media blockbusters–the first debates’ audience was “more than the number of Americans who watched the opening night of the Beijing Olympics”–“not only exclude legitimate third-party candidates, but are structured in a way to inhibit meaningful engagement between the candidates […]
The American News Project (10/16/08) bucks corporate journalists’ obsession with largely substanceless campaign politics by filming “people outside of the media spotlight, people hit hard by our nation’s crises at home and abroad”: For the third and final presidential debate, a horde of journalists and pundits… descend… on Hempstead, New York, and focus their attention […]
Even a group of respondents generous enough to give “CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer a thumbs-up for his moderation of the third and final presidential debate” tells Free Press/Tyndall pollsters (10/16/08) they “felt the moderator could have done more to challenge the candidates’ spin”: Despite their general praise of Schieffer, the debate raters agreed that […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin101708 Lori Minnite and Bethany Albertson @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin101708.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: From the reaction of quite a bit of the mainstream media, the community organizing group ACORN is poised to steal the election for Barack Obama. Scattered allegations of voter registration fraud have been the subject of wall-to-wall TV coverage, but what […]
Over at Media Matters’ County Fair blog, they’ve updated their tally of ACORN mentions on cable news: *Number of times CNN has mentioned ACORN since Friday: 67 *Number of times Fox News has mentioned Joe Biden since Friday: 130 *Number of times Fox News has mentioned Sarah Palin since Friday: 541 *Number of times Fox […]
Andrew Burmon of Salon reports on corporate media-facilitated “voter fraud hysteria” like the New York Post‘s Ken Blackwell op-ed–“yes, the former Ohio secretary of state of 2004 election infamy–warn[ing of] radical groups sending the nation into a protracted legal battle even worse than the mess back in 2000.” Burmon features (10/15/08, ad-viewing required) Barnard College […]
Just in time for Bob Schieffer’s hosting of the final 2008 U.S. presidential debate, Brad Jacobson has republished (10/15/08) his May 6 MediaBloodhound blog post critiquing Schieffer’s Bush administration record, “which has treaded between muted criticism and outright fawning”: Throughout his January 2006 interview with Bush, Schieffer responded “Um-hmm” and “Okay” and jarringly changed topics […]
Writing of FAIR’s new Smearcasters report on the Washington City Paper‘s website (10/13/08), Bobby Allyn finds that “searching U.S. newspapers on Lexis Nexis for ‘Obama,’ ‘Muslim’ and ‘smear’ generates 509 unique hits.” Allyn continues: There have been plenty of reports debunking the Obama Muslim allegation, but not enough about the racial subtext of “smearing” a […]
Hosting David Frum of the National Review on MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow Show (10/13/08), Maddow responds to the “axis of evil” inventor’s complaint of “an intensification of some of the ugliness of tone that has been a feature of American politics”: I wonder if part of the problem, in the way that we haven’t moved through […]
Expanding on her blog post of October 8, FAIR Communications Director Isabel Macdonald details (Common Dreams, 10/13/08) “one small glitch” in “the Obsession campaign‘s marketing plan [that] has been quite slick”: The public doesn’t seem to be buying it. Newspapers that carried the DVD have faced floods of complaints from readers, and the past week […]
New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt examines (10/12/08) his paper’s presidential campaign reportage: Through Friday, of 270 news articles published in the Times about the election since the national tickets were formed in late August, only 29, or a little over 10 percent, were primarily about policy substance. And that is a generous tally […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald sees (10/12/08, ad-viewing required) “Bill Kristol in a Nutshell” when observing the New York Times columnist’s statements over the past week. First Greenwald points to an October 5 column in which Kristol “agreed [with Sarah Palin] that the McCain/Palin campaign must attack Obama harder on his ‘associations,’ particularly with Bill Ayers.” Then […]
A former ACORN communications coordinator from 2000 to 2003, David Swanson rebuts the “absolutely fraudulent and nationally coordinated attacks… currently all over the news” for American Chronicle readers (10/10/08) In fact, the accusations against ACORN are not about voting, but about voter registration. Now, if some kid fills out bogus forms in order to make […]
With the presidential election fast approaching, Uncounted documentarian Mary Mancini uses her film’s blog (10/10/08) to give us “a little history from the year 2000–to remind us why we need to keep our eyes and ears open this November 4. . . and beyond”: We’re still not ready for a close election. . . . […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin101008 David Cay Johnston and Isabel MacDonald and Steve Rendall @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin101008.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The bailout story turns again as Congress passes the White House’s bailout bill. Will reporters give up questioning the plan entirely now that it has that holy grail of “bipartisan support”? We’ll hear from one journalist who’s […]
Any lingering hope you may have harbored for corporate pundits to rise above their infatuation with John McCain running mate Sarah Palin will surely be dashed by Rich Lowry’s titillated take (National Review Online, 10/3/08) on her debate performance–quoted in full: A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is […]
Not-exactly-progressive journalist Joe Klein has been on a bit of a tear over at CNN‘s Swampland blog, declaring himself (10/6/08) to be of two minds about how to deal with the McCain campaign’s further descent into ugliness. Their strategy is simple: you throw crap against a wall and then giggle as the media try to […]
Via TPM, CBS‘s Dean Reynolds complains at length that the Obama campaign doesn’t have its priorities straight: The Obama aides who deal with the national reporters on the campaign plane are often overwhelmed, overworked and uninformed about where, when, why or how the candidate is moving about. Baggage calls are preposterously early with the explanation […]
Liz Cox Barrett writes on the Columbia Journalism Review website (10/7/08) of the corporate media version of public participation: The rules for [Tuesday]’s “town hall-style” debate, agreed to by both campaigns “as part of a 31-page memorandum of understanding that leaked out this week,” a “document that is not made public, even by the Commission […]
