FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The American News Project‘s Harry Hanbury reports (10/1/08) that “by now millions of Americans have seen the video clips where [GOP Vice Presidential candidate Sarah] Palin… prays the Iraq war will be revealed as a task from God.” The ANP video even shows Palin praying “that our… national leaders, are sending them [occupation soldiers] out […]
David Swanson’s latest piece in OpEd News (10/1/08) chronicles the fight against corporate media that report on the economic crisis as if, Swanson paraphrases, “the stock market is the same thing as the economy”:
When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg began to pave the way for tossing out term limits and running for a third term, the first place he went was to his fellow media moguls (New York Times, 8/23/08): Even as he publicly remains coy about his political future, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has quietly approached some […]
The New York Times‘ Jim Rutenberg had a follow-up piece on Friday’s debate headlined “The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won.” The story described the McCain and Obama camps’ attempts at “influencing the public perception of who won an encounter that produced no clear winner or loser.” Except–is it really true that the […]
The Washington Post (9/28/08) gathered reactions from “foreign policy analysts and others” to last Friday’s debate on international policy, and what’s striking is how hawkish the Post‘s circle of foreign policy experts is. The lineup included Henry A. Kissinger–inevitably–and a bunch of hawks from right-wing think tanks and/or the Bush administration: Danielle Pletka of AEI, […]
Veteran reporter Robert Parry muses on his Consortium News website (9/27/98) that “perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect a U.S. presidential debate to deal – substantively and honestly – with wrongful actions by the American government”
To illustrate what he deems corporate media’s “arbitrary and often contradictory standards set for Barack Obama as a black candidate,” Tapped blogger Adam Serwer (9/26/08) quotes a New York Times “Political Memo” by Patrick Healy that complains the candidate “is sometimes out of sync with the visceral anger of Americans who are losing their jobs […]
L.A. Times media reporter Matt Welch (9/26/08) says it’s “no wonder John McCain ‘suspended’ his presidential campaign Wednesday to focus in a bipartisan manner on a grave national crisis,” considering how the same move during NATO’s 1999 bombing of Kosovo has been called “a masterful political stroke”:
In “Facts, Fables and Fibs” (9/18/08), Time reporters Michael Scherer and James Carney attempt to sum up the truth and falsity of presidential campaign claims with a gimmicky chart that places Obama and McCain commercials on a grid that separates ads into “Mostly True” and “Mostly False” on the one hand, and “Serious” and “Silly” […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin091208 Jim Naureckas and George Farah @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin091208.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: John McCain may have fired-up the GOP base with his pick of Sarah Palin as a running mate, and his campaign’s increasingly rancorous rhetoric, but along the way his campaign has made a number of claims that beg for media scrutiny. […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin090508 Heidi Boghoson and David Moore @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin090508.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Most of the coverage of the political conventions focused on what was going on inside the arenas; so what about what was happening outside? Crackdowns on protests, arrests of journalists, and pre-emptive house raids could provide a very different measure of […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin070408 Glenn Greenwald and Ariana Huffington @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin070408.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: a special conversation with two authors who have been producing some of the sharpest criticism of the political and media establishment during the Bush years. Arianna Huffington is founder of the Huffington Post website and author of numerous books. Her most […]
[Note: This is a sidebar to “Obama the Snob?: Hanging the ‘elitist’ label on another Democratic candidate“] In the 2004 election, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was crowned by an influential Beltway publication with an unexpected designation: He was, according to its calculation, the most liberal member of the Senate (National Journal, 2/28/04). The ranking […]
Establishment media and Bolivian politics, with author Ben Dangl. Also on the program: Kate Sheppard, political reporter at Grist.org, discusses John McCain and how the press has perhaps oversold his environmentalism.
This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court and Indiana’s voter ID law, with Justin Levitt of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. Also on the program: Blogger/writer Sara Robinson joins to discuss how media coverage surrounding the recent raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch turned sensationalized + the legal implications of this story.
The second-tier candidates, they get angry. They think that the press doesn’t focus on them, spends too much time talking about the front-runners in the debates, in the coverage day by day. But we say to them, “Well, make your mark. Start showing some growth. Start showing some resonance with the populace and you’ll get […]
Leading up to the New Hampshire primary, the storyline on the Democratic side was the disastrous state of the Clinton campaign. Her loss was a given; it seemed the only considerations were the margin of defeat and whether or not she would even continue running at all. The day of the primary, the Washington Post […]
USA Today Reader Editor Brent Jones responded to questions, prompted by a FAIR Action Alert (1/23/08), about the newspaper’s failure to identify a white supremacist group by arguing that doing so would have been an illegitimate “judgment” on the part of the paper. USA Today had run two stories on the Nationalist Movement, a group […]
This week on CounterSpin: What the media is saying about Clinton, Obama, and the current state of the Democratic race for the White House, with Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report. Also on the program: Rob Richie with the group FairVote joins for a conversation on how media election coverage makes us feel discouraged, and what we can do about it.
This week on CounterSpin: A conversation about the National Intelligence Estimate with lawyer Asli Bâli. Also on the program: Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research discusses the constitutional referendum in Venezuela and how this has been covered by the U.S. press corps.
