FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
In an editorial on “Election Risks in Cambodia” (11/28/97), the New York Times warned that “flawed elections are worse than none,” and that “the international community must proceed cautiously, lest a rigged election give Mr. Hun Sen a veneer of legitimacy.” Similarly, in writing on “Kenya’s Flawed Election” (12/31/97), the Times‘ editors noted that “holding […]
In February (2/11/97), as the French election campaign approached, the New York Times ran a front-page “special report” from France. Entitled “Liberty, Equality, Anxiety,” the report by Roger Cohen was accompanied by a menacing photograph of a rally for far-right nationalist Jean-Marie LePen’s National Front party, featuring a giant poster of a grinning LePen. “France […]
American media seem never to run short of disillusioning experiences. When members of FAIR did a study of L.A. local TV news three years ago, we expected to find a lot of crime stories, and sure enough, we did. What we didn’t expect to find was zero campaign coverage only weeks before an election. So […]
The August 21 Mexican elections, which the U.S. media have characterized as “generally fair and clean” (New York Times, 9/27/94) despite widespread protests to the contrary, have presented establishment media in the U.S. with a serious problem: how to make people believe that a ruling party, which could only win elections through massive fraud in […]
While there was no shortage of polls published during the election campaigns, most opinion surveys offered little more than a snapshot of attitudes or voting intentions. FAIR’s survey of the U.S. electorate during the 1992 presidential election campaign, by contrast, was concerned not only with what people thought, but with the knowledge that lay behind […]
Two years ago, NBC News senior vice president Timothy Russert penned a widely read op-ed (New York Times, 3/4/90) criticizing broadcast coverage of the 1988 presidential campaign. According to Russert, “the public felt cheated by the emphasis on flag-waiving and furloughs rather than on deficits and defense.” Russert insisted that in the future, the networks […]
The year 1988, the press reported, would be a breakthrough year for women in politics. But in the end, only two additional women were elected to the House of Representatives, none to the Senate. In 1990, we were again told we were seeing the “Year of the Woman.” But although 70 women won major party […]
H. Ross Perot’s drive for the presidency has, up until press time, largely been given a free ride by the mainstream media. Uncritical interviews on Larry King Live (3/16/92) and 60 Minutes (3/29/92) have resulted in multitudes of volunteers joining the Texas billionaire’s effort. An informal survey, using the Nexis computer database, of more than […]
To see how papers were following through on their promise of more substantive reporting, FAIR surveyed all news articles on the presidential election in three national papers.
The relatively low national stature of the “major” Democratic candidates might logically have led people to pay attention to alternative candidates. But when I spoke to journalists, many immediately adopted the perspective of their sources in the Democratic Party Leadership, which they told me was more concerned than ever about not giving the impression of […]
The pundits had a dream—the Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder would drive Jesse Jackson from the public stage. Doug Wilder, a self-described fiscal conservative who advocated budget cuts, supported capital punishment and bragged of his state’s “right to work” (anti-union) laws, was a moderate black who would, in the words of the 1992 Almanac of American […]
Press treatment of low voter turnout in American society has become schizophrenic. On the one hand, the press is giving strong support to voter registration reform as a way of increasing voting; on the other, press coverage suggests–incorrectly–that registration reform will not increase voting because so many registered voters don’t bother to go to the […]
If the presidential campaign often resembled a circus, television was its distorting mirror—turning election realities upside down. The winning candidate carried around four names—George Herbert Walker Bush—degrees from elite schools Andover Academy and Yale, residences in many states. Yet on TV he ran as Joe Sixpack, while his opponent spent most of the campaign denying […]
By the end of the Democratic Convention, media cliches about the campaign had outpaced peaches as Georgia’s leading export. Through dint of repetition, the most dubious claims became truisms. If there was a chorus that resounded in Atlanta’s Omni Coliseum even louder that Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America,” it was the media’s unanimous refrain about […]
As the presidential campaign marches on, certain media themes have become as stale and repetitious as the candidates’ stump speeches. Extra! looks at some of the more familiar frames, examining what reporters choose to highlight and what they ignore. Democratic Party ‘Captured by Special Interests’ In traditional political parlance, the term “special interests” referred to […]
Addressing the American Society of Newspaper Editors (4/13/88), President Ronald Reagan asserted that criticism of Jesse Jackson had been muted because of concern that it “might be misinterpreted into some kind of racial attack.” The president seemed to be adding his voice to the popular media refrain: When will Jackson’s “free ride” with the press […]
A curious phenomenon of the presidential campaign has been that the least popular Democratic candidate, Bruce Babbitt, has drawn the most favorable media treatment, while the most popular political demand has received the least favorable media treatment. The New York Times (1/20/88) noted raves for Babbitt in Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles […]
The signing of the Central America peace accord in Guatemala City set off a U.S. media reaction that showed once again the extent to which White House assumptions are shared by the national press corps. While some reporters have questioned whether President Reagan sincerely supports the Arias plan, virtually all mainstream media accept the administration’s […]
