FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Do elections represent the public will? Does everyone who wants to vote get to? How can we ensure that our voting process reflects the principles of democracy that are so insistently invoked?
For US media, keeping Mexico “open for business” for “foreign investors” should be a priority, a call for maintaining the economic status quo in a country where nearly half the population lives below the poverty line.
The extreme center refuses to acknowledge even the most elementary distinctions between those who depart from the reigning consensus: Everyone angry about the state of the world is the same, however numerous and gargantuan the gaps in the political content of their grievances, or of the social changes they endorse.
Across media, coverage of the Venezuelan election was eerily similar. Indeed, most media outlets even used the same word choice and structure in their headlines, declaring Maduro the winner while undermining the system’s legitimacy with the helpful preposition “amid.”
The outlets that covered Facebook’s partnership with the Atlantic Council failed to examine the motives of the DC think tank, its funders, or the broader premise that “fake news” and “foreign meddling” were something in need of combating.
Much of US media, indignant about Russian impact on the US elections, are openly supporting a coup in Venezuela.
The United States secretly pressured a Venezuelan opposition candidate not to run, so that the election can be discredited as having no viable opposition candidate.
“To suggest that now this administration is concerned about enforcement of the Voting Rights Act really is laughable.”
The rise of social media platforms like Twitter (launched in 2006) and Facebook (opened to the general public in the same year) allowed people to share news and opinions directly, giving them an opportunity to gravitate towards outlets and outlooks that resonate with them.
If you want the support of working-class whites without engaging in xenophobia or other forms of race-baiting, the obvious approach is to appeal to them as members of the working class. But Thomas Edsall seems to have another agenda.
“The state saw, almost immediately, tens of thousands of individuals whose voter registration applications were suspended, and blocked from registering, because they couldn’t come up with the documents that the state was demanding.”
The federal trial over voter fraud mouthpiece Kris Kobach’s effort to change registration laws in Kansas is a chance for corporate media to acknowledge the voter fraud pretense as part of the voter suppression effort.
The 1990s’ deregulation of media illustrates the effectiveness of the Anti-Democracy Movement in convincing Republicans and Democrats alike that a narrow, market-driven, anti-government approach was imperative, even if it led to oligopoly.
President Lenin Moreno’s bullying of the judiciary gets passed over in silence by Ecuador’s media, and the international media follow suit.
“For over 100 years, the US has utilized Honduras as an airport, as a base, a military base, to control what goes on in Cuba, to control what’s going on in Nicaragua, and then, now, to control what’s going on in Venezuela.”
Should the New York Times have disclosed that the author of a piece about government propaganda runs a group overwhelmingly funded by the US government?
What makes Trump’s endorsement news—what justifies the entire reporting of the story—is that Trump is backing someone accused by multiple people, backed by years of circumstantial evidence, of sexual assault and child sexual abuse.
For more than a century, the Times has played the same role in Democratic politics—defending the party’s Big Money wing against populist encroachments. But rarely has the paper’s pleading on behalf of elite interests in the Democratic Party been as frenetic as it has lately.
“They’re going to decide the rules that will either make our national politics fairer and more balanced, or continue being as extreme as they have been through the next decade.”
The Supreme Court case of Gill v. Whitford, deciding whether the way Wisconsin Republicans redrew voting districts in 2011 amounted to “an aggressive partisan gerrymander,” touches on nothing less than whether the US can ever become the democracy so many hope for.
