FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“Electricity from nuclear fission continues to be the most comprehensive source of energy available to meet growing U.S. demand,” declared Richard Rhodes, beginning his 1993 book Nuclear Renewal. He ended it 126 pages later declaring “whether it will be or not depends on leadership and public education.” Rhodes and John Palfreman made their contribution to […]
I knew I was in trouble when, walking into a “leadership summit” of the Society for Environmental Journalists, I tested out what I was planning to say with a young reporter. SEJ should accept investigative reporting as being a part of environmental journalism—after all, I noted, Rachel Carson, the mother of environmental journalism, practiced investigative […]
Make your own media! I’m what they call a “media critic”—I teach a course called Politics of Media as a journalism professor at the State University of New York’s College at Old Westbury, and criticize media plenty, especially in the pages of Extra!. My focus is on concentration of media ownership, especially its impact on […]
Long before Ted Kaczynski’s arrest, we knew exactly how the Unabomber felt about the left: “Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful,” he wrote in his 35,000 word manifesto. “They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality…. The leftist is antagonistic […]
“Earth Day alarmists had it wrong,” proclaimed conservative columnist Joseph Perkins of the San Diego Union in a pre-Earth Day commentary (5/1/95). Drawing on a New Yorker article (3/10/95) written by veteran Newsweek writer Gregg Easterbrook, Perkins takes to task liberals and “greenies” for “grossly overstating the prospects of global warming, the threat of species […]
“How come the cars on television commercials can’t seem to find the road?” my Aunt Sue asked me a couple of years ago. Indeed, TV cars and trucks are found splashing through creeks, climbing rocky slopes, parked in wetlands, invading deserts and even perched on needlelike pinnacles, but rarely are they shown actually driving down […]
Like a sick cow, the mainstream press has lain down and closed its eyes to growing criticism of the drug rBGH since it reached the U.S. market lastyear, including the failure to report on the European Union’s December decision to extend its ban on rBGH use until the year 2000. Extra! May/June 1995
From dioxin to Whitewater, from Rodney King to Reaganomics, Rush Limbaugh has a finely honed ability to twist and distort reality.
Victor Neufeld, 20/20‘s executive producer, whose wife is a PR agent whohas represented the nuclear, chemical and plastics industries, has continued to steer the show away from environmental stories. In an Extra! expose (1-2/94), 20/20 staffers and ex-staffers told of Neufeld squelching stories critical of the nuclear industry and putting a spin on environmental stories […]
Victor Neufeld, 20/20‘s executive producer, whose wife is a PR agent who has represented the nuclear, chemical and plastics industries, has continued to steer the show away from environmental stories. In an Extra! expose (1-2/94), 20/20 staffers and ex-staffers told of Neufeld squelching stories critical of the nuclear industry and putting a spin on environmental […]
Victor Neufeld runs 20/20, the second-most popular TV news magazine in U.S. media. Neufeld has been a top executive of 20/20 for 14 years—for the last seven, its executive producer with the final say on what the average 14 million viewers of the ABC news magazine get to see every Friday night. After 60 Minutes, […]
There’s good news and bad news, America. The good news is that toxics in the environment are much less dangerous than once thought; the bad news is the government’s exorbitant over-regulation of chemicals. The solution? Wait patiently for more definitive data and then apply strict cost/benefit analysis. That’s the growing consensus among a new “third […]
FAIR’s four-month study of National Public Radio found that All Things Considered and Morning Edition devoted less than 2 percent of stories — 45out of 2,296 — to the environment. This parallels commercial broadcasting trends, where coverage of the environment has been declining since 1990 (Tyndall Report1/92). Here, as in other subject areas, NPR tended […]
A space probe with 50 pounds of plutonium aboard–theoretically enough if dispersed to give everyone in the world lung cancer–made an extremely risky low-level “flyby” of the Earth in December 1992. But you wouldn’t have known any danger was involved by reading most of the mainstream U.S. media. Indeed, the New York Times‘ Dec. 8 […]
Another Year of the “environmental decade” is upon us: Acid rain and ozone depletion are household words; nature calendars, dolphin-safe tuna and neighborhood recycling programs are a part of everyday life; and the “environmental president” is running for reelection. Surely, since Time magazine named the Earth “Planet of the Year” in 1989, the environment has […]
One of the claims of the nuclear industry is that it is subject to constant criticism from the media. But a five-month sample of clippings gathered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission indicates that the majority of editorials, columns and news stories on nuclear power in U.S. newspapers are supportive of nuclear power. Extra! conducted a […]
“A decade after Washington declared war on businesses that expose the public to hazardous wastes,” began a New York Times front-page article (9/1/91), “environmental experts are questioning the unquestionable: Is it worth spending a staggering $300 billion to $700 billion to restore waste sites to pristine condition?” Leaving aside the question of when the U.S. […]
The environment and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe were two of last year’s hottest stories. And the two issues came together in the aggressive, graphic reporting on the severe pollution behind the “Iron Curtain.” There was no dearth of coverage: In the ten major publications studied by Extra!, there were 37 stories on […]
The story was hot in more ways than one: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposed to deregulate much of so-called “low-level” radioactive waste from the nation’s nuclear plants, to deem it “Below Regulatory Concern” and allow it to be treated, without monitoring, like plain old garbage. This proposal was on the NRC’s agenda from 1985 […]
With the amount of lip service paid to environmental threats, one would have expected the media to leap at an expose dealing with ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)–like Dennis Hayes’ article in Mother Jones (12/89), which showed that Silicon Valley electronics firms began using CFCs to clean circuit boards and microchips after the 1976 ban on CFCs […]
