FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
What the Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbyn is proposing is directly financing spending by printing money. If that is “childlike,” then folks like Paul Krugman have a similar affinity for childlike solutions to economic problems.
The “do something” crowd wants us to “do something” about the refugee crisis and “solve” the “bigger problem,” which, of course, involves regime change. To create the moral urgency and to tether the refugee crisis to their long-standing warmongering, these actors have to insist the US has “done nothing” about Syria.
The New York Post headline “Greek Tragedy: Nation Commits Economic Suicide” was only yelling what was spoken elsewhere: that Greek voters invited ruin with their “No” vote on an austerity referendum.
from 2010 to 2015, Greece has cut government spending from roughly 13 billion euros to 10 billion euros–a cut of 23 percent.
In the Washington Post’s eyes, though, Greece has not yet demonstrated the willingness to “trim its spending”
While the process of switching currencies will never be painless, it must be compared to the pain associated with an indefinite period of unemployment in excess of 20.0 percent, which is almost certainly the path associated with remaining in the euro on the Troika’s terms.
NYT (Mis)Spells Out Debt Problem for SYRIZA A New York Times report (1/29/15) by Liz Alderman suggested that Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, from the anti-austerity SYRIZA party, doesn’t understand his country’s debt problems: When pressed to describe how Greece would pay for bonds falling due in the coming months without taking the €7 billion […]
We’ll talk to Mark Weisbrot about the Greek elections: Could it be that what elite media fear isn’t that Syriza will fail—but that it might succeed? And Amanda Marcotte on how shallow cover of abortion and the new Congress threatens women’s rights.
If It Weren’t for Those Meddling Iranians “This demonstrates the ever pernicious Iranian meddling in other countries in the region.” —unnamed U.S. official complaining to Reuters (1/28/13) about Iran allegedly sending arms to Yemen, where the U.S. is conducting a secret drone war Extreme Weather, Unexplained NBC Nightly News (1/13/13) asked a serious question, […]
If there’s one thing the media seem to be convinced of—or at least seem to want to convince the public of—it’s that rules that protect workers kill jobs and are therefore to blame for high European unemployment rates.
When there are austerity protests in Europe, New York Times headlines like “Markets Falter in Europe Amid Protests on Austerity” (9/27/12) and “Markets Tumble on Unrest in Greece and Spain” (9/27/12) accurately capture the reports’ primary concerns: how the protests might affect financial markets. Of lesser concern to the Times, it seems, is how austerity […]
When someone acts out in reality the violent fantasies that are far-right bloggers’ stock in trade, they pretend to have nothing to do with it.
Right-wing terror suspect Anders Behring Breivik reportedly killed 76 people in Norway on Friday, by all accounts driven by far-right anti-immigrant politics and fervent Islamophobia. But many early media accounts assumed that the perpetrator of the attacks was Muslim. On news of the first round of attacks—the bombs in Oslo—CNN‘s Tom Lister (7/22/11) didn’t know […]
One thing Thomas Friedman demonstrates over and over is that you don’t need to know much to be an expert. Take today’s column (New York Times, 4/13/11), which is based around a contrast between the European wave of democratization in 1989 and the current “Arab spring”: Think about the 1989 democracy wave in Europe. In […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: As French protestors take to the streets against proposed austerity measures, the U.S. media have taken sides. Expressing scorn for spoiled French workers; and cheering the grown up, responsible attitudes of those, like French President Sarkozy who seek to cut promised retirement benefits. How are these same battles covered […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: When Brazil and Turkey brokered a deal to get Iran to ship much of its Uranium abroad for enriching, much of the world saw it as a positive step. But not so U.S. officials, who saw it as a threat to their efforts to impose UN sanctions on Iran—though […]
An AP story (6/7/09) previewing today’s European Parliament election is headlined on MSNBC, “Europe Leans Right Ahead of Parliament Voting: Amid Economic Gloom, Conservatives Look Set to Win Big in Europe-Wide Poll.” The article, by Michael Weissenstein and Robert Wielaard, begins: Europe was leaning to the right ahead of European Parliament elections Sunday, with voters […]
Blogging (Beat the Press, 5/26/09) about how the “New York Times Cooks the Books on Europe’s Auto Industry,” economist Dean Baker catches the paper “touting the layoffs in the U.S. auto industry as a virtue”–since “it notes that auto industry employment in Europe is remaining steady at around 2.3 million, while it is falling to […]
Nothing rankles bigfoot journalists more than seeing the conventional wisdom they so painstakingly craft, distill and disseminate each day simply ignored—or worse, rejected en masse—by large numbers of people. That seems to be how most U.S. pundits and correspondents interpreted this spring’s rejection of the proposed European constitution by voters in the Netherlands and France. […]
Do recent election results suggest that Spain is going soft on the war on terror? Also: how has the Iraqi National Congress meddled with American media?
Election season came to Germany last fall, and in time-honored fashion, the New York Times spent the campaign bemoaning the high wages of German workers. Whether workers in a distant country are overpaid may seem like an odd fixation for an eminent newspaper, but for years the Times has treated no other factor as more […]
