FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck had a surprising 2009 (Extra!, 6/09), becoming a high-profile advocate for the right-wing Tea Party movement and attracting millions of viewers to his late afternoon cable talk show. How does one top that? By spinning out elaborate theories about the “progressive” assault on the Constitution and the country, hinting […]
Abraham Lincoln despised class warfare, Thomas Jefferson detested bailouts and the founders of the nation were all Bible-believing Christians. These are among the historical “facts” you’ll learn as a regular consumer of talk radio, Fox News and other conservative sources. While non-conservatives have been known to misquote historical figures to add credibility to their own […]
When conservative activist James O’Keefe was arrested on January 25 for attempting to interfere with the phone lines of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu from Louisiana (Washington Examiner, 1/26/10), outrage in the media was hard to come by. O’Keefe secretly filmed two accomplices as they impersonated telephone company employees in the senator’s office; he claimed he […]
Through all the twists and turns of the healthcare reform debate, one thing has remained constant: Progressive ideas with majority popular support are falsely portrayed as radical, ideological fantasies, while those who oppose them are praised as pragmatic and reasonable. This trend began when Washington insiders excluded the idea of a single-payer public health insurance […]
One of the most striking images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was of poor New Orleans residents crowded together outside that city’s convention center, days after the storm had subsided, chanting, “We want help!” It was a scene that shocked viewers and reporters alike, who had not realized that a major U.S. city could […]
Better to Mislead Than to Take a Side In the third paragraph of a report on the stimulus program in the New York Times (2/18/10), readers were told, “There is little dispute among economists that the measure has kept the jobless rate from being even higher than it is.” Clear enough. But since reporting must […]
Hunting for Orion in Green Press List I enjoyed the environment focus published in my recent e-edition of Extra! (2/10), but I am puzzled by the omission of Orion magazine from Miranda Spencer’s round-up of notable environmental magazines and websites (“Environmental Journalism in the Greenhouse Era”). Orion magazine is an extremely ambitious and high-end nature […]
The role of George W. Bush’s tax cuts in the current federal deficit is tremendous. Their role in corporate media’s current round of deficit obsession, however, is tenuous at best. Sometimes acknowledged in editorials or op-eds, the cuts generally only make it into news reports as assertions from the White House or Democrats, rather than […]
