FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Mainstream news media are shortchanging the public—especially women—in their coverage of affirmative action. Consideration of affirmative action’s impact and meaning for women of all colors is largely missing from news stories, and women are severely underrepresented on opinion pages. Worse—with a few exceptions, major media are reporting the debate on affirmative action without reference to […]
Did self-styled anti-terrorism expert Steven Emerson help push the world toward nuclear war? On Sunday, June 28, a sensational story appeared in the British newspaper the Observer: “Pakistan was planning nuclear first strike on India.” The stunning revelation that South Asia was on the brink of thermonuclear war was credited to an unnamed “senior Pakistani […]
“FCC Closes Down Unlicensed Radio Operation That Threatened Air Safety at Sacramento Airport; Fourth Report of Interference Incident in Five Months.” So reads the Federal Communications Commission’s March 20, 1998 press release applauding its own shutdown of unlicensed broadcasters who the agency claims have caused interference to air/ground communications this year in Miami and West […]
In late 1998, the world watched with concern a sinister wave of killings against moderate Muslim clerics in East Java, Indonesia. The killings had the marks of a psychological terror campaign, much like that waged in 1965 by the Indonesian Army. By its use of “psywar,” the Army was able to kill off its Communist […]
As a poverty specialist for the conservative Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector is one of the right-wing media machine’s most prolific pundits. In 1996, the year of the welfare reform debate, he was cited in media outlets an average of more than 15 times a month. Rector also feeds a vast network of right-wing talkshow hosts […]
Other than ultra-quotable crime experts such as Princeton’s John (“adolescent superpredator”) DiIulio and Northeastern University’s James Alan (“teenage crime storm”) Fox, few individuals have contributed more to the inflammatory and systematic misportrayal of teenage crime in American than Rolling Stone magazine’s contributing editor Randall Sullivan. Sullivan’s fact-lite, anecdote-laden style specialized in blowing up extremely rare, […]
Concerned about the high cost of college? Many people are, but your hard-earned dollars are hardly lining the pockets of history department faculty. What your tuition dollars are doing is fueling the profits of a few multinational media conglomerates that publish journals like Brain Research or Tetrahedron. Brain Research, a publication from Elsevier Science (owned […]
Another election cycle is completed, and once again the local television news industry has let the voting public down, offering newscasts Filled with political advertising but little meaningful election news. Rocky Mountain Media Watch`s national network of volunteers taped their local evening newscasts on three consecutive nights (10/20-22/98) two weeks before election day and examined […]
