FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Guessing the Views of Pro-Choice Advocates New York Times reporter Charlie Savage (5/28/09) reported on the “unease” some abortion rights advocates feel about the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, because “when she has written opinions that touched tangentially on abortion disputes, she has reached outcomes in some cases that were favorable to […]
The Hannity Prescription I enjoyed your coverage of the media quarantine of single-payer health plans (6/09). I was particularly tickled by the quote of this right-wing fanatic Sean Hannity. His is idea was that if we look at France, England or Canada, we would see that single-payer is the worst thing. I then checked the […]
Newspapers are faltering. Their traditional economic base is continually being eroded by the Internet, and this trend will only increase with time. The lot of print newspapers is unlikely to improve, and the sooner journalists and those who care about the press accept this foregone conclusion, the better. Because there is a critical question confronting […]
First came the waves of consolidation that swallowed up independent newspapers across the country. Now, as more newsrooms shrink and shutter in the Internet age, the local daily paper may be verging on extinction. But in many communities, a new tide of experimental Web-based ventures is moving to fill in the holes left by declining […]
On December 6, 2008, a 15-year-old in Athens was shot and killed by a police officer. The event sparked nationwide riots and protests, with news spreading rapidly through word of mouth and new media platforms like cell phones and Internet sites. Meanwhile, reported Andrew Lam at New America Media (12/16/08), some 500 media professionals were […]
When critics talk about “saving journalism,” the image one gets is of ink-stained toilers bringing important truths into the light of public scrutiny. But this bears little relation to most people’s experience of news media. For one thing, most people get their news from TV, not generally the poster child for journalism worth saving. Certainly, […]
Some voices in the corporate media have pushed for government intervention to relax ownership restrictions in order to allow for the creation of even bigger media conglomerates—which seems a bit like a hangover victim’s thirst for the hair of the dog that bit them. New York Times reporter Carr (5/9/09) confessed that while as a […]
While the Internet in general is sometimes fingered as the newspaper industry’s problem, these days the search engine Google seems to get more attention, and vitriol, from corporate media. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd (4/15/09) summed up the media industry’s complaint: Robert Thomson, the top editor of the Wall Street Journal, denounced websites like […]
Extra! asked progressive media activists and scholars to share their ideas on how to make journalism’s future better than its present; the following are some of the highlights. *** The one thing that we should do in the face of the erosion of commercial journalism is invest heavily in libraries. That means we should publicly […]
SIDEBARS: Proposed Cure: More of the Disease and Did Google Kill the Newspaper Star? Corporate media are in a state of severe business shock, it seems—layoffs at newspapers large and small, due to advertising revenue drying up and readers ceasing to pay for a printed copy of a newspaper that they can usually read for […]
