Gary Webb Defends Gary Webb
On May 16, days after his editor backed away from the contra-crack series and amid rumors that he would soon be fired, Gary Webb was interviewed by Laura Flanders and Janine Jackson on CounterSpin, FAIR’s radio show.
Ellen’s Coming Out Was No Rerun
By the time you read this, the sober cynicism of summer will probably have settled in, but now, it’s spring. I’m as excited about “Ellen” coming out as I am about the budding leaves. By summer, I’ll remember that the obstacles to lesbian equality remain intact long after Ellen DeGeneres and her TV character said […]
‘The Power of the Press Has a Price’
Sixty years ago, reporter and press critic George Seldes wrote in Freedom of the Press that advertisers, not government, are the principal news censors in the United States. Not only do advertisers pressure newspapers to kill or alter stories, he concluded, but newspapers censor stories out of deference “toward the sources of their money” without […]
Fear of Fat
Fat has been a matter of huge media interest lately, if you’ll pardon the pun. As a nation, we’re wrestling with the fact that we’re getting fatter and fatter all the time—on average, we’ve gained eight pounds apiece in the past decade—and we don’t know what,if anything, can be done about it. The news about […]
Atoning for Environmentalism
“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 […]
Pot Boiler
As America’s officially ignored death toll from overdoses of heroin, cocaine, prescription drugs and alcohol mixed with dope took another huge jump in 1995 (taking 10,000 lives, up 65 percent since 1992), America’s media raged with the threat to the republic posed by . . . sick people smoking marijuana to relieve pain.
New Survey on Think Tanks
Major news media continued to give greater prominence to conservative think tanks in 1996, according to a survey of major paper and broadcast media citations in the Nexis computer database. Of the 10 most-media-cited think tanks, six are conservative or right-leaning, three are centrist and one is left-leaning. More than half of the total citations […]
Election Neglected on L.A.’s Local TV
American media seem never to run short of disillusioning experiences. When members of FAIR did a study of L.A. local TV news three years ago, we expected to find a lot of crime stories, and sure enough, we did. What we didn’t expect to find was zero campaign coverage only weeks before an election. So […]
