FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
With the public still many months away from choosing major-party presidential candidates, robust public debates with a wide sampling from across the political spectrum would seem to be an empowering democratic exercise. And for a press corps so often complaining about the scripted and stilted tedium of day-to-day political campaigning, wide-open debates and a freewheeling […]
Ocean Beach in San Francisco was abuzz with 1,500 people who showed up to spell out a giant “Impeach Now” with their bodies on April 28, all in the home district of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi made a splash prior to the November 2006 election by saying that a Bush impeachment was “off […]
After the Supreme Court’s Gonzales v. Carhart decision upheld federal legislation that restricted abortion procedures without providing an exception for the woman’s health, CNN correspondent Candy Crowley (4/23/07) voiced a popular media refrain: “What’s interesting is whoever frames this issue the best is who is going to benefit from it politically.” Crowley was correct in […]
Reading the coverage of Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason, the line elite media have developed was impossible to miss: Gore’s a smartypants! His ideas may be good or bad, but the point is, he’s a laughingstock. Even those inclined to dislike Gore might be put off by the kind of condescension expressed […]
If 2006 was the year that the issue of global climate change broke through into greater public consciousness—thanks in large part to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, plus books like Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe—2007 could be the year that it becomes old news. Between February and May of this year, the Intergovernmental […]
O’Reilly: NBC “Jazzed” About Kids’ Deaths A new study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (5/25/07) found that over a 10-week period in 2006, Fox spent less time covering the Iraq War than either CNN or MSNBC—half as much time compared to the latter. In response to the “big deal” that “the liberal press […]
In November 2004, a New York Times article on Palestinian elections (11/14/04) stated, “The post-Arafat era will be the latest test of a quintessentially American article of faith: that elections provide legitimacy even to the frailest institutions.” The “faith” that elites in the press and in government have in such elections is tested when the […]
As Hurricane Katrina tore off roofs and exposed the destroyed interiors of homes, it also peeled back the genteel veneer on elite media opinion about New Orleans—revealing that some pundits and reporters viewed the majority of its residents to be essentially irrelevant, if not an outright impediment, to the restructuring of the city’s devastated economy. […]
The principle of universality is universal in only one crucial respect: It’s universally rejected, with scarcely any departure. Worse, the rejection is scarcely if ever even noticed, and so deeply ingrained that we are now immune to fundamental moral and legal principles.
A Little Learning I am struck by the fact that George Will referred derisively to those who believe in global warming (which includes, of course, the vast majority of scientists) as “climate Cassandras” in a February 12 Newsweek column (Extra!, 5-6/07). Can it be that Will doesn’t know that in Greek mythology, Cassandra was endowed […]
