FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
It’s easy to imagine why corporate-owned media might be eager to report the political downfall of Ron Carey—the man who in August 1997 led the 1.4 million-member Teamsters union in the most prominent and popular strike in recent memory. The sudden media fascination with union politics is a little suspicious; many a tainted Teamsters […]
Early last year, ABC News asked me to participate in a “town meeting” at the right-wing Cato Institute. It was for a piece that ABC’s 20/20 was doing on José Piñera, Cato’s guru of Social Security privatization. The Harvard-educated economist–who also owns a lucrative world-wide consulting business–axed Social Security in his native Chile in 1981, […]
When the federal Food and Drug Administration last month approved irradiation of red meat, government scientists cited the need to beef up efforts to combat a new, deadly strain of E. coli bacteria. No scientific explanation, however, has been forthcoming for the way the FDA’s decision seems to have zapped the critical faculties of the […]
MSNBC, the cable news channel, has a headline for its breathless, round-the-clock coverage of the Clinton sex scandal: “The President in Crisis.” A better headline might be: “The News Media in Heat.” In the media environment of 1998, when it comes to a sex-related scandal, many national news outlets can’t seem to avoid binge coverage. […]
The topic of sexuality received unprecedented news media attention in the 1990s–in part due to the AIDS crisis, in part because of a national fight to bring down centuries of legal, social and cultural bias against people who are bisexual, transgendered and/or lesbian and gay. In many year-end round-ups, the media remembered 1997 as a […]
Examining the aftermath of Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series makes clear that investigative reporting—particularly reporting that approaches politically sensitive agencies such as the CIA—can cost a reporter dearly.
Many people have heard of Pat Robertson, but few can say they know him, even among his limited number of close friends. To the general public he is an enigma—a Baptist minister, a televangelist, a would-be kingmaker behind the Republican Party, the founder of the powerful Christian Coalition, a businessman, a broadcast mogul, a defender […]
