FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The electoral breakthrough of the extreme-right Austrian Freedom Party—which came in a close second with more than a quarter of the vote in that country’s national elections last October—generated front-page coverage in most European newspapers. Editorial commentary emphasized the importance of keeping the Freedom Party, led by Jörg Haider, from joining a new governing coalition. […]
Cute Kid! Cruel Communists! Martyred Mom! A Thanksgiving Miracle! Any one of these elements can make for the kind of sensational story the U.S. press craves, but the case of Elián González–the 6-year-old boy rescued at sea on November 25, after his mother and 10 others drowned en route from Cuba–has all these ingredients for […]
Coverage of restrictive abortion legislation demonstrates that “balanced” reporting is not necessarily synonymous with accurate reporting. Even while seeming to present impartial facts, media often simultaneously participate in the subtle rhetorical shift toward elevating the fetus to a legal standing separate and equal to a woman’s. The “rights of the unborn” is the most recent […]
The WTO protests in Seattle may be remembered as the time when the words “pepper spray” first entered the vocabulary of the American public. From November 30 through December 3, as police took on demonstrators outside the World Trade Organization meeting at the Seattle Convention Center, you couldn’t turn on a TV or open a […]
The January announcement of the proposed merger of AOL and Time Warner–the largest deal in history–crystallizes one trend, and may trigger another, more ominous one. It can be seen as yet another of the colossal media deals that has dotted the past decade, such that only a handful of conglomerates now own almost all the […]
In a 1998 article (4/23/98), New York Times United Nations correspondent Barbara Crossette critiqued the film Genocide by Sanctions, a documentary produced by a coalition of activist groups opposed to the U.N. sanctions on Iraq. Using footage of dying Iraqi children, the film sought to dramatize Iraq’s desperate humanitarian conditions under the U.N. embargo; more […]
Articles on corporate donations of computers to schools are commonplace these days. Indeed, if you work for a corporation and you’re looking for positive publicity, or the sort of thing that PR spindoctors call “corporate goodwill,” donating a handful of computers to a local school is a pretty sure bet. You’ll pick an impoverished one, […]
