FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The 25 most media-prominent think tanks were cited 17 percent less in 2007 than they were the year before, FAIR’s annual survey of think tank citations found. The decline was felt across the board among centrist, conservative and progressive think tanks. Once again, the centrist Brookings Institution garnered the most citations, with the general decline […]
U.S. journalists seeking to fulfill the profession’s traditional goal of telling the truth and “letting the chips fall where they may” have powerful forces to contend with, starting with the corporate owners who employ them, and the corporate advertisers who fuel the enterprise, both of whom have an investment in maintaining a political conversation and […]
For a moment it looked like the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) finding that Iran had halted its alleged nuclear weapons program might put a crimp in the White House’s campaign to portray Iran as a menace to the U.S. and its Mideast neighbors. The Washington Post (12/4/07) summarized the NIE’s impact: The new intelligence […]
After years of paying scant attention to Somalia, U.S. media suddenly rediscovered the war-torn African nation in 2006 when a coalition of Islamic courts and their affiliated militias imposed peace on feuding warlords and began enforcing religious law. A U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion soon loomed, and the Bush administration made the preferred story line clear. “The […]
Many political reporters and pundits would probably like to forget the months they spent talking about how Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani was a strong front-runner amidst a relatively weak field. Giuliani enjoyed remarkably upbeat coverage for much of his campaign (Extra!, 5–6/07, 11–12/07), and even as he exited the race media continued their mythologizing, […]
Given that one of the stated goals of George W. Bush’s January 8-16 Mideast trip was to “remind” allies in the Persian Gulf that “Iran is a threat” (New York Times, 1/9/08), it should have at least struck journalists as a strange coincidence when a January 6 encounter between the U.S. Navy and five small […]
Of all the strange stories to come out of the media’s debacle in Iraq, one of the most Orwellian is the fable in which Saddam Hussein tricked America into invading Iraq by making us believe that he had weapons of mass destruction (Extra!, 1–2/04, 5–6/04). Of all the lies, hypocrisies and half-truths of this war, […]
This past February, the famed lobbying firm APCO was approached by a man named Kenneth Case. Case said he represented the Maldon Group, an obscure firm that wished to improve the public image of Turkmenistan, where it had some investments. It was nothing out of the ordinary—private firms often lobby on behalf of foreign […]
How to Bore Reporters Setting the scene for Hillary Clinton’s famous “tearing up” in New Hampshire, reporters Faye Fiore and Peter Nicholas of the Los Angeles Times (1/10/08) revealed more about the press corps than they did about the candidate: “For more than an hour, the discussion was so wonkish that campaign reporters fiddled with […]
Most “fear and favor” shown by media outlets takes the form of slanted or incomplete news coverage. But media companies’ zeal to please the advertisers, who are, after all, their main client, goes beyond covering news to making it. In 2007, congressional debate on a big Food and Drug Administration bill touched on pharmaceutical ads, […]
I’m not in a position to speak for or about other American reporters or newspapers that have written about the Tri-Border Area (TBA) and its ties to Islamic extremist groups. But since April Howard and Benjamin Dangl refer to one of my articles (New York Times, 12/15/02) in the oh-so-snide first paragraph of their report […]
‘Truthful’ or ‘Alarmist’ on Nuclear Power? I would like to comment on the excellent story Karl Grossman wrote on the horrors of nuclear power (1-2/08). Too many people don’t understand the dangers associated with nuclear power, and Karl Grossman did a wonderful job detailing some of them. Nuclear power is dead, or at least should […]
