FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
When presidents appear at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, it’s traditional for them to tell a few jokes. But when George W. Bush appeared at this year’s dinner (3/24/04), he made a series of “jokes” about the failure to find the banned weapons that had been the central justification of his invasion of […]
Introduction It’s no secret that advertisers, media owners and powerful political figures pressure journalists to ignore critical stories or sing the praises of a corporate pet project. With diminished journalistic resources available due to corporate cost-cutting in the media industry, news outlets often put commercial or political priorities ahead of journalistic ones. Each year, FAIR […]
A decade ago, major U.S. media joined corporate and political elites in steamrolling the public’s overwhelming 64 percent opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (Gallup, 8/8/93), and NAFTA was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Major U.S. media almost uniformly dismissed NAFTA’s opponents as backward-looking “protectionists.” Mean-while, editorial writers and pundits almost […]
When National Public Radio was launched in 1971, it promised to be an alternative to commercial media that would “promote personal growth rather than corporate gain” and “speak with many voices, many dialects.” In 1993, when FAIR published a study of NPR’s guestlist that challenged the network’s alternative credentials (Extra!, 4-5/93), incoming NPR president Delano […]
Even as media reliance on think tanks increased in 2003, the slant in coverage toward conservative groups and away from progressives held steady. While mainstream media citations of the top 25 think tanks increased 13 percent from 2002 to 2003, right-leaning institutions received 47 percent of last year’s citations, with centrists getting 39 percent and […]
If mainstream media outlets had devoted as much ink and airtime to electronic voting machines as they had to O.J. Simpson, Monicagate or even Janet Jackson’s breast, the outcome of our next presidential election might not depend on machines that can be programmed to favor one candidate over another without anyone ever knowing. As it […]
Late last January, chief U.S. weapons-hunter David Kay left his post, saying that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that most likely none would ever be found. For pro-war pundits and editorialists who had spent months issuing periodic reminders that Kay still had not yet finished his work, and that we should […]
