FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
[Note: this piece is a sidebar to Opinion Omission] When Harvard president Laurence Summers suggested that “intrinsic aptitude” might be holding women back in math and the sciences, the opinions sparked at major media outlets demonstrated the predictability of a punditocracy that itself lacks gender balance and diversity. In the initial stir toward the end […]
Dan Rather got the lion’s share of the attention, but another journalistic retirement has also been cause for discussion in media circles. Award-winning journalist Laurie Garrett announced recently that she won’t be returning to her post at Newsday, the Long Island daily, and she was crystal clear about the reasons why. In an exit memo […]
When Susan Estrich launched a public attack in February on Los Angeles Times op-ed page editor Michael Kinsley for not including enough women on his pages, it made a brief stir in certain (mostly female) circles of the media. But the problem runs deeper than the op-ed pages of prominent newspapers; female opinions are muted […]
In the months before the January 30, 2005 elections in Iraq, gloom and dissension began creeping into the media’s usual cheerleading for the war. Casualties were mounting, Iraqi resentment was growing, and the Army was facing an alarming shortage of manpower. In a December column (12/27/04), Washington Post editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt—a staunch supporter of […]
The Washington Post headline on March 18 seemed straightforward enough: “Senate Rejects GOP Budget Cuts; House Deficit-Reduction Moves Thwarted.” The U.S. Senate, in passing its budget bill the previous afternoon, had, reported Post writer Jonathan Weisman (3/18/05), “dealt a slap to President Bush and the Republican leadership, approving a 2006 budget that would gut much […]
A study of media citations of think tanks in 2004—the 10th year of collecting such data—finds that think tanks of the right and center still predominate, despite a slight increase in citations of left-leaning think tanks. The study counts citations of the 25 most prominent think tanks of right, center and left, using the Nexis […]
The commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, held at the former Nazi death camp in Poland on January 27, featured speakers warning about a new rise in antisemitism. “From broken windows to death camps was the blink of an eye,” said Moshe Kantor of the European Jewish Congress (New York Times, […]
Failing to find weapons of mass destruction or an Al-Qaeda/Saddam Hussein connection almost two years after it invaded Iraq, the Bush White House fell back on its second-tier justification for the invasion: that occupying the country would start a domino-chain of democratization throughout the Middle East. In the wake of the January 30 Iraq elections, […]
Congo is the site of the world’s worst humanitarian emergency, according to U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland, the organization Doctors Without Borders and most relief professionals. But English-language media have given the crisis minimal attention, according to a study of humanitarian disaster coverage released on March 10. The study was commissioned by web-based Reuters […]
Expert Opinion “Jim, you think he’s with Jesus now? We only have 30 seconds.” –Larry King, interviewing Jim Caviezel, the actor who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, on Pope John Paul II’s death (Larry King Live, 4/3/05) “The pope is above public opinion. His relationship is with God.” –Phil Griffin, […]
WEBB AND HESS I would like to thank you for your tribute to Gary Webb. While you quite properly contrasted the fate of people who wrote stories the mainstream media deemed unacceptable with people who ducked the stories altogether, it might be interesting to find out what happens to people who write right-wing stories that […]
White House officials were reportedly telling staffers that there was a “don’t gloat” policy when it came to talking about the stirrings in the Middle East (NBC Nightly News, 3/8/05; Time, 3/14/05). No such limits were placed on pundits, some of whom saw the events as proof that they were right all along to support […]
While some examples of increasing anti-Semitism go little noted, considerable attention has been paid to dubious accusations that seem to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Before Harvard President Laurence Summers drew fire for suggesting that women were inherently inferior at math and science (see Extra!,5-6/2005), he stirred things up by proclaiming that a new […]
