FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
As powerful lawmakers debate healthcare legislation of enormous potential impact, corporate media have largely failed to explore the problem of health and insurance industries attempting to influence many of these legislators with a flood of campaign contributions. Despite Deep Throat’s urging journalists to “follow the money,” there’s a longstanding media taboo against discussing the role […]
It was Finley Peter Dunne who said that the job of newspapers was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But the other job of newspapers, as we all know, is to bring in advertisers—who want to reach a big-spending demographic. So what’s a paper to do in this current economic recession? Simply redefine […]
For most Americans, “public broadcasting” means the local PBS affiliate. But there’s another kind of non-commercial media that’s established by the government: public access channels. PEG (Public, Educational and Governmental) channels, as they’re officially known, are created by agreements between municipalities and cable companies: In exchange for getting access to lay their cable through public […]
When the Obama administration’s Federal Communications Commission underwent its first hearing by the House oversight committee on September 17, the agenda largely centered on FCC chair Julius Genachowski’s upcoming broadband plan and net neutrality—yet before it was over, a Republican representative from Oregon felt compelled to examine the Commission’s new associate general counsel and chief […]
Wake Up and Sell the Coffee The October 5 edition of Time magazine reported that some people are wondering if Fair Trade coffee is too cheap—in other words, if the program that is supposed to provide a better deal for coffee growers is paying too little for beans. The minimum price for Fair Trade coffee […]
Murdoch and the Weekly Standard I was disappointed in Michael Corcoran’s article about Rupert Murdoch and the Weekly Standard (Extra!, 9/09). Corcoran’s conclusion is that despite selling the Weekly Standard, “Murdoch still has a powerful soapbox to push his policy preferences.” This gets Murdoch exactly backwards. Murdoch doesn’t have a political agenda. He has a […]
