FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
How did a local story about a proposal to build an Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan turn into a national controversy about whether a “Ground Zero Mosque” would be a slap in the face to 9/11 victims? It started with a small group of anti-Muslim activists who suggested the proposal was a scheme by […]
For corporate media, the verdict is already in: The Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), the unpopular program that redistributed some $700 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds upwards, to the very financial institutions that contributed to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, is an unabashed success. It is hardly stunning that corporate media would […]
Over the course of two months, the war in Afghanistan lost its commanding general over an embarrassing article in Rolling Stone magazine (6/22/10), and the website WikiLeaks (7/25/10) posted tens of thousands of classified documents that offered a stark reminder—if one were needed—of the brutal, futile nature of the U.S.-led war. But while both revelations […]
For the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, NBC anchor Brian Williams (Dateline NBC, 8/22/10) recalled the experience as his own boy’s adventure tale: You know, I’ve been around a lot of guns and a lot of dead bodies, and a lot of people shooting at people to make dead bodies. But you put them all […]
It’s not often that a small group of determined colleagues take on corporate power and win, but in academic publishing exactly that is happening. The colleagues are the scientists, researchers, and professors of the Open Access Publishing movement. The corporate powers are the well-monied and politically savvy publishers like Reed Elsevier, whose thousands of journals […]
Wasteful Stimulus—or Simulated Waste? ABC’s Good Morning America (8/3/10) aired a so-called “exclusive” that unveiled a list of supposedly wasteful stimulus projects compiled by two Republican senators. Correspondent Jonathan Karl led off his segment by telling viewers that half a million dollars went to fix up a visitors center near Mount St. Helens that was […]
Extra! Let NYT Off the Hook on Books I would like to take issue with Steve Rendall and Zachary Tomanelli’s handling of book reviews in the latest Extra! (“Who Gets to Review and Be Reviewed?,” 8/10). First, I question giving primacy to ethnicity and gender as opposed to political ideology. The former two are easier […]
