FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
There’s an old grade-school joke that about homework that went something like this: The more you study, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why study? Substitute “watch TV news” for study, and it still sounds like a joke, but it’s […]
Newsday‘s reputation as a promoter of development on Long Island, N.Y., is being reinforced by publisher Robert M. Johnson—to the discomfort of many of the daily’s reporters and other Long Island media. Johnson was the principal speaker at an April 7 meeting of top Long Island developers, leaders of business groups and construction unions, who […]
If there is one image that has come to epitomize the abortion debate, it is pro-choice and anti-abortion demonstrators shouting at each other, brandishing placards. Mainstream media specializes in “extremists of both ends” coverage, bemoaning the “angry rhetoric” of both sides. The search for “compromise” has long been a staple of abortion reporting, and in […]
The year 1988, the press reported, would be a breakthrough year for women in politics. But in the end, only two additional women were elected to the House of Representatives, none to the Senate. In 1990, we were again told we were seeing the “Year of the Woman.” But although 70 women won major party […]
Question: When does a drought that threatens millions of human lives become news that fits the front page of the New York Times? Answer: When animals die. That’s the rule New York Times editors apparently followed in the week of July 5-12, 1992, when they published five substantial stories in eight days on countries ravaged […]
Nowadays one can be portrayed as a wanton murderer on a nationally televised program, get killed by police less than 48 hours later, and have the nation invited by television to applaud the death within the week. That fate befell Cesar Mazariego-Molina, 26, an undocumented worker from El Salvador, who L.A. County sheriff’s deputies said […]
Today, the “drug issue” remains a blank screen of public concern upon which society’s most profound fears — about the urban poor, or dark-skinned foreigners — can be easily focused. Although polls indicate that public concern about drugs is again at an ebb, it remains a small matter for the media or the administration to bring the issue back to life.
It was fashionable to bemoan the networks’ lack of gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Democratic conventions. ABC‘s Peter Jennings (Washington Post, 7/12/92) said it was “a little sad” that the networks were passing up “a chance to present the democratic process in the purest sense.” Of course, modern stage-managed conventions are anything but a democratic process—and […]
Bill Clinton’s remarks about rapper Sister Souljah were part of a clear, if some what peculiar, political strategy: identify those voting blocs most likely to support you, and alienate them. This strategy was outlined in a David Broder/Thomas Edsall Washington Post piece (6/12/92) just before the Rainbow Coalition conference: “Some top advisers to Clinton argue that…he […]
