FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
You don’t expect to have to defend the position that the 175,000 residents of the small Pacific island your newspaper serves have a right to know about the brutal, nearly 40-year-long history of assault, rape and other crimes shadowing the 8,000 Marines set to be stationed in their backyard (Asia Times Online, 3/5/08). But that […]
If you had any doubt that the elite Washington press corps is too close to the political and corporate elites they are supposed to be scrutinizing, a recent scheme cooked up by the Washington Post might close the case. The plan, as revealed by the website Politico (7/2/09), would have seen Post publisher Katharine Weymouth […]
The Weekly Standard, the country’s preeminent neoconservative magazine, was sold to Clarity Media Group, a Denver-based publishing group, for an undisclosed sum in June (Washington Examiner, 6/17/09). Rupert Murdoch’s unloading of the country’s most vigorously pro-war journal marks the end of a particularly sinister and regrettable era in the history of U.S. media. At a […]
And 10 Times as Many Clueless Pundits Asked by a Canadian viewer, “Has anyone noticed that life expectancy in Canada under our health system is higher than the USA?,” Fox’s Bill O’Reilly (O’Reilly Factor, 7/27/09) responded: “Well, that’s to be expected, Peter, because we have 10 times as many people as you do. That translates […]
The Future of Journalism I welcomed Extra!’s special issue on the future of journalism and especially enjoyed Jim Naureckas’ piece, in which he rightly points out: Giant for-profit companies do not have the same interests as the public at large. And if any sort of entity is able to set aside its own interests when […]
Parroting the Republican Party, corporate media have recently devoted much energy to deploring the federal deficit and chastising President Barack Obama for not focusing enough on balancing the budget. Very soon, media warn, either spending must be cut or taxes will need to be raised across the board—an argument that rests on the assumption that […]
On Earth Day, President Barack Obama gave a speech from Newton, Iowa, a town CNN’s report (4/22/09) placed on “the front lines of a wind-power revolution.” During his speech, which focused on energy, he outlined his proposed cap-and-trade program: “Carbon dioxide and other tailpipe emissions are harmful to the health and well-being of our people. […]
The pretext for the Honduran coup d’état is nothing new. In a remarkable replay, bogus charges that the corporate media in the U.S. and Europe have repeated endlessly without attempting to substantiate—that Honduran president Manuel Zelaya sought to amend the country’s constitution to run for another term—are virtually identical to the sham justification for the […]
