FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
In September 1987, when Amnesty International issued its annual (1986) report on human rights abuses in 129 nations, it received scant and oversimplified coverage reflecting the anti-Sovietism of the day. Amnesty’s world-spanning report was typically cast in a superpower framework, as US journalists focused on human rights violations in the USSR or in countries out […]
A wall exhibit, “A people in Print: Jewish Journalism in America,” held in 1987 at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, featured enlarged photocopies of articles from the New York Times about the Holocaust–the most terrible stories–but given short shrift, relegated to the back pages of the paper. Included were items like […]
Few topics are of greater concern to the US media than freedom of the press. Their treatment of this topic thus provides a useful test of factors that shape the media product. Specifically, by comparing the reaction to abuses by US friends and US enemies, we can determine the relative weight of journalists’ professed values […]
Press coverage of human rights in El Salvador and Nicaragua provides an excellent test of journalistic integrity. This is because the US government has staked clear positions: supporting the Salvadoran regime and playing down its less savory qualities; opposing and denigrating the Nicaraguan government while trying to portray the US-organized contras as “freedom fighters.” The […]
Most mainstream human rights organizations place a de facto priority on questions of physical integrity and violations of political and civil rights. Social and economic rights are addressed only insofar as they have a direct bearing on the political and civil issues; labor organizing, for example, is a form of free association, and restraints on […]
A wave of exhilaration surged through the crowd when the first contingent of Chinese workers joined student hunger strikers in Tiananmen Square. Three thousand students started their protest in May, two days before Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev arrived for historic talks with China’s rulers. By the time Gorbachev left Beijing, mass demonstrations had spread to […]
‘The enthusiasm for free-market initiatives and other reforms became the new rationale for turning a blind eye to the continuing repression in China.’
The facts of the Holocaust were in US newspapers during the war years, but published in such a tentative way as to minimize the impact on US readers.
