FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
It may be unlikely that the United States will summon the political will to implement a realistic plan for not just delaying, but stopping Covid-19. But it’s crucial for media reporting on options in the fight against the outbreak to distinguish.
The right-wing vendetta against the Postal Service long predates the pandemic, but gutting it now has the potential to undermine the integrity of the November election. Yet establishment media seem remarkably uninterested in connecting the dots.
For a perfect illustration of how corporate media function as ruling class propagandists, watch how they spun a titanic upward redistribution of wealth as a “rescue plan” for the US economy. In discussions of the (officially) estimated $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act—the largest government spending program in US history—before it […]
The difference between the US and Vietnamese governments is not how much they surveil their citizens—but whether they use the information they collect to protect their citizens’ health.
It may be unlikely that the United States will summon the political will to implement a realistic plan for not just delaying, but stopping Covid-19. But it’s crucial for media reporting on options in the fight against the outbreak to distinguish.
Backed by Washington, the coup that the Western media deny is a coup (FAIR.org, 11/11/19) appears successful, at least for the time being. However, as in the short-lived 2002 coup in Venezuela, the media blackout and savage repression have not stopped multitudes of Bolivians from taking to the streets to restore democracy. Only time will tell if the pueblo will triumph.
The New York Times’ voluminous coverage of the impeachment hearings detailed many of the pieces that make up the overall strategy, but the vast majority of it boiled down to the predictable formula of covering the whole process like a partisan horserace
So the paper recycled its poll to tell essentially the same story, about Democrats being too far left for the battleground states, in a different and more roundabout way, presenting it as if it were new.
Will interest payments take up the entire federal budget? A Wall Street Journal column by Greg Ip (3/28/18) gave us another rendition of this old scare story. The argument is that the interest paid on US government debt will soon impose an enormous burden on the federal government, choking off spending on important government programs. […]
The linguistic gymnastics needed to report on police violence without calling up images of police violence is a thing of semantic wonder. The case of Ohio Deputy Richard Scarborough shooting and killing 16-year-old Joseph Haynes inside a courthouse checked off nearly all the pro-police propaganda tropes:
Journalism lost one of its most valuable investigators when Robert Parry died on January 27, from pancreatic cancer, at the age of 68. He was the first reporter to reveal Oliver North’s operation in the White House basement (AP, 6/10/1985), and the co-author of the first report on Contra drug-smuggling (AP, 12/21/1985). He did some […]
Dreamers Shut Out of Shutdown Commentary Out of 34 op-eds and editorials in three leading papers from three days before to three days after the government shutdown (1/17–25/18), only one—by New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (1/22/18)—criticized Democrats for selling out the Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants who had been granted limited protection by the Obama […]
CBS News’ 60 Minutes (11/19/17) took a deep dive into the humanitarian crisis in Yemen without once mentioning the direct role the United States plays in creating, perpetuating and prolonging a crisis that’s left over 10,000 civilians dead, 2 million displaced and an estimated 1 million with cholera.
Under the cover of a shallow understanding of “balance,” corporate media have internalized the outlandish idea that it is “partisan,” and thus not “neutral,” to acknowledge the undeniably destructive effects of particular political policies.
Ed Herman was the main author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, written with Noam Chomsky—the 1980s masterwork that exposed how elite US media typically function as propaganda organs for US empire and militarism.
