FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
New York City school chancellor Joel Klein is stepping down to take a job with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, and will be replaced with Cathleen Black, chair of Hearst Magazines. Though Black has no experience with education and Klein had none going in, I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense that the current […]
People love Fox News…. We said to the cable operators when we put the price up, we said do you want a monument to yourself…. Cancel us, you might get your house burnt down. –Rupert Murdoch (Australian Financial Review, 11/5/10)
After being fired by NPR, Juan Williams made an appearance with Fox host Bill O’Reilly (10/21/10) where he explained that he wasn’t likely to get support from prominent African-American leaders like Al Sharpton because “I’m not a predictable black liberal.” It’s not totally clear what he means by that, but Williams does a pretty good […]
Fox News must be a funny place to work. The biggest star there is constantly talking about how the Obama administration is leading us toward tyranny, slavery and dictatorship. Meanwhile, on the FoxNews.com website (10/25/10), you’ve got “frequent contributor” and Bush State Department alum Christian Whiton (you couldn’t make these names up) complaining bitterly that […]
It seems to me that debating Juan Williams’ firing from NPR in terms of the role of “opinion” and “objectivity” in journalism is missing the point. Williams has expressed his opinions on Fox News countless times. Other NPR employees frequently express opinions, too, as when Scott Simon wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal […]
Brian Stelter has a piece today in the New York Times (10/20/10) explaining the latest in the fight between Cablevision and NewsCorp. NewsCorp wants the cable company to pay them more money—a lot more—for airing Fox‘s broadcast signal (and a few, smaller cable channels). The two sides couldn’t reach a deal, and as of Saturday, […]
You may have heard that Barack Obama shared some thoughts about Fox News Channel in a recent interview with Rolling Stone. When asked about the channel, Obama pointed out that media outlets with a political perspective have been relatively common throughout U.S. history, but that he believed Fox‘s perspective is “ultimately destructive for the long-term […]
Gabriel Sherman’s New York magazine piece on cable news (10/3/10) has an important insight into the Fox News‘ success: Fox‘s rightward flanking maneuver, capturing a disenfranchised part of the audience, was only part of its strategy. The news, especially political news, wasn’t something that happened. It was something that you shaped out of the raw […]
Starting about a minute in,this clip from last night’s Daily Show is must-see media criticism. On the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends, it is revealed thatthe Kingdom Foundation is a dangerous Saudi organization that, according to guest Dan Senor, funds radical madrassas and has also funded Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam at the […]
Fox News Channel continues to mislead viewers aboutthe “Ground Zero Mosque.”On the August 18 broadcast of the O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly countered the argument that there would be no controversy over a Jewish or Christian house of worship by saying this: Nobody would be complaining because Christians and Jews weren’t involved in the 9/11 […]
Boston TV newscaster Barry Nolan was outraged to learn back in 2008 that Fox host Bill O’Reilly was getting an award from the local chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. So Nolan made flyers documenting various O’Reilly outrages and distributed them at the local Emmys ceremony—and did not do so in […]
The “Ground Zero Mosque” story is unlikely to go away anytime soon.Republican politicians apparently believe it to be an issue that works in their favor, and the media are doing little to challenge the bogus storyline in the first place. Over at Salon.com, Justin Elliot hasa useful timeline that shows how little controversy the Park51 […]
In Howard Kurtz’s latest column (8/2/10), the Washington Post media reporter bemoans the new media atmosphere as a “search-and-destroy culture” that is “as likely to vilify journalists as political and corporate leaders.” Kurtz counts himself among those vilified journalists, citing recent criticism over his defense (7/22/10) of Fox News‘ handling of the Shirley Sherrod debacle: […]
Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (7/22/10) defends Fox News against charges it promoted Andrew Breitbart’s fraudulent Shirley Sherrod story—because, he says, Fox‘s news division didn’t even address the story until after Sherrod resigned. In an extensive defense of Fox, Kurtz also cites an e-mail circulated by a Fox executive to the channel’s news division, […]
Web-based outlets like Salon (7/21/10) and Talking Points Memo (7/21/10) have picked up on the connection—apparently first pointed out by dagblog (7/21/10)—between shooting suspect Byron Williams and Fox News host Glenn Beck. But to judge from a Nexis search, traditional media have ignored the story almost completely. (One exception, found via Facebook: local CBS station […]
The lesson of Shirley Sherrod’s disgraceful treatment by right-wing and not-so-right-wing media (followed by her equally squalid dismissal by an administration that took that media at face value) boils down to a single question: When will journalists see Andrew Breitbart as the serial promoter of journalistic frauds that he is, rather than as a legitimate […]
At the top of his show last night (7/7/10), BillO’Reillynotified viewers that the Factor had “investigated”how much crime in Arizona is committed by undocumented immigrants,explaining: “What we found may surprise you.” “Telling the truth in the illegal immigration controversy, that is the subject of this evening’s Talking Points Memo,” O’Reilly began hiscommentary. Now that would […]
Having your ethics challenged by a Rupert Murdoch-owned media outlet is like having your honesty challenged by Bernie Madoff. Take the recent story about CNN hiring former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned from the office in 2008 following revelations that he had patronized prostitutes. When rumors of the CNN hire began circulating weeks […]
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has endorsed the draconian Arizona immigration law on the grounds that immigration has caused the state’s crime to skyrocket—a claim that founders on the fact that crime in the state has actually gone down (FAIR Action Alert, 5/17/10). Of late, he hasn’t talked much about the immigration/crime angle, leading us […]
Witless commentary and breathtaking hypocrisy are no strangers to Fox News, but Bill O’Reilly was in rare form on June 1. Discussing Joe McGinniss, the journalist who moved next door to Sarah Palin’s family home in Alaska in order to write about her, O’Reilly declared the move “immoral” and maybe even unconstitutional: “He’s intruding upon […]
