FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Doling out “a little positive reinforcement” when Fox News “actually gets something right,” Mark Howard of News Corpse (6/18/09) agrees with Sean Hannity’s declaration of “the death of journalism”–though disagreeing with the context of Fox‘s pronouncement, being their assertion that a scheduled ABC News broadcast “that would delve into the pros and cons of the […]
Political Animal blogger Steve Benen (6/11/09) has a look at the remarkable occurrence of Fox News‘ Shep Smith “reminding the viewing audience, shortly after the shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, of the DHS report that warned of potentially violent radicals” and “talking about the emails he’s seen from Fox News viewers” he calls […]
Washington Monthly contributing editor Art Levine has a piece for In These Times (5/31/09) reporting on economist Anne Layne-Farrar’s recent congressional appearance in which she warned about the horrendous impact of the Employee Free Choice Act. Its potential to increase union membership from between five and 10 percent, she said, ‘would result in an increase […]
Progressive critic Dr. Roberto Rodriguez has a new commentary (New America Media, 6/2/09) demonstrating how the miserable press reaction to Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s U.S. Supreme Court “nomination clearly shows us is that what this nation needs is more incisive journalism, not less.” But, Rodriguez laments, “to be sure, the rise of right-wing media, which include […]
Writing at Salon (5/31/09, ad-viewing required) on the murder of “Kansas doctor George Tiller, who was killed Sunday while attending church services with his wife,” Gabriel Winant wants us to know that there’s no other person who bears as much responsibility for the characterization of Tiller as a savage on the loose, killing babies willy-nilly […]
Jonathan Hiskes of Grist—who recently exposed “The NYT‘s Favorite ‘Climate Change Denier’”—has now (5/13/09) caught Fox News giving airtime to Marc Morano’s charge of Al Gore “profiting off global warming campaign” : Say you’re a harried cable news producer with 24 gaping hours to fill with finished material every day of the week. Say you’re […]
During his regular review of scientific reporting for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Boyce Rensberger describes (5/7/09) how the “11-year (give or take) sunspot cycle, associated with a periodic reversal in the sunâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s magnetic poles” means that “the number of sunspots increases in the years just before a reversal.” But Rensberger notes that “Where are […]
Just one highlight in Brad Jacobson’s wide-ranging interview of Editor & Publisher‘s Greg Mitchell (Media Bloodhound, 5/5/09) is Mitchell’s scorn for “media coverage of the anti-tax tea parties”: Greg Mitchell: Most amazing was that they tended to treat it like protests in the past. There have been national abortion rights protests and immigration rights protests […]
Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz (5/3/09) seemed startled when the New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza argued that “just because Bush or some previous president didn’t garner as much coverage as Michelle and Barack Obama did doesn’t tell you anything about press bias one way or another.” “Are you kidding?” Kurtz exclaimed. He didn’t express any similar […]
Fox host Bill O’Reilly has been passionately defending Bush-era torture for some time. But onApril 23 he went further; not only does torture “work,” butit is actually broadly popular, too: According to a new Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll, most Americans want tough interrogations of top terror killers. When asked if they would support using torture […]
With Fox News Channel relentlessly promoting—and MSNBC mostly mocking—the right-wing “tea party” demonstrations around the country today, middle-of-the-road media critics are making a typically middle-of-the-road complaint: Yes, Fox shouldn’t be sponsoring such events, but the rest of the corporate media shouldn’t just ignore these allegedly newsworthy events. As Howard Kurtz put it in the Washington […]
Do you remember when Fox News Channel thought comparisons between the U.S. government and Nazi Germany were insane and reprehensible? This was the channel’s reaction when a couple of entries to a video contest sponsored by the progressive activist group MoveOn used Hitler analogies to criticize George W. Bush (FAIR Action Alert, 1/16/04): News Corp‘s […]
Blogging on “Greta Van Susteren’s defensive response” to reports “saying that one of the reasons that Sarah Palin has been caught up in a ‘series of public relations gaffes’ is because she is ‘taking advice from Greta and her husband,’” major GOP booster John Coale, the Huffington Post‘s Geoffrey Dunn (3/29/09) thinks the Fox News […]
News Corpse blogger Mark Howard goes deep into the belly of the beast (3/21/09) with a look at some revealing comments from Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume upon receiving the William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence: “Thanks to Brent [Bozell] and the team at the Media Research Center…for the tremendous amount […]
Upon seeing that, “on her show Tuesday night, Fox News‘ Greta Van Susteren devoted an entire segment to criticizing David Letterman” for having “made jokes about Sarah Palin and her family,” Political Animal blogger Steve Benen (3/19/09) notices that there seems to be a pattern here. In fact, it’s hard not to notice that Van […]
Jon Stewart (3/17/09) has found Glenn Beck expressing his philosophy in what may be its purest form: Believe in something! Even if it’s wrong! Believe in it!
On this morning’s Fox & Friends, the hosts were having a laugh about Mauricio Funes, the new president of El Salvador. Funes won as the candidate of the FMLN, the political party of the former guerrilla group–and he was once a freelancer for CNN. Ergo, Fox couldmake jokes aboutCNN‘s “communist” ties. One of the hosts […]
Steve Benen of Political Animal points out a couple of strange questions posed by corporate journalists—one to each of last year’s major presidential candidates. In this post, Benen quotes an unnamed New York Times reporter (apparently either Sheryl Gay Stolberg or Steven Lee Myers) basically red-baiting Barack Obama: “The first six weeks have given people […]
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly tries to nail Obama on a “no more earmarks” flip-flop in his “talking points” commentary (3/4/09): O’REILLY: We begin with this: BARACK OBAMA: We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review. O’REILLY: That’s President Obama pledging last January to end […]
Prefacing a Daily Show segment (3/4/09) with his version of current big-media reporting: “Recent opinion polls indicate that six weeks into Barack Obama’s administration, the American public thinks they approve of his performance–but it turns out they’re wrong,” Jon Stewart runs clips of celebrity news figures like Fox‘s Sean Hannity asking, “How did the market […]
