FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Ryan Grim’s new book sheds new light on the establishment media’s 1996 effort to discredit Gary Webb’s Contra crack revelations by talking to some of the key players. They sleep very well, they want you to know.
Fox hosts rush to the defense of a local reporter who blamed a pervasive “anti-cop mentality” on “young black men growing up without fathers.”
Journalism about the current violence is bound to focus on the death and destruction in Gaza. But there remains ample space to ask whether the war was launched to punish Hamas for something it had nothing to do with.
It tells you a lot about our media and society that no one even expects O’Reilly to apologize for his slur of the left.
Fox News is certainly the place for Republicans to go to be told what they want to hear–including that their favorite news outlet is the one that Americans in general find most trustworthy.
On the question of whether or not Christie is a bully, veteran Fox pundit Brit Hume blamed that perception on our “feminized atmosphere.”
There’s no doubt that the sex scandal that prompted CIA director David Petraeus’s sudden resignation late last week is a big story. New details–verified or not–seem to arrive almost by the hour. But the reason it seems to have shaken so many media figures is because Petraeus was uniquely beloved by many in the corporate […]
On the subject of why politicians aren’t worried about corporate media factcheckers, a New York Times article from last week (8/31/12) by Alessandra Stanley is worth a second look. Under the headline, “How MSNBC Became Fox‘s Liberal Evil Twin,” Stanley wrote: “You can agree with everything that Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz say on MSNBC […]
Writing in Newsweek, Peter Beinart has a pretty good idea: America’s foreign-policy debate desperately needs some measure of accountability. I’m not suggesting that politicians and pundits who got Iraq wrong be banished from public life. (This standard would leave me looking for other work.) But neither should they be able to flee the scene of […]
There seems to be a lot of attention to a new study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) study that finds Barack Obama to be much more harshly covered than the Republicans competing to run against him this fall. “Obama Has Received Least Favorable News Coverage So Far During 2012 Election Cycle” reads […]
There’s a popular verb in headlines about climate researcher Peter Gleick’s admission that he used trickery to get damning documents out of the climate change–denialist group the Heartland Institute: “Activist Says He Lied to Obtain Climate Papers” (New York Times, 2/21/12); “Scientist Peter Gleick Admits He Lied to Get Climate Documents” (L.A. Times, 2/21/12); “Climate […]
Is Fox News Channel going soft? In an election year? Some media figures seem to think the hard-right channel is going to the “middle,” but this seems to be a figment of the centrist imagination. New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman has a short piece trying to make this case. His first bit of evidence is […]
The Sarah Palin hostage drama continues. In case you haven’t heard, Palin is taking a bus tour up the East Coast, visiting various sites of historic interest. Which naturally means that every media outlet is forced to follow along, covering this series of non-events as if they are of tremendous importance, asking the pertinent questions: […]
Certain features of the White House story about the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound were irresistible to the media: A fierce firefight. The feared terrorist leader crouching behind his wife as the Navy SEALs approached, before resisting or possibly even reaching for a weapon. And on and on. Of course, those details have been […]
In 2007 Harper’s journalist Ken Silverstein wanted to do a story on Beltway lobbyists’ willingness to work on behalf of creepy dictators. So he went undercover: I decided to approach some top Washington lobbying firms myself, as a potential client, to see whether they would be willing to burnish the public image of a particularly […]
MSNBC host Keith Olbermann’s indefinite suspension for violating network policies regarding political donations lasted all of two work days. On his Wednesday show (11/10/10), Olbermann brought up the point that FAIR made in our alert–the difficulty of squaring such a policy with MSNBC parent General Electric‘s political giving and multi-million dollar lobbying. Olbermann was joined […]
Rush Limbaugh (10/18/10), holding a photo montage from Drudge up to the “Dittocam,” went off on a bizarre rant that suggested that Obama was possessed by supernatural evil (Mediaite, 10/19/10): Folks, these pictures, they look demonic. And I don’t say this lightly. There are a couple pictures, and the eyes, I’m not saying anything here, […]
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, […]
The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz (6/21/10) write aboutthe investigative journalism produced by the Center for Public Integrity, and wonders about its independence: The center has also received grants–including $300,000 last year–from the Open Society Institute founded by liberal philanthropist George Soros, sparking questions about whether its news agenda leans to the left. “We have a […]
