FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
US media bring images of Yemen’s suffering, but you could think it was happening on Mars, if the dots are not connected between the bombs and the hunger and the cholera, and elected US congressmembers voting again and again to be part of it.
“We can’t continue to work in silos of doing this gun violence work, that urban areas’ gun violence, domestic violence, suicide rates from gun violence, all talked about in the report, all tie together, and you have to come together as one human community to really address these issues.”
Vast majorities of Americans support serious regulation, but corporate media debate still seems to revolve around the supposed “rights” of the few, rather than the right of the many to live a life free from this scourge.
The “dictator” label is also a powerful cue, used by media to prime the reader to see a particular country or leader a certain way.
When the right of return is mentioned in media, pundits and other journalists often baselessly call its legitimacy into question.
“These wrongs and these crimes, if they are not investigated and prosecuted, then most likely this will happen again in the next armed conflict the United States will be involved in.”
On August 20, the Economist ran an article on Venezuela saying that “forced migration from the country might surpass the Syria crisis.” The magazine reported: The UN’s International Organization for Migration estimates that at the end of 2017 approximately 1.6 million Venezuelans were living outside their country. Today that number is likely to be far […]
“They know exactly what they’re doing; they want to ensure that the ethnic cleansing of the entire Rohingya population is complete before anybody finds out.”
“The Court simply—or a majority of the Court—doesn’t seem to feel as though it’s their responsibility anymore to make sure that the Constitution is enforced.”
The Supreme Court has just denied the right to sue officials for unlawful detentions. What does that mean for accountability when powerful people make unconstitutional policy?
Vox, which constantly tells its readers that life is actually swell, with the momentum of history indisputably on the road to justice, decreased poverty and less war, consistently uses a method of ranking countries to prop up its argument that “democracy” is on the rise. But dig into the criteria being used and you find a troubling definition of “democracy” that serves the interests of US power—and wealthy elites.
While American human-rights hypocrisy is nothing new, a string of Bush-era, pro-torture, pro-Guantánamo pundits expressing indignation at Cuba’s human rights failings was still remarkable.
Human Rights Watch’s conflicts of interest contribute to a culture of normalizing and accommodating the extreme power that the United States arrogates to itself.
After more than a decade of criticism, the New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet announced (8/7/14) that when the paper reports on US torture, it will call it “torture” (FAIR Blog, 8/8/14). But what if the paper decides that well-documented evidence of US torture is not fit to print? On August 11, Amnesty International […]
This week on CounterSpin: With the Islamic State, or IS, occupying large swathes of Iraq and Syria, a common refrain from politicians and pundits is to suggest that the group would not be a menace had the US intervened earlier and more deeply in the Syrian civil war. Author and professor Vijay Prashad will join us to address that canard and other misconceptions about Iraq, the US and the Islamic State.
Also on the show: The recent summit of African leaders in Washington DC was criticized by some for soft-pedaling human rights issues, but that only meant in African nations; media seemed to have no question at all about the beneficent goals of the policy of increased ‘investment’ on the continent by US corporations. We have some questions; we’ll ask them of Emira Woods of ThoughtWorks and the Institute for Policy Studies.
What should be done to prevent incidents like the January 26 fire at the Smart Fashion Export factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in which at least seven garment workers (three of them teenage girls) were killed, their escape impeded by a blocked exit and the absence of the most rudimentary fire safety equipment? The answer for […]
The New York Times‘ lengthy report (5/29/12) on Barack Obama’s drone “kill list” should provoke serious questions: Is such a program legal? How does it square with Obama’s criticism of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” policies? Is the White House covering up the killing of civilians by labeling them “militants”? Why is the United […]
After a FAIR Action Alert (12/2/11), the CBS Evening News has changed its count of civilian deaths–citing a new figure that is roughly twice their original count. On December 1 the CBS Evening News reported: It is estimated that more than 50,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the war. As FAIR pointed out, this was […]
A December 1 CBS Evening News report about the Iraq War managed to mislead viewers about the start of the war and severely diminish the loss of civilian lives. Reporting on the handover of the U.S. military headquarters to Iraqi forces, anchor Scott Pelley announced: What began in 2003 as an effort to overthrow Saddam […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Congressional debate over the Libya War shows an apparently bipartisan sense of frustration and outrage over the NATO mission. This has triggered a serious debate over the legality of the war, among other things. But there is almost no discussion of whether the pretext for the war has actually […]
