FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
International efforts to ban cluster bombs fell apart late last week. If you were reading about this in the New York Times, you might have been led to believe that the United States was pushing to get rid of the weapons—instead of the opposite. Here’s the lead sentence from a story in Saturday’s paper (11/26/11): […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin070111 Patrick Cockburn and Jordan Flaherty @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin070111.mp3″] 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 […]
The number of Afghan boys gathering firewood killed by a March 1 U.S./NATO helicopter attack in Kunar Province: Nine. The number of stories about the killing of the nine children on ABC, CBS or NBC morning or evening news shows (as of March 6): Two. One was an 80-word report on NBC Nightly News (3/2/11), […]
The May 31 Israeli attack on the Free Gaza humanitarian flotilla has returned some media attention to the humanitarian crisis faced by 1.5 million Palestinians living under Israeli blockade in the Gaza Strip. But some media figures have sought to deny the existence of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza at all. The Gaza Strip remains […]
Download MP3 On May 31st the Israeli military attacked a flotilla of boats full of civilians attempting to deliver humanitarian supplies to the Gaza strip, and to call attention to the impact of Israel’s blockade. At least 9 and as many as 16 activists were killed—we don’t know in part due to Israel’s tight control […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: A few months ago it seemed like Dick Cheney wouldn’t get off your television screen, insisting that secret CIA documents would prove that Bush torture policies saved the United States from further terrorist attacks. Well those documents have surfaced, along with a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report. So what’s […]
The wars that have wracked the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996, killing well over 5 million people (International Rescue Committee, 1/08) in what may be the deadliest conflict since World War II, are officially over. A peace agreement was signed in 2002, and general elections were held in 2006. But conflict and the […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin031309 Melissa Harris Lacewell and Alex de Waal @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin031309.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The evils of earmarks. Barack Obama signed a spending bill “stuffed with earmarks,” the media tell us–despite the fact that he campaigned pledging to reform that practice. The assumption is that Congressional earmarks are bad; but are they? We’ll […]
Click here to download pdf. Any evenhanded comparison of the Colombian and Venezuelan governments’ human rights records would have to note that, though Venezuela’s record is far from perfect, that country is by every measure a safer place than Colombia to live, vote, organize unions and political groups, speak out against the government or practice […]
U.S. corporate media coverage of the Israeli military attacks launched December 27 that, as of January 13, had reportedly killed over 900 and injured thousands more—many of them civilians—has overwhelmingly failed to mention that indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets are illegal under international humanitarian law. Israel’s aerial attacks on Gazan infrastructure, including a TV station, […]
U.S. corporate media coverage of the Israeli military attacks that have reportedly killed over 900–many of them civilians–since December 27 has overwhelmingly failed to mention that indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets are illegal under international humanitarian law. Israel’s recent aerial attacks on Gazan infrastructure, including a TV station, police stations, a mosque, a university and […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin121908 Michael Ratner and Alfie Kohn @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin121908.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: When the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report finding former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other high officials responsible for abusive treatment of detainees in Guantánamo, Iraq and Afghanistan—with few exceptions, the media played the story down, preferring, for instance, […]
In the Darfur region of Sudan, truly horrific atrocities have taken place in recent years: Roughly 200,000 people have died from violence, disease or hunger (Science, 9/15/06), and well over 2 million have been driven from their homes, resulting in a severe humanitarian crisis. Such crises often go criminally ignored by a mainstream media seldom […]
The Iraq War was sold to Americans in part as an intervention that would benefit Iraqis, “liberating” them from the despotic rule of Saddam Hussein. In retrospect, after no weapons of mass destruction were found and the alleged links to Al-Qaeda were debunked, this supposed humanitarian mission became the central justification for the invasion. Today, […]
When Human Rights Watch recently released two investigations of the 2006 Israel/Lebanon war, the New York Times found the group’s documentation of unlawful attacks against Israel to be far more newsworthy than unlawful attacks committed by Israel. It’s rare that a media outlet’s news standards can be tested so directly. The human rights group released […]
When they’re discussed at all by corporate media, civilian deaths in Afghanistan are often presented as a tactical or public relations problem for U.S. military and political officials, or labeled as “accidental” or “errant.” The civilian deaths are not accidents, however; they are the predictable result of a deliberate decision to protect American troops by […]
“Africa is sexy and people need to know that,” declared U2 singer Bono (New York Times, 3/5/07), promoting his new (RED) line of products that propose to save Africa one iPod at a time. Celebrity interest in Africa is not particularly new, but today more stars than ever seem to be converging upon the continent, […]
Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani joins CounterSpin to discuss how the U.S. press oversimplifies the story of Darfur. Also this week: Karen Greenberg describes a recent trip to Guantánamo and shares about her recent essay on the experience.
Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies joins CounterSpin to discuss how U.S. press has remembered Augusto Pinochet and his legacy. Also on the show: While the U.S. Latino population continues to grow, the number of local Spanish language television newscasts will soon be shrinking, per a recent announcement by NBC Universal. We’ll talk about what it means to lose local news with Rafael Olmeda, the president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
After a FAIR action alert (12/6/06) pointed out an error in a New York Times article (“Offering Video, Israel Answers War Critics,” 12/5/06), the Times published a correction on December 7. FAIR had pointed out that, in a piece describing an Israeli report that attempted to defend Israel against charges of war crimes, the Times […]
