FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
There’s been plenty of commentary about Monday’s front-page New York Times story (6/14/10) announcing, “U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan.” Reporter James Risen‘s lead: The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and […]
Media Detector, a New York Times blog, has a post today (6/14/10) about a comic book adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses that Apple is insisting be bowdlerized before it can be turned into an app for the iPad–replacing an image of a bare-breasted “milk lady” with a close-up of her face. While calling Apple‘s decision […]
Quipping that “usually newspapers are big defenders of free speech, but not the Washington Post,” economic reporting critic Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/2/09) takes down the paper’s recent piece giving over “nearly 2,000 words to complain that a website had ripped off” one reporter’s story. Careful to say that “the problem was not that […]
Free Press’s newest release (7/31/09) touts some fresh congressional legislation that “Would Protect Net Neutrality Once and for All.” According to the media reform activists, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 “would protect Network Neutrality under the Communications Act, safeguarding the future of the open Internet and protecting Internet users from discrimination online.” Policy […]
Free Press campaign coordinator Misty Perez has sent out (7/15/09) a call to action in light of the astonishing figure that “in the first three months of 2009, the phone and cable industries spent at least $20 million to hire more than 400 lobbyists” in an effort to “push for policies that fatten phone and […]
While the Internet in general is sometimes fingered as the newspaper industry’s problem, these days the search engine Google seems to get more attention, and vitriol, from corporate media. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd (4/15/09) summed up the media industry’s complaint: Robert Thomson, the top editor of the Wall Street Journal, denounced websites like […]
On December 6, 2008, a 15-year-old in Athens was shot and killed by a police officer. The event sparked nationwide riots and protests, with news spreading rapidly through word of mouth and new media platforms like cell phones and Internet sites. Meanwhile, reported Andrew Lam at New America Media (12/16/08), some 500 media professionals were […]
Bringing us the news that “the North Carolina legislature just sent a bill to study committee (a.k.a shelved it at least until next year) that would have crippled municipal broadband projects in the state,” AlterNet‘s Tana Ganeva (5/6/09) tells “why that’s a really, really good (albeit temporary) thing”: According to a recent study, America ranks […]
Free Press is welcoming (4/28/09) as “a long overdue step in the right direction” the news that “Cablevision announced plans to offer download speeds of 101Mbps and upload speeds of 15Mbps” without charging “usage caps or overage fees” to users. Research director S. Derek Turner explains that the plan does, however, beg the question why […]
Free Press Campaign Director Tim Karr (SaveTheInternet.com, 4/16/09) is celebrating Time Warner Cable having “shelved its plan to impose excessive Internet fees against those who use the Web for more than email and basic surfing.” Karr details how Time Warner Cable had been testing new Internet use penalties on people in Beaumont, Texas, and planned […]
The media activist group Free Press has a new release (3/19/09) warning of the latest threat to free speech online: “a technology known as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) that offers Internet service providers unprecedented control over Internet content.” DPI, says Free Press, “could spell disaster for the free market online,” AKA Net Neutrality. According to […]
If the Bush administration lets large media conglomerates and local telephone companies have their way, the Internet as we know it—that free-flowing, democratic, uncensored information superhighway—could soon be a thing of the past. The Internet itself is not going away. Rather, technological advances, changes to the rules governing its use and the continued consolidation of […]
Journalists pushing their newspapers and broadcast companies to move into online publishing say the Internet promises an exciting new type of media—interactive, democratic, instantaneous, multi-modal and many-layered. Yet there is new evidence that the very qualities that make online publishing so intriguing to journalists are spawning subtle new approaches to advertising that may threaten the […]
Al Gore may get credit for coining the term “information superhighway,” but it’s Newt Gingrich and company who are burning rubber on it. House Speaker Gingrich and his fellow Republicans have clearly stolen the thunder of their Democratic counterparts in applying state-of-the-art information technology to further their political agenda. Since seizing power in November, the […]
