FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Assessments that judge George Shultz to be one of “the good guys,” with a commitment to things like freedom, human dignity and humanity, necessarily gloss over his role in both the Iraq War and the Iran/Contra scandal.
CNN/Time pundit Fareed Zakaria is considered one of the smartest guys in elite policy/media circles.Speaking with CNN host Anderson Cooper on Friday(3/4/11), he advocated CIA intervention in Libya. Deriding a no-fly zone as something less than a “magic solution,” he explained: ZAKARIA: There’s a lot of covert stuff we can do. We can effectively fund […]
In a Consortium News rejoinder (4/30/09) to how “mainstream U.S. news media often laments the decline of objective journalism, pointing disapprovingly at the more subjective news that comes from the Internet or from ideological programming,” Robert Parry writes that one could argue that the U.S. mainstream press has inflicted the severest damage to the concept […]
FAIR was founded on the belief that journalism matters—that getting out the truth can improve the world, while news that distorts or denies reality can have terrible consequences. To illustrate this conviction, we’ve compiled a list of 20 news stories published since FAIR’s 1986 debut that had a major impact on society—for good or for […]
As the Bush administration carries out what the New York Times (4/5/05) describes as a “concerted effort” to block the return of the left-wing Sandinista party to power in Nicaragua, U.S. media are returning to the kind of distorted reporting on Nicaragua that characterized coverage during Washington’s war against that country in the 1980s. The […]
George W. Bush’s February 17 nomination of John Negroponte to the newly created job of director of intelligence was the subject of a flurry of media coverage. But little attention was paid to Negroponte’s role in the brutal and illegal Contra war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the mid-1980s. From 1981 to 1985, […]
In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent U.S. foreign policy—the Reagan/Bush administration’s protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of the Nicaraguan Contra war in the 1980s. For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb […]
At 2 a.m.—midnight in San Jose—on August 18, 1996, I was at a party at my best friend’s house in Indianapolis. I excused myself, went into a bedroom, plugged into my laptop, and dialed into the Mercury’s website. A picture of a man smoking crack, superimposed upon the seal of the CIA, drew itself on […]
Professor Stephen Zunes on US coverage of Syria. And reporter Terry Allen talks candidly about John Negroponte, the Bush nominee for National Director of Intelligence.
George W. Bush’s February 17 nomination of John Negroponte to the newly created job of director of intelligence was the subject of a flurry of media coverage. But one part of Negroponte’s resume was given little attention: his role in the brutal and illegal Contra war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the mid-1980s. […]
FAIR founder Jeff Cohen discusses Gary Webb’s work and the backlash he suffered at the hands of an establishment media bent on protecting the powerful. Also on the show: Workers at the Youngstown, Ohio daily The Vindicator are on strike. Eileen Loh Harrist explains why management at New Orleans’ Gambit Weekly is encouraging its reporters to go to Ohio to break the strike.
News stories about George W. Bush’s appointment of numerous Iran-Contra veterans to key posts have largely relied on past reporting and he-said, she-said soundbites rather than in-depth investigations into their complicity in one of the bloodiest scandals of the past 20 years.
Time magazine’s May 17 issue ran a feature on the funding of the Kosovo Liberation Army, titled “A Fighting Chance,” suggesting that the KLA is sustained by donations from ethnic Albanians outside of Kosovo. The article reports that the Republic of Kosova Fund holds “more than $33 million” in a bank in Albania, yet in […]
FAIR’s October 16 Action Alert criticized mainstream media silence following the October 8th release of a second CIA report detailing the agency’s knowledge of Contra drug trafficking. Activists were encouraged to write directly to journalists at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to inquire about each paper’s treatment of the new […]
The recently de-classified second volume of the CIA’s internal investigation of Contra-drug connections was released last week (still censored in parts), and found the CIA had knowledge of allegations linking many Contras or Contra associates with drug trafficking. But how did the major media cover the story? It’s a good question to put to the […]
Examining the aftermath of Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series makes clear that investigative reporting—particularly reporting that approaches politically sensitive agencies such as the CIA—can cost a reporter dearly.
On May 16, days after his editor backed away from the contra-crack series and amid rumors that he would soon be fired, Gary Webb was interviewed by Laura Flanders and Janine Jackson on CounterSpin, FAIR’s radio show.
After the San Jose Mercury News linked CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras with the importation of cocaine into poor black areas of Los Angeles, establishment papers relied for their debunking of the Mercury News on the CIA’s own obligatory denials
Gary Webb’s Mercury News reporting has provided solid evidence that the contras were not just involved with the cocaine trade, they were major players in it. But the New York Times still seems to be more worried about shattering republics than reporting the truth.
Most of the major media reacted to George Bush’s last-minute pardon of leading Iran/Contra figures with less than outrage. The conventional wisdom in media circles for years has been that the scandal is old news and it should just go away. Robert MacNeil of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (12/24/92) spoke for many in the media when […]
