FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Media outlets are creating a climate for a US military attack on Iran by hyping the idea that Iran is an imminent threat to peace. Headlines breathlessly suggest to readers that Iranians are going to kill Americans if Americans don’t kill Iranians first.
Reading corporate media’s inversion of reality, it’s hard to escape the impression that while Iran betrays its international agreements, the US just leaves them behind.
US leaders have been threatening Iran for years, but US corporate media persistently and wrongly paint US escalations against Iran as defensive countermeasures.
If we can still call things “surreal,” that would describe watching corporate media do the same things they did in the run-up to the Iraq War, things they later disavowed–like the credulous repetition of administration claims about the supposed threat.
“They have this idea that they promote, that these policies help the Iranian people, or they support the Iranian people against their authoritarian governments. When in reality, it’s crippling the space needed for peaceful democratic change in Iran.”
The immigration beat is multi-faceted, and media choices about what to look at, who to listen to, may be impactful, as the White House looks set to make its war on immigrants a key piece of Trump’s reelection drive.
When everyone decides that war is the only other possibility, it starts to look like an inevitability. But even when they aren’t overtly stoking war fever against Iran, corporate media prime the militaristic pump in more subtle yet equally disturbing ways.
A country’s political leaders are likely to be called a “regime” when they do not follow US dictates, and are less likely to be categorized as such if they cooperate with the empire.
Janine Jackson interviewed Trita Parsi about the Iran Nuclear Deal for the August 3, 2018 episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. MP3 Link Janine Jackson: August 5 marks the anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when journalists reported official claims about an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam on American destroyers as […]
In addressing Donald Trump’s virulent threats to the president of Iran, media have, minimally, the responsibility to separate accusation from reality, and to talk openly about how to resist the degeneration of diplomacy.
The debate in the New York Times and Washington Post over President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran deal, revolves around which tactics America should use to dominate Iran.
As the Trump administration pulls out of the multinational agreement about Iran’s nuclear energy program and generally tries to ramp up hostility toward Tehran, once again seeing a raft of news reports illustrated with photos whose essential visual message is that Iran hates freedom.
Hours after Trump pulled out of the Iran deal, CNN’s Barbara Starr rushed to publish an anonymously sourced and transparently propagandistic press release for the Trump administration and Pentagon. Wouldn’t it be easier if Starr just skipped the middleman and worked at the DoD directly?
When a number of major outlets reported on a speech Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani gave at an MEK conference, the outlets failed to note that the group is widely loathed inside Iran, and seen as an illegitimate cult by experts across ideological lines.
For casually threatening economic ruin, inciting violence against entire populations, pushing for bombing faceless Muslims, or downplaying racism and child rape, there’s no better outlet than long-time echo chamber of power-serving conventional wisdom, the Washington Post.
Media outlets are saying that Israel is “retaliating” against Syria for defending itself against an ongoing Israeli attack.
Using MEK images to represent unrest in Iran is like a Chinese outlet using images of a Westboro Baptist Church protest in a story about Occupy Wall Street, because both oppose the US government.
Leading the pack in the “do something” insta-consensus on Iran protests was the right-wing pro-Israel think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
It’s unsurprising that under Trump, national security investigations are politicized to advance a hawkish policy agenda. What’s perhaps more shocking is how many major media outlets took the bait.
How we visualize the news is just as important as the written content. By reflexively relying on the most sinister and bias-reinforcing images to depict Iran, we help perpetuate the idea—even if unconsciously—that Iran is an anti-American hellscape.
