FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The Best of CounterSpin is a reflection of the sorts of conversations we hope offer some voice or context or information that you might not have heard elsewhere, or that might help you assess the news you are hearing.
Even those accusations that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh took part in a now-defunct weapons program are largely based on fabricated evidence.
Corporate media coverage of Iranian oil shipments to Venezuela has framed the deliveries as a problem that needs to be solved, rather than a commercial transaction that doesn’t concern third parties.
“If there were an opposition movement in countries like Canada and the United States and Europe, the demand wouldn’t just be, ‘You gotta stop this’; the demand would actually be, ‘Hey, we’ve got to prosecute the people involved with this. This is killing people. This is a crime. People should be facing legal consequences for this.’”
What would it look like to call corporate media’s bluff on their sudden, serious respect for working people who didn’t start being important because there’s a contagious disease going around?
Because the US government is directly responsible for Iranian deaths, Washington’s role should be a central concern to US media. Yet that’s not the case, according to an examination of stories.
The IMF loan rejection as the deadly coronavirus spreads underscores that the US government’s concern was the opposite of what it claimed: It always wanted Venezuela’s humanitarian situation to get worse, not better.
Even on the debate’s own terms, there’s a much stronger case that the US rather than Iran is actually the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism.
“This, I think, is one of the more central and deeper and troubling assumptions in imperialist media, that the United States and its partners are allowed to kill whomever they want, wherever they want, and no resistance to that is legitimate.”
Netflix’s Nisman: The Prosecutor, the President and the Spy is an entertainment product that advances US interests through character assassination of a popular left-wing Latin American leader.
Even when critical of US actions, media commentary on recent US bombings and assassinations in the Middle East is premised on the assumption that the US has the right to use violence (or the threat of it) to assert its will, anytime, anywhere.
If Facebook is removing content because it believes it is required to do so by law, that is government censorship—and forbidden by the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of the press.
The overt saber-rattling may be slowing now, but is that any thanks to media? Does it even mean an end to violence?
When the president carries out dangerous, aggressive actions, such as the assassination of Iranian general and political leader Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on January 3, “resistance” turns to assistance from the corporate press.
Election Focus 2020: Despite Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s prominent role in leading the US into the disastrous Iraq War, and his recent stream of lies and equivocations about why he supported it and when he began to reverse his position, many pundits continue to uncritically paint Biden as “mature” or a “steady hand” on foreign policy.
The New York Times’ “anti-war” arguments are woefully lacking—vilifying Iran without subjecting the US to comparable scrutiny, and hiding US aggression towards Iran.
In Wired’s imagination, military weapons resemble otherworldly creations, high-tech spectacles, the stuff of science fiction.
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.
