FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
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.
Katharine Gun’s revelations showed before the invasion that people on the inside, whose livelihood depends on following the party line, were willing to risk jail time to expose the lies and threats.
Some in the press pounced on Beto O’Rourke’s description of an Iraq war that is “27 years and counting.”
Corporate media’s role in the run-up to—and the ongoing aftermath of—the war on Iraq.
Corporate media’s role in the lead up to and the ongoing aftermath of the war on Iraq.
Shock and Awe delivers an effective valorization of aggressive, adversarial journalism that should inspire young reporters, and a powerful condemnation of one of the darkest moments in the history of journalism.
“Assaults on residential areas with AC-130 gunships cannot possibly be designed to minimize civilian casualties.”
In April 2004, CounterSpin spoke with journalist Rahul Mahajan, just returned from Fallujah. We replay that interview to mark the 15th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
Max Boot’s hiring by the Washington Post goes to show, again, that the most certain way to move up in the media pundit universe is to consistently echo US national security orthodoxy—without pause or regret.
Ignoring the Fantasies That Kill Real People… Here’s What Forgetting History Looks Like… Disclosure: I Get Paid to Fool WaPo Readers About Climate… Freebooter Turns Freelancer… And by ‘Dethroning,’ We Mean One-10th as Popular… Trump’s Problem Is That New York Doesn’t Understand Media… Questions That Don’t Require Asking
Corporate media have a long history of lamenting wars they themselves helped sell the American public, but it’s rare so many wars and so much hypocrisy are distilled into one editorial.
Which “conspiracy theories” the media decide to care about and which they don’t is largely a function of who is advancing those conspiracy theories, and whose interests they serve.
The expulsion of ISIS from Mosul by the US-led coalition received coverage, but the US role in killing civilians was uniformly ignored.
In all of the fawning press coverage of George W. Bush’s paintings of US veterans, one thing has been notably absent: Bush’s Iraqi victims.
Note the assurance with which Zakaria insists that a military attack on a sovereign state, unauthorized by the United Nations and unjustifiable in terms of self-defense, signifies a new respect on Trump’s part for “global norms” and “international rules.”
“I’m really surprised by this media hype around the attack on Mosul, because I’m not sure what kind of collective amnesia do we expect to have as a nation, to believe that there is something new happening.”
More than 200 Iraqi civilians killed by a US airstrike in Mosul. But while media express concern, the idea that the deaths were a lamentable part of a nevertheless valiant effort to liberate the city from terrorists’ grip is not being questioned.
The Washington Post reports that a recent airstrike in Mosul “was potentially one of the worst US-led civilian bombings in 25 years.” Yet leading news networks went out of their way to craft some of the most euphemistic headlines imaginable.
The Weekly Standard, lest we forget—as Rutenberg clearly has—was second to no publication in using shoddy journalism to sell a war that would leave countless hundreds of thousands dead.
The New York Times editorial board didn’t take a wave of civilians deaths as a reason to question the wisdom of America’s various “counter-terror,” nation-building and regime-change projects in the Middle East, but instead chose to browbeat Congress into rubber-stamping a war that’s been going on for almost three years.
