FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow had a discussion last week (3/31/11) about the U.S. role in the Libya War with Col. Jack Jacobs, an MSNBC military consultant. Jacobs described the U.S. military’s “ability to jam communications that take place between units or among units of Gadhafi’s army,” then referred to the U.S.’s ability to jam electronic transmissions […]
In a New York Times science article (3/29/11) about the CIA and Pentagon’s psychological profiling of foreign political figures, reporter Benedict Carey adds a note of caution: Yet the assessments can also be misleading, even embarrassing. Profiles of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq that circulated in the early 1990s suggested that he was ultimately a […]
The New York Times has a piece today (3/7/11) about the debate over U.S. military intervention in Libya. The paper reports that there are persistent voices–in Congress and even inside the administration–arguing that Mr. Obama is moving too slowly. Reporters David Sanger and Thom Shanker contend that there is too much concern about perceptions, and […]
The Guardian published a piece yesterday (2/15/11) based on an interview with “Curveball,” the Iraqi exile whose fraudulent claims about Iraq’s WMDs helped the Bush administration sell the Iraq War. “I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime,” he explained. The piece is pretty revealing–as Curveball watched Colin Powell’s UN address in […]
Four months ago, Steve Rendall wrote here (9/10/10) about the militarization of the State Department and its role in the continuing occupation of Iraq—developments that were getting little attention amidst all the talk of the “end” of the war. Now Aaron Davis of the Washington Post (1/14/11) fills in some of those details, writing that […]
USA Today (1/12/11) continues the tradition of dishonest reporting on the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. In a front-page article, reporter Tom Vanden Brook writes: Estimates vary among organizations that have tried to count civilian dead, according to a review last year by the Congressional Research Service. The Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights reported […]
Remember the toppling of that Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad (4/9/03) that signified the “end” of the Iraq War? At the time, there were critics who pointed out that the extensively televised images of a jubilant crowd of Iraqis were misleading.The sense of media excitement was unmistakable; as FAIR pointed out, the Los Angeles Times […]
According to NPR ombud Alicia Shepard (12/30/10), one very persistent letter writer named Henry Norr managed to get NPR to correct an error made several times by different programs–that WikiLeaks “published” the many thousands of State Department cables in its possession. The site has actually published few of them– less than 2,000. Shepard wrote: On […]
A Washington Post editorial (12/3/10) on the film Fair Game complains that “the film’s reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored.” Talk about lack of self-awareness. The film dramatizes the story of Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who blew the whistle on the Bush […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses WikiLeaks as a jumping off point to talk about George W. Bush’s new book and the run-up to the Iraq War (11/30/10): As my colleague, the indefatigably indefatigable Walter Pincus, has pointed out, Bush manages to bollix up both the chronology and the importance of the various inspections of […]
Patrick Cockburn has a wonderful piece in the Independent (11/23/10) on the hazards of embedded journalism that is a must-read. He points out: “Embedding” also puts limitations on location and movement. Iraq and Afghanistan are essentially guerrilla wars, and the successful guerrilla commander will avoid fighting the enemy main force and instead attack where his […]
I agree with Keith Olbermann (11/15/10) about the dubious value of “objectivity” as a journalistic value; he makes a telling point about how journalistic icons like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow are most honored for the moments when they reached conclusions and asserted values. And I think he’s right that the U.S. media establishment’s […]
NBC star Matt Lauer’s one-on-one interview with George W. Bush revealed very little in the way of information, though some lessons could be drawn from Lauer’s mediocre performance. Here was one comment from near the top of the interview: The Florida recount. Hanging chads. A divided Supreme Court. George Bush had a rough road to […]
“I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.” That’s how George W. Bush referred to the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in his new book Decision Points. The quote is featured in Time magazine’s Verbatim section (11/15/10), and has been discussed pretty widely. This is an interesting […]
MSNBC personality Chris Matthews—who sometimes claims he was opposed to the Iraq War—worked behind the scenes to get anti-war colleague Phil Donahue fired.
With all the talk of the Iraq War winding down (never mind the ongoing violence, the U.S. troops still fighting, or the continuing U.S. casualties), filmmaker Michael Moore makes an important point about how the war started—specifically, that it happened not despite but because of the way the “liberal media” behaved: But most importantly, they […]
When Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies appeared on FAIR’s radio show CounterSpin last week, she challenged Barack Obama’s assertions that U.S. combat in Iraq was ending and that the last combat brigade was leaving the country, describing the plans the U.S. actually has in store for Iraq: The policy has not changed. […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: On August 31, President Obama announced the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq in a speech from the Oval office. While in a palace in Baghdad the commander of those combat operations, General Ray Odierno, announced that his job was over, proclaiming that in Iraq, “hope has replaced […]
“Seven Years of War Provides Many Answers” is USA Today‘s front-page headline (8/27/10) over a story by Jim Michaels and Mimi Hall that attempts to take stock of the Iraq War. But one issue that the paper can’t seem to get right seven years later is how the war started. USA Today provides this stunningly […]
Some in the media just can’t let go of John McCain. David Broder’s column today is really headlined, “John McCain, Your Country Is Calling.” He explains that he wasn’t “bothered by the doctrinal compromises the senator made to convince Arizona voters that he was, in fact, a conservative. McCain has always been a realist, doing […]
