FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
During an August 18 segment about the Iraq War, anchor Brian Williams said (emphasis added): Let’s bring into this conversation retired U.S. Army Colonel Jack Jacobs. He’s a decorated combat veteran, a recipient of the Medal of Honor and, of course, an NBC News military analyst. Well, at this point, people like me always ask […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: One war is ending, while the other is the subject of a major PR blitz. Right on schedule, we’re told, Operation Iraqi Freedom is winding down, with live TV coverage relaying the images of the final U.S. combat brigades leaving the country. The caveats to the story of the […]
Former Israeli soldier and current writer for the Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg has a long cover story (9/10) on the “better than 50 percent chance” that Israel will launch air strikes against Iran by next July, with the aim of taking out the alleged nuclear threat from the Islamic Republic. Based on roughly 40 interviews with […]
Noting that policies like the stimulus plan tend to poll pretty badly, New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes (7/16/10) that Obama says he has pursued such policies because they’re “the right thing to do for America.” To Stolberg, that sounds familiar: It is an argument that sounds eerily similar to the one Mr. […]
Philadelphia Inquirer TV critic Jonathan Storm (7/1/10) noted that tonight, July 2, the city’s public TV station WHYY is airing a documentary called The Surge: The Untold Story. As he puts it, what’s most interesting about the documentary is who’s behind it: The film was produced by communications companies that work predominantly for the GOP […]
With Gen. David Petraeus back in the media spotlight after being tapped to take control of the Afghanistan war following General Stanley McChrystal’s fall from grace, the corporate media are trumpeting the “successful” surge in Iraq (Extra, 9/10/08) that Petraeus oversaw and are looking to him as the man to turn around the Afghan war. […]
Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt wrote a piece today (5/24/10) headlined, “In the Absence of Debate, Iraq and Afghanistan Go Unnoticed.” Hiatt laments the silence surrounding U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ponders whether “the absence of debate reflects not full-bodied consensus but a wishful averting of eyes.” Fair enough. But what […]
On May 4, 2010: What killed President Bush’s credibility? His utter claim that the reason we went to war in Iraq was to search for nuclear weapons. Because he and his people were dishonest enough to make that claim, he ended up looking like an incompetent when we fought our way into that country and […]
Newsweek‘s Jacob Weisberg is tired of people picking on Robert Rubin. Sure, his critics to point to his involvement in the financial deregulation of the 1990s and his disastrous tenure at Citibank, but they’re wrong. At least that’s what Weisberg tries to argue in his column “In Defense of Robert Rubin” (5/10/10). Weisberg admits early […]
Offering a critique of the Iraq War drama Green Zone, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (3/15/10) offers a “narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told,” that ends with: And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have WMD was the best way to keep his […]
Former Bush adviser Karl Rove is making the rounds to promote his new book Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. He landed on NBC‘s Meet the Press yesterday (3/14/10), interviewed by Tom Brokaw. Brokaw asked him about his book’s discussion of the Iraq War: BROKAW: And in it, you acknowledge […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin030510 Mary Bottari and Raed Jarrar @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin030510.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: A recent NBC–Wall Street Journal poll showed 74 percent of Americans believed not enough had been done to regulate the banking industry. But is the legislation the Senate is now considering anything like what those people had in mind? We’ll get […]
In his New York Times column today (2/24/10), Tom Friedman presents a bizarre view of the Iraq War. Attempting to answer the question of whether Iraq is dysfunctional because of its culture (the “conservative” argument) or because of its politics (the “liberal” argument), he writes: Ironically, though, it was the neo-conservative Bush team that argued […]
On November 1, New York Times reporter Alissa Rubin has a look back at her experience as a war correspondent in Iraq. It’s mostly interesting, though when she gets to the part where she draws the big lessons, things turn for the worse: In my five years in Iraq, all that I wanted to believe […]
Politico (10/14/09) published a list of top topics on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show, based on a search of Nexis transcripts since the show’s January 2009 debut. It’s instructive to look at the placement of some individuals, groups and places in the news as an indication of Beck’s sense of whom and what his audience […]
In citing how Talking Points Memo creator Josh Marshall “has talked many times about the ways in which the Washington establishment is ‘wired for the GOP,’” Steve Benen (Political Animal, 9/13/09) notes that “the Washington Post offers a helpful example today”–as posted on Media Matters: “Behold the media’s glaring double standard. Today, the Post puts […]
The Weekly Standard, the country’s preeminent neoconservative magazine, was sold to Clarity Media Group, a Denver-based publishing group, for an undisclosed sum in June (Washington Examiner, 6/17/09). Rupert Murdoch’s unloading of the country’s most vigorously pro-war journal marks the end of a particularly sinister and regrettable era in the history of U.S. media. At a […]
Media Monitors Network has the latest column from Norman Solomon (8/26/09), in which the longtime analyst of corporate media boosterism for U.S. wars considers a recent swath of stories that “have compared President Johnson’s war in Vietnam and President Obama’s war in Afghanistan.” True, “the comparisons are often valid,” Solomon finds, “but a key parallel […]
Seeing all the press attention given to pitbull-fighter and NFL star Michael Vick‘s return to football, David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 8/19/09) can’t help but think that Vick should have tortured humans instead of dogs. Then we would have been told to overlook it for the sake of moving forward. Better yet, he should have killed humans […]
Consortium News Robert Parry (8/13/09) is citing media-promoted “‘deathers‘ who claim that President Barack Obama’s healthcare plan would promote euthanasia,” along with how the U.S. “population was persuaded that Iraq was some lethal threat” and “fear-mongering about Iraq somehow sending small remote-controlled airplanes across the Atlantic” as strong arguments against “hopeful slogans that ‘the truth […]
