FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Recapping at TPM Café (5/27/09) how the U.S. “press bent over backward to paint both Bushes as moderate, sensible, nice guy Republicans,” Editor & Publisher‘s Greg Mitchell writes that “a hard-right [George W.] Bush, whether real or media-created, would have never beaten Gore–not that this one did either.” Reminding us that “the New York Times, […]
Pointing to a May 9 Boston Globe editorial saying that Barack “Obama conveyed the right message last week by hosting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari” to emphasize “the close link between Pakistan and the anti-Taliban struggle in Afghanistan,” before admitting that “U.S. military strikes against militants in both countries inevitably […]
Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald gets the site’s lead story today (5/8/09, ad-viewing required) with an excerpt from the New York Times obituary for U.S. fighter pilot Harold E. Fischer Jr., who, as the Times headline puts it, was “Tortured in a Chinese Prison.” Greenwald deems such naming of Fischer’s ordeal–“kept in a dark, damp cell […]
The current Democracy Now! (5/8/09) features New York Times Pentagon Pundits reporter David Barstow giving Amy Goodman the background on the U.S. military’s retraction of a report clearing itself of domestic propaganda wrongdoing: So the report comes out in January, and it effectively exonerated the program. Now, one thing your viewers should know is that […]
Reading Mark Landler’s and Elizabeth Bumiller’s New York Times “tidbit out of an overheated Washington last week: ‘President Obama and his top advisers have been meeting almost daily to discuss options for helping the Pakistani government and military repel the [Taliban] offensive,’” Tom Engelhardt (TomDispatch, 5/7/09) decides to toss some cold water on “this kind […]
Eyeing a new poll that “revealed that one in four Americans now believe that the ‘faux’ news delivered by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is replacing ‘real’ news sources as viable outlets,” Greg Mitchell (Editor & Publisher, 5/5/09) has to wonder “if the remaining (if relatively low) public respect for the press is gone for […]
With Fox News Channel relentlessly promoting—and MSNBC mostly mocking—the right-wing “tea party” demonstrations around the country today, middle-of-the-road media critics are making a typically middle-of-the-road complaint: Yes, Fox shouldn’t be sponsoring such events, but the rest of the corporate media shouldn’t just ignore these allegedly newsworthy events. As Howard Kurtz put it in the Washington […]
Richard Cohen’s Washington Post column today (4/14/09) is about how the new George W. Bush Policy Institute should focus primarily on Bush’s managerial errors: Conventional wisdom holds that the bungling of the Iraq war was a consequence of ideology run amok. Maybe. But it was also an example of awful management. Whether you supported the […]
Despite the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s new “State of the Media” report likening the current U.S. media condition to “someone about to begin physical therapy following a stroke suddenly contracting a debilitating secondary illness,” Eric Alterman and Danielle Ivory spot (Center for American Progress, 3/26/09) “one sunny area in the news business, according […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald has an explanation (3/23/09, ad-viewing required) for why he thinks that Howard Kurtz’s belief that the image of corporate reporters as “just a bunch of cozy Washington insiders” is not “that big a deal”—because “there’s such a built-in adversarial relationship between the press and the pols”—constitutes “an extremely funny joke today, showing […]
Proving that the Washington Post is not the only purportedly “liberal” outlet interested in whitewashing the dark history of U.S. involvement in Latin America, Mytwords (NPR Check, 3/23/09) has blogged NPR‘s March 21 episode of Weekend Edition Saturday, in which the show returned to the scene of the crimes of El Salvador’s 1980s bloodbath–a U.S.-nurtured […]
Resisting the tide of “liberal blogger men” who “are thrilled with the New York Times‘ appointment of 29-year-old Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat to replace William Kristol on the op-ed page,” Katha Pollitt (Nation, 3/18/09) contrasts the fact that “Douthat is best known for his conservative Catholicism (abortion is murder, frozen embryos are children, contraception kills […]
As the world marks the sixth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, corporate media’s most prominent journalism critic is wondering if Barack Obama’s Iraq policy isn’t being sufficiently scrutinized. As Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz asked recently on his CNN program (3/15/09): What about the previous president? I mean, he famously landed on […]
The ABC network, in conjunction with the BBC and Japan’s NHK, has repeatedly polled Iraqis about the state of their country and the U.S. occupation. On Monday night (3/16/09) they aired a report that featured findings from the latest poll. Anchor Charles Gibson reported: Every year we have taken an extensive look at where things […]
Consortium News‘ Robert Parry (3/5/09) uses New York Times do-gooder Nicholas Kristof as an example of blatant corporate media hypocrisy: Kristof–like many of his American colleagues–is applauding the International Criminal Court’s arrest order against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for his role in the Darfur conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives…. By […]
Media reporter DeWayne Wickham sees (USA Today, 3/3/09) the new Pentagon rules allowing photography of U.S. casualty coffins as “just the silver lining” around the dark cloud of a fact that “our free press is still being stage-managed by those who run the wars.” That the new regulations permit photos only “if the family of […]
Reporter Thomas Ricks’ new book The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, documents the military changes that took place in Iraq after the controversial troop “surge,” which is commonly credited with having greatly reduced violence in the country (Extra!, 11-12/07, 9-10/08). A Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, Ricks […]
FAIR associate Norman Solomon (Creators Syndicate, 2/14/09) tells why he’s concerned the potential lifting of the government ban on press photography of war casualties’ coffins isn’t “particularly good news”: I wrote in my book War Made Easy that ambiguity is part of the process that we bring to the media-consuming table: “Visual images may be […]
A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (2/8/09) quotes from yet another “Time magazine article about Larry Summers and how incredibly brilliant he is”: Perhaps as early as March, they’ll launch their biggest lift with the beginnings of a plan to reform Social Security and Medicare, the two entitlement programs that, even before the economy collapsed, […]
It’s disturbing enough to read Chris Tomlinson’s account (Huffington Post, 2/5/09) of the fact that “the Pentagon now spends more than $550 million a year–at least double the amount since 2003–on public affairs, and that doesn’t including personnel costs” and how “over the past two years, the number of public affairs officers trained by the […]
