FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Norman Solomon’s latest column (Creators Syndicate, 1/31/09) looks over a decade in which “the false truism of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction led to the horrors of the Iraq invasion and occupation,” and “in the wake of 9/11, overall, the main journalistic outlets of the United States fed us falsehoods, hysteria, self-righteousness and endless […]
Jonathan Schwarz (A Tiny Revolution, 1/20/09) is linking to Glenn Greenwald’s Salon catch of John Barry telling Newsweek readers to not sweat “the core charge that the [Bush] administration ‘misled’ the legislature and the American public by faking evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.” Barry asserts any such accountability would be “vengeance, […]
Chris Matthews reacting Bush’s speech (as transcribed by the right-wing Media Research Center): The idea that we have some brand new neo-conservative ideology of freedom that’s going to bring peace over in that part of the world is not true, and he’s still selling it, and that’s the tragedy of the last eight years. The […]
Crooks and Liars blogger Cernig posts (12/15/08) the video of George W. Bush responding to an ABC interviewer’s point that Al-Qaeda did not actually “take their stand” in Iraq “until after the U.S. invaded”: “Yeah, that’s right. So what?” The sad part is that Martha Raddatz’s correction of the inverted justification timeline shows what can […]
Glenn Greenwald has a Salon update (12/15/08, ad-viewing required) on corporate media apathy toward the U.S. Senate report finding George W. Bush and his highest appointees responsible for U.S. detainee “deaths caused by abusive treatment”–many of which “have been formally characterized as ‘homicides’ by autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan”: This report was issued on […]
By now most people have seen the video footage of the Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi throwing his shoes at George W. Bush. The New York Times helps you put it in perspective: The shoe-throwing incident in Baghdad punctuated Mr. Bush’s visit here–his fourth–in a deeply symbolic way, reflecting the conflicted views in Iraq of a […]
The Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch has propaganda watchdog Diane Farsetta asking (12/5/08) “when will the cable and network television stations that featured the Pentagon’s pundits tell viewers that their war commentary was anything but independent?” Her “prime example” is NBC analyst former general Barry McCaffrey, who shilled Bradley Fighting Vehicles to the […]
This week FAIR’s CounterSpin radio show (12/5/08) takes on an important issue from the last U.S. invasion of Iraq: For years, veterans claiming to suffer from Gulf War Syndrome were derided as cranky and hysterical by the Department of Defense and even by some journalists. Will that change now that a definitive report says the […]
Thanks in advance to all the folks who are participating in FAIR’s action alert, “Media Still Letting Bush Lie on Iraq Inspectors.” Please post any responses you receive from ABC and the Washington Post in the comments section of this blog. Update: Feel free to post your letters to ABC and the Washington Post here […]
Well aware that “from the aftermath of the 2003 ‘shock and awe’ bombing campaign all the way through Thanksgiving Day 2008, major U.S. news outlets have nearly uniformly blacked out or downplayed reports of the Iraqi death toll,” critic Brad Jacobson notes (MediaBloodhound, 11/30/08) that “a recent Associated Press article reveals the depths to which […]
A New York Times headline today about President-elect Barack Obama’s nomination of Susan Rice to be U.N. ambassador declared “Obama’s Choice for U.N. Is Advocate of Strong Action Against Mass Killings.” Undoubtedly, one of the greatest mass killings of recent years has been the Iraq War, which Just Foreign Policy estimates has killed nearly 1.3 […]
The headline (and subhead) in today’s print edition: National Security Team Would Be Diverse Mix Obama Picks Span Eras; Some Espouse More Centrist Views And what, exactly, makes for a “diverse mix?” Holding “moderate” views against a troop withdrawal from Iraq, apparently: Obama’s latest picks would give him a foreign policy team with a moderate […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald contrasts (11/26/08, ad-viewing required) Joe Klein in the current Time magazine declaiming George W. Bush’s “ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign” as a “defining moment… of the Bush failure” with Klein’s May 4, 2003 Face the Nation response to […]
It says something for the weakness of your argument when you have to turn your opponents’ argument on its head. Take the L.A. Times editorial today (11/24/08) headlined “An Unfair Litmus Test.” The editorial claims that “some ardent supporters of Barack Obama are aggrieved because the president-elect’s emergent national security team includes supporters of the […]
The New York Times‘ Week in Review section yesterday (11/23/08) gathered a group of op-eds under the heading “Transitions,” which they described as “a series of Op-Ed articles by experts on the most formidable issues facing the new president.” The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were the topics under examination; we’ve examined who gets to […]
Posting on Editor & Publisher‘s E&P Pub blog (11/17/08), Greg Mitchell has more on “Misleading Parents After Their Kids Are Killed in War”: Battle fatalities are way down in Iraq, thank goodness (though not Afghanistan), but many U.S. troops are still passing away in “noncombat” ways, via accidents, friendly fire, suicides and so on. And […]
A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz quotes (11/12/08) Iraq War booster Michael Hanlon writing on the Politico website that “it is important that Senator Obama hear from centrists on Iraq, and Susan [Rice] may not be such a person on that subject.” In response to the Hanlon assertion that former Bill Clinton official Rice “is […]
As FAIR’s magazine Extra! has noted (9-10/08, 11-12/07), it’s often hard to tell from reading the U.S. press that polls have consistently shown a clear majority of Iraqis favor a withdrawal of American troops from their country. Today the New York Times published two articles offering Iraqi perspectives on the significance of Obama’s electoral victory. […]
In a TomDispatch essay (10/23/08), professor and author Michael Schwartz lets us know “What the Good News from Iraq Really Means”: Even before the spectacular presidential election campaign became a national obsession… coverage of the Iraq War had dwindled to next to nothing. National newspapers had long since discontinued their daily feasts of multiple–usually front-page–reports […]
Today New York Times reporter John Harwood wonders what happened to the idea, voiced in the aftermath of the 2004 election, that the country would see a long era of Republican dominance: How did such a turnabout happen so fast? In part, the answer stems from developments so rare that, as the former Federal Reserve […]
