FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The Washington Post‘s weekly Saturday feature on “Iraq War Casualties” has consistently listed a “maximum count” of Iraqi civilian deaths that is dramatically lower than the likely civilian death tolls assessed through surveys of the Iraqi public. In the most recent edition of this feature (10/25/08) which the Post has been publishing as a chart […]
The Canadian Journalists for Free Expression organization has named recently-freed reporter Sami al-Haj as a recipient of its 2008 International Press Freedom Award. The Indo-Asian News Service reviews the back story (10/23/08): Held at Guantanamo Bay for six years, Sami al-Haj was freed on May 1 this year. Never formally charged, he was pressured to […]
Bill Kristol writes in his column in the New York Times today that media elites like telling us what’s going to happen. They’re always annoyed when people cross them. Pundits spent all spring telling Hillary Clinton to give up in her contest against Obama–and the public kept on ignoring them and keeping her hopes alive. […]
A Google News search for the term “William Timmons” yields trusty progressive publications like Think Progress, OpEd News, TPM, AlterNet and Democracy Now!, but days after it appeared at Huffington Post (10/14/08), no “mainstream” U.S. outlet has picked up the intrepid Murray Waas‘ new exposé on how Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has […]
Disgusted that “the three participants in the third U.S. presidential debate last week pretended Iraq didn’t exist,” David Swanson tells OpEd News readers (10/18/08) of the residents of a devastated Baghdad “are “managing major rallies of tens of thousands of people in opposition to the treaty to extend the occupation for three more years (and […]
What happens after your credulous reporting helps sell the public argument on the case for the Iraq invasion, and your name becomes more or less synonymous with the broad media failures on the war? You get hired by Fox News, according to today’s Washington Post. Fox‘s John Moody’s comments are worth a special note: “She […]
The Resisting Empire speaking tour keeps on rolling (Fall/08), with a decidedly non-corporate mission: Here and around the world, people want to see an end to the Iraq War and a change in the reckless direction of U.S. foreign policy. U.S. aggression has inflicted a humanitarian catastrophe–from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond–with millions of people […]
In an OpEd News review (10/13/08) of David W. Moore’s new book, The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls, David Swanson writes of how the longtime Gallup pollster “objects to the fact that polls are conducted and reported as if ignorance and apathy do not exist”: Moore shows that when pollsters […]
A reader of the NPR Check blog flags a troubling passage from the October 1 All Things Considered: “Some estimates put the number of widows in Iraq at 1 million–women who’ve lost their husbands to Iraq’s endless succession of wars: Iran/Iraq, the invasion of Kuwait, the recent civil war.” Public radio watchdog Mytwords (10/5/08) isn’t […]
New York Times reporter Michael Gordon, analyzing the major-party candidates’ positions on Iraq (10/6/08), writes the sort of article you would expect from someone who has already taken a public position in favor of the policy embraced by one of the candidates and against the policy adopted by the other.
Who knows when U.S. troops will be leaving Iraq, but the Washington Post reports that the Pentagon has a long-term strategy for the information war:
The latest TomDispatch (9/30/08) features historian Ira Chernus ruminating on “How Forgotten Iraq May Elect the Next President”: Even before the present financial meltdown hit the news, the Iraq War had slipped out of the headlines and off the political stage. Now, as investment houses totter and bailout plans fill the headlines, it will be […]
The American News Project‘s Harry Hanbury reports (10/1/08) that “by now millions of Americans have seen the video clips where [GOP Vice Presidential candidate Sarah] Palin… prays the Iraq war will be revealed as a task from God.” The ANP video even shows Palin praying “that our… national leaders, are sending them [occupation soldiers] out […]
FAIR associate Norman Solomon tells Real News viewers (9/29/08) of lessons to be drawn from corporate U.S. media’s non-coverage of what was big news overseas during the run up to war on Iraqâ┚¬”ÂU.S. spies used the U.N. arms inspection process to identify future bombing targets and track Saddam Hussein’s movements
When Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki called for a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troop (Der Spiegel, 7/19/08), U.S. corporate media coverage of his statement displayed a remarkable condescension. The New York Times‘ Steven Lee Myers (7/10/08) suggested that al-Maliki didn’t mean what he was saying and was just doing what Iraqi politicians […]
The most conspicuous thing about the mainstream media’s election-year discussion of the Iraq War is the lack of one. The numbers tell much of the story. Although it had been the main news story between January and May of 2007, totaling 20 percent of the news hole, that number declined to just 4 percent in […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin071808 Charles Knight and Diana Duarte @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin071808.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The idea that we should get U.S. troops out of Iraq is, to hear the media tell it, becoming less attractive by the day. The corporate press also seems to buy the argument that withdrawing U.S. troops would lead to a […]
On June 5, the Independent newspaper in London reported on secret negotiations between the U.S. and Iraqi governments over a plan that would grant legal immunity to U.S. soldiers and private contractors, give the U.S. control over Iraqi airspace and allow for 50 military bases to be built in the country. Lawmakers in Iraq expressed […]
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s forthcoming book has caused a political firestorm by offering unusually blunt criticisms of the Bush White House. But McClellan has also aimed his fire at the news media, accusing mainstream reporters of being “deferential, complicit enablers” instead of challenging the White House’s case for the Iraq War. The […]
A key document in making Britain’s case for attacking Iraq, the so-called “September Dossier” (9/02), was initially drafted by a press advisor in then-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Foreign Office, according to stories in the British press. Furthermore, the differences between the early draft and the published dossier indicate that caveats were removed and language strengthened […]
