FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
There is no more important question about the Iraq War than the question of how many Iraqis have died. It is impossible to truly evaluate the war or discuss where to go from here without knowing the human cost of the war, and that cost has overwhelmingly been borne by Iraqis. That’s why it’s so […]
Given the common media rhetoric of “supporting the troops,” to ignore these same troops when they speak out about the horrors of the war is unconscionable.
As the Iraq War nears its fifth anniversary, close to 4,000 U.S. troops have died in the conflict. But a significant number of deaths connected to the Iraq invasion have remained off the books, uncounted by the U.S. military and seldom noticed by the media. Private contractors have played an integral role in the occupation […]
The New York Times offered a look back at the Iraq War in its March 16 “Week In Review” section that leaned heavily towards pro-war voices. The Times explained to readers: “To mark this week’s fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the Op-Ed page asked nine experts on military and foreign affairs to reflect […]
“In our view, President Bush has built a strong case for the invasion of Iraq, a case that will be overwhelming with the inevitable discovery of the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein is hiding.” —Oregonian editorial (3/20/03) “HUGE CHEMICAL WEAPONS FACTORY FOUND IN SO IRAQ. . . . REPORTS: 30 IRAQIS SURRENDER AT […]
Of all the strange stories to come out of the media’s debacle in Iraq, one of the most Orwellian is the fable in which Saddam Hussein tricked America into invading Iraq by making us believe that he had weapons of mass destruction (Extra!, 1–2/04, 5–6/04). Of all the lies, hypocrisies and half-truths of this war, […]
A January 27 report on CBS‘s 60 Minutes attempted to answer what CBS reporter Scott Pelley claimed was a key mystery of the Iraq War: Why didn’t Saddam Hussein tell the world he had no weapons of mass destruction, and thus avoid the U.S.-led invasion? But if Pelley had been watching his own network’s exclusive […]
The Iraq War was sold to Americans in part as an intervention that would benefit Iraqis, “liberating” them from the despotic rule of Saddam Hussein. In retrospect, after no weapons of mass destruction were found and the alleged links to Al-Qaeda were debunked, this supposed humanitarian mission became the central justification for the invasion. Today, […]
To hear many in the mainstream media tell it, the Iraq War is of diminishing importance to American voters. But the evidence for such a shift in the electorate is thin at best—suggesting that journalists and pundits are really the ones who would rather not talk about Iraq as we head into an election year. […]
The disastrous end to the Vietnam War served as a historical reference point for many pundits urging Democrats to forget pulling out of Iraq. But the history lesson was shaky. Presenting the congressional fight over war funding as indicative of “what will likely become post-Iraq politics in America,” ABC World News (4/26/07) reported that Republicans […]
This week Dahr Jamail joins CounterSpin to discuss his new book “Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From An Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq.” Also on the program: Earl Ofari Hutchinson of Hutchinson Political Report unpacks Bill Cosby’s latest book and the blame it places on Black communities.
Following a pattern set when Congress passed supplemental funding for the Iraq War last May (FAIR Media Advisory, 6/1/07), major media outlets continued to “explain” the politics of the war in incomplete and misleading ways. The point made by these media outlets again and again is that the Democrats have little power to affect policy […]
To paraphrase Clark Hoyt, if you’re going to defend the performance of a news organization, you at a minimum need to get your facts right. In his second response to FAIR regarding the New York Times‘ review of the play Fallujah, Hoyt wrote: In restating its case, it introduced a new error—calling white phosphorus (WP), […]
While much has been written about how credulous reporting about the Bush administration’s bogus weapons claims paved the way for the Iraq War, it’s important to remember that media cheerleading for the war only intensified once the bombs started falling—a dismal performance documented here with examples from the first celebration of “shock and awe” to […]
Critical journalists and analysts raised serious questions at the time about what the White House was saying. Often, however, their warnings were ignored by the bulk of the corporate press.
No “Happy” Talk Asked at a press conference (8/21/06) if he was “frustrated” about the situation in Iraq, George W. Bush responded: “Frustrated? Sometimes I’m frustrated. Rarely surprised. Sometimes I’m happy. This is—but war is not a time of joy. These aren’t joyous times. These are challenging times, and they’re difficult times, and they’re straining […]
Gearing up for an invasion of Iraq in 2002, U.S. media vividly evoked the cruel effects of unconventional weapons. Washington Post foreign affairs columnist Jim Hoagland referred repeatedly to Saddam Hussein’s imagined stockpiles of “horror weapons” and “weapons of horror,” and later to the “horrors” of Saddam’s past use of chemical weapons (7/11/02, 10/25/02, 9/24/03). […]
Days or weeks into the war, commentators and reporters made premature declarations of victory, offered predictions about lasting political effects and called on the critics of the war to apologize. Three years later, the Iraq War grinds on at the cost of at least tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.
Throughout the Iraq War, the mainstream media have shown little interest in documenting or quantifying the suffering of Iraqis. But a recent comment by George W. Bush provoked an unexpected round of discussion on the topic. At the close of a public event on December 12, Bush took questions from the audience. The very first […]
With polls showing growing opposition to the Iraq War and an increasing distrust for the White House, one might think that the press corps would be willing to re-examine how the threat from Iraq‘s supposed weapons of mass destruction was used to lead the country into war. But for many pundits, the origins of […]
