FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Supreme Court nominee John Roberts passed the media confirmation process without much scrutiny. . . With all that praise, what are we missing? Elliot Mincberg of People for the American Way joins to answer that question. Also on the show: David Enders discusses one aspect of the current Iraq debate that gets next to no media attention.
In the months before the January 30, 2005 elections in Iraq, gloom and dissension began creeping into the media’s usual cheerleading for the war. Casualties were mounting, Iraqi resentment was growing, and the Army was facing an alarming shortage of manpower. In a December column (12/27/04), Washington Post editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt—a staunch supporter of […]
(NOTE: Please read the update to this alert.) In three recent reports about the military invasion of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, the New York Times has misreported the facts about the April 2004 invasion of the city and the toll it took on Iraqi civilians. On November 8, the Times reported: In April, American […]
When U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan declared that he thought the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was illegal (BBC, 9/15/04), CNN‘s Lou Dobbs was outraged, calling it “another incredible outburst by Kofi Annan” (9/16/04). But Dobbs and his CNN reporters neglected to pursue the most important aspect of the story: Was Annan right? Annan told the […]
The July 3 L.A. Times finally put to some sort of definitive rest the notion that it was ebullient Iraqis who pulled down the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square in April of last year. The statue pulldown is described in an internal Army study, the Times reported, as one of many psychological operations […]
The Senate Intelligence Committee report found that the intelligence about Iraq’s weapons programs was severely flawed, but is there more to this story than what we’ve been reading from mainstream media? Also this week: Robert Greenwald on his new documentary, Outfoxed, which analyzes the relationship between the Fox News Channel, conservatives, and the Bush White House.
With its policy in Iraq flailing, the Bush administration has lately made a great show of delegating authority over the country’s political future to the United Nations. For some dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, this is heresy. And for some reviled Iraqi exile politicians, notably Ahmed Chalabi, it is a threat. So perhaps it is not surprising that […]
Late last January, chief U.S. weapons-hunter David Kay left his post, saying that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that most likely none would ever be found. For pro-war pundits and editorialists who had spent months issuing periodic reminders that Kay still had not yet finished his work, and that we should […]
Ali Abunimah of the website Electronic Intifada on new developments in the Palestinian West Bank. And journalist Jason Vest on the Coalition Provisional Authority and its alleged criticism of the Iraq occupation.
January saw a major dispute between the Bush administration’s Iraq occupation authority and that country’s leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The administration was promoting a plan to hand over power to an Iraqi government selected through a system of what it called “caucuses.” Sistani, a spiritual leader for the country’s majority religious group, […]
The Sunday morning interview shows on March 14 all devoted significant time to the one-year anniversary of the start of the invasion of Iraq. But viewers of these programs would have had a hard time finding a debate about the controversial decision to go to war. ABC‘s This Week with George Stephanopoulos featured an interview […]
(NOTE: Please read the update to this alert.) Journalist Christian Parenti was invited to talk about Iraq on the March 2 broadcast of PBS‘s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. But Parenti’s criticism of the reconstruction contracts granted to corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel apparently crossed a line for the program’s host. According to a report by […]
How has media handled the Bush administration’s charges against the likely Democratic nominee for president, John Kerry? Also: a new study from the University of Maryland gives U.S. news coverage of weapons of mass destruction low marks. More on this with the study’s author, Susan Moeller.
Did the Bush administration portray Iraq as an imminent threat in order to justify an invasion? According to the White House, that’s a media hoax. “I think some in the media have chosen to use the word ‘imminent,’” White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters (1/27/04). “Those were not words we used.” With this […]
Investigative journalist Robert Dreyfuss shares about his recent Mother Jones article, The Lie Factory, which details how faulty information has shaped much of the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq. Also this week: are new reports giving us enough background information about what has prompted the current crisis in Haiti?
Even though—or perhaps especially because—the memo was from the US government and showed that Washington was spying on UN diplomats, the big American media showed scant interest. The coverage was either shoddy or nonexistent.
Despite criticism of the media by the Bush administration and its allies, U.S. TV news coverage of the Iraq situation continues to be dominated by government and military officials, according to a new study by FAIR. The few critics of military operations that find themselves on the nightly news broadcasts rarely question the war as […]
NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin responded (1/28/04) to complaints about a Morning Edition interview with Vice President Richard Cheney (1/22/04), including many emails that were sent in response to a FAIR Action Alert (1/23/04). In his response, Dvorkin wrote that “FAIR’s suggestion that Morning Edition devote some time to further investigation of Cheney’s statements from that […]
(NOTE: Please see the Activism Update regarding this alert.) Vice President Dick Cheney rarely submits to one-on-one interviews, so the chance to question him directly presents a valuable opportunity for journalists. Unfortunately, National Public Radio‘s Juan Williams failed to challenge Cheney’s questionable claims about Iraq on the January 22 broadcast of NPR‘s Morning Edition. In […]
Once the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq produced nothing but a few false alarms in the media, a new theory was being advanced by some outlets: The idea that Iraq had such weapons was really a well-orchestrated bluff by Saddam Hussein, telling the world false tales about his imaginary weapons. The Los […]
