FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
In an article that should go down in the annals of improbable news analyses, Peter Baker argues in the New York Times (3/28/13) that the Chief Justice might be in favor of gay rights if they weren’t so popular: Momentum in the political world for gay rights could actually limit momentum in the legal world. […]
“Outspent and lately out-hustled by highly organized gay rights organizations,” USA Today reports, “opponents have struggled to get their story out.” That’s a curious premise, given that “their story” is the law of the land, and that’s why we’re talking about it in the first place.
There is no objective evidence that allowing two people of the same gender to marry will harm mixed-gender marriages. So you might think objective reporting would treat that assertion as a dubious claim.
The New York Times reports that in the last few years, several elite U.S. universities have begun to cover sex reassignment surgery and/or hormones for transgender students. On the one hand, it’s great that they’re reporting news like this, and after years of extremely disrespectful coverage of transgender issues, it feels like a victory that […]
Give the corporate media cookies for finally getting pronouns right when reporting on transgender people. That only took dozens of years. Now if we could curb the media fixation on genitalia, we might be really getting somewhere. Because when it comes to covering transgender issues, media are still asking all the wrong questions, and framing […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin051812 Kenyon Farrow and Nada Alwadi @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin051812.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Before media were saying Obama’s declaration of support for same sex marriage shows how far we’ve come, they were saying how North Carolina’s constitutional amendment banning recognition of those marriages shows how far we have to go. Both can be true, […]
Sean Hannity got his start in radio on UC Santa Barbara’s KCSB in the late 1980s, where he got in trouble for promoting homophobia and disinformation about HIV and AIDS. I wrote about this in a 2003 Extra! profile of the then-Fox News show Hannity & Colmes: After airing for less than a year, Hannity’s […]
According to Tim Dickinson’s new piece in Rolling Stone, Fox honcho Roger Ailes lives in fear of “those gays”: Murdoch installed Ailes in the corner office on Fox‘s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that […]
Media coverage of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues has come a long way since the days when the New York Times referred to gay people as “perverts” (12/16/50) or the New York Post (10/17/90) published an op-ed claiming that “our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hellbent on Satanism and suicide.” Though stereotyping and sensationalism […]
Amy Gardner’srecent reporting on the Tea Party in the Washington Post has been very insightful. Today’s piece (10/27/10) deals with the activists’ views of the media.There’s astandard right-wing whine about mainstream media neglect, but actual Tea Party activists see things differently: Most local tea party organizers interviewed in an extensive canvass this month by the […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Reporters can always find many themes in election season, but some are saying this time around there’s really only one and that’s money. A new study from the Center for Public Integrity examines the fundraising going into the midterm elections; what impact is the Supreme Court’s Citizen United ruling […]
In light of the recent and tragic spate of gay youth suicides, the Washington Post‘s On Faith blog chose to honor National Coming Out day with a guest post (10/11/10) by raging homophobe Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. The post, titled “Christian Compassion Requires the Truth About Harms of Homosexuality,” accused “homosexual activist […]
Last year, when California’s Supreme Court upheld the state’s gay marriage ban known as Proposition 8, there was little speculation about the sexual orientation of the seven justices or the possible heterosexual biases they might harbor. But when federal Judge Vaughn Walker overturned Proposition 8 on August 4, reporting and commentary treated claims of Walker’s […]
When Barack Obama nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, her status as an unmarried professional woman did not go unnoticed—nor did her disregard for stereotypically “feminine” dress and behavior. Policing of Kagan’s gender and sexuality worked its way through the media like a whispering campaign, proving that conforming to rigid gender norms […]
After months of pressure from activists to make good on his campaign promise, Barack Obama called for a repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in his January 27 State of the Union address. Less than a week later, Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate committee hearing on February […]
The New York Times features an op-ed today (3/5/10) by Gen. Merrill McPeak, a retired Air Force chief of staff, arguing against allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the U.S. military. It’s not much of an argument, really–there’s not much more to it than the assertion that “warriors are inspired by male […]
“How do you, by and large, miss a gigantic rally?… America is waking up to the fact that our media is just not biased. They’re not giving us the truth.” —Glenn Beck (Fox News, 9/14/09) “When at least 75,000 Americans gather to protest something, you’d think it was news. But some media played down […]
Thomas Rogers of Salon‘s Broadsheet (9/10/09, ad-viewing required) reports that world champion South African runner Caster Semenya recently “was tested (possibly without her consent) by the International Association of Athletics Federations” and “now the results of her gender testing have leaked, and, if the reports are to be believed, they show that she is, in […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media promised to pay more attention to poverty and race after the Gulf Coast’s Katrina disasters in 2005, and for a short time they did a little more reporting. But where was the followup on this year’s August anniversary, when papers like the Washington Post and L.A. Times, […]
Ishmael Reed’s contextualization (CounterPunch, 6/29/09) of the epic demonization of Michael Jackson within historical U.S. media racism also takes a swipe at CNN‘s Black in America program, “an exercise meant to boost ratings by making whites feel good by making blacks look bad, the marketing strategy of the mass media since the 1830s“: In preparing […]
