FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
With the election over, you’re seeing familiar corporate media advice about the need for Obama to move to the right and learn to compromise with Republicans. Some of this is based on a frankly nonsensical view of the polarization that accompanied his first term. Matt Bai of the New York Times writes (11/7/12): There are, […]
Writing about Newt Gingrich‘s presidential bid on the New York Times‘ Caucus blog (5/10/11), Matt Bai seems to confuse GOP rhetoric for fact as he suggest that, when it comes to marriage vows, Republicans are generally known for walking the line: Mr. Gingrich, a bit of a rogue in his personal life, has never been […]
Today in the New York Times Paul Krugman (1/10/11) suggests that we not pretend that “both sides” are responsible for toxic political rhetoric: Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: It’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to […]
New York Times reporter Matt Bai has tried to argue that the public is really worried about the budget deficit. He’s tried to find polling evidence to show the public favors some form of budget-cutting austerity,which usually leads him to focus on numbers that support his argument while ignoring those that run counter to his […]
As Peter Hart noted earlier, New York Times political reporter Matt Bai has a piece today (12/1/10) critical of Barack Obama for being “loath to publicly disown his base.” Bai writes of Obama: “Since he isn’t willing to break publicly with liberals, independent and conservative voters tend to see him as a tool of the […]
New York Times reporter Matt Bai uses the debt commission (12/1/10) to ask whether Barack Obama will finally stand up to the liberal base of the Democratic Party. As the headline puts it, “Debt-Busting Issue May Force Obama Off Fence.” You see, in Bai’s world, Obama was never much of a Clinton-style “triangulator,” which is […]
New York Times reporter Matt Bai apparently really, really cares about the budget deficit– so much so that he’s done reporting suggesting that the rest of us care about it as much as he does. He’s also demonstrated his concern by writing an outrageously misleading article about Social Security and the deficit (the Times had […]
Matt Bai (New York Times, 11/9/10), as a standard-issue corporate media political analyst, sees the Democrats being moved to the right as an upside to their disastrous showing in the ’10 midterms. But he’s worried that the party isn’t learning the obvious lesson. If there was any sliver of hope for moderate Democrats on a […]
New York Times political analyst Matt Bai writes in a post-election piece (11/4/10): A powerful force in the party, Ms. [Sarah] Palin represents an aggrieved, anti-elitist strain of conservatism that goes back to Richard M. Nixon’s Silent Majority. It is a rural conservative impulse, rooted most firmly in the South and West, that equates liberal […]
New York Times reporter Matt Bai had a long piece Sunday (10/31/10)that argued that Tea Partiers are really the right-wing version of Bush-era MoveOn activists and bloggers (the “netroots”). Bai writes of “the larger forces that unify many self-styled activists on both the left and right,” and suggests that “the recent uprisings on both ends […]
The New York Times (9/16/10) points out in a write-up of its new poll : The economy and jobs are increasingly and overwhelmingly cited by Americans as the most important problems facing the country, while the deficit barely registers as a topic of concern when survey respondents were asked to volunteer their worries. Huh. The […]
Matt Bai has a piece in theNew York Times today (9/9/10) explaining how Barack Obama squandered an opportunity to make fundamental changes to the American economy. One claim in the piece jumps out; after explaining that large infrastructure projects–rail lines, broadband, etc.– are “things that only an active government could realistically do,” Bai claims: Getting […]
New York Times reporter Matt Bai writes a piece today (8/26/10) singling out a Democratic congressmemberwho talks aboutcuts to the federal budget. Thisis presumably an unusual, newsworthything worth writing about–hence the headline, “One Liberal Voice Dares to Say, Cut the Budget.”It’s worth pointing out thatother Democrats have proposed ideas likecutting military spending withoutgetting points for […]
In his New York Times column on Monday (8/9/10), headlined “The Flimflam Man,” Paul Krugman took aim at Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, who has emerged as the GOP’s big thinker on budgets: One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past […]
The lesson of the Shirley Sherrod story would seem to be a simple one:A conservative blogger with a history of promoting inaccurate, racially chargedstories published another one, and people in the media (not to mention the White House) fell for it–again. But New York Times reporter Matt Bai wrote a piece in the paper’s Week […]
Senate Democrats are having trouble passing a spending bill that would, among other things, extend unemployment benefits and deliver much-needed financial aid to cash-starved states. Today the New York Times (6/18/10) explained the legislative logjam this way: The spending and tax measure has become caught up in intensifying politics around deficit spending as members of […]
