FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
After giving a dubious account of the causes of the Democrats’ 1994 electoral disaster, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson (11/14/08) provides an inaccurate description of the Fairness Doctrine, which he calls a federal regulation (overturned by the Reagan administration in 1987) requiring broadcast outlets to give equal time to opposing political viewpoints. Under this doctrine, […]
Fresh off successes in mobilizing people to pressure the FCC to condemn Comcast censorship and wrest “white spaces” from corporate control, Free Press has a new Internet for Everyone project announcing (11/11/08) their Los Angeles Town Hall event to “Kick-Start the Movement to Make an Internet Connection a Right of Every American”: The meeting–to be […]
Free Press activists so instrumental in bringing public attention to the issue announce (11/4/08) that “the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve the unlicensed use of ‘white spaces‘–empty airwaves between television channels–to provide high-speed Internet access nationwide”: Nearly every market in the United States has available white spaces; in some communities, more than three-quarters of […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald is incensed (11/02/08, ad-viewing required) over a column that had Washington Post Ombud Deborah Howell claiming that one reason that the Post and other papers are losing money is because they are “too liberal,” have had “more favorable stories about Barack Obama than John McCain,” and “conservatives are right that they often […]
Staying abreast of technological issues with repercussions in the areas of media consumer rights, privacy rights and corporate censorship, Free Press (10/28/08) is calling for the Federal Communications Commission to require all broadband providers to disclose any practice that monitors or interferes with their customers’ Internet use. In addition to transparent “network management” practices, according […]
Reporting on former Chicago detective Jon Burge’s long-delayed arrest for “perjury and obstruction of justice” related to police torture in “the Area Two Violent Crimes unit on Chicago’s South Side,” American Prospect blogger Phoebe Connelly writes (Tapped, 10/21/08) of how “John Conroy (whose exhaustive reporting on the subject is worth a read) mapped out the […]
Free Press Campaign Director Timothy Karr reminds us (Communities United, 10/23/08) that “a huge decision is going to be made on Election Day that could change the lives of millions of Americans,” but is “not about Obama or McCain”: On November 4, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on whether to open unused television airwaves […]
Perhaps CNN and Headline News will take the lesson that at the very bottom of the barrel, there isn’t much worth eating.
There’s a Latin phrase that people use—cui bono—that translates as “for whose good?” It means that you can figure out who is responsible for a situation by looking at who benefits from it. Sometimes, though, it’s easier to figure out who benefits by looking at who is responsible. This rule greatly simplifies the task of […]
New York Newsday had become the most enterprising and in many respects the best daily newspaper in New York City. In investigative reporting, liveliness, experimentation, in serving the New York City urban core, just as New York Newsday‘s advertisements said, it was “ahead of the Times.” But on July 14, 1995, the parent company of […]
The pundits had a dream—the Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder would drive Jesse Jackson from the public stage. Doug Wilder, a self-described fiscal conservative who advocated budget cuts, supported capital punishment and bragged of his state’s “right to work” (anti-union) laws, was a moderate black who would, in the words of the 1992 Almanac of American […]
