FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Unlike a lot of critiques of Amazon from the publishers’ point of view, Colin Robertson’s article in the latest issue of the Nation (8/2-9/10) does describe actual bad behavior on the part of the online bookseller: Dennis Loy Johnson, co-publisher of the Brooklyn-based independent Melville House, is one of the few publishers who have dared […]
In a lengthy New Yorker piece (4/26/10) about the Amazon/Apple battle over e-books, Ken Auletta paints some familiar heroes and villains: The [publishing] industry’s great hope was that the iPad would bring electronic books to the masses—and help make them profitable. E-books are booming…. But publishers were concerned that lower prices would decimate their profits. […]
This week on CounterSpin: The network camera crews have mostly packed up and gone home, but the political fights over reconstruction and rebuilding in Haiti are only just getting started. University of Texas professor Jemima Pierre was part of a delegation that recently visited Haiti, and she wrote about what she saw for the Nation. […]
Boy, the folks at Amazon.com sure are mean–to hear the New York Times tell it. A March 18 story by Motoko Rich and Brad Stone begins: Amazon.com has threatened to stop directly selling the books of some publishers online unless they agree to a detailed list of concessions regarding the sale of electronic books, according […]
There’s a certain category of newspaper article where you’re better off ignoring the text and just looking at the accompanying graph. Such an article is “Math of Publishing Meets the E-Book” (New York Times, 3/1/10), by Motoko Rich. The context for the article is the fight between publishers and Amazon over how much to charge […]
James Ledbetter (Big Money, 2/20/10) points out that Mexican media mogul Carlos Slim, the third-richest person on the planet and one of the New York Times‘ biggest stockholders, is a central player in a remarkable New York-based legal story–one that the Times has so far ignored. The story involves Slim’s attempt to take over a […]
Washington Times, the paper of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, has announced it will be going to free distribution and laying off at least 40 percent of its staff. Which positions won’t make the cut? Well, one that’s been mentioned is that of editor. That’s right; former editor John Solomon resigned last month after […]
In their analysis of what ails the journalism business (CJR.org, 10/19/09), Leonard Downie, Jr., and Michael Schudson seem to pooh-pooh the idea that newspapers could be turned into non-profits funded by endowments, “as though they were museums.” “It would take an endowment of billions of dollars to produce enough investment income to run a single […]
The New York Times reported (10/15/09) that rocker Jon Bon Jovi has arranged an unusual deal to become an “artist in residency” on NBC, appearing across the network’s various shows to promote an upcoming album. The deal is all the more striking because it includes a segment on NBC Nightly News–part of the show’s “Making […]
In the wake of Rush Limbaugh being booted from a group of investors bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams football team, a minor media tempest has been stirred by conservative commentators who charge that Limbaugh has been falsely accused of making racist remarks. Central to their charge are two quotes allegedly made by Limbaugh–in […]
The New York Times reported (10/6/09) that the Federal Trade Commission was planning to establish new rules for bloggers: The FTC said that beginning on December 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any […]
Rupert Murdoch’s latest hire John Stossel, speaking at a Michigan college: I quit ABC a couple weeks ago partly because they didn’t like what I was doing. They viewed it as too biased. Yes, ABC promoted Stossel to 20/20 anchor, gave him regular “Give Me a Break” commentary segments and one-hour, factually challenged primetime specials…all […]
On his Media Citizen blog, Free Press’ Timothy Karr (9/17/09) has compiled some astounding Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs quotes propounding a “fear that’s laced with paranoia, stoked by misinformation and prejudice and fed to millions of people via powerful media”–namely that “the most anti-American notion of the lot is the idea that […]
By now it’s old news to any reasonably critical observer that corporate outlets’ “business reporters failed to see the crisis in the mortgage and credit markets as it brewed and bubbled,” as former City Limits editor Alyssa Katz puts it (CJR.org, 9/14/09), but Katz also gives props to others who noticed how “evidence of its […]
Under the charming headline “Eliminate the Parasites,” Newsweek‘s Daniel Lyons (9/12/09) advances another brilliant scheme to save corporate media from the menace of Google. Lyons likes the idea put forward by billionaire Ayn Rand fan Mark Cuban: Cuban’s advice: declare war on the “aggregator” Web sites that get a free ride on content. These aggregators–sites […]
In looking at “all the angst over online appropriation of newspapers’ work,” Nieman Foundation blogger Zachary M. Seward (Nieman Journalism Lab, 9/4/09) thinks that “information actually flows in all directions, right?” As “blog posts inspire newspaper articles, newspapers lift from other newspapers, and radio stations do the rip-and-read,” Seward writes that “when a blogger uncovered […]
One of the items enumerated in Glenn Greenwald’s round-up of “Various Matters” for Salon (9/4/09, ad-viewing required) addresses how NBC‘s “Chuck Todd this week noted the series of petty scandals the right has been manufacturing and remarked: ‘The ability of some conservatives to create media firestorms is still much greater than liberals these days’”–which viewpoint […]
Adam Liptak of the New York Times (8/31/09) says that we can thank Riverside, California’s Press-Enterprise for having “fought ferociously” in multiple Supreme Court battles ensuring “the press and the public have nearly an absolute constitutional right to attend jury selection in criminal cases.” According to Liptak, “news organizations used to consider those kinds of […]
On news that “today, a federal court threw out the Federal Communications Commission’s rule to cap cable ownership at 30 percent,” Free Press (8/28/09) comments “the rule served as an important consumer protection from media consolidation and growing cable cartels, and encouraged diversity in ownership in the cable industry.” The media advocacy group’s Ben Scott […]
Noticing that Democratic strategist Mark Penn “is the Wall Street Journal‘s ‘Microtrend’-spotting columnist” and “also CEO of PR giant Burson-Marsteller,” Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan (8/26/09) posits that “only a scumbag would abuse the former to drum up business for the latter.” Alas, “Scumbag spotted!” is Nolan’s cry when writing that Penn’s latest (old, and none […]
