Angelo Carusone on Media Matters v. FTC, Rachel K. Jones (2023) on Mifepristone
Media Matters’ victory over Elon Musk and the FTC is not just hopeful but instructive, offering what the group calls a “roadmap” for other organizations.
Trump’s FTC Wages a War on Media Criticism
The FTC’s intervention against media criticism outfits comes from the same censorious impulse that weaponized the Trump FCC to stifle criticism.
Best of CounterSpin 2025
We call it the “best of,” but these are just a few of the void-filling conversations it’s been our pleasure to host in the last year.
Most-Read FAIR Posts of 2025
The rise of authoritarianism was the big story of 2025, and the censorship that goes along with it.
Robert W. McChesney, a Scholar/Activist Who Fought for Media Democracy
No one did more to analyze the negative impacts of our media systems being controlled by giant, amoral corporations.
Projects to Shift Media Further Rightward Get Kid Glove Treatment From Centrist Press Journal
Illuminating information could have been found if Quill had looked into sources of funding for right-wing media training.
David Sirota on Accountability Journalism
The public still look to news media to give them accurate, independently sourced and documented information to help them make decisions.
Not All Media Literacy Programs Are Created Equal—and Most Have Yet to Be Created
Many media literacy programs are actually funded by large corporations and feature advice from corporate news outlets that uphold simplified, status quo standards of “objectivity” without teaching students how to analyze power dynamics, profit motives or their own internal beliefs and biases.
Remembering Robert Parry, a Believer in Journalism
Journalism lost one of its most valuable investigators when Robert Parry died on January 27, from pancreatic cancer, at the age of 68. He was the first reporter to reveal Oliver North’s operation in the White House basement (AP, 6/10/1985), and the co-author of the first report on Contra drug-smuggling (AP, 12/21/1985). He did some […]
Raul Garcia on Trump Infrastructure Plan, Robert Parry on ‘Why We Write’
It should now surprise no one that Trump’s infrastructure plans—promoted in his State of the Union—have more to do with private riches than with public works.
A Tribute to Robert Parry: Independent Journalism at Its Best
Journalism lost one of its most valuable investigators when Robert Parry died on January 27, at the age of 68.
Remembering Ed Herman, Friend and Critic
Ed Herman was the main author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, written with Noam Chomsky—the 1980s masterwork that exposed how elite US media typically function as propaganda organs for US empire and militarism.
NYT Corrects Its Ed Herman Obit
FAIR thanks the activists who contacted the New York Times, and the Times for correcting the record.
Edward S. Herman: Master of Dissent (1925–2017)
One of the greatest and sweetest media critics ever, Edward S. Herman, has passed away. Ed was the main author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, written with Noam Chomsky.
Why the Revolution Will Not (but Must) Be Televised
Corporate media are really designed around preserving the status quo—unsurprisingly, because they are owned by the class of people who benefit from things staying the same.
Anti-Obama Media Bias? Not Quite
Liberal writers are zeroing in on a new study from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that found Barack Obama has been subjected to far more “negative” coverage than any of the Republican presidential candidates. The graphic accompanying the study is dramatic: Slam dunk, right? One of Eric Boehlert’s blog items at Media Matters is […]
Brill’s Content: Sweet on Sugar
About once an issue, Brill’s Content—Steven Brill’s for-profit, advertiser-supported magazine of media criticism—has an article about a corporation that Content says was mistreated by the media. In its July/August 1999 issue, the magazine came to the rescue of the Flo-Sun sugar company, which Time magazine’s Don Bartlett and Jim Steele (11/23/98) had cited as a […]
