FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
When it comes to political books, the New York Times Book Review and the C-SPAN book show After Words share an exceedingly narrow view of whose books deserve review—and who is fit to discuss them. A FAIR study found that these important media venues for discussion of newly published books were overwhelmingly dominated by white […]
On its surface, the announcement by ABC‘s This Week that the website PolitiFact would monitor the show’s content was a welcome development, despite the obvious downside that the Web-only factchecking would deprive the show’s TV audience of needed correctives. But an evaluation of the record thus far suggests that even this limited attempt to test […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: a special look at the state of the media in America. Every week on CounterSpin we talk mostly about what the media are getting wrong. But the big story inside the news industry is the collapse of the business itself. What are the implications for citizens? What can we […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Some of the current conversations about the future of journalism trade on some pretty rose-colored notions of journalism’s past. The reality is journalism has always been a very mixed bag, with just some reporters doing the challenging, talking truth to power work that later generations may imagine everyone was […]
For 17 years our colleagues Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon have worked with FAIR to present the P.U.-Litzers, a year-end review of some of the stinkiest examples of corporate media malfeasance, spin and just plain outrageousness. Starting this year, FAIR has the somewhat dubious honor of reviewing the nominees and selecting the winners. It’s a […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin121109 Curtis Brainard and Corie Wright @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin121109.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The so-called “Climategate” email scandal seems to have thrown media coverage of climate change back a decade, with news outlets giving warming deniers more or less equal time alongside actual climate scientists. Part of the problem has been the media’s general […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Argentina just passed a media law that will severely curb the power of the country’s largest conglomerates by putting a majority of the country’s broadcast licenses in non-corporate hands. How did the law come about, and how is it expected to change Argentina’s media landscape. And what lessons might […]
Special online-only study Progressive think tanks gained in media prominence over 2008, despite overall think tank citations declining for the fourth year in a row. The 25 most-cited think tanks in major U.S. media received 13,149 citations in 2008, a 6 percent decline from 2007 levels. The decline primarily hit conservative or right-leaning think tanks, […]
Extra! asked progressive media activists and scholars to share their ideas on how to make journalism’s future better than its present; the following are some of the highlights. *** The one thing that we should do in the face of the erosion of commercial journalism is invest heavily in libraries. That means we should publicly […]
First came the waves of consolidation that swallowed up independent newspapers across the country. Now, as more newsrooms shrink and shutter in the Internet age, the local daily paper may be verging on extinction. But in many communities, a new tide of experimental Web-based ventures is moving to fill in the holes left by declining […]
On December 6, 2008, a 15-year-old in Athens was shot and killed by a police officer. The event sparked nationwide riots and protests, with news spreading rapidly through word of mouth and new media platforms like cell phones and Internet sites. Meanwhile, reported Andrew Lam at New America Media (12/16/08), some 500 media professionals were […]
Back in the mid-1980s, when Jeff Cohen founded FAIR, large-scale progressive media activism was still more than a decade away, and the media justice movement lay in the even more distant future. But FAIR set out to focus attention on race/ethnicity, class and gender bias in the media from the beginning, and to draw connections […]
Tekle Gebremedhin, an Eritrean immigrant and veteran cab driver in Philadelphia, might not seem like the most obvious activist for broadband policy, a field long dominated by technology wonks. But in the course of a battle for the drivers’ right to form a union, Gebremedhin and his fellow organizers at the Unified Taxi Workers Alliance […]
Most people in the United States don’t interact with Congress or the Federal Communications Commission on a daily basis. Most know little about who owns our media system, or the array of laws and rules that regulate media ownership and public access. What some do know, however, is that accessing these media is harder when […]
On June 12, all analog television signals will go dark, and many people will be cut off from an important information source. The cause: the Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act, signed into law by George W. Bush in February 2006. This act gave the Federal Communications Commission the authority to terminate analog licenses […]
In just over a month last winter, two Latino men were beaten to death in New York state while their attackers shouted racial slurs and epithets (Philadelphia Inquirer, 1/25/09). Such hate crimes, motivated by anti-immigrant prejudice and other bigotries, have spurred a media justice campaign to reveal the potential human costs of hate speech. When […]
We encourage you to listen to FAIR advisory board member Tim Robbins’ no-holds-barred speech on broadcasting and to pass it on to your friends. A renowned actor, director and writer, Robbins used his keynote address at the National Association of Broadcasters conference on April 14 to speak out about the “dangerous lack of diversity of […]
I did a public forum in New Haven last week, and someone noted that FAIR was formed before even the Internet was big, and I corrected her and I said, actually, we were formed before the fax machine was big. And I remember when we got our first fax machine, how it made it so […]
So, happy 20th birthday to FAIR. Time really flies when you’re trying to counter an inexhaustible onslaught of lies and distortions, doesn’t it? Because that’s essentially what FAIR does: They try to set the record straight. Which sounds really simple in theory, but how do you even begin to have the most basic conversation about […]
I remember the first time I heard of FAIR as if it were yesterday. I was a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Alexander Cockburn was giving a speech on campus. This was 1986, and Cockburn was in his full glory; his main beat at the time was media criticism, and […]
