FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Three moments, actually: —NBC‘s Chuck Todd yesterday on Meet the Press (12/10/11), commenting on Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich: Well, first of all, those are a couple of nimble debaters. They are pretty good. I think we have seen it. This is the final two. I’m old enough to remember when Todd had the campaign […]
The Michele Bachmann presidential campaign–formerly treated as atop-tier juggernaut by Beltway media–has been floundering for weeks. Which makes right now as good a time as any for them to grab some headlines by shouting about liberal media bias. The Bachmann campaign was furious about email correspondence concerning a possible Bachmann appearance on a CBS Web […]
ABC This Week host Christiane Amanpour (11/6/11) kicked the show off with a pretty funny joke: Clash of the titans in Texas last night, as Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich met for the first of a series of one-on-one Lincoln/Douglas-style debates. Less funny was the show‘s very imbalanced roundtable discussion: So let’s bring in our […]
There’s an old joke about how the pundit spectrum in corporate media debates goes from GE all the way to GM. On Sunday‘s Meet the Press, viewers got a chance to see that joke come to life. On the panel was conservative former GE CEO Jack Welch, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks and […]
On his MSNBC show (10/15/11), Chris Hayes went through the NBC archives to look at Martin Luther King’s appearances on Meet the Press. He was struck by the tone of the questions King was asked–and the show put together this clip reel (apologies for the ad you’re likely to be forced to watch before the […]
Squint or you’ll miss it–the Sunday front page of the Washington Post: In case you’re having trouble finding it, it’s in the lower right-hand corner: a blurb approximately one column inch long, directing people to page A20 to find news about protests in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street in “more than 900 cities in Europe, […]
NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory, interviewing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Sunday (10/10/11): GREGORY: What’s going on in the streets of Occupy Wall Street? EMANUEL: Yeah. GREGORY: Complaining about the unfairness, railing against Wall Street. The president has sympathized with those protesters in the street. Is demonizing Wall Street the way to create […]
At the top of Meet the Press yesterday (9/25/11), NBC anchor David Gregory announced one of the topics to come: Is the president’s plan basic fairness or class warfare? As with too many other media debates, an absurd proposition—that returning tax rates for certain wealthy people to levels seen in the 1980s and 1990s is […]
There is growing Congressional opposition to the Libya war. Two House votes this month sought to challenge the White House policy—one of which passed by a wide margin. On Saturday (6/18/11) Charlie Savage reported in the New York Times that the Office of Legal Counsel’s advice to Obama was that he needed to comply with […]
Guess who’s booked to appear on the CBS Sunday morning chat show Face the Nation this weekend? None other than Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan. It has, after all, been an eternity since Sunday TV viewers had a chance to listen to Ryan talk about his Medicare-slashing budget plan. May 22 on Meet the Press, to […]
There have been a lot of complaints about New York Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin being too cozy with the Wall Street powers that he’s covering. Some of those critics are in-house; a New York magazine article went so far as to quote a Times staffer who (like several others at the paper) likened […]
Labor journalist Mike Elk (In These Times, 5/16/11) made an excellent point after watching NBC host David Gregory interview Newt Gingrich on Sunday’s Meet the Press (5/15/11). Elk wrote: Speaking yesterday on Meet the Press, Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said that “the Obama system of the National […]
From Meet the Press (3/27/11): GREGORY: I’ll start with you, Ted Koppel. You spent time, in your early days as a correspondent, with Henry Kissinger. KOPPEL: I did. GREGORY: Who knew something about the big ideas for the world. Is this administration getting the big ideas right in the–in the tumult of the Middle East? […]
As we noted here, there weren’t many labor voices booked on the Sunday morning chat shows. One, actually–Richard Trumka from the AFL-CIO. ABC’s This Week featured four governors (two Democrats, two Republicans) talking about their fiscal problems. CBS‘s Face the Nation had a soft interview with New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie. Host Bob Schieffer […]
Joe Biden on non-dictator Hosni Mubarak and “high-tech terrorist” Julian Assange.
You got a sense from some of the coverage of the Simpson/Bowles deficit commission report that their right-leaning prescription was exactly the kind of solution the corporate media could get behind. Charlie Rose could apparently only find two panelists who wished the commission had gone further with its spending cuts. On NBC‘s Meet the Press […]
Meet the Press announced that its show this Sunday will feature two conservative Republican guests, Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Gov. Chris Christie (N.J.). Well, that’s only natural, because the GOP did so well on Tuesday, winning back the House…. Right? Oh wait…. Here’s Meet the Press‘s then-host Tim Russert on November 12, 2006: Our […]
Wrapping up a panel discussion (10/31/10) on Barack Obama’s post-midterm political challenges, NBC reporter Chuck Todd raised the possibility that the Beltway debate on Afghanistan might change: On Afghanistan, the Democratic caucus that will be left, you brought this up, is going to be a very liberal caucus, very anti-war caucus. This is going to […]
Thispast Sunday’s edition of NBC‘sMeet the Press (10/10/10) featuredtwo gueststalking about the midterms, the economy and public sentiment: conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan and Time magazine’s Joe Klein. Klein has been on a road trip through the middle of the country to assess how Americans are feeling (that is, Americans who don’t live […]
A new study of the guest lists for the Sunday morning chat shows finds that the networks prefer lawmaker guests who are white, male, older and Republican. The study was publishedby the George Mason University School of Law’s Green Bag Journal, and got a brief write-up in the New York Times today (9/13/10). And that […]
