FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Bob Schieffer is right that “a lot of people” think the Democrats should move to the “center”–especially journalists and pundits, who have been saying this for at least 30 years. There’s no reason to think it’s especially good advice, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
Trying to cover the 2016 presidential election based on a poll in 2014 is a waste of time.
Food stamp cuts are an encouraging sign of bipartisanship, according to some media accounts. And journalists are fascinated by the “real” Mitt Romney. Plus a domestic terror trial that’s not getting much press attention–perhaps because the terror suspects aren’t Muslims.
The documentary Mitt is causing many journalists to wonder why the Mitt Romney in the film wasn’t the one who ran for president. It’s a bit like asking why drinking a particular brand of beer doesn’t make you as popular with attractive strangers as the beer ads promised.
Since the consensus seems to be that Obama’s inaugural address was actually a statement of a bold, progressive vision for his second term, it’s not a surprise that some in the corporate media are upset. Obama’s words were seen as particularly injurious to Republicans, who presumably already feel bad enough as it is.
Reporters appear to be wedded to a set of “rules” that say they are not allowed to convey reality to their readers and viewers.
Asked about the pre-election sense that Mitt Romney might win the election, CNN reporter Candy Crowley told viewers (11/7/12): There was an optimism in the Romney camp. But it wasn’t based on the numbers. It was based on the feel of things. And one thing you know when you cover a campaign, the feel of […]
The Obama campaign has released a new ad criticizing Mitt Romney for having a Swiss bank account and wanting to keep tax breaks for corporations that offshore jobs. The commercial’s most devastating line: Romney once railed against the deadly pollution from a coal plant. I know what you’re thinking: Totally racist, right? That’s sort of […]
USA Today (10/17/12) ran a story about a battery manufacturer filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. But the story might as well have been a press release from the Mitt Romney campaign. “Another Blow for Green Energy” read the headline. Wendy Koch’s piece led off with this: An electric vehicle battery maker that was awarded […]
Over the past few weeks of the presidential campaign we’ve been hearing a lot—maybe too much—about the September 11, 2012, attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. It’s been turned into a campaign issue by the Romney team, which has used the incident to charges […]
Mitt Romney has a multi-trillion dollar tax cut plan that he says won’t add to the deficit. How does that work? He won’t say, other than to pledge that he’d close some loopholes and deductions, but that none of those would harm “middle-class” Americans. Analysts have argued that this is not mathematically possible. So how […]
CNN reporter Candy Crowley was apparently causing the Obama and Romney campaigns to panic over the weekend. Why? She was telling people she might ask a question at tonight’s presidential debate. Time‘s Mark Halperin reported (10/14/12) that has done a series of interviews on her network in which she has suggested that she will assume […]
This passage from Meet the Press (10/14/12) says a lot about how middle-of-the-road elite journalists think about fiscal issues. Here’s NBC veteran Tom Brokaw and host David Gregory: BROKAW: I was just going to say, I talked to a lot of major business leaders who want Romney to get elected, but almost to a man […]
Corporate journalism is not known for standing up to powerful politicians–or for its long memory. And so, when factchecks of the first presidential debate revealed that GOP candidate Mitt Romney was often not very truthful, sometimes even misstating his own policies, the media not only failed to make much of a fuss over Romney’s falsehoods, […]
Before the first presidential debate, CNN sent out a press release to promote the idea that they’d be doing factchecking of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. It’s kind of sad that this would be considered a novel enough idea to warrant a press release, but the actual factchecking was nothing you’d want to call attention […]
Politicians should not be able to pull the plug on the public’s media—PBS needs a dedicated trust fund that can’t be used as a political prop by candidates.
In Time magazine’s new cover story (“Blue Truth, Red Truth,” 10/3/12), Michael Scherer attempts to sort out the puzzle of campaign season factchecking. But while the cover promises to tell us which candidate is telling the truth, it mostly manages to capture some of the corporate media’s worst factchecking tropes. The article kicks off with […]
We’re familiar with campaign reports that don’t do enough factchecking. But here’s a strange one from ABC World News (9/25/12), which seems to be complaining that Mitt Romney departed from his usual misleading claims about how Obama’s been raising your taxes. Pointing this out would be a good thing. The problem is that you have […]
This week on CounterSpin: In the wake of the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and angry demonstrations in several other Muslim countries, corporate media are largely fingering religious differences and the peculiarities of Islam as the reason.
From last night’s ABC World News (9/18/12): DIANE SAWYER: But we do remember four years ago the president, then candidate, was at a fundraiser, it was during the primary, but he too was caught on tape. JAKE TAPPER: That’s right, he was talking about the difficulty of reaching small-town Pennsylvanians and how, because of tough […]
