FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
A study of ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in the year 2001 shows that 92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican. Conducted for FAIR by the media analysis firm Media Tenor, the study […]
No sign of journalistic caution attended the pulsating graphic Fox News flashed across screens late on Election Night 2000: George Walker Bush, 43rd President of the United States Tom Brokaw was no more circumspect in interrupting NBC’s broadcast to announce, “George Herbert—George Walker Bush wins!” And CBS’s Dan Rather left no doubt when he announced: […]
The pain establishment media felt over Ralph Nader’s challenge to the two-party system was evident in CBS‘s election night coverage. When reporter Ed Bradley commented that Ralph Nader might approach the 5 percent threshold for receiving federal matching funds, Dan Rather interrupted: “About $12 million, $13 million of your money and mine.” As Bradley pointed […]
Booknotes is an entertaining program on the C-SPAN cable network. Hosted by general manager Brian Lamb, the show features hour-long author interviews every Sunday evening. Lamb is an intelligent interviewer, choosing guests who have written informative, politically interesting non-fiction and presenting them in a conversational, audience-friendly format. Unhappily, Booknotes also displays a pronounced conservative bias […]
Contact: Rachel Coen, (212) 633-6700 x318 **PLEASE NOTE CORRECTED VERSION OF EARLIER 6/13/00 RELEASE: Due to an error in calculation, some of the percentages in the release you received earlier today are incorrect. Below is a corrected version. We apologize for the error.** Media rely more on think tanks for “expert” sources than they did […]
Much like in the global economy, in the world of the think tanks that dominate the mass media, the rich have gotten richer. There has been little shuffling at the top of the most cited think-tank list, based on references to the group in major papers and broadcast transcripts in the Nexis database. Once again, […]
A good place to begin a discussion of media bias on economics is with the price of wine. In 1997, this is how the New York Times wine columnist discussed the issue: “The $100-a-bottle wine, once an example of vulgar excess, is now an everyday occurrence.” What’s now an everyday occurrence is celebratory and ignorant […]
On November 9, 1999, representatives from a national coalition of over 30 feminist, progressive groups and individuals–including Barbara Ehrenreich, Gloria Steinem, the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and a variety of women and men from the labor, black, Latina and South Asian grassroots communities–met with […]
Throughout April, the PBS public affairs program National Desk presented a three-part series on “the gender wars” that sought to address “whether the advancement of women in virtually all areas of society can be achieved without a retreat, in some way, on the part of men.” Asking the question that way is akin to answering […]
Introduction Public television has survived. The high profile assault from conservative critics, which was front-page news in the early 1990s, now seems like ancient history. As we enter the digital television age, we no longer hear Congressional threats to “zero out” public television, plans to “privatize” public broadcasting have receded from the opinion pages, and […]
A FAIR analysis of sources on ABC‘s Nightline and PBS‘s NewsHour during the first two weeks of the bombing of Yugoslavia found an abundance of representatives of the U.S. government and NATO, along with many other supporters of the NATO bombing. Opponents of the airstrikes received scant attention, however; in almost all stories, debate focused […]
Any time a broadcast outlet adds new programming, it’s an opportunity for new perspectives and opinions to be aired. So it’s disappointing when “new” offerings turn out to be the same old thing. A case in point is MSNBC, which has recently added two new shows to its political lineup, and reformatted another. And what […]
As a poverty specialist for the conservative Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector is one of the right-wing media machine’s most prolific pundits. In 1996, the year of the welfare reform debate, he was cited in media outlets an average of more than 15 times a month. Rector also feeds a vast network of right-wing talkshow hosts […]
“I want it implemented…. God damn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” So railed President Richard Nixon (Abuse of Power, Stanley Kutler) to his aides about papers regarding the Vietnam War that he thought were at the Brookings Institution. The documents the White House apparently wanted to get […]
Conservative think tanks patterned after the highly successful Washington, D.C.-based American Enterprise Institute (1996 revenues: $16.5 million) and Heritage Foundation (1996 revenues: $28.7 million) opened up around the United States during the 1980s and early 1990s almost as quickly as Scholotzky’s Delis. Like Scholotzky’s, they have now reached saturation. Most states have one, some have […]
Pundit-watchers never tire of the sport of spotting establishment, status quo commentators posing in their none-too-convincing camouflage as representatives of the left. While right-winged pundits cackle in full-throated yelps and are frequently leaders of their flocks, the specimens that serve as their competition often have their left wing clipped, teeter precariously on the fence and […]
If a newspaper has a political agenda, presumably it would be most visible on its editorial page. Examination of editorials in some of the most prominent dailies—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today—on a range of economic and social issues shows that they tend to articulate the same […]
Executive Summary The conservative critique of the news media rests on two general propositions: (1) journalists’ views are to the left of the public, and (2) journalists frame news content in a way that accentuates these left perspectives. Previous research has revealed persuasive evidence against the latter claim, but the validity of the former claim […]
“A PR debacle.” “A very difficult sell.” “A fiasco.” Those were among the terms used to describe the Ohio State “town meeting” on Iraq broadcast on CNN February 18—used not by the Clinton administration, but by the news media. In the days following the raucous event, at which audience members peppered three administration officials with […]
For the third year in a row, conservative or right-leaning think tanks in 1997 provided more than half of major media’s think tank citations, according to FAIR’s third annual survey of major newspaper and broadcast media citations in the Nexis computer database. Think tanks of the right provided 53 percent of citations, while progressive or […]
