FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Thanks to the efforts of independent media outlets like Free Speech TV (10/2/10), GritTV (10/4/10) and Democracy Now! (10/4/10), you may have been able to follow the happenings at last weekend’s One Nation Working Together rally. Organized and endorsed by hundreds of progressive citizens’ groups, labor unions and grassroots activists, the gathering drew tens of […]
Thousands have signed on to FAIR’s petition–add your voice today and keep the pressure on NBC to have a real war debate! July saw more U.S. troop fatalities in Afghanistan than any month since the war began nine years ago. Gen. Stanley McChrystal was removed from his commanding post amid controversy, and WikiLeaks released a […]
The war in Afghanistan has re-emerged as a major news story, thanks to the controversies surrounding the removal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the WikiLeaks release of classified documents. But on NBC‘s Meet the Press, the opportunity to engage in a robust debate about the war has taken a back seat to promoting the views […]
On May 31, the Israeli military attacked a flotilla of boats full of civilians attempting to deliver humanitarian supplies to the Gaza Strip. Reports indicate that at least nine and as many as 16 of the activists on board were killed, though details remain sketchy due to Israel’s censorious limitations on media coverage. Much of […]
Silencing supporters of single-payer, or Medicare for All, is a media staple, but PBS‘s Frontline found a new way to do that on the April 13 special Obama’s Deal—by selectively editing an interview with a single-payer advocate and footage of single-payer protesters to make them appear to be activists for a public option instead. The […]
Over the course of the past year, the New York Times has provided ample coverage to a series of potential U.S. Senate candidates from New York–none of whom are actually running for office. Meanwhile, a candidate who is in fact challenging incumbent Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand in the September 2010 primary has been all but erased […]
The Obama administration, having increased the number of troops in Afghanistan by 21,000 in March, is engaged in a contentious internal discussion about whether to send an additional 40,000 more. There is growing anger over Afghan civilian deaths, and July and August were the deadliest months for U.S. soldiers since the U.S. invaded in 2001 […]
The New York Times devoted some rare space on September 20 to discussing single-payer (or Medicare-for-all) health reform. The result? A one-sided account of why such a system couldn’t work. With a headline like “Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely,” readers probably had a sense of what the Times had in mind with the […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Barack Obama’s recent trip to Africa gave the press corps a chance to opine predictably on Obama’s “unique role” as a “son of Africa” who was specially suited to “tell African leaders hard truths”. It should’ve also been a chance for a serious look at the substance of U.S. […]
At this point, the confirmation battle over Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor will hinge in part on whether the media want to fact-check her critics. So far, the press is largely failing. Right-wing critics and politicians have been circulating comments Sotomayor made in 2001 at UC Berkeley. One quote has been replayed endlessly: “I […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: No Child Left Behind may be up for reconsideration in Congress soon, but if current coverage of national math and reading scores is an indication, media coverage will need to get a lot deeper to be useful. We’ll hear from Stan Karp of Rethinking Schools about what questions ought […]
In the wake of a FAIR Action Alert (4/6/09), Frontline has responded to critics of its documentary Sick Around America, defending the film’s focus on mandatory private health insurance and its exclusion of the single-payer option. (Frontline‘s full response follows.) In an email response to FAIR (4/7/09), Frontline characterized FAIR’s charge that the documentary presented […]
The March 31 documentary by PBS‘s Frontline, Sick Around America, treated mandatory for-profit insurance coverage as the only alternative to the current U.S. healthcare system–even though the documentary was a sequel to a 2008 Frontline special, Sick Around the World (4/15/08), that examined several publicly funded healthcare models, including Taiwan’s single-payer system. In a segment […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin022009 Robert Parry and Brandon Lacy Campos @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin022009.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: A new study from Think Progress shows that cable news stories about the stimulus debate were dominated by Republicans, with GOP guests outnumbering Democrats by 2 to 1. This isn’t an aberration says our guest, but a return to the […]
Following up on the well-documented phenomenon wherein corporate news outlets justify their mode of getting “conservatives to dominate their shows, booking them as guests far more often than progressives” by using “the rationale… that Republicans were ‘in power,’” ThinkProgress (1/28/09) now shows that “it appears that old habits die hard.” Even with a Democratic president […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin012309 Norman Solomon and Ann Jones @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin012309.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The inauguration of President Barack Obama was undoubtedly historic, and was covered as such by the corporate media. But what are we to make of the idea that the media have gone gaga for Obama? And what are the pundits and […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin120508 Paul Sullivan and Peter Hart @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin120508.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: For years veterans claiming to suffer from Gulf War Syndrome were derided as cranky and hysterical by the department of defense and even by some journalists. Will that change now that a definitive report says the Gulf War illnesses are real, […]
Corporate media are largely cheering Barack Obama’s early appointment of Clinton-era centrists. Many of these nominees have a distinct record of support for the corporate-friendly NAFTA trade pact, gutting public assistance programs under the guise of welfare “reform,” and pushing various deregulatory policies in the financial sector (including the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act). Yet, […]
PBS‘s Jim Lehrer, as the moderator of the sole presidential debate dedicated to international policy and security issues, asked a narrow set of questions that left the vast majority of the world and its problems undiscussed. Lehrer spent much of the debate asking about the ongoing global financial crisis, quoting President Dwight Eisenhower as saying […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin091208 Jim Naureckas and George Farah @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin091208.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: John McCain may have fired-up the GOP base with his pick of Sarah Palin as a running mate, and his campaign’s increasingly rancorous rhetoric, but along the way his campaign has made a number of claims that beg for media scrutiny. […]
