FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
It’s been said (by me!) that the big spending cuts set to hit the federal budget next year—so-called “sequestration”—are not created equal, at least in the eyes of the corporate media. The cuts, as designed, hit the military budget and non-military spending in roughly equal measure. The political calculation was that Republicans would object to […]
New York Times columnist Gail Collins had a good critique of standardized testing and the No Child Left Behind law (4/28/12), weighing in on the “Pineapplegate” controversy about a bizarre question that appeared on a New York English exam. She writes: We have turned school testing into a huge corporate profit center, led by Pearson, […]
By now it’s old news to any reasonably critical observer that corporate outlets’ “business reporters failed to see the crisis in the mortgage and credit markets as it brewed and bubbled,” as former City Limits editor Alyssa Katz puts it (CJR.org, 9/14/09), but Katz also gives props to others who noticed how “evidence of its […]
Since “on his Wednesday radio show, [Lou] Dobbs as much as announced that CNN president Jon Klein” is forcing him into “focusing on a nonpartisan objective reality that it is our job to cover”–with Dobbs “admitting, ‘I resisted this idea initially’”–author and journalist Leslie Savan (TheNation.com, 8/12/09) has noticed some “kind of French” behavior from […]
In Katha Pollitt’s latest Nation column (7/15/09), she finds it “not hard to poke holes in” the July 2 Time magazine cover story by “Caitlin Flanagan–professional antifeminist, author of a whole book of essays attacking working mothers, herself excepted”–being full of “Flanagan’s predictions of universal doom for the children of divorced or never-married parents”: After […]
Columnist Katha Pollitt (Nation, 6/10/09) has examined the extent to which, “in the immediate aftermath of Dr. Tiller’s murder, it was astonishing how many men were called upon to weigh in on abortion on national television”: CNN featured William Schneider, Sanjay Gupta and Bill Press. On Fox, Bill O’Reilly defended his use of “baby killer” […]
“If media reports are to be believed,” Gabriel Arana of the Nation writes (5/27/09), “an Armageddon-like rash of drug-related violence–unlike any seen since ‘Miami Vice years of the 1980s‘–has crossed from Mexico into the United States, ‘just as government officials had feared.’” But that’s a pretty big if, even though “in the national media, it’s […]
Looking at “people of a certain age” for whom “getting a letter published in the Times has always been a very, very big deal,” David Margolick (Nation , 5/27/09) tells the tale of two lifelong friends and constant New York Times letter submitters–one with a “Babe Ruth”-like record of getting his views into print, and […]
Quoting John Dewey’s warning about “the proper role of the press in a democracy”–“a class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge”–Eric Alterman finds it (Nation, 5/6/09) “difficult to imagine a more telling–and disturbing–manifestation of Dewey’s prediction than the current torture debate […]
In a column on media treatment of Michelle Obama, Katha Pollitt (Nation, 4/20/09) points out this forehead-smacking quote from New York magazine’s David Samuels (3/15/09): There are clear limits to Michelle’s ambition. She went to excellent schools, got decent grades, stayed away from too much intellectual heavy lifting, and held a series of practical, modestly […]
Resisting the tide of “liberal blogger men” who “are thrilled with the New York Times‘ appointment of 29-year-old Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat to replace William Kristol on the op-ed page,” Katha Pollitt (Nation, 3/18/09) contrasts the fact that “Douthat is best known for his conservative Catholicism (abortion is murder, frozen embryos are children, contraception kills […]
Personally inclined to think that “CNBC may be beyond repair,” John Nichols (Nation, 3/17/09) still thinks a new Fix CNBC! campaign’s “messaging is smart and instructive with regard to the broader media crisis in America,” quoting their open letter to the financial network: Americans need CNBC to do strong, watchdog journalism–asking tough questions to Wall […]
Stating that “a lot of funny things can happen when the media translate science for the public,” science writer Chris Mooney (Nation, 3/6/09) looks over more evidence that the U.S. public got really lucky when CNN‘s Sanjay Gupta was not made Obama’s surgeon general. Mooney’s list of Gupta “approaching medical coverage through ‘one the one […]
