FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
When talkshow host Cenk Uygur announced that his short tenure at MSNBC had come to an end due to his criticism of “those in power” (Young Turks, 7/20/11), it highlighted an unsettling pattern at the channel. Uygur’s ouster represented the third time in recent years that a show hosted by someone with progressive ideals and […]
Richard Engel on NBC Nightly News (10/21/11), speaking about the end of the Iraq War: The training wheels off, Iraq will have to succeed or fail without American troops on the ground to guide the way. That’s quite a metaphor—invading and occupying a country for eight years as “training wheels.” Engel’s report includes this reference […]
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 Nightly News (10/7/11) marked the 10th anniversary of the Afghan War on October 7 with a segment that linked the war to the Occupy Wall Street protests. As anchor Brian Williams put it in the introduction: Tonight protesters remain in the streets of a dozen U.S. cities, angry over what’s happened to their lives […]
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 […]
The New York Times had a headline on Saturday that read, “Imagining a Christie Campaign for President.” That seems appropriate–if we’re talking about how it’s the corporate media doing the imagining. On ABC‘s This Week (10/2/11), Jonathan Karl announced that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie‘s speech at the Reagan Library “was the most electrifying event […]
There’s an interesting piece at the Huffington Post (9/27/11) by Joy Resmovits about what some critics of the corporate-backed NBC Education Nation conference are saying. Even though some are crediting NBC for a more balanced program than last year, not everyone’s ready to give the network a passing grade: While some lauded the increased balance […]
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 […]
When Dick Cheney appeared on the Today show, at the conclusion of the interview a camera that shows the crowd outside the studio picked up this image: That sign probably represented the harshest take on Cheney’s record that TV viewers saw during the PR campaign for his book. Unsurprisingly, it caught someone’s attention over at […]
On NBC Nightly News (8/16/11): ANDREA MITCHELL: Perry’s Texas swagger is his calling card, bred of a hardscrabble boyhood on the family farm and Aggie roots at Texas A&M. Perry’s chief claim to challenging President Obama is the Texas jobs record. Perry says his state produced 40 percent of all the jobs created across America […]
One of the strangest comments post- Iowa straw poll came from reporter Kelly O’Donnell on NBC Nightly News (8/14/11): Both Pawlenty’s exit and Perry’s launch consumed political oxygen that typically would have gone to the straw poll’s actual winner, Congresswoman Bachmann, who appeared on all five Sunday morning talk shows, including Meet the Press. I’m […]
Amid tough competition from his corporate media colleagues, Meet the Press host David Gregory has stood out as a journalist who has consistently misinformed the public about the impact of Social Security and other entitlement programs on the deficit. To find out how he’s been wrong and to tell him to correct his errors, see […]
There’s been plenty written about how reporters skew reality by treating “both sides” as equally intransigent or inflexible when it comes to the budget deficit battle. Another example, from the L.A. Times today (8/2/11): For Republicans, it was preventing any tax increase to upper-income families. For Democrats, it was ensuring no cuts to Social Security, […]
NBC (Nightly News, 7/19/11) did some polling to see what the public thinks about the Republican and Democratic positions on the budget and debt ceiling : CHUCK TODD: Now, look, any sort of deal is putting pressure on the bases of both parties. For Republicans, a large majority of the country is telling Republicans get […]
You may have heard about new Defense Secretary Leon Panetta‘s trip to Iraq–mainly because while in the country he told some U.S. soldiers that they were there because of 9/11. That led to coverage like this in the Washington Post: On Monday, in his first visit to Iraq as Pentagon chief, Panetta appeared to justify […]
As noted by an account on the TVNewser blog (7/11/11), on ABC‘s This Week panel there was some talk of Rupert Murdoch losing his U.S. television licenses over the News of the World phone hacking scandal. There is a “character clause” for broadcast licensees, and the current scandal would go a long way towards demonstrating […]
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 […]
