FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
This week on FAIR TV: Can Chuck Hagel really be considered anti-war? Pundits are mad about the fiscal cliff tax deal–they wanted more Social Security and Medicare cuts. And Murdoch’s New York Post made another attempt to link Occupy Wall Street to crime–and other media outlets went along.
The December 30 episode of Meet the Press was, of course, devoted to discussion of the “fiscal cliff.” And NBC veteran Tom Brokaw was on hand to recycle some of the most tiresome talking points about wealth and taxes.
If you were concerned that the Syria WMD stories didn’t already feel enough like the Iraq WMD reports, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius had one just for you. It’s not that Ignatius doesn’t know that this story sounds, well, familiar–but it’s important to recall more of the journalism from the Iraq invasion era.
Meet the Press’s David Gregory (12/16/12) seemed really proud of how hard his show worked to try to get a pro-gun viewpoint on the air to talk about the Newtown massacre. Funny, Gregory doesn’t always make that much of an effort to balance his panels.
The theatrics of WMD claims about Syria–satellite images, anonymous sources and so on–are obviously reminiscent of the lead up to the Iraq War. But media stress that this time–it’s different.
Meet the Press hosted what David Gregory dubbed a “special economic roundtable” on December 2 that included “CNBC‘s dynamic duo,” Maria Bartiromo and Jim Cramer. But Bartiromo’s comments about tax increases for the wealthy needed a factcheck. She started by making a familiar conservative point about the so-called “fiscal cliff”—that the White House talks about […]
This week: What do corporate media get wrong about the “cycle of violence” in Gaza? Is there really such a thing as a “fiscal cliff”? And David Gregory says Obama’s big mistake was not having an economy-boosting event with CEOs. You mean like the one he had a week after being inaugurated in 2009? Take […]
On NBC Nightly News (11/15/12) , correspondent Martin Fletcher gives viewers a sense of the suffering on both sides of the Israel/Gaza conflict: FLETCHER: Terror in Israel. (SHOUTING) FLETCHER: “There is another one,” a soldier screams. (SHOUTING) FLETCHER: More than 200 missiles fired at Israel today. And in Gaza, despair. (SHOUTING) FLETCHER: Burying an infant […]
Post-election lessons are everywhere in the media, as pundits either try to explain how Mitt Romney lost or what Obama must do in his second term. My favorite example of this came on the front page of USA Today (11/8/12): If you think it’s somewhat odd that Obama would need to “soothe Wall Street,” then […]
There’s no doubt that the sex scandal that prompted CIA director David Petraeus’s sudden resignation late last week is a big story. New details–verified or not–seem to arrive almost by the hour. But the reason it seems to have shaken so many media figures is because Petraeus was uniquely beloved by many in the corporate […]
Surveying international reaction to Barack Obama’s re-election, NBC Nightly News correspondent Richard Engel declared (11/7/12): In the Middle East, there is hope that President Obama will embrace the Israeli/Palestinian peace process in second term the way he embraced the Arab Spring in his first. This would be a surprising reaction to find among people in […]
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 […]
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 […]
TV news veteran Ted Koppel has done two pieces on NBC‘s Rock Center that attempt to critique the partisanship of today’s media system. But what the reports really illustrate is that some people aren’t very good at playing media critic—especially when they feel obligated to suggest that “both sides” are equally at fault. Koppel’s first […]
Sometimes very little can tell you a lot. Here’s Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News, updating viewers on protests that are linked to that famous anti-Islamic video: Overseas tonight, new and deadly retribution from that amateur Internet film that’s enraged much of the Muslim world. The “Muslim world” is, well, enormous–somewhere in the neighborhood of […]
On NBC‘s Meet the Press (9/9/12), Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and host David Gregory had a discussion about the failures of the Obama administration’s foreign policy that included this: ROMNEY: The president has not drawn us further away from a nuclear Iran. And in fact Iran is closer to having a weapon, closer […]
Paul Ryan’s RNC convention speech kicked off a lot of discussion about how and when journalists should do factchecking. Some reporters noted that, for instance, the people you factcheck can push back; other pieces wondered if it was making any difference at all. There are plenty of factchecking operations, but there seems to be a […]
NBC‘s Tom Brokaw from the Republican National Convention last night (8/30/12): The best line, I think, in the speech was the one in which he said: “President Obama wants to slow the growth of the oceans, I want to help you and your family.” Yeah, wasn’t that great when Romney pretended we weren’t facing an […]
NBC‘s Olympics broadcast last night included a profile of Grenadian runner Kirani James. The small island is peaceful now, viewers learned, thanks in no small part to Ronald Reagan’s decision to invade. Here’s the clip: (UPDATE: As you can see, someone at NBC is keeping tabs on YouTube, and they’ve taken this down twice. You […]
Coverage of national political campaigns is generally pretty bad–a parade of polls, horesrace analysis and fundraising tallies, with pundits doing their best at pretending they’re campaign strategists. Can it actually get worse than that? Maybe. NBC reporter Chuck Todd made that case with a full page article in the Washington Post on August 5 that compared […]
