FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Some days it’s not easy to make it through a Tom Friedman column. Take today (11/14/12), for instance. I got all the way to the second sentence: Virtually every American president since Dwight Eisenhower has had a Middle Eastern country that brought him grief. In case you’re wondering, he really means every president: For George […]
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 […]
With the election over, you’re seeing familiar corporate media advice about the need for Obama to move to the right and learn to compromise with Republicans. Some of this is based on a frankly nonsensical view of the polarization that accompanied his first term. Matt Bai of the New York Times writes (11/7/12): There are, […]
The New York Times has a news piece today (11/6/12) reporting that MSNBC is just like Fox News, and isn’t that awful. Now, MSNBC, for all its flaws, is not really anything like Fox News. And most of Times reporter Jeremy Peters‘ evidence for their similarity comes from a Pew study of “positive” and “negative” […]
After establishing that Karl Rove is a terrible political prognosticator, Dana Milbank did the false-balance thing and attacked polling blogger Nate Silver,
The gossipy, horse race-obsessed outlet Politico ran a story on October 29 about the credibility of polling expert Nate Silver, whose 538 blog at the New York Times is a must-read for people interested in election forecasting. What Silver does isn’t, on one level, all that tricky–his model combines national and state polls and generates probabilities […]
You can learn a lot from reading the Corrections box in the New York Times–often because going back to read the story that is being corrected reveals more than the correction itself. On October 20, the Israeli navy intercepted another boat attempting to reach the Gaza Strip to deliver supplies in defiance of the Israeli […]
USA Today (10/17/12) ran a story about a battery manufacturer filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. But the story might as well have been a press release from the Mitt Romney campaign. “Another Blow for Green Energy” read the headline. Wendy Koch’s piece led off with this: An electric vehicle battery maker that was awarded […]
The day after the second Obama/Romney debate, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (10/17/12) offered a sort of scorecard for the debate–for the benefit of those watching on DVR, presumably. “I thought the most useful thing I could do is to offer the scoring system I’ll be using to determine who did best,” Friedman wrote, […]
Over the past few weeks of the presidential campaign we’ve been hearing a lot—maybe too much—about the September 11, 2012, attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. It’s been turned into a campaign issue by the Romney team, which has used the incident to charges […]
FAIR TV takes a look at how the U.S. media handled the Venezuelan election, how the Washington Post “greened” fracking and how the New York Times used a time machine to “fix” a headline about Israel/Palestine. Watch it, share it with your friends and please leave a comment below.
Corporate journalism is not known for standing up to powerful politicians–or for its long memory. And so, when factchecks of the first presidential debate revealed that GOP candidate Mitt Romney was often not very truthful, sometimes even misstating his own policies, the media not only failed to make much of a fuss over Romney’s falsehoods, […]
Media activist Alison Weir (10/8/12) calls attention to a remarkable New York Times report (10/9/12) on Gaza violence. While we’ve come to expect a pro-Israeli bias from the Times, it’s still surprising to find the paper using time travel to make sure that events happen in their proper sequence. The headline of the Times piece […]
Even stranger is the New York Times going on to point out that Iran’s uranium stockpile that could even be used for a weapon is getting smaller.
The New York Times‘ Jackie Calmes has a piece yesterday (9/26/12) on Obama’s failure to rein in the budget deficit. The big problem is that Obama’s explanation is apparently hard to follow: Four years ago, Barack Obama campaigned for president on a promise to cut annual federal budget deficits in half by the end of […]
The New York Times‘ September 26 coverage of Barack Obama’s UN address on Arab democracy, free speech and violence included a good sampling of the distortions, double standards and bigotry often present in U.S. corporate reporting on these issues. Helene Cooper‘s news report (9/26/12) explained that Obama’s speech was a “strong defense of America’s belief […]
The Paper of Record has spoken: We didn’t think much of Occupy before, and now what we think is that it’s over. The day before Occupy activists were gathering to mark the movement’s one-year anniversary, Times columnist Joe Nocera wrote (9/16/12): “For all intents and purposes, the Occupy movement is dead.” Before the collapse of […]
The protests and violence in Egypt, Libya and Yemen have caused a notable uptick in media discussions about, as Newsweek‘s cover puts it, “Muslim Rage.” Part of the corporate media’s job is to make sure real political grievances are mostly kept out of the discussion. It’s a lot easier to talk about angry mobs and […]
An New York Times editor doesn’t seem to think checking the integrity of your argument is the business of the Paper of Record.
