FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The details are somewhat murky, but we know the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency is heavily involved in counternarcotics in Honduras. A shooting incident last Friday reportedly left four innocent people dead–including two pregnant women. Questions are being raised about whether they were shot by DEA agents who were apparently going after a boat carrying drug […]
A new FAIR Action Alert (5/16/12) calls on the New York Times public editor to address the conflict of interest posed by Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner’s marriage to someone whose job it is to sway the coverage of international outlets like the Times in a pro-Israel direction. Please leaves copies of your messages to the […]
The New York Times‘ Jerusalem bureau was embroiled in controversy two years ago when news broke that bureau chief Ethan Bronner had a son who enlisted in the Israeli army (Extra!, 4/10). As Bronner wraps up his tenure, a new conflict of interest has arisen: Bureau reporter Isabel Kershner’s spouse works to promote favorable coverage […]
The New York Times editorially decried the New York City police department’s stop-and-frisk practices (“Injustices of Stop and Frisk,” 5/13/12), noting that the criterion of “furtive movements” most often used for stopping disproportionately black and brown people is “so vague as to be meaningless,” that people of color are treated more violently than white people […]
The election results in Greece and France sent a clearer message about austerity: Voters don’t like it. That sentiment isn’t hard to fathom; massive spending cuts and pay cuts aren’t fixing the problems in their economies–they’re making things worse. Media coverage seems to be clearer these days about what the public thinks of austerity. But […]
The New York Times shouldn’t be trusted to report on future wars if it can’t get the facts about previous wars right. Once again, the Times misleads readers about the lead up to Israel’s invasion of Gaza in late 2008. Isabel Kershner writes (5/3/12): Up to 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed during Israel’s […]
In corporate media, some political arguments are treated as indisputable fact. One of the most important: Democrats win by moving to the right. In the New York Times (5/3/12), Peter Baker offers the latest example: Mr. Obama, who campaigned on Sunday with Mr. Clinton, seems to be following his Democratic predecessor’s playbook. After a generation […]
With Occupy Wall Street making its May Day comeback, what did the corporate media have to say? Take a look at the New York Times story (5/2/12), which was stuffed in the Metro section and focused on… well, take a look at the headline: About half of the article is focused on arrests, “occasionally bloody […]
The New York Times‘ Alissa Rubin (5/2/12) reports of President Barack Obama’s trip to Afghanistan: The trip communicated something of vital importance to the Afghans: reassurance that the United States is not in an all-out scramble to get away. It’s not clear what the basis for Rubin’s claim that “reassurance” that the U.S. is in […]
Stories about new state voter ID laws should, at a minimum, explain that the problem the laws supposedly address–voter fraud–doesn’t really exist. On that count, a New York Times report (4/30/12) by Michael Shear failed, since it presented the issue as a partisan dispute. On the one hand, Democrats complain: Many of the laws in […]
After the news broke that New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner had a son who enlisted in the Israeli army (Extra!, 4/10), Times public editor Clark Hoyt (2/6/10) noted that it was problematic for Bronner to continue reporting on “one of the world’s most intense” conflicts while his son took up arms for […]
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, […]
Last week Barack Obama declared some sort of class war on Mitt Romney–at least that’s what Fox, the New York Post and a few other outlets would have you believe. On April 18, Obama gave a speech at a community college touting, among other things, a rather common only-in-America underdog spirit: Somebody gave me an […]
There seems to be a lot of attention to a new study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) study that finds Barack Obama to be much more harshly covered than the Republicans competing to run against him this fall. “Obama Has Received Least Favorable News Coverage So Far During 2012 Election Cycle” reads […]
More Democrats are starting to shift towards supporting the controversial Keystone pipeline, reports Jennifer Steinhauer in the New York Times (4/20/12). The media discussion has leaned heavily in favor of the project, so perhaps this is no surprise. And this report is no exception. The political fight over Keystone has a lot to do with […]
Brian Stelter reports in the New York Times that Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity are renewing their contracts…meaning that we’ll be enjoying–and paying for–their talents through the 2016 election season. Not many people around Fox wanted to speak on the record about the new deals, but Stelter granted anonymity to one Fox insider who was […]
Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor acknowledged on Al Jazeera English (4/14/12) that Iranian leaders have never called for Israel to be “wiped” off the map. Meridor agreed with interviewer Teymoor Nabili’s suggestion that the supposed remarks were never actually made; Iranian leaders, Meridor said, come basically ideologically, religiously, with the statement that Israel is […]
Portraying Assange a ‘nut job’ says little about Julian Assange–and plenty about the corporate media.
There are different ways media talk about how you can’t trust Iran. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, for one, went straight for bigotry: “These Persians lie like a rug,” he wrote in 2009. The New York Times took a slightly different route on Saturday (4/14/12): Maybe Iran can’t be trusted because their religion permits—or perhaps […]
Nobody loves centrism, writes Bill Keller in the New York Times (4/16/12), but they should. “Centrism is easily mocked and not much fun to defend,” writes, noting that critiques of centrism from the left and right have a certain appeal: The politics of the center–including the professional centrists and trans-partisans of groups like Third Way […]
