FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Huffington Post reporter Jon Ward did what reporters should do when covering political campaign ads. He told readers, at the top of his story, that the new Mitt Romney ad was based on a lie: The 60-second Romney ad quoted Obama as saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” It […]
New York Times media reporter David Carr has written some interest pieces on Occupy Wall Street. His piece today tries to work out where things go from here, but one comment in the piece about how Occupy Wall Street compares with protests of the past caught my attention: There were citizens screaming invective about the […]
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry’s new TV commercial is based on a lie. Will reporters say so? The ad starts with a Barack Obama quote: ”We’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades.” To which Perry responds: ”Can you believe that? That’s what our president thinks is wrong with […]
When the authorities are going out of their way to keep your journalistic colleagues from witnessing what they’re up to, yet they reach out to give a ringside seat–what does that say about your reporting? That’s the question raised by a blog post by Yves Smith (Naked Captialism, 11/16/11) that makes the case that the […]
Paul Krugman argues in the New York Times today (11/18/11) that the failure of the Congressional supercommittee might be a good thing, and that public understanding of what’s really happening is hampered by a familiar media problem. He also makes a pretty safe bet about what coverage is going to look like if they fail […]
The New York Times, writing about Bloomberg’s crackdown on Occupy Wall Street, said this: For the mayor, a champion of the First Amendment…. I am not sure what is required to deserve the title of “champion,” but was it a different Michael Bloomberg who was mayor during the 2004 Republican convention, which saw mass arrests, […]
The New York Times (11/13/11) had a Sunday Style section profile of ABC Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz that started off on a bad note—only to get much worse. First the bad: If there has been a glamour beat in television news in recent years, it may well be war correspondent. Starting with the original “Scud […]
The New York Times reports that Chelsea Clinton will be a full time special correspondent for NBC News, starting more or less immediately. Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald connected this news to the media careers of Meghan McCain (MSNBC), Luke Russert (NBC) and Jenna Bush Hager (NBC), and reached this conclusion about the state of our meritocracy: […]
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (11/9/11) went to India in order to appreciate how the grassroots movement to stamp out political corruption there is superior to Occupy Wall Street. Still, he sees a common thread: The world’s two biggest democracies, India and the United States, are going through remarkably similar bouts of introspection. Both […]
When the International Atomic Energy Agency is about to release a report on an official enemy like Iran, you can be fairly confident that contents of the report–or what people believe should be in it–will be leaked to elite newspapers by anonymous sources in or near the IAEA, who will tend to make more alarming […]
Remember how the media all turned negative on Steve Jobs so soon after his death? Me neither. But don’t tell the New York Times. Today (11/03/11) the paper has a piece by Alex Williams pondering the speed with which the glowing tributes turned into something else–i.e., when “bloggers began their assault.” That assault, by Williams’ […]
In Wednesday’s New York Times (10/26/11), Michael Gordon wrote a piece headlined “Papers From Iraqi Archive Reveal Conspiratorial Mind-Set of Hussein,” about some Iraqi archives that give an inside-the-bubble picture of Saddam Hussein’s rule. Not surprisingly, Hussein comes off as paranoid, incompetent and so on. Gordon begins the story noting that Hussein was troubled by […]
A New York Times story today (10/28/11) by Jennifer Steinhauer on the state of bipartisanship in Washington noted: Outside of a few recent flashes of light–the passage of three trade bills this month, and an agreement on patent reform–there have been no big bipartisan jobs initiatives in this Congress. The idea that trade deals with […]
The New York Times has a fascinating new poll out today (10/26/11); too bad the paper doesn’t emphasize the most newsworthy findings. The headline is: New Poll Finds a Deep Distrust of Government That’s based on the poll’s finding that the public doesn’t have much faith in government. But paragraph four offers a more striking […]
Today the New York Times (1/18/11) reports a big scoop. A “Tea Party commission” convened by Freedom Works is set to announce its crowd-sourced $6 trillion debt reduction plan—”A copy of the preliminary findings was provided to the New York Times,” Kate Zernike reports. The story’s second paragraph critiques the plan from the right for […]
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, […]
Corporate media’s incredibly uncritical boosterism of so-called “free trade” deals has been remarked on many times, and continues to be remarkable. What else but blind faith would allow a story to carry a line like one in the October 12 New York Times, about textile industry opposition to the new deal with South Korea: “The […]
New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a tedious column today (10/11/11) about how the real radicals are the centrists, not the Wall Street occupiers. (Read Dean Baker to see what Brooks is getting wrong.) But this jumped out at me: A third believe the U.S. is no better than Al-Qaeda, according to a New […]
Leave it to the New York Times (10/7/11) to find a guy collecting unemployment who opposes the extension of unemployment benefits. He’s “Dan Tolleson, a researcher and writer with a Ph.D. in politics…whose last good job was working for a group that aims to replace the income tax with a national sales tax.” But don’t […]
New York Times business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has been criticized for being too chummy with the Wall Street tycoons he’s supposed to be covering. Today he has a piece in the Times (10/4/11) about Occupy Wall Street–which he’s decided to check out because it’s beginning to make some CEOs nervous: I had gone down […]
