FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The New York Times‘ David Carr (9/20/10) compares involvement by media figures in politics–exemplified by CNBC‘s Rick Santelli and various Fox News figures fueling the Tea Party movement, and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s dueling answer rallies to said movement–to “a football game where the reporters and commentators, bored by the feckless proceedings on the […]
With all the talk of the Iraq War winding down (never mind the ongoing violence, the U.S. troops still fighting, or the continuing U.S. casualties), filmmaker Michael Moore makes an important point about how the war started—specifically, that it happened not despite but because of the way the “liberal media” behaved: But most importantly, they […]
The New York Times (9/16/10) points out in a write-up of its new poll : The economy and jobs are increasingly and overwhelmingly cited by Americans as the most important problems facing the country, while the deficit barely registers as a topic of concern when survey respondents were asked to volunteer their worries. Huh. The […]
Today in the New York Times (9/15/10) Woody Allen was interviewed on his latest film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and had this to say about the state of journalism: Q. Were you prepared for the firestorm of media coverage you set off by casting Carla Bruni-Sarkozy in your next movie, Midnight in […]
There’s a simple way of looking at the debate over the Bush tax cuts. The White House and most Democrats say they want to extend them for the vast majority of the population, but keep higher rates in place for families making over $250,000 a year. Republicans seem to know that “Keep Taxes Rates Low […]
Matt Bai has a piece in theNew York Times today (9/9/10) explaining how Barack Obama squandered an opportunity to make fundamental changes to the American economy. One claim in the piece jumps out; after explaining that large infrastructure projects–rail lines, broadband, etc.– are “things that only an active government could realistically do,” Bai claims: Getting […]
Barack Obama has long supported the idea of extending the “Bush” tax cuts for 98 percent of the population. The highest-earning 2 percent, meanwhile, will see their top tax rates go back up to where they were in the 1990s. The Washington Post has a story today (9/8/10)that more or less explains this fact. The […]
A recent FAIR study (Extra!, 8/10) looked at politically themed books reviewed by the New York Times Book Review and the C-SPAN show After Words and concluded that both outlets heavily favored white male authors and reviewers. The Times came off particularly badly in the study, which revealed 95 percent of the U.S. authors reviewed, […]
The New York Times‘ Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes today (8/31/10) about the possible steps Obama might take to bolster the economy: With voters angry about government spending, and economists divided about just what approach is the correct one, such aggressive steps are by now out of the question. “There’s a deep frustration among economists that […]
It really is offensive for commentators to use the word “violence” to mean “violence against one side in a conflict.” As in Martin Indyk’s op-ed in the New York Times yesterday (8/27/10), which argues that there is “For Once, Hope in the Middle East,” because, “First, violence is down considerably in the region.” Here’s his […]
New York Times reporter Matt Bai writes a piece today (8/26/10) singling out a Democratic congressmemberwho talks aboutcuts to the federal budget. Thisis presumably an unusual, newsworthything worth writing about–hence the headline, “One Liberal Voice Dares to Say, Cut the Budget.”It’s worth pointing out thatother Democrats have proposed ideas likecutting military spending withoutgetting points for […]
The New York Times‘ Susan Dominus, writing an article (8/24/10) entirely about a congressional candidate’s footwear, makes an attempt at self-inoculation: I know. We, the news media, are not supposed to ask female candidates about their hairstyle or their choice of pantsuits over skirts or their shoes. It is irrelevant. It is trivializing. It is […]
“CIA Sees Increased Threat in Yemen” is the Washington Post‘s headline today (8/25/10) over astory thattells of a”sober new assessment” of Al Qaeda-related activities that has “helped prompt senior Obama administration officials to call for an escalation of U.S. operations there–including a proposal to add armed CIA drones to a clandestine campaign of U.S. military […]
Yesterday’s New York Times (8/24/10) brought this headline: “Afghans Say NATO Troops Killed 8 Civilians in Raid.” About those claims, we were told this: Maj. Michael Johnson, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, as the NATO force is known, said NATO authorities were unaware of any such attack. Today’s Times (8/25/10) brings this […]
In his New York Times column on Monday (8/9/10), headlined “The Flimflam Man,” Paul Krugman took aim at Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, who has emerged as the GOP’s big thinker on budgets: One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past […]
Today we learn that the New York Times does indeed print corrections if an op-ed writer makes an error: An op-ed article on Sunday about Arizona and immigration mistakenly suggested that javelinas are pigs. They are peccaries. Now, if someone were to, say, flagrantly misrepresenta “poll” that is the entire premise of an op-ed–as FAIR […]
We often heard during the WikiLeaks controversy that civilian deaths in Afghanistan are well-covered in the corporate media, so the revelations in the documents about such incidents were “old news.” A report in today’s Times from Rod Nordland (“Afghans Say NATO Strikes Killed Civilians,” 8/6/10) teaches a useful lesson in how such reporting appears. There […]
On August 2, the New York Times published an op-ed arguing that Arabs do not care much about Palestinians–and that this is a good thing, especially for Palestinians. But the argument relied on a “poll” of the Arab world that does not exist. The piece, by historian Efraim Karsh, intended to show that the “conventional […]
Israeli historian Efraim Karsh argues in the New York Times (8/2/10) today that Arabs have lost interest in the Palestinian cause, which apparently is a good thing because that severs “the spurious link between this particular issue and other regional and global problems,” making it a “positive” sign of hope for future Arab/Israeli peace. But […]
Former special ops squad leader/current think tank fellow Andrew Exum noisily yawns at the WikiLeaks Afghan document release on the New York Times op-ed page today (7/27/10): The news media have done a good job of showing the public that the Afghan war is a highly complex environment stretching beyond the borders of the […]
