FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The New York Times has a web headline today (4/5/10): “U.S. Admits Role in February Killing of Afghan Women.” The story explains that the “role” the U.S. played in the killing of the three women was that it killed them. When this story first broke, NATO officials denied the killings, and tried to blame the […]
Articles like “Accusations Fly Between Parties Over Threats and Vandalism” in the New York Times today (3/26/10) are fairly useless. Are Republicans “fanning the flames with coded rhetoric,” as a Democratic lawmaker says, or is a Republican representative right that it’s Democrats who are “ratcheting up the rhetoric”? Readers are really left to judge based […]
The New York Times, thanks in large part to FAIR activists, printed an ACORN correction today (3/23/10): Several articles since September about the troubles of the community organizing group ACORN referred incorrectly or imprecisely to one aspect of videotaped encounters between ACORN workers and two conservative activists that contributed to the group’s problems. In the […]
In a response to a FAIR action alert (3/11/10), New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt (3/21/10) acknowledged that the paper got key facts wrong in reporting on the undercover videos attacking the community organizing group ACORN. The main issue was the fact that James O’Keefe, the activist who produced the videos, did not actually […]
Boy, the folks at Amazon.com sure are mean–to hear the New York Times tell it. A March 18 story by Motoko Rich and Brad Stone begins: Amazon.com has threatened to stop directly selling the books of some publishers online unless they agree to a detailed list of concessions regarding the sale of electronic books, according […]
Via Climate Progress (3/16/10), Scientific American guest blogger John Horgan (3/16/10) makes a disturbing claim: Two sources at the Science Times section of the New York Times have told me that a majority of the section’s editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity. Now, reviews of climate research literature […]
Offering a critique of the Iraq War drama Green Zone, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (3/15/10) offers a “narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told,” that ends with: And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have WMD was the best way to keep his […]
New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has not had a chance yet to respond to questions about his commentary on the ACORN hoax (FAIR Action Alert, 3/11/10), instead devoting his Sunday column (3/14/10) to a discussion of political labeling. It included this question: Why is the American Enterprise Institute almost always called “conservative” in […]
FAIR has a new Action Alert out pointing out that the New York Times has repeatedly published accounts of the right-wing anti-ACORN videos that credulously accepted assertions that have turned out to be false–for example, that one of the video-makers, James O’Keefe, went into ACORN offices dressed as a cartoon pimp. See the alert here […]
Ignoring calls from numerous critics, the New York Times refuses to own up to mistakes in the paper’s coverage of the now-famous right-wing videotapes attacking the community organizing group ACORN. Instead, the paper’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, is relying on an absurd semantic justification in order to claim the paper does not need to print […]
The New York Times has a piece today (3/9/10) with the headline “Experts Urge Keeping Two Options for Terror Trials”–meaning both regular trials under the criminal justice system as well as newly established military tribunals. But who are these “experts,” exactly? Well, they’re “national security officials who served in the Bush administration”–though later on, “national […]
The New York Times features an op-ed today (3/5/10) by Gen. Merrill McPeak, a retired Air Force chief of staff, arguing against allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the U.S. military. It’s not much of an argument, really–there’s not much more to it than the assertion that “warriors are inspired by male […]
In a column headlined “A Word From the Wise” (3/3/10), New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lets us know what Intel CEO Paul Otellini thinks is wrong with the U.S. economy. And there’s a certain theme that runs through his critique: “The things that are not conducive to investments here are [corporate] taxes and capital […]
There’s a certain category of newspaper article where you’re better off ignoring the text and just looking at the accompanying graph. Such an article is “Math of Publishing Meets the E-Book” (New York Times, 3/1/10), by Motoko Rich. The context for the article is the fight between publishers and Amazon over how much to charge […]
In his New York Times column today (2/24/10), Tom Friedman presents a bizarre view of the Iraq War. Attempting to answer the question of whether Iraq is dysfunctional because of its culture (the “conservative” argument) or because of its politics (the “liberal” argument), he writes: Ironically, though, it was the neo-conservative Bush team that argued […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald has had a couple of posts (2/18/10, 2/22/10) on a New York Times op-ed (2/18/10) that urged the U.S. to not worry so much about killing civilians in Afghanistan. The piece was written by Lara M. Dadkhah, who is vaguely identified as an “intelligence analyst” and who notes that she is “employed […]
New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt (2/21/10) returns to the issue of Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner having a child fighting on one side of the conflict he’s covering (FAIR Activism Update, 2/12/10): Some Times journalists have taken issue with my position in this case, believing it suggests that no Jewish reporter could […]
James Ledbetter (Big Money, 2/20/10) points out that Mexican media mogul Carlos Slim, the third-richest person on the planet and one of the New York Times‘ biggest stockholders, is a central player in a remarkable New York-based legal story–one that the Times has so far ignored. The story involves Slim’s attempt to take over a […]
From one of today’s New York Times stories (2/16/10) about the NATO/U.S. campaign in Marja, Afghanistan (emphasis added): The heavy civilian toll highlighted the stressful and confusing nature of the fighting, especially in Marja, and of the difficulties inherent in conducting military operations in a guerrilla war, where insurgents can hide easily among the population. […]
On Tuesday, the New York Times (2/9/10) was front-paging a non-story about criticism of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change– hyping accusations about scientific misconduct and conflicts of interest that the paper itself called “half-truths” (FAIR Blog, 2/9/10). Well, it turns out that there was quite a bit of snow on the East Coast this […]
