FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“If media reports are to be believed,” Gabriel Arana of the Nation writes (5/27/09), “an Armageddon-like rash of drug-related violence–unlike any seen since ‘Miami Vice years of the 1980s‘–has crossed from Mexico into the United States, ‘just as government officials had feared.’” But that’s a pretty big if, even though “in the national media, it’s […]
Looking at “people of a certain age” for whom “getting a letter published in the Times has always been a very, very big deal,” David Margolick (Nation , 5/27/09) tells the tale of two lifelong friends and constant New York Times letter submitters–one with a “Babe Ruth”-like record of getting his views into print, and […]
Posting to the Columbia Journalism Review‘s Behind the News blog, Megan Garber (5/26/09) catches New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt espousing “a peculiar brand of institutional defensiveness” in his May 23 column: One that plays itself out via divisiveness–and via, in particular, a false dichotomy that aggrandizes Times reporters and dismisses those who are […]
According to today’s New York Times (5/29/09), there’s a scandal brewing in the Japanese media. Apparently in its coverage of a current political scandal, the Japanese press has “reported at face value a stream of anonymous allegations, some of them thinly veiled leaks from within the investigation.” The Times goes on to note that “big […]
The New York Times‘ front-page piece today (5/29/09) on Sonia Sotomayor’s work with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund is a good example of what is meant by “framing”–and a bad example of how it can distort a story. The bulk of the story describes various cases that the group took on while […]
Charlie Savage did some good reporting on the Bush signing statements, but his front-page story in today’s New York Times on reproductive rights groups’ reaction to Sotomayor is way off course. His lead explains that abortion rights advocates are worried about Sotomayor, because “when she has written opinions that touched tangentially on abortion disputes, she […]
Recapping at TPM Café (5/27/09) how the U.S. “press bent over backward to paint both Bushes as moderate, sensible, nice guy Republicans,” Editor & Publisher‘s Greg Mitchell writes that “a hard-right [George W.] Bush, whether real or media-created, would have never beaten Gore–not that this one did either.” Reminding us that “the New York Times, […]
FAIR’s latest Action Alert asks media activists to ask New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt about a recent Elisabeth Bumiller article that reported on former Guantanamo prisoners “returning” to terrorism–even though it was not clear there was evidence that any of the released prisoners had ever been involved in “terrorism” of any sort. Please […]
While former Vice President Dick Cheney has been front and center in the media debate over the current White House’s national security policies, he’s not the only one trying to challenge the White House’s message. The New York Times published a front-page article (5/21/09) that bolstered the notion that former Guantánamo prisoners “return” to terrorist […]
Remembering all too well how the New York Times “helped sell the Iraq War with a bogus story about aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges and withheld evidence of illegal spying on Americans for more than a year,” Consortium News editor Robert Parry (5/21/09) tells how the paper “is again mishandling a sensitive story in a […]
The New York Times had a story yesterday (5/21/09) about the test of an Iranian missile “that was capable of striking Israel and parts of Western Europe.” This was an important point in the article—reporters David E. Sanger and Nazila Fathi included it in their lead paragraph, and later listed it among “three technologies necessary […]
New York Times media reporter Tim Arango has a story (5/20/09) on one very serious repercussion from shrinking corporate news outlets: Opponents of the death penalty looking to exonerate wrongly accused prisoners say their efforts have been hobbled by the dwindling size of America’s newsrooms, and particularly the disappearance of investigative reporting at many regional […]
Quoting Sen. Lindsey Graham’s statement at a May 13 Senate hearing that “one of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work,” Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/16/09) explains that this is “implicitly endorsing the Spanish Inquisition’s brutal treatment of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and other alleged heretics from the […]
Giving us a glimpse at “a large part of what was left on the editor’s floor” from his On the Media NPR interview, Harpers.org‘s Scott Horton (5/12/09) writes of “the New York Times and its history of dealing with the word ‘torture’”: I noted that in the pre-Bush era, the Times had absolutely no compunction […]
Current Anti-Advertising Agency CEO Steve Lambert and founder Jordan Selier have posted (AntiAdvertisingAgency.com, 5/12/09) their letter to the New York Times responding to a May 11 piece that cites one NYC advertising executive asking, “All you have to do is walk out the door for lunch and notice the number of vacant storefronts… so why […]
The New York Times‘ Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner (5/9/09) wrote about the Israeli government’s development planin Jerusalem–a “$100 million, multiyear development plan in some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City here as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital.” […]
Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald gets the site’s lead story today (5/8/09, ad-viewing required) with an excerpt from the New York Times obituary for U.S. fighter pilot Harold E. Fischer Jr., who, as the Times headline puts it, was “Tortured in a Chinese Prison.” Greenwald deems such naming of Fischer’s ordeal–“kept in a dark, damp cell […]
The current Democracy Now! (5/8/09) features New York Times Pentagon Pundits reporter David Barstow giving Amy Goodman the background on the U.S. military’s retraction of a report clearing itself of domestic propaganda wrongdoing: So the report comes out in January, and it effectively exonerated the program. Now, one thing your viewers should know is that […]
Reading Mark Landler’s and Elizabeth Bumiller’s New York Times “tidbit out of an overheated Washington last week: ‘President Obama and his top advisers have been meeting almost daily to discuss options for helping the Pakistani government and military repel the [Taliban] offensive,’” Tom Engelhardt (TomDispatch, 5/7/09) decides to toss some cold water on “this kind […]
In the wake of the release of the U.S. military’s own figures showing a record number of bombs were dropped by U.S. warplanes in Afghanistan during April, newspapers are reporting today on a particularly deadly bombing attack on Monday that killed over 100 civilians, according to Afghan officials and witnesses. Anonymous U.S. military officials of […]
