FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Resisting the tide of “liberal blogger men” who “are thrilled with the New York Times‘ appointment of 29-year-old Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat to replace William Kristol on the op-ed page,” Katha Pollitt (Nation, 3/18/09) contrasts the fact that “Douthat is best known for his conservative Catholicism (abortion is murder, frozen embryos are children, contraception kills […]
Writing that “an astonishing number of North American dailies are gasping their last,” veteran Mexico journalist John Ross (CounterPunch, 3/18/09) cites “a recent survey by the New York Times, itself on its last legs,” that “lists 75 daily newspapers of being at risk from sea to stinking sea,” and singles out how San Francisco Chronicle […]
The New York Times‘ Peter Baker reports today (3/18/09) that Obama has tapped “a Swahili-speaking retired Air Force officer who grew up in Africa as the son of missionaries” to be his special envoy to Sudan. Does Baker or his Times editors realize that they don’t speak Swahili in Sudan? It’s like reporting that Obama […]
As “the American foreign policy community worked itself into something resembling a frenzy over the appointment of Charles W. ‘Chas’ Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council”–because “at stake was, if not a direct policy battle of huge consequence, a real struggle over the range of viewpoints that will be permitted in an official government […]
Reporting that “marketers are running advertisements on the covers of some publications,” Stuart Elliott (New York Times, 3/11/09) reviews past precedents–“the February issue of Esquire broke ground with a window, or flap, in the middle of the cover under which [was] an ad for…a series on the Discovery Channel” and “a hole in the [1990] […]
The federal government has to decide what to do in a court case concerning same-sex partner benefits. Robert Pear sees this as a problem for Barack Obama in today’s New York Times (“Obama on Spot Over a Benefit to Gay Couples”), explaining: As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama said he would “fight hard” for the […]
In a typically half-empty David Brooks piece (3/13/09), the columnist praises Barack Obama for embracing “rigor” in education policy, for endorsing “testing and accountability,” for “mak[ing] sure results have consequences.” He complains about the “education establishment’s ability to evade the consequences of data” and that watered-down proficiency standards mean that “parents think their own schools […]
Jane Kim of CJR.org (3/9/09) quotes some of the reactions to a New York Times reporter asking Barack Obama if he is “a socialist as some people have suggested”: Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post cracks that “the New York Times was THAT CLOSE to a journalistic coup!” and American Prospect‘s Ezra Klein wants to […]
Asserting that “one positive aspect of the wreckage left by the Bush presidency is that many of the most sacred Beltway pieties stand exposed as intolerable failures, prominently including our self-destructively blind enabling of virtually all Israeli actions,” Salon.com‘s Glenn Greenwald (3/9/09, ad-viewing required) cites “the last three New York Times columns by Roger Cohen” […]
Steve Benen of Political Animal points out a couple of strange questions posed by corporate journalists—one to each of last year’s major presidential candidates. In this post, Benen quotes an unnamed New York Times reporter (apparently either Sheryl Gay Stolberg or Steven Lee Myers) basically red-baiting Barack Obama: “The first six weeks have given people […]
Just last week (2/26/09), Nicholas Kristof, who has written often about the situation in Darfur, was rooting for the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president, as a step towards “help[ing] end the long slaughter and instability in Sudan”: Next Wednesday, the International Criminal Court is expected to issue an arrest […]
Consortium News‘ Robert Parry (3/5/09) uses New York Times do-gooder Nicholas Kristof as an example of blatant corporate media hypocrisy: Kristof–like many of his American colleagues–is applauding the International Criminal Court’s arrest order against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for his role in the Darfur conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives…. By […]
Sometimes when you read reports about the Middle East, you get the impression that corporate journalists think Palestinians are another species entirely. Here’s the New York Times‘ Mark Landler (3/4/09) explaining the theory of how better relations with Syria could help create a peace deal between Israel and Palestine: By seeking an understanding with Syria, […]
In examining how the “national news media remains largely enthralled by the pro-Republican rules of the past three decades,” Robert Parry (Consortium News, 2/28/09) notes that “in both right-wing and mainstream news organizations, stories continue to be structured as faulting Obama and largely absolving Bush.” Parry looks at recent major New York Times and Washington […]
Having already caught “the infamous GOP talking point that the stimulus package contains gobs of cash for saving marsh mice” having “found its way into a New York Times story, without the paper mentioning that the claim is untrue,” blogger Greg Sargent (Plum Line, 2/24/09) now finds that “earlier drafts of the story did describe […]
Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias (2/25/09) hits the Washington Post for “standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is”–and then spreads some of the blame around: Meanwhile, one of the Post‘s main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is the New York […]
Apparently the New York Times hasmoved Elisabeth Bumiller over to the Pentagon beat. Her record as Bush White House correspondent produced some memorable missteps (“You can’t just say the president is lying,” for example), so it wasn’t a surprise to see her byline under the story, “From a Carrier, Another View of America’s Air War […]
Jackie Calmes reports in the New York Times (2/23/09): The president signaled in his campaign that he would support addressing the retirement system’s looming financing shortfall, in part by applying payroll taxes to incomes above $250,000. But that would ignite intense opposition from Republicans, especially with the economy deep in recession. Liberal Democrats are already […]
Economics blogger Dean Baker asserts that “about the only thing that readers can learn from an article on Japan in the business section today” is that “The New York Times Doesn’t Like Japan” (Beat the Press, 2/22/09). Among the piece’s “variety of complaints about Japan’s economy, many of which are contradictory,” is “the standard line […]
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred disparagingly this week to the praise that terrorism allegedly receives in “mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera.” In his February 18 column, Friedman wrote: To be sure, Mumbai’s Muslims are a vulnerable minority in a predominantly Hindu country. Nevertheless, their in-your-face defiance of the Islamist terrorists stands out. […]
