FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
While the U.S. economy’s current ills have proven “that the people who run Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, Wells and other major financial institutions may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer,” Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 2/18/09) wants to know, “How much do taxpayers have to cough up to make up for their ineptitude?”: David […]
Today’s New York Times features a piece by Thom Shanker that dwells on suspected budget cuts at the Pentagon. As the headline tells us, “After Stimulus Package, Pentagon Officials Are Preparing to Pare Back.” The piece gives little reason to believe that there are any such plans afoot; Obama did not campaign on cutting the […]
The author of an upcoming “people’s history of the Bolivarian Revolution entitled We Created Him,” George Ciccariello-Maher tells (CounterPunch, 2/15/09) an eerily “familiar” tale of one unnamed political leader who, after being “in power for nearly eight years,” no longer feels the need to comfort his opponents, and his discourse radicalizes as his view of […]
The New York Times‘ Travel section featured a February 8 piece by Ned Martel headlined, “In Grenada, Leaving the Past Behind,” where the reporter refers to the 1983 U.S. invasion of the tiny Caribbean nation. A more accurate headline might have read, “Leaving the Facts Behind.” Here’s how Martel summed up the invasion story: In […]
Gail Collins covered Albany in a way that was both informative and funny—no mean feat. Then she went to work for the New York Times and has never been the same since.
Today’s lead New York Times story (2/1/09)–subheaded in the print edition “Scant Details, and Wall Street Reacts With a 4.6 Percent Plunge”–is a classic example of the fallacy of treating stock market prices as a kind of opinion poll. Reporters Stephen Labaton and Edmund L. Andrews wrote: “The initial assessment of the plan from the […]
New York Times reporters Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise went to Gaza (2/4/09) to look into stories of civilian atrocities, and turned up some very powerful examples. Unfortunately, the impact of that reporting was undermined by the all-too-familiar tendency to “balance” these facts with criticisms of Palestinians. Fora piece that is attempting to get a […]
There’s a trope that you often see in corporate media discussions of the stimulus plan: Yeah, but do you really want to spend money on that? It may have started with the misrepresented contraceptive plan—which seemed to be grounded in a traditional media fascination/embarrassment at anything involving sex—but now it’s moved on to anything that…well, […]
Reading this at the bottom of neo-con William Kristol‘s column in the New York Times (1/26/09): This is William Kristol’s last column. Homer says, “Woohoo!” Then reading this at the Politico: EXCLUSIVE: Progressives will delight when they get to the italic note at the end of Bill Kristol’s column in the Times today say, “This […]
The Pentagon inspector general’s report on the Pentagon Pundits scandal was released (to no one’s surprise) late on Friday. Also unsurprising were its contents–the report basically concluded that there was no serious wrongdoing, not to mention no clear idea of what constitutes “propaganda” in the first place. The report was summarized in the New York […]
The New York Times today makes a rare, if highly obfuscatory, reference to the fact that Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory continues despite nearly unanimous international consensus, expressed annually via the United Nations General Assembly. As a FAIR media advisory recently pointed out, international law is largely missing from U.S. media reporting on Israeli […]
When white phosphorus was used by Saddam Hussein, the weapon was identified by U.S. intelligence as a “chemical weapon.” The New York Times (3/22/95) seemed to concur; In an article noting that white phosphorus was technically classified as an “incendiary weapon,” the paper nonetheless described it as one of “the worst chemical weapons” in existence: […]
Those who might expect the Paper of Record to ignore or bury stories about Israel using the incendiary white phosphorous in its attack on Gaza can point to yesterday’s paper (1/11/09), where the following sentence appears at the very bottom of one piece: Human rights groups are also concerned about the Israeli use of white […]
Editor & Publisher reports that the musings of Bono will begin appearing on the New York Times opinion pages this Sunday–the latest episode in a long media tradition of choosing Western celebrities to address issues concerning Africa, one of Bono’s pet projects. Given Bono’s record of cozying up to Western leaders on issues like debt […]
Peter Hart asked the New York Times: What should TV reporting of a civilian massacre look like, exactly? Well, I guess the Times thinks they should be covered this way: Extra!: How America’s Leading Paper Covered a Massacre …which is to say, they should be covered almost exclusively from the point of view of the […]
When you routinely report about Israel and Gaza through the eyes of Israelis, the results can be awkward, like today’s New York Times front-pager that frames what was a human catastrophe for many Palestinians–the killing by Israel of some 40 Gazans at a U.N. school–into a mere military and PR “pitfall” for Israelis. As the […]
The New York Times‘ Charles Blow writes on the op-ed page (“Heaven for the Godless?,” 12/27/08): “The Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life: No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.’” He then expresses […]
Useless caveat of the day, courtesy of the New York Times (12/19/08): Mr. Bush, one of the least popular presidents in recent history, if public opinion polls are accurateâ┚¬Ã‚¦ Yes, perhaps it’s all a mirage.
The corporate media template for explaining Mideast violence can be summed up like this: Palestinians attack, Israel retaliates. It wasn’t surprising, then, to read this lead in today’s New York Times (12/19/08): JERUSALEM – Rockets are flying from Gaza into southern Israeli communities again. Israeli warplanes are firing missiles back, and Israel is closing the […]
By now most people have seen the video footage of the Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi throwing his shoes at George W. Bush. The New York Times helps you put it in perspective: The shoe-throwing incident in Baghdad punctuated Mr. Bush’s visit here–his fourth–in a deeply symbolic way, reflecting the conflicted views in Iraq of a […]
